Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:09)
Mm-hmm.

I want to talk about what Politico is doing. They're betting their future on setting up free registrations for their readers. Hi, I'm Pete. I'm from Leaky Paywall, and we're gonna dive into why the free registration wall that you set up will be your path to the future. And I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but we've been working with hundreds of publishers getting these registration walls set up. They throw off a lot of benefits, and I want to dig in why. So ⁓

Neiman Lab covered the future of media technology conference recently. And there were a lot of interesting things. But this one, this this move that Politico is making really jumped out at me because it's something we've been talking about for a while. And it throws off five really important benefits to you as a publisher. So ⁓ when you put a registration wall up, and let me define a little bit

First of all, what it is. A registration wall is essentially a paywall, but you're the reader is paying with an email. So what Politico is doing is they're letting ⁓ readers read a few articles, and then they put up a wall that says, hey, drop off your email address. And ⁓ with that, ⁓ you get registered in through a password and you get access to their free content. So their approach is they're gonna have a selected category essentially of free content, and that

registration is going to give the reader access to it. That's that's essentially how a free free registration works. And you might think that is an annoying thing for readers to run into. And yeah, I guess initially it's a little bit annoying, but you get the benefit of getting the newsletter. You get the benefit of getting access to their great reporting. And this is how you should think ⁓ of a registration wall. What happens with the newsletter?

⁓ it throws traffic back to your publication. It gets delivered to that reader. The reader gets the value of that newsletter that you're sending to them. And something to keep in mind is that the newsletter really should be treated as ⁓ one of your main products. It's it's kind of the way the newspaper used to show up in your driveway or in your mailbox. It's the thing that happens automatically.

For the reader, they don't have to go to a website, they're not going to AI to ask for things. They're literally getting your newsletter in their mailbox. And just scanning the headlines of your newsletter is of value to your reader. So this is part of the reason why ⁓ Politico is doing this. Email lists growth. Now, what you're doing, and what we see on our end is we see a ⁓ about a 2x to 7x growth.

across our publishers versus just setting up an opt-in or a pop-up or something that ⁓ says, hey, please join our newsletter. And the time is really over for that approach. The time is for requiring the email to get access to your content. It's a fair trade and it works. And what you'll see is when you set up a registration wall, you'll see ⁓ 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x,

maybe higher conversion rate where readers will give you their email address, they'll choose a password to log in to get access to some of your content. So email growth is a really big one and that's something that Politico is seeing. Okay.

We've covered email growth, we've covered the newsletter. ⁓ the other thing is that when somebody has registered on your site, they are now ⁓ logged in to your site. And guess what? You get to track their every movement. So the idea is that and the and if you're in the paid subscription game, you want to know who's going to upgrade, who's gonna pay, right? And so the registration wall.

gets your free casual readers logged in and it it it lets you see who's engaged, who's looking at multiple articles every week on your site. And then you can you can you can see who who these folks are. You have their email address and you can send them an offer, a promotion, ⁓ something, or you could target them on the on the your website and

give them something that ⁓ only they see because they're an engaged reader. No one else sees it. That's something that we're doing with our publishers today, and it's working incredibly well for them. So I imagine for Politico it's working very well as well. Okay, so you get ⁓ email list growth, you have ⁓ data now, engagement data from these free registered ⁓ readers.

The newsletter lands in their mailbox, let's say weekly or daily, whatever the your cadence is. And that newsletter becomes a product that I would recommend you spend some time getting, really polishing and and getting right. ⁓ and if you if you're if you're really time strapped, you can fully automate your newsletter as well. And there's several ways to do that.

⁓ another thing that ⁓ that publishers have discovered is that you know a big list is very attractive to ⁓ advertisers. So you end up with advertising growth. you can charge more, you'll have more more advertisers are interested in your list. Your list is a really it's a it's a direct sales tool for that advertiser. Your ⁓ your list ⁓ is

is is your viewers. If you're local news, then you're you're saying, Hey, I have I have all the important folks in this town or if you're a a magazine or niche publisher, you have a a specialty and an interest specialty and you can get ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, whatever, hundred thousand ⁓ email addresses out ⁓ for an advertiser, that's what they want. So the the growth in your list really does ⁓

speak to ⁓ advertising growth and and we've seen that and ⁓ the industry has seen that ⁓ the fifth one is a little more subtle but it's it's ⁓ maybe the most important certainly down the road and that's AI defense so ⁓ let me show you a little something I saw ⁓ as well ⁓ this week. I'm gonna hop over to ⁓ Neiman Lamp here again. ⁓

Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It's now the top news app in Argentina. Okay, so this these are the things that are happening with AI. AI is letting ⁓ individuals really create pretty interesting things. So, what is this AI app doing? This AI app is scraping the top news publishers' websites, pulling the headlines,

And then creating automatically creating an AI audio briefing that that's that's going out to readers. It's the top app in the country, and it's a fully AI driven approach that is pulling the content off of the work that local publishers are doing. Now, for the for their readers, this is great. They get a place to to go to get sort of a AI curated, maybe ⁓

⁓ news via audio and ⁓ but for the publishers that are creating this it might not be so great so ⁓ and i've seen this as well with 6am studios they ⁓ they've been put it popping up local news sites in different towns in the in the united states and they're doing exactly the same thing they're scraping the sort of the the top headlines from

local news publishers putting it in a newsletter and then sending it out. It's not audio, it's just a a s standard newsletter. And so not only is AI scraping your content and putting the answers into AI overviews, and when you go to Google and you just ask for something, you might get get ⁓ the answer without the click to your website. But you have entrepreneurs that are essentially going after your ⁓ news content.

And putting together their own curated products, which are working. So ⁓ back to the registration wall. you can set up the registration wall to block bots, and those AI bots that are coming in and grabbing your content can absolutely be blocked. And so we are we are absolutely seeing some of our publishers do this, ⁓ the ones that are kind of waking up early to this and

my recommendation today is if you do not have a registration wall up and you've never tried it, ⁓ then it's time to put one up and you'll find you'll find email list growth, you'll you'll you'll know who's engaged and who's gonna upgrade. ⁓ your newsletter really just becomes more and more important and getting the cadence and getting the the content structure right for it becomes a priority.

you'll see advertising growth and then you'll be able to block AI bots. Now, yes, you can pay AI companies to have access to your content, and that's that's starting to generate some revenue for the really big publishers. for small, mid mid-sized publishers, it's it's pennies, and you're also risking ⁓

humans ⁓ basically getting that data in say AI overviews versus paying you the bigger dollars for the subscription. So it's a bit of a balancing act. You do have you do have the two audiences, the AI audience and the human audience. And today I think it's a valid strategy to sure you can you can reach out and pay for get paid for for the content AI polls and have humans pay for ⁓ your content as well but

Some point down the road, ⁓ you want to lead it, lean into your own audience and continue to nurture that. Okay. So ⁓ I'll just close with a bit of an offer if you've stuck around. And ⁓ if you're running WordPress and you're looking for a registration won't, ⁓ go to leakypaywall dot com and you can go to the WordPress repository and find ⁓ the leaky paywall plugin. It's free. You just download it, includes a

registration wall includes upgrade messaging and paid subscriptions. ⁓ it's pre-built for Stripe. It's all free. You can you can but you can use that wall ⁓ as a starting point just to build your list. And if you get in touch with us, we will set up insights for you at no charge and you can start tracking the engagement of your free registered readers. Just send an email to info @ leakypaywall.com and

just note that you heard this on the podcast and we'll we'll get that going for you. So ⁓ free registration wall, ⁓ bottom line, let's get it set up and reach out if you have any questions.