Paywalls, tiers and conversion

If you sell access, the questions you care about most are about the line between free and paid: how many people subscribe, who pays, what a paywall earns. This page shows which of those questions the Studio answers today and which it doesn't. How to set a paywall is in Access and paywalls.

The words

• Tier (or level): what a reader has access to. Peakub offers everyone, paid members, and higher levels of paid members.
• Free subscriber: someone subscribed at the free level.
• Paid subscriber: someone subscribed at a paid level.
• Conversion: a reader who was free becoming a paid subscriber.

What you can see per level

Subscribers. The Audience block of the Dashboard gives your subscriber total with Free subscribers and Paid subscribers lines. These come from your subscribers' records, not from page visits, so they stay available even if the visit counting is briefly down. Members on a level above "paid" are in the total but don't have a line of their own.

Payments. The Revenue block of the Dashboard gives the total of the payments recorded for your publication. Three kinds of payment are added up: subscriptions, one-time payments and tips. It shows the amounts in your publication's currency. The Daily Recurring Revenue and Monthly Recurring Revenue lines count only subscription payments, for today and for the current month. The Daily revenue and Monthly revenue blocks draw the same payments as bars. In the Revenue tab, Best contributors lists the readers who have paid you the most, with how many payments each made. Fees and payouts are covered in Monetization.

Payments are never filtered. Unlike reader figures, they don't leave out your own activity or visits from robots, since money that moved is money that moved.

How a paywalled piece shows up in the reader numbers

A read is recorded when the page opens. It makes no difference whether the reader then saw the whole piece or the short note that stands in place of the part behind your paywall. So:

• A free reader who hits your paywall counts as a read, like any other.
• A paying reader counts as a read, like any other.
• Peakub notes the reader's level at the time of each read, but the Studio doesn't show reads split by level yet. You can't ask "how many of my readers last week were paid members".

What you can't see yet

• Conversion from a paywall. Peakub doesn't record what a reader was actually served (the full piece, a teaser, or the note in place of the rest), and payments are recorded against your publication as a whole and not against the piece the reader was on. So it can't tell you how many people subscribed after meeting a given paywall, or which piece earned a subscription.
• Teasers against paywalls. Whether a preview wall or a sneak peek brings in more subscribers than a hard paywall can't be compared.
• A conversion rate per month. The Studio doesn't show one.
• Revenue per level and per piece. Not shown.
• Email behaviour per level. Delivered and clicked emails aren't split by free or paid, and email opens aren't recorded at all.

What you can do meanwhile is compare, by hand, the Free and Paid subscribers lines over time. They are the most reliable numbers on the Dashboard.