Text-to-Speech Paywall Integration: BotTalk Case Study with Hamburger Abendblatt

👆Click to see (and hear) how BotTalk Text-to-Speech was integrated into the paywall of Hamburger Abendblatt 👆

The problem

Hamburger Abendblatt is one of the oldest newspapers in Germany, dating back to 1820.

Like many publishers nowadays, the colleagues at Hamburger Abendblatt focus on their "north star metric" - generating more subscriptions and, what is even more critical, preventing churn.

The problem that BotTalk and Hamburger Blatt were set to solve was a challenging one:

How do we make premium content more attractive to the readers to convert more users into paying customers? And how do we keep those converted users engaged, reducing churn?

The solution

BotTalk provided easy integration with the paywall solution used by Hamburger Abendblatt. One can activate paywall integration in the BotTalk project settings with one simple checkbox.

Furthermore, the editorial team can decide by themselves how much of the premium content should be read to the free user - as a teaser.

After a short teaser, a non-subscriber would get a call to action that promotes the subscription:

To hear the full article, please subscribe. If you are a subscriber, please log into your account.

BotTalk Statistics Free To Premium Conversion

The results

BotTalk provides a comprehensive set of tools to measure the success of Text-to-Speech conversion and engagement.

Text-to-Speech audio articles integration into the paywall achieved the following results:

Engagement improvement: 10% of the users clicked on the "Listen Button"
Dwell-time improvement: 75% of the listeners stayed for over 2 minutes
Conversion improvement: Call to action after the audio teaser converted 0.5% additional users into paying subscribers