Case Study: Harvard Law School achieves 300% subscription growth and explosive email list expansion with Leaky Paywall

How a legal magazine managed their paywall to explode their email list and subscriptions

The Practice, an online magazine from Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, had strong, specialist content but poor discoverability and low readership. A strict hard paywall blocked search engines and social sharing, making it difficult to demonstrate value to potential readers and to grow subscription sales.

They moved their WordPress site to Zeen101’s Leaky Paywall, which lets bots and social platforms index content while metering access: two free articles, then the choice to subscribe or register (email capture) for two more, with corporate subscriptions adding domain emails to the list. In six months this drove a >300% increase in subscriptions, big social gains (Twitter followers +20%, Tweets +950%, impressions +1000%, engagement +2000%), and allowed them to resurface back issues and broaden their audience.

Harvard Law School

Bryan Fong

Practice’s Managing Editor