The electronic version of the Wall Street Journal is identifying readers who are likely to subscribe to paid content by machine learning

One of the world's leading economic newspapers "Wall Street Journal"(WSJ) is also known for positively working on the paid electronic version, and the number of subscribers exceeds 1 million. In the "increase the number of subscribers" initiative, WSJ uses machine learning to anticipate the individual user's judgment and change the correspondence,NiemanLabIt reports.

After years of testing, The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader »Nieman Journalism Lab
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/

Dow JonesThe Wall Street Journal published is a business-specific newspaper, the earliest in economic paper in 1996 the electronic version of "wsj.com"Was launched. Most of the articles are set so that only the paid subscribers can read the full sentence, depending on the plan, subscription fee for reading everything is 222 dollars a year (about 24 thousand yen), and for students about 49 dollars a year It is 5200 yen).

Bydennis crowley

However, if you become a "closed service" for paid subscribers, articles on the WSJ electronic version will not spread out. Therefore, by registering an e-mail address, we adopt a mechanism to issue a guest pass that allows non-subscribers to read paid articles 24 hours a day. However, the guest pass is not issued to anyone, and over the past several years, there are more than 60 such as the place of residence of nonsubscriber who visits the electronic version of WSJ · the OS / device being used · the contents of the article being read I investigate the item and I am assessing nonsubscribers. However, what the Wall Street Journal understands is only the content of the survey, and the assessment result is said to be anonymous.

According to Karl Wells, general manager of the Wall Street Journal, by analyzing the assessment results, it is possible to roughly group several groups of nonsubscribers and subscribe to the WSJ electronic version in the future It is said that whether to do or not can be predicted using machine learning. For people with high possibility to subscribe, pay classes and free classifications are strictly set, while for those who seem to be unlikely to subscribe to paid content, please show the articles once for free and then pay content We are taking actions such as directing them to guests, introducing guest passes, and interested in paid contents.

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"The issuance of these guest passes is to predict the tendency of visitors who subscribe paid contents in a more accurate way.While the WSJ electronic version is known as a paid site, WSJ electronic version welcomes visitors who use the 24 hour limited guest pass, "Wells says.

WSJ electronic version is also now available as a way to allow non-subscribers to share a fee-based site, such as establishing a mechanism for reporters of the Wall Street Journal to publish their articles via SNS for free I am also exploring. The number of subscribers to the WSJ electronic version was about 1.4 million in February 2018, which means that it has increased significantly from 1.10 million in 2017.