The challenge
Premium content that Google couldn’t see
ArtsHub had built something rare: a genuinely trusted membership platform for artists, cultural organisations, and arts professionals across Australia and the UK. Thoughtful editorial, quality job listings, courses, and events — content that its subscribers valued and paid for.
The problem was that Google couldn’t see most of it. Paywalled content is invisible to crawlers, which meant ArtsHub couldn’t rank for the topics it covered in depth. New audiences couldn’t discover the platform at all, which directly limited membership growth. And alongside the technical barriers — a fragmented subdomain structure, JavaScript-dependent pages, crawlability issues — there was a harder internal challenge: a long-running standoff between two legitimate business interests.
The commercial team needed to protect subscription revenue. The marketing team wanted organic reach. Every proposed solution seemed to help one side at the expense of the other.
The approach
Finding the solution that appeased both sides
The answer was flexible sampling — a structured approach to what Google could index and what required a membership to read in full. Done properly, this gives search engines enough access to rank your content without giving readers enough to make a subscription unnecessary.
This isn’t a new concept, but implementing it well requires care. The rules around what’s visible and what isn’t need to be technically sound — Google is attentive to whether the experience it sees matches what users see. And the sampling threshold needs to be calibrated so it genuinely drives interest rather than just giving content away.
Working closely with the editorial, product, and development teams, we defined the framework and made sure the implementation held up under scrutiny. For the first time, both the commercial and marketing teams had a solution they could accept — because it genuinely served both interests rather than compromising either.
Rebuilding the technical foundation
Alongside sampling, the fragmented subdomain structure was consolidated. Content that had been spread across separate subdomains was brought under a single domain, concentrating authority rather than diluting it. Internal linking was repaired, mobile usability issues were addressed, and structured data was implemented across job listings, events, and courses to improve performance in enriched search results.
The CMS migration, delivered in partnership with CodeCo, was the most complex piece of work. A publishing platform with a large content archive carries real traffic risk through any major infrastructure change. Working with CodeCo meant SEO requirements were built into the migration process from the start — not bolted on afterwards. The result was a cleaner, faster, more scalable platform, with no traffic lost through the transition.
Expanding the model
The success of the approach created the foundation for expansion into related platforms: ScreenHub, focused on the screen and media industries, and GamesHub, targeting the games sector. The same principles — quality editorial, careful visibility management, solid technical foundations — applied across all three.
The outcome
8x organic growth — with subscriptions intact
ArtsHub has achieved an 8x increase in organic traffic. Organic search is now a major driver of both audience growth and membership acquisition. The CMS migration completed without traffic loss. And the standoff between revenue and reach that had limited growth for years has a sustainable answer — one that both sides of the business can work with.
The collaboration with the ArtsHub and CodeCo teams was one of the more satisfying projects I’ve worked on, precisely because the problem wasn’t purely technical. Finding a solution that genuinely served competing interests, and building the trust to implement it properly, is the part of this work I find most rewarding.