George Montagu

Head of Insights

FT Strategies

Welcome to Trendlines & Headlines - a monthly newsletter from FT Strategies' Data & Insights Practice where we share and analyse one graph from the world of news and publishing.

Registration ‘walls’ and sign-in ‘gates’ often wind people up. Whether it is audience members or editorial teams, these barriers to entry are hardly the most popular feature of the internet.

However, our chart this month suggests that registration walls and sign-in gates play an important role for publishers:

Source: News Sustainability Project 2025 Report - FT Strategies and the Google News Initiative

What the graph shows, in simple terms, is that publishers who have more people logging into their websites tend to make more profit. This is based on data from over 800 news publishers. Diving deeper, 41% of profitable publishers had logged-in rates of over 7.5%, compared to only 15% of unprofitable ones.

I know what some of you are thinking: “just because two things move together doesn’t mean one causes the other”. The classic correlation vs. causation debate. True, we can’t say for certain that logged-in audiences ‘causes’ profitability, but what we can say is:

• Registered users are far more likely to convert to paying subscribers - the NYT is on record saying that these users convert at rates more than 40x higher than anonymous users, largely attributed to email marketing (NYT Investor Day 2022). We have seen even higher conversion rates (up to 100x) with some of our clients.
• Registered users are far more likely to come back to your site / app - rather than rely on flimsy referral mechanisms, an email address allows you to take control of your destiny by reaching people in their inbox.
• The very registering of a user creates a permanent ID for the individual. That is beneficial to data teams and allows for more accurate web analytics tracking. It is also beneficial to advertising teams because they can append behavioural or demographic data to the ID and use it for target advertising at higher CPMs. 
• Registration is likely to become more important as third-party cookies (potentially) deprecate, flimsy referral mechanisms become broken and AI assistant disintermediation materialises.

So what?

1. News organisations need to stop fearing registration walls - although they may limit traffic in the near term, they typically create value for advertising and reader revenue businesses.
2. Make it easy for users to login - a lot of websites (e.g. Hotels.com or Uber) now offer passwordless options such as sending a unique login code via SMS or over email. This reduces friction and can improve engagement.
3. Use the data you are collecting to build a connection with audiences - don’t just let the data sit there, build a customer onboarding journey, encourage them sign-up to engagement-linked features (e.g. newsletters) and incentivise them to provide more data (e.g. interests to personalise their experience).

From our perspective, it’s no surprise that logged-in rates and profitability move together. What publishers need to do is ensure that their access model (to increase registrations or sign-in) is balanced and not overly throttling reach or advertising revenue. We have advised many organisations on how to do that, so if you are interested, please drop me an email at george.montagu@ft.com.