Subscription funnel: from a shared article to an attributed install

News spreads as individual articles, shared one link at a time. The reader who taps a friend's link wants that story — not your app's front page, and certainly not a subscribe wall with no context for why they're there.

What problem does this solve?

A reader shares an article. The recipient taps, doesn't have the app, installs — and should open directly to that article, with the subscription prompt framed around the story they came for and the channel that referred them recorded.

How do you set the links up?

Every article share is a deferred deep link to that article, carrying enough context to personalize the paywall and attribute the eventual subscription.

{
  "deepLinkPath": "/article/2026/06/grid-failure-report",
  "customData": { "section": "investigations", "ref": "reader-share" }
}

Where should the paywall sit?

• Open the article first — let the reader land on value before any ask.
• Contextualize the prompt with the section they arrived through.
• Attribute the subscription back to the share and channel, even when it converts days later.

The ordering is the whole argument. A reader who arrives from a friend's share has demonstrated interest in one specific story and none at all in your brand — they don't yet know which publication this is. Asking for money before they've read a paragraph converts on the small fraction who already recognise you and loses everyone else.

How should metering work for a deep-linked reader?

Count the shared article against the meter, but never let it be the article that triggers the wall. A reader whose first-ever screen is a paywall has no basis to judge whether a subscription is worth it, and shared articles are the single best-qualified traffic a news app receives — they arrive with a personal recommendation attached.

• Let the referred article read in full, regardless of meter state, on a first install.
• Start the meter from the next article, when the reader is browsing on their own initiative rather than following a friend.
• Keep the section they arrived through in the payload — an investigations reader and a sport reader should not see the same subscribe copy.
• Track the meter server-side against the account or install, not in local storage a reinstall wipes.

There's a real trade-off here and it's worth stating: a generous first article costs you some conversions from readers who would have paid immediately. It buys a much larger pool of readers who reach article two, and article two is where the subscribe prompt actually has an argument to make.

How do you attribute a subscription that converts days later?

Bind the originating article and channel to the install at first open, and carry that binding on the user record — not on the session. News subscriptions rarely convert on the first visit; the reader arrives from a share, reads, leaves, comes back twice, and subscribes on Thursday. If attribution lives in the session, all of that credit lands on 'direct' and the share that started it looks worthless.

Store the acquisition context as a property of the account when it's created, and report subscriptions against it regardless of how much time passed. That's what makes it possible to tell editorial which coverage actually earns subscribers — a question most newsrooms can only answer anecdotally.

Which metric should you watch?

Share-to-subscription rate — installs from article shares that convert to a paid subscription, attributed to the originating story and channel. It tells editorial and growth which coverage actually drives subscribers, not just clicks.

Report it per story, not just in aggregate. The aggregate number is a dashboard metric nobody acts on; the per-story cut is the one an editor will actually read, because it says which piece of journalism brought in paying readers this month.