Context
Dainik Bhaskar is one of India's largest news platforms — millions of daily readers across Hindi-speaking India, mostly in tier-2/3 cities, mostly on mid-range Android phones, in a market with famously low willingness to pay for news. Premium membership was a strategic bet for the company, and as the designer for subscriptions and growth, the funnel was mine.
The puzzle: a brand this big, this trusted, was converting far below what its reach deserved. The paywall existed. People hit it every day. It just wasn't selling.
The problem — found in Bhopal, not in a dashboard
Analytics told us conversion was low. It couldn't tell us why. The answer came from the field: during a user study in Bhopal, sitting with our actual readers, a pattern kept repeating — many users had no idea paid plans existed at all. Not "too expensive." Not "not worth it." They had simply never seen them.
Looking at the funnel through that lens, it was obvious. The lock screen — the single point where a reader's intent to read is highest — told users they'd run out of free articles and to come back next month. A dead end. The plans lived elsewhere in the app, behind taps most readers never made. Awareness, not willingness, was the first bottleneck.
What I did
1 · Plans onto the paywall
The redesigned lock screen carries the store itself: both plans with prices, an anchoring badge — "less than ₹1 a day" on the annual plan — a pre-selected default, and a single continue action. Two plans, no more; on a small screen, in Hindi, for readers who've never compared subscription tiers, every additional option is friction dressed up as choice.
2 · Discovery before the wall — plans on the home feed
The Bhopal finding meant discovery couldn't wait for users to hit a wall. So plans came to the home feed too: a membership banner at the top of the feed and a full plan widget placed within the feed itself — pricing visible in the reader's daily scroll, before any article was ever locked.
3 · Intro offers, layered on
A couple of months after the paywall shipped, intro offers followed: a ₹1 first-month trial designed to collapse the decision cost to nearly zero, with clear "₹25/month from the second month" framing — an honest trial, not a trap.
4 · One screen change to paid: quick checkout
The funnel kept compressing. The paywall's current form carries not just the plans but the payment itself — a reader picks a plan, chooses their payment method (UPI apps like PhonePe, right on the lock screen), and pays without ever leaving the article they came to read. Home feed → lock screen → member. The distance from "didn't know plans existed" to "paid" is now one screen change.
Decisions & tradeoffs
Editorial vs. monetization — solved with a system, not a fight
Placing plans inside the home feed meant putting commerce in editorial's territory, and editorial pushed back: the widget would interrupt the news. The resolution wasn't a compromise on position — it was making position itself flexible. I designed the widget to be customizable in placement and presentation, so it could move day to day around the news agenda. Editorial kept control of their feed; monetization kept its presence in it. The lesson I carry from this: when two teams fight over a surface, don't design a screen — design the control over the screen.
Alignment before pixels
The paywall concept was discussed directly with the CEO before detailed design began. That sequencing — leadership aligned on the idea first, then the design developed inside that mandate — is why approval came in one pass and the team never burned weeks on directions that would die in review.
Restraint on the lock screen
The strongest pull on a paywall design is to add: more benefits, more badges, more plans, more urgency. Almost all of it got cut. Two plans, one anchor, one action. For this audience, on these devices, clarity converts better than pressure.
Outcome
Plan discovery from the lock screen rose ~34%, paywall-to-payment completion improved ~18%, and the intro offers lifted conversions a further ~27% in their first quarter. The paywall stopped being a wall and started being the storefront it should have been all along — and the home feed placements meant a reader could now go from "didn't know plans existed" to "member" without ever hunting through the app.
What I'd do differently
Two things. First, I'd instrument before designing: our baseline measurement of the old funnel was thinner than I'd like, which made attribution fuzzier than it needed to be. Now I treat the measurement plan as part of the design deliverable — if we can't cleanly see the lift, we didn't finish the work. Second, I'd think past the purchase from day one. We optimized the moment of buying brilliantly; the moment after buying — the first premium session, the renewal decision — got attention later than it deserved. Subscription products aren't bought once, they're re-bought every cycle, and I'd design for the second purchase from the start.