A digital publisher can establish various types of paywalls. If you have a great reputation, lots of high quality content, and a large audience, you can choose to gate your entire content catalog, like Financial Times and Netflix. We call this as a Hard Paywall. Your audience or readers will have to subscribe first, and only then they can access any of your content.
Others might simply avoid paywalls altogether, and instead seek donations while offering Free Open Access to all their content. Wikipedia and The Guardian are good examples of this. But even here, you need to have established your brand and have a strong position in the information landscape.
But most digital publishers and content creators can neither use hard paywalls nor go fully free. For one, putting all of their content behind paywalls will severely hamper their SEO score and site rank. And lots of valuable revenue opportunity will be lost if they go fully free and depend on donations. So, most media companies and creators will go for some version of a Soft Paywall. We will explore the nuances of various soft paywall types next.