The bottom line of Victoria Turner's message is simple: "We needed to monetise our content," she says. "The good news is that people will pay for value."

And from the mindset that saw News Corp titles among the first in the world to install paywalls has evolved a position on how print and digital works - "we have two paywalls, for print and for digital," she says - work together.

The News Corp Australia customer relationship marketing general manager told the INMA Congress understanding this has led to "really strong progress" and been rewarded with growing consumer revenue including a 100 per cent increase in digital subscriptions over two years, despite increased prices, with total digital revenue growing in double digits.

The group's titles in Australia include national daily The Australian, metropolitan dailies in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and a Sunday paper in Perth.

Turner says print consumer sales are driven through retail promotions, content marketing and product development, "but equally in our digital paywall, we encourage customers to take weekend bundles, and digital packages which include both paywalls". Awards programmes for premium subscribers are worth "hundreds of dollars".

An earlier metered model brought problems with backdoor access to content, confusion and inconsistency about the offer to subscribers. "We now have very strong retention in what we're calling customer interrupted channels," she says.

In the last 12 months, "the more stories we have blocked, the more subscriptions have been driven".

As a resut, the approach to premium content has significantly changed for our editorial teams as they try to understand not only the impact on traffic, but also the result in terms of subscriptions generated.

"We have seen the number of stories blocked increase from about 25 per cent to almost 50 per cent, with minimal impact to traffic in pageviews," she says.

"The good news is that our editorial teams have more confidence of what customers are willing to pay for."

That also requires a balance between quality and quantity, with 60 per cent of traffic coming from search and social, but local and exclusive content being key and responsible for about half of subscriptions generated and 30 per cent from sport. "In case of the (Melbourne) Herald Sun, we've seen that AFL football, Victorian news and crime drive the best conversions."

Evolution of the value proposition - which is a focus on access, rewards, product and service improvement - is a given, plus an ongoing focus on engagement. Premium members who redeem a reward, for example, are 52 per cent less likely to churn, she says