Managing digital audiences has become one of publishing’s toughest operational challenges. Nearly 70% of major publishers now run paywalls, yet only 17% of consumers actually pay for a subscription when they see a paywall.
Referral traffic from search engines and social media too has steadily declined since 2024, just as Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies has hit ad revenue hard.
To compensate, publishers are doubling down on first-party data, which not only makes ads more valuable, but also enables publishers to implement dynamic paywalls, cleverly varying offers to customers, offering personalized bundles, and smarter retention strategies.
In fact, many publishers are now experimenting with hybrid or dynamic models, managing free readers, trialists, premium subscribers, and corporate accounts, each with different access rules, entitlements, and personalization needs.
This complex balancing act is possible only by leveraging first-party data. The challenge, however, is that this data typically lives across scattered and often ill-matched systems.Traditional CMSs were never built to handle this kind of identity and entitlement complexity, while CRMs are geared toward sales, not editorial workflows. Paywalls can manage content gating, but fail on identity management or other integrations.
As a result, publishers end up patching together half-measures: an access rule here, a paywall plug-in there, without ever achieving a unified view of their audience.
The result is a patchwork view of audiences, rising costs as you try and fill the gaps in the patchwork, and missed opportunities for personalization and growth.:
Glide Nexa claims to close that gap.
By consolidating what’s usually spread across multiple systems, Nexa helps publishers simplify operations, to reduce friction and better focus on growing engagement and revenue.
Join us as we review Glide Nexa, and evaluate whether it lives up to its claims.
What is Glide Nexa?
Glide Nexa is an Audience Interaction Platform designed for publishers, allowing the management of identities, entitlements, and subscriptions in one place.
It is created to fill a gap which publishers and other businesses struggle with when trying to manage audience access to services and products using tools which are not designed with those experiences and admin workflows in mind.
Unlike, say, a pure-play CRM that was built to focus on sales, or an identity management system that was built to care for user ID data, Nexa puts decisions about the audience/content relationship at the center – the bit where other systems usually struggle – and allows the other systems to focus on their strengths without needing to be bent into shape.
Glide says Nexa is not meant to duplicate the features publishers almost certainly have already, like analytics, and there has been a conscious attempt to keep the platform simple on the basis it is expected to work alongside dedicated systems, or itself provide enough functionality for smaller publishers to get them to the point where second or third dedicated systems can then make sense.
Rather than require admins to look across multiple systems to build up a picture of what someone is entitled to, or to create a new access level or product, Nexa means they can see it and create it in a single place. It unifies data about customers and audiences, organizes them into groups, and applies entitlement rules that determine exactly who can access what – all the sort of tasks that the other specialized systems or paywalls were struggling with.
In practice, this means publishers can:
- Define users (subscribers, members etc) with flexible data fields such as subscription type, location, or verification status.
- Assign entitlements for trials, premium content, corporate accounts, or competitions.
- Organize audiences into groups that can drive newsletters, alerts, ballots, or loyalty programs.
- Automate rules like subscription expiry, tier upgrades, or preventing repeat entries in a contest.
Glide Nexa is already being used by publishers ranging from fantasy sports platforms to nonprofit ticketing services to financial information providers. Some of its prominent clients include Poker.org, Tickets for Troops, and IFR, part of the London Stock Exchange Group.
Each of these platforms leverages Nexa for specialized functions. For example, Poker.org uses it to integrate newsletters and commenting, as well as to power fantasy games, Tickets for Troops uses Nexa for handling verification and ballot entry rules (such as preventing repeat winners), and at IFR, Nexa powers personalized dashboards, saved searches, and targeted alerts.
Glide Nexa’s Pricing and Features
Nexa is tailored to each publisher’s needs, which means there is no standard price list, and given the platform’s broad set of capabilities and the wide range of use cases it supports, from subscription bundles to entitlement-driven ticketing and financial dashboards, it is not realistic to expect a one-size-fits-all price tag.
Glide’s team deliberately built Nexa as a standalone product rather than bundling it into their CMS, because no two publishers use the same stack. Some need Nexa to sit alongside an existing CMS, while others rely on APIs or third-party tools that must integrate smoothly. By remaining independent, Nexa positions itself as a flexible hub that can integrate into various environments, rather than locking publishers into a single ecosystem.
The pricing model for the platform involves a monthly license plus hosting costs that are transparently passed through. This pricing package is designed to ease the transition, with access to comprehensive documentation, training videos, and unlimited editorial training for newsroom teams. This ensures publishers can migrate smoothly, minimize disruption, and get the most from the platform right from the start.
Irrespective of the price, all Nexa users get access to the same set of features. These include:
1. Identity and Access Management
Glide Nexa gives publishers a central way to manage how audience members log in and access content. Instead of relying on a patchwork of IDAM services, CRMs, and bolt-on solutions, Nexa consolidates this into a single layer of control. It supports single sign-on (SSO) across multiple platforms, so a reader who signs into a publisher’s site can also access related services such as newsletters, commenting systems, or loyalty programs without re-authentication.
This unified approach reduces friction for end users while cutting down on the maintenance overhead for publishers. It also allows admins to set granular rules around who can access what, ensuring entitlement logic is tied directly to identity rather than spread across disconnected systems. For example, a premium subscriber can automatically be given access to newsletters, alerts, and exclusive content without manual intervention. Enhanced security controls ensure that sensitive data and premium content remain protected.
2. Entitlements and Subscriptions
Nexa enables publishers to create and automate flexible access rules. Subscriptions can be set with custom expiry dates, renewals, or trial windows. Corporate accounts and tiered memberships can be modeled alongside niche use cases like ballot entries for ticketing. Rules are enforceable automatically, for example preventing a user from winning the same contest multiple times or upgrading access when a subscription level changes.
3. Data Model Configuration
Every publisher has its own mix of audiences, workflows, and business rules, and Glide Nexa’s data model is built to adapt to that variety. Instead of forcing organizations into a rigid template, Nexa allows administrators to configure the data structure so it reflects real-world needs. Custom fields can be added to capture attributes such as verification status, region, subscription type, or engagement tags. These fields can also carry metadata that informs how content is personalized, filtered, or made searchable.
These fields are not just for storage; they can be set as visible, hidden, or filterable, giving teams precise control over how data is surfaced and used.
This flexibility extends to entitlements and permissions. For example, a “country” field can be tied to geographic access rules, or a “verification status” field can determine eligibility for ballots and ticketing schemes. This makes it easier for publishers operating across different countries to enforce region-specific entitlements without managing multiple platforms.
Editorial and marketing teams can filter by these fields to build highly specific audience segments, while technical teams can map them directly to subscription logic or API calls.
Because the data model is configurable, Nexa adapts to a publisher’s needs instead of forcing them to change their workflows. It also future-proofs audience management: as new products, bundles, or access models are launched, fields can be added or adjusted without waiting on a major development cycle. In short, Nexa turns the data model from a constraint into a strategic enabler for personalization, entitlement, and long-term audience growth.
4. First-Party Data Capture and Synchronization
Nexa is designed around the growing importance of first-party data. It captures and stores customer-facing data in a unified structure, integrates with external CRMs when needed, and supports progressive data capture to enrich audience profiles over time.
By acting as a proxy between legacy systems and new engagement tools, Nexa helps publishers avoid data silos and instead build a 360-degree audience view.
5. User Management
Glide Nexa provides publishers with a robust user management layer that goes beyond simple account creation. Administrators can create, update, suspend, or remove audience members, assign them to one or more groups, and apply entitlement rules automatically.
For example, when a subscription expires, Nexa can remove the subscriber from premium access groups and downgrade them to a free tier without manual intervention.
This automation reduces repetitive admin work and ensures entitlement accuracy across the platform. Publishers can also set up workflows that react to user behavior.
A highly engaged free reader might be tagged for a trial upgrade, while a corporate subscriber could automatically gain access to newsletters, alerts, and premium dashboards. By centralizing these controls, Nexa eliminates the confusion that comes from managing audiences across multiple disconnected systems.
In practice, this means fewer errors, less manual overhead, and a cleaner relationship between the audience and the products they consume. For editorial teams, it translates into confidence that when they gate content or launch a new subscription package, the right people get the right access at the right time.
6. Customization Features
Nexa offers publishers the ability to tailor audience experiences without the need to get involved in custom builds of their other tech, a key selling point. Teams can set up branded email templates for, say, onboarding, promotions, and entitlement updates, so comms stay consistent with the publisher’s identity.
Onboarding flows can be adjusted to match different audience segments, such as local versus international readers, or trialists versus paying subscribers. Support for multiple languages also ensures that global publishers can personalize onboarding and communications. Nexa also integrates smoothly with third-party tools like newsletter or commenting platforms, and CRMs, giving publishers the freedom to change those systems or vendors over time without upending all the existing user and data workflows.
This balance of structure and flexibility ensures Nexa can adapt as strategies evolve, making it a long-term fit rather than a short-term workaround. For content teams, this means fewer bottlenecks when launching campaigns, when updating access rules, or experimenting with new audience segments.
7. Integrations and Flexibility
Glide Nexa is designed to fit into existing tech stacks rather than replace them or their major parts. It integrates with third party services such as newsletter platforms, commenting systems, and CRMs, including enterprise solutions like Salesforce.
Nexa can run in proxy mode, synchronizing data between systems so that Salesforce, for example, can remain the master record for sales while Nexa powers audience-facing identity and entitlements.This approach reduces vendor lock-in, lowers migration costs, and gives publishers confidence that adopting Nexa will extend current investments rather than disrupt them.
Getting Started With Nexa’s Dashboard
Nexa is structured around three main resources: Users (your audiences or customers), Groups, and Access Management areas such as Entitlements, Entitlement Groups, and Subscriptions. Fields in each of these areas can be customized using Nexa’s data models, based on your product offering and entitlements offered to an end user.
Here’s a quick look at what publishers can expect to see when they log in to their Nexa Dashboard.
1. Users
The Nexa dashboard treats your audiences and customers as its foundation in the Users section, giving administrators quite detailed control. A user list provides fields such as name, email, tags, and confirmation status, while administrators can decide which fields are displayed prominently, which are filterable, and which are obscured or hidden.
In our example, clicking into an individual user record reveals more detailed default attributes such as country, profile picture, and custom tags, and ours highlights whether a user had completed email confirmation – useful for onboarding flows.
Beyond static information, administrators can interact with end users directly by sending templated messages such as promotions, reminders, or other comms. For organizations running multiple projects, Nexa supports account management across entirely different products and domains, ensuring flexibility in handling large or complex user bases – so for example a customer using one site could also be given access to another site on a different domain, with Nexa at the center managing the relevant authorizations and access rights.
2. Groups
Groups allow administrators to cluster audiences or users according to purpose, making it easy to organize communities around specific needs. These groups might represent something as straightforward as a newsletter list, or be as complex as a tailored subscription bundle, a fantasy sports team selection, or geo-targeted ticketing experience.
Each group can again be customized with its own fields and filters, allowing administrators to capture the details most relevant to that use case. Membership settings provide further control such as the ability to highlight active or expired users, and set automatic expiration or removal dates – particularly useful for temporary access such as trial memberships or time-gated event access.
Real-world implementations also use groups to manage eligibility, such as Tickets for Troops which use groups to set tight rules for verified members to retain access to benefits or ballots.
3. Access Management
Access management within Nexa consists of Subscriptions, Entitlements, and Entitlement Groups, working together to determine what content or services a customer can access and over what timeframe. Subscriptions are typically time-bound and can include a grace period or free trial, after which access can be set to automatically expire.
Entitlements function like a form of permanent access rights, remaining in place until manually removed, while Entitlement Groups bring individual access rights together into packages that can be attached to a subscription offering or tier – easy then for an editorial or commercial team to relate to subscription bundles, pick-and-mix offers, or price levels.
This layered structure makes it possible to control audience and subscriber experiences down to a very granular level.
4. Data Models
A distinctive feature of Nexa is its configurable data models, which allow system users to shape the platform around their own needs rather than being forced into rigid rules or templates. Administrators can create and modify fields which appear in User, Group, and Access Management areas and decide whether a field is simply stored in the database, displayed in user lists, or available as a filter.
This means that the same dashboard can serve very different business models, from news publishers managing briefings and newsletters, to gaming companies configuring games, to membership organizations handling anything related to member benefits and entitlements.
The ability to extend data models also supports progressive profiling, where additional user data can be applied over time and help you deliver increasingly personalized experiences. This adaptability ensures that Nexa can act either as the primary system of record or as a proxy platform sitting between other systems such as a CMS or a CRM.
Glide Nexa in Action
Glide Nexa’s flexibility becomes clearest when we look at how it has been applied in the real world. Different organizations, each with unique needs, have adapted the same dashboard tools to solve problems ranging from content personalization to ticketing eligibility and even fantasy gaming.
The following examples illustrate how Nexa operates in practice.
International Financing Review (IFR)
International Financing Review (IFR), part of the London Stock Exchange Group, used Nexa to underpin its MyIFR personalization features. The goal was to give subscribers greater control over their experience,saving searches, subscribing to alerts, and configuring their own dashboards.
Nexa’s entitlements became the engine that decided what individual users could see, going well beyond a standard site-wide paywall. For example, IFR was able to determine whether a subscriber could access specific homepage components such as the hero banner or detailed financial league tables. In this way, Nexa enables page block-level content control, so different subscription tiers deliver different value while giving the editorial team flexibility in how content is presented.
Tickets for Troops
Tickets for Troops, a charity offering free event tickets to members of the UK Armed Forces, turned to Nexa to manage its complex eligibility requirements. The organization needed a system that could check whether key credentials were still valid, enforce ballot rules, ensure fairness in ticket allocations, and – crucially – allow it to retain an existing admin interface with which staff were familiar.
With Nexa, administrators set up expiry dates to run ballots that self-terminate, and ensure the fairness of consecutive ballots viz previous winners. The platform allows staff to flag or block attempts to circumvent ballot rules, and importantly, Nexa often works in the background as a proxy layer, feeding eligibility and group data into the existing interface.
Poker.org
Poker.org, a global poker news and community site, uses Nexa for a wide range of log-in and community features familiar to most publisher sites, but its most innovative use has to be in powering an interactive fantasy game tied to professional poker tournaments. Users could be grouped into fantasy teams, and their scores tracked automatically based on the performance of real players.
Nexa’s flexible group structures and custom data fields provided the framework to manage these teams and their entitlements, making it easy to build game logic on top of its existing user management features. Here again, Nexa acted as the back-end infrastructure, supplying the data needed for Poker.org to run a highly customized user experience without reinventing its entire technology stack.
Help and Support
Glide Nexa has been designed so that administrators can configure and manage users, groups, and access rules without needing to have specialist technical skills.
The system mostly is self-explanatory, and the flexible data model allows you to adapt it to various needs without custom development.
Where support is required, Glide people can work with clients to provide direct assistance such as for helping configure new entitlement structures, integrating Nexa with external systems, or setting up user journey logic.
Glide offers several layers of customer support tailored to the product tier.
Standard support is included at no extra cost, while premium packages extend coverage to 24/7 availability. Most queries raised through the support portal receive a response within an hour and are typically resolved the same day.
Beyond the portal, clients are also connected to the team through shared Slack channels, which include not only support staff but senior managers and leadership, ensuring visibility and quick escalation.
Additional help is available by phone and email, and customers have access to a comprehensive library of training materials and documentation at no charge.
In practice, many organizations have found that their own teams can manage Nexa day-to-day with minimal training, leaning on Glide only for more advanced support and guidance. This combination of intuitive design and responsive backing ensures that Nexa remains practical for teams of different sizes and technical backgrounds.
Glide Nexa in Review
Nexa is one of the most flexible and sophisticated identity, membership, and access-management platforms available to publishers and membership-driven organizations today.
What We Love About Glide
- Extremely flexible data models that adapt to different business needs, from news subscriptions to ballots, fantasy games, and beyond.
- Fine-grained access control that can determine not just site-wide access but visibility of specific blocks, components, or features.
- Acts as both a standalone platform and a proxy layer, integrating smoothly with existing CMS or CRM systems without forcing a change in workflow.
- Designed for real-world complexity, such as handling membership expiries, enforcing ballot rules, or managing strict eligibility requirements.
- Intuitive dashboard that balances configurability with ease of use, reducing reliance on developers for day-to-day changes.
- Proven use cases across diverse industries from financial news (IFR) to charities (Tickets for Troops) to gaming (Poker.org).
Where There’s Room for Improvement
- The dashboard, while powerful, could be enhanced with more native analytics and reporting to reduce reliance on external tools.
- Bulk communication is handled via integrations, not within Nexa itself; some organizations might prefer a more built-in approach.
- Because of its flexibility, initial setup and modeling may feel complex without guidance.
In the final analysis, Nexa lives up to its positioning as a composable and highly configurable identity and access-management layer. Its ability to flex between acting as the system of record or as a behind-the-scenes proxy gives it broad applicability.
For publishers, non-profits, and membership-based businesses seeking to modernize access control without rebuilding their stack, Glide Nexa is a compelling and future-ready solution.
We believe that as most publishers adapt to a post-cookie world, platforms like Nexa that unify identity and access will play a key role in guiding business decisions on subscriptions, personalization, and long-term growth.
