Flip-Pay built Ireland’s biggest paywall. Now it’s helping American newsrooms take theirs down
Flip-Pay builds paywalls for Mediahuis Ireland, HuffPost and Press Gazette. So why did its founder help the Salt Lake Tribune scrap one?
Paul McCarthy-Brain hears the same objection so often he has a name for it: nobody has heard of his company. “We’re kind of neverheardofyou.com unless you’ve heard of us,” quips the Founder and Chief Executive of Flip-Pay, the Dublin content monetisation company he launched in 2015. “We operate predominantly off referral. Our sales team is small, and we generate more work than we can handle.”
The anonymity sits oddly against the client list. Flip-Pay’s platform took Mediahuis Ireland from zero digital subscribers in February 2020 to 100,000 across the Irish Independent and the Belfast Telegraph by June 2025. It runs HuffPost’s membership programme, Euractiv’s access systems and Press Gazette’s metered paywall.
In May it powered the Salt Lake Tribune’s removal of its paywall, the most closely watched reader revenue experiment in American local news. This year the company has engaged PR for the first time. “It’s about time we actually told people what it is that we do.”
Micropayments died in the finance department
Flip-Pay’s legal name, International Micro Payment Ventures Limited, records the founding idea. “We actually started off as a micropayments play,” says McCarthy-Brain. He had been investigating whether cryptocurrency wallets could finally make small payments work for publishers. Three years of R&D followed. The first phase dug into why every previous attempt had failed; the second, run with News Corp in the UK and US, explored what a working version might look like.
His conclusion was that the industry had misdiagnosed the problem. The real barrier was moving a reader’s identity and entitlements between publishers without friction, and no vendor had cleared it.
“If you’re reading an article about Man United versus Liverpool and the game is on, there’s a button: watch the second half. When you click it, and it takes you from The Sun to Sky, some magic should happen in the background which transfers rights. The customer shouldn’t have to fill in forms.”
The technologists liked it. Its accountants did not. “The CFOs always found it too disruptive. These are businesses predominantly based on recurring monthly and annual subscriptions, growing 2 or 3%. Something which would cannibalise that business would present too much of a risk.”
The BBC came closer, exploring a journalism wallet for small, regular payments. “They got it straight away. But the BBC is slow. The heads of tech and the director generals come and go. We were one of those cycles, and it ended up going nowhere.”
Mediahuis made the pivot pay
The turn came from Independent News & Media, preparing the Irish Independent’s move to paid access under its new owner, Mediahuis. Flip-Pay won the business against Piano, with a brief that reset its direction.
“They said, we love what you’ve done with the tech you’ve built, but would you go and build the gated community, for the monthly and annual subscriptions? Now we can do everything at the micro level. A day pass, an individual article, an e-paper, all the way through to monthly and annual subscriptions.”
That relationship still defines the pitch: “Really customised boutique implementations for very innovative publishers. That’s where we’re making our bread and butter.” When a client sets what McCarthy-Brain calls a North Star objective, Flip-Pay builds the feature, then folds it back into the platform for every other publisher.
For Euractiv, the Brussels title he describes as “basically the European equivalent of Politico”, that meant a European Parliament integration. Officials log in with EU credentials and get automatic access to pro-level content.
Flip-Pay would rather acquire than be acquired
The sector around Flip-Pay is consolidating fast. Sophi went to Mather Economics in 2023 and Poool to Darwin CX in March. “We’re privately funded. We have no interest in selling. We get loads of venture capital and private equity queries monthly.”
The company went through what he calls a growing-up phase around 2022, taking on ISO, SOC, and NIST certifications. “We stopped being a startup and started being a proper company. We may acquire something, but we’ve no current intention of selling.”
The unglamorous end of the business is growing fastest. In 2024 an introduction from California’s Press Democrat led to an alliance with Teak Systems, pairing Flip-Pay’s digital stack with Teak’s print circulation tools. The target is American publishers on legacy systems such as Naviga, in his words “tech which was developed before the dinosaurs roamed the earth”. That combination, he says, is “growing like crazy” in the US, with Latin America following.
A recurring donation is a subscription by another name
Flip-Pay’s move into donations began with a customer request. “We stepped back and looked at our platform. There’s not an awful lot that’s different between donations and subscriptions. If it’s recurring, basically it’s a subscription. The next question was, how could we deploy paywall tech into the donations flow?”
That means pointing the machinery of dynamic paywalls at the appeal itself: cohort analysis, metering and content-level context. A story about the US government and women’s health services, read by a largely female audience, can carry an ask tied to that coverage.
McCarthy-Brain gives the category’s pioneer qualified credit: “The Guardian is the daddy of this. I think they built it themselves, and it’s quite a blunt instrument.”
His other rule is that the transaction must never leave the publisher’s brand. “The worst thing a publisher can do is link out to a third party. You’re taking your money and giving it to somebody else. It should be invisible to the user.”
“You can’t just stick up a thing saying give us money, donate now. It just doesn’t work. Nobody will. The tech is fine. We’ve got the tech; it works. The hardest period is coming up with the narrative. Why should you support this publisher?”
Converts, he argues, are worth more than the payers they replace. “Subscribers are transient for the most part. If you can sell them on why what they’re doing matters, you’ve got a much stickier subscriber. It’s a different model, but the mechanics are all the same.”
HuffPost tested the thesis at scale, launching voluntary contributions with Flip-Pay in 2023 and evolving them into a tiered membership programme in January 2025.
Salt Lake did its homework before the gamble
The Salt Lake Tribune is the harder case. The Utah Daily has been under nonprofit ownership since 2019. In mid-May it took down its paywall and asked its 32,000 digital subscribers, roughly a third of its revenue, to become voluntary members instead.
Press Gazette framed the move as a gamble with that third. McCarthy-Brain rejects the framing. “They’d done their homework. They tested the waters. They didn’t just jump into this. They engaged with customers. A high percentage said they would convert.”
The conversion was heavy engineering: migrating subscriber data off a legacy platform, rebuilding onboarding journeys and satisfying “a lot of really specific non-profit accounting rules and regulations that you absolutely must follow.”
Early behaviour supports his stickiness argument. “People who may never subscribe are now deciding to contribute.” Lapsed payers are not written off either; they “go into your standard dunning flow, like you would a subscriber, and they can be targeted later.”
Flip-Pay now hopes to work with the American Journalism Project to replicate the model across the US local news landscape. On the Tribune itself, he hedges: “Time will tell. Once we’ve done a couple of years with them, we’ll get some really good solid data.”
The next subscriber may be a software agent
Collapsing Google referral traffic is doing Flip-Pay’s selling for it. His shorthand for what publishers on legacy paywall tech is telling him: “This was fine six months ago, but now what we need is every single bell and whistle available to us at a better price.” “Just having a paywall up is not good enough these days. You need dynamic elements. You need intelligence.”
On AI answer engines, his assessment is blunt. “At the moment, the only tools you’ve got available to you are to block them or to license, and that is pretty much it.”
The bigger shift, he believes, is agentic purchasing: an AI assistant instructed to find the cheapest route to a title’s journalism and transacting through a programmatic interface. That would bypass the A/B-tested checkout journeys the industry has spent a decade refining. “The content will be consumed in a different way, but there will still be the need for news organisations to tell us what’s going on. If that stops, the AI agents have nothing to read.”
AI has also compressed Flip-Pay’s own build cycles (“When you have an idea, we can prototype and iterate in days”). It is feeding retention too: a cancellation call can be scored in real time against lifetime value and engagement, with a custom offer generated on the spot.
In September, Flip-Pay will launch an unnamed AI product with Press Gazette at the Future of Media Technology Conference, born from a call with Editor-in-Chief Dominic Ponsford. “It started with a telephone call, and it spiralled into an enterprise thing.”
The growth has a lopsided shape, and McCarthy-Brain knows it. When his principal investor asked before the summer what could hurt the business, his answer was concentration. The Americas are expanding fast, and Europe is not keeping pace; a move by President Trump against the dollar or the wider US economy could turn that strength into an exposure. So, after a decade of being recommended in private, Flip-Pay is setting out to make itself known in public, in a market where the vendors it wants to displace have been advertising for years. Expect to be hearing more.
