Sticky side card · blur strategy
The newsroom that stopped guessing about price
A regional daily tried single-article unlocks for ninety days. The results surprised the editors — and changed how the whole paper thinks about paywalls.
When the editorial board of the Kurier Zachodni sat down in January to look at nine months of paywall data, the chart nobody expected was the price one. Not the conversions, not the retention — the price. The paper had been selling annual subscriptions since 1998, and the idea that a single story could carry a price tag of its own had always felt, in the words of one editor, “like selling one page out of a book.”
Then market research came back with a number that made them pause: readers who never bought a subscription were, in large numbers, willing to pay pocket change for a single well-reported story. Not a bundle, not a membership — one story, read once, paid once.
The pilot started small, on the weekend long-reads the desk was proudest of. Three prices, three audience buckets, ninety days. The paywall itself was the simplest possible thing: blur the second half of the article, ask for a small one-time payment, unlock instantly on the same scroll position.
This page demonstrates one of the seven paywall layouts built on gvm.js — the sticky side card. The unlock card is docked to the right edge of the viewport and follows the reader through the blurred premium part without covering the reading column.
The first surprise came in week two. On the pilot articles, the average reader reached the paywall, hesitated for less than a second, and paid. The friction was so low that the editors initially suspected the analytics were broken — the whole checkout was a single button, a single SMS, a single tap, and the article simply un-blurred in place.
The second surprise was about the readers who paid. They were not the heaviest users of the site. Many were occasional visitors who landed from social media, read the free half of one exceptional story, and decided that the asking price — less than a bus ticket — was fair. They were the readers the paper had spent years trying to convert to subscribers, now paying voluntarily, story by story.
The third surprise was the quietest and, for the business desk, the most interesting: the price itself could move. When the paper tested 0.99 PLN against 2.99 PLN on the same tier of stories, the lower price converted roughly twice as well — and the revenue difference was smaller than the subscription team had predicted, because volume made up for the lower ticket.
None of this made the annual subscription obsolete. What it did was reveal that the demand curve under a price of five złoty was a curve — not a cliff. There were readers at 0.99, more at 1.99, still substantial numbers at 2.99 and 4.99. The paper simply had never given them anything to buy at those points.
The editorial conclusion, written up in the internal review, was deliberately unglamorous: “Readers do not hate paywalls. Readers hate subscriptions they forget they have. A single, honest, small payment resets the relationship with every article.”
The commercial conclusion followed a week later. The pilot multiplied into a permanent fixture, and the paper began marking its strongest stories for single-article unlocks at a flat 1.99 PLN — the price point that had performed best across every bucket in the study.
For the technical team, the lesson was broader. The deployment took an afternoon: a template, a blur strategy, and a data attribute. No checkout backend, no redirect flow, no app store dependency. The same infrastructure now drives every paywall layout in this showcase — including this inline card.
When the ninety days were up, the board asked for one number. The paper reported: average unlock time, from click to article, under four seconds. It stopped apologizing for the paywall after that.
data-gvm-env="demo" — the payment
resolves automatically after 3 seconds.