Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
greetings. What's up, man?

Tyler (00:02)
Hello, 2026.

Pete (00:04)
⁓ that's right. It's the first podcast of the year. my God. Yeah. Well, we have a big one here. We're going to talk about this one's going to be a teardown of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. They announced that they are closing in May and yeah, painful. So it's funny when when I heard the news a few days ago, I know you and I were chatting and

We were thinking, okay, let's maybe we should take a look and see if there's anything that we would do differently. And, I know, I know you went through it, but I, when I went through it, I couldn't believe the number of things that were just, how do I say it? Wrong. That we're just destroying the visitor experience. So let's, let's get into it.

I'm going to share my screen here and what we're going to do here.

is yeah, we're gonna pick on, we're gonna pick on this, on the poor Pittsburgh Post Gazette. ⁓ But we're also gonna talk about what should have been done to actually move the needle in their favor. So the thing about it, I mean, they're a 240 year old publication, right? They're the number one news publisher in Pittsburgh.

Tyler (01:54)
Peace.

Pete (02:01)
And it's, know, Pittsburgh has the trading areas like 2.4 million residents or something like that. And

bottom line is when we go through this teardown ⁓ you're gonna see that they kind of treated their visitors and readers like enemies and I don't say that lightly it was really hard to to go through the site I actually went through a paid subscription on the site just to experience that and to be fair it was okay it wasn't terrible but it wasn't great either but there are things on here that are obvious

And there's some things on here that are really subtle, but are absolutely operationally destroying them and confusing their readers. So what do you say? Should we jump into it? Okay. All right. So here it is. This is the website. Can you see it?

Tyler (02:50)
Let's do it.

Pete (03:01)
Okay. ⁓

So I run an ad blocker, about 40 % of readers run ad blockers. ⁓ And you know what, before I even get into the tactics of this, I just gotta say something.

One of the questions you might be thinking is like, like what should the, what should the expectations be for reader revenue? And with a 2.4 million residential area, we have some data from Statista that looks at different publishers across the United States, what their, ⁓ what their, ⁓ you know, the geographic area is size wise and it breaks down how many print and digital subscribers that they have.

And we come up, if we do an average across a bunch of different markets, some really big markets like LA, but some smaller markets like Little Rock. And we see that on average, they're doing about five percent, over five percent of the residents are paid subscribers. Five percent is like, if you're doing a decent job and you're the leader in ⁓ a city, like you should be hitting five percent. And if you look at them through the numbers, you can see that some of them are doing a better job and going higher.

Um, these, this data is about a year plus old. I mean, Baton Rouge, you know, they're creeping up on 10 % conversion, right? As far as, you know, population that, that subscribes. So they're really embracing their readers as community, you know, as members in this community. This is not what what's happening in Pittsburgh. Okay. So if I go back to, um, 2.4 million, if you, if they, if they were to charge $10 a month,

And they get 5 % of their population to subscribe. That's a $14 million a year income stream at 5%. At 10 % is $28 million per year. And they could do it. And we're going to, we're going to talk about how. Yeah. Sure. If you, I do, I do not interested in being a publisher, but, ⁓ but, if somebody, if somebody, if.

Tyler (04:58)
Are you suggesting an acquisition that we should do? Do you see an opportunity,

You

Pete (05:14)
If you're listening to this and you're rebooting the Pittsburgh area, let's have a chat because we can certainly help on some fronts. Okay. ⁓ Where was I? All right. So let's get a little bit more into the tactics. mean, you know, have, have, they had a chance to build a nice moat. not sure. Well, I know why it happened and there are a lot of operational things in the backend that we know about.

that we don't know about, and I'm not really here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about as a paid subscriber, which I became, like what do we see on the front end that can be improved? Okay. First thing here is ad blocker. Okay, 40 % of people do have ad blockers running. Why would you annoy them right off the bat? If I'm blocking ads, ⁓ okay, I'm blocking. I don't want to see ads. They're not going to work for me, right? So just...

You know, let me through without having to figure out how to get past this, right? So when I say like treating readers as kind of the enemy, this is what I mean, right? ⁓ Okay, so now what do you gotta do to relinquish your ad blocker? You gotta click on this thing and you gotta say, okay, well, we're not gonna block for this website. We're gonna hit refresh and now we're in to the site. Okay, so it's like, here come the ads, right?

Tyler (06:38)
on come the ads.

Pete (06:42)
Yeah.

And, you know, to be fair, like this layout, this is fine, right? It's a new style layout. It's got, seems pretty well organized. it, it, you on the surface, it's the design is, is, is pretty good. Um, and, but when you start like actually digging in, starts to, whoo, it starts to get intense. Okay. So let's go and, uh, I don't think I'm logged in here. I'm to go in and, uh, look at an article. What happens?

Tyler (07:12)
right away. Hit with 8 weeks for 99 cents. Ouch.

Pete (07:19)
I mean,

how do I know I want to pay?

Tyler (07:23)
Right.

Pete (07:26)
It's just, this is tough, right? This is tough to swallow.

Tyler (07:27)
Well, it's...

And if you're only gonna... If you're doing eight weeks for 99 cents, you might as well... If you're gonna block all content, you might as well do a free registration and at least collect the email address in exchange for, you know, a couple of more articles because this is just... First of all, you do...

Pete (07:46)
Right.

Tyler (07:48)
If someone does happen to sign up for this trial, you're already losing money on the credit card transaction fee. It's like 70 % of it's going to the credit card vendor. you've made your 30 cents or whatever from the subscriber. it's a difficult task at that point to then get them to level up to a paid plan without giving much tasting.

Pete (08:14)
Yep.

Yeah. So the profits are, the profits are terrible here. Secondly, it cheapens the whole brand. 99 cents. Are you kidding me? Like, like I see these 99 cent promotions and I know you're probably more pissed off about it than I am, but they, do devalue the content, right? That's just, just don't do it, right? Give away time, not money. Like give away, like, you know, pay for the full month, but get three months instead of.

Tyler (08:22)
Yeah.

Ha

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like an impulsive thing, think, for publishers in print because they're so used to that, like, you know.

gimmicky, low-cost, gas station style advertising that's just like, it's undervaluing everything that they're doing as far as content goes. But I think that's been an issue for a while. It's like getting publishers to see value in their content where for the last however many centuries the value is in getting people to come to your site and

then look at ads, You're not here for the content, you're here for our ads.

Pete (09:23)
Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, that is true with a lot of publishers and you know, and then the third thing is, I mean, you have the instant pop-up like pay now. I'm not ready to get married yet. It's too cheap. It cheapens the brand. There's no money in it. Right. I mean, if it's a Stripe transaction, Stripe takes 50 % 50 cents per transaction plus they're 3 % or whatever. And so you're, you're just blown out all profits.

And the missed up at the biggest crime is what you mentioned earlier. It's, it's the opportunity to grab an email address and say, Hey, if you register, I'm okay with hard walls. got a brand, right? Like they got, people know who they are. They got trust. ⁓ but you know, hard wall, everything to keep AI out. Okay. That that's a, that's a big part of it, but ask for an email registration to get to that article, build that email. That's like crazy. Right.

And then all that, all the newsletters get, you know, grow and and grow in size, swarms traffic back. Sponsors love big newsletters. I mean, if we do the math, right? So 2.4 million population should result at about a, let's say 15 or 20 % newsletter conversion, which would be likely, you know, talking 300 to 400,000 email addresses that you should have.

And if you do the free registration here, then yeah, you would be building that list very quickly. And you know, do sponsors want to get in front of three or 400,000 local, you know, or people that are interested in Pittsburgh?

Tyler (11:06)
Yeah.

Pete (11:06)
I

think so. I think so. But before we get into that, me jump to, because we're talking about newsletters. So the other thing I did, I was like, okay, I don't want to do this. I'm going go back to the homepage here. And I'm like, maybe I can get on their newsletter, see what their newsletters look like, right? Now, as a resident, probably want to be on the newsletter. So I went looking and I found this button here. I think it says newsletters, right?

Tyler (11:30)
Hmm.

Pete (11:31)
So when I click it, I get a login screen.

That's what I said. What is happening here? I'm so sorry, but this is, this is a disaster. Just at the very least have an email field and just let people put their email in and click. Right. If you're to do a pop-up, just make it easy. So the idea is though, put a, put a, put a, registration, this kind of thing, but a registration where that 99 cent offer is. So.

Tyler (11:44)
All right.

Exactly.

Pete (12:04)
This was

a huge mess. don't know. I don't know how they're building their newsletter, but I mean, we've talked this talked about this in previous episodes. You're not building your newsletter. You're not going to grow paid subscriptions. Bottom line. I mean, you will, but not as fast. Not nearly as fast. OK, so.

Tyler (12:19)
Yeah.

Pete (12:24)
So that kind of was driving me a little bananas. ⁓ right. Okay, so, you know, they're gating, it's funny, it's like, this is the first publisher I've seen gating top of funnel, right? So if you look at like, from an internet marketing, it's like top of funnel is do everything you possibly can to reduce the friction to grab that email address. And they're doing the opposite. They're gating the top of funnel of the leads that come in.

that hopefully they turn into paid subscribers and maybe buy other products or join events or whatever. It's just the whole thing is insane to me. Okay. All right. ⁓ Let's talk a little bit about something else that's I'm ⁓ use the word bad. And this is the subscriptions. They are running three different subscription platforms here.

Tyler (13:16)
Hmm.

Pete (13:24)
And this has got to be causing an operational collision. And it's certainly causing subscriber confusion, right? So I'm to go find their subscribe button, which is over here. And I get this now. Speaking of collisions, their ad network here is overlaying their subscription cards. So these two systems are separate. They're not talking to each other. There's, you know, there needs to be a

You need to get rid of this, this ad here. But back to subscriptions, you got two options. You got digital subscription and you got the digital and Sunday subscription. Now, if I go to digital subscription, I get this pop-up. This is what I went through. I went through a digital subscription. ⁓ It's a little funky. It's a little clunky. It did work though. And I got in and I was able to access content. So that was fine. Okay. But if I go to this like...

print digital combo, I'm all of a sudden on form stack.

Right? This is a whole different platform. Right? So now they're managing. First, I'm confused as a subscriber because I don't know what forms like, if I'm just like Pete interested in subscribing, like what is form stack? Why am I here? And have they been hacked? I mean, really.

Tyler (14:33)
Interesting. Right.

Right, does look

a bit, yeah, it's strange, yeah.

Pete (14:55)
It's strange and you don't want strangeness in your as a friction point in somebody who's going to pull out a credit card. that's, that's a conversion killer right there. So this is obviously going into a circulation management situation. We know that, but it's, this is a whole separate operation. So, you know, like what happens like, okay, I'm creating an account here and I'm creating an account, different account and digital.

And how does the print get access to digital? Also, you have all these challenges. have just pure login challenges with two separate systems. But now it gets worse, Tyler. This is absolutely bananas. And so was poking around. I'm like, all right, what else they got? Remember how I mentioned that they're 240 years old, right? They've been publishing content. So what do they have? They got archives. I mean, we're talking juicy.

Tyler (15:46)
Right.

Pete (15:52)
pile of gold archives from 240 years ago. If I'm a paid subscriber, like, and I get access to these old archives and I'm a resident, I love Pittsburgh, whatever. Yeah, like this would be amazing to look 100 years ago, 200 years ago, right? What happens when I had archives? Yeah, George, right.

Tyler (16:09)
Yeah man, George Washington time.

It's way back. ⁓ wow, okay.

Pete (16:15)
Look at this. went

to newspapers.com newspapers.com is ingesting their content and they're getting like pennies on the dollar for access here. So this is another login system and it's not even controlled by the post.

Tyler (16:34)
They're not even controlling their own archive and so therefore they're not even benefiting from the 200 plus years of content that they have available that newspapers.com is, obviously they're pulling it from their old PDFs or whatever. And especially in the age of AI, this stuff can be converted into...

Pete (16:40)
Go.

Right.

I... Yep.

Tyler (16:57)
into PDFs and even into readable articles. So there's lots of gold here that's probably converting at the same rate of Google Ads.

Pete (17:00)
Yeah, right, right.

And there's no social sharing happening here. There's little SEO value for what's left of SEO. It's just a whole different. So if I buy a subscription here, then I need to buy a digital subscription? Or do I need to buy a print and digital? Do I need two subscriptions at least to get everything, right?

Tyler (17:31)
Boy, that gets messy, yeah.

Pete (17:33)
It's, this is really, this is a problem and it's pretty, and the tragedy is that this is gold. This is a pile of content gold. If you bring it over on the main site and you gated appropriately and you make it part of a single subscription where you get everything like one subscription, get it all. You, maybe you opt out of print if you don't want print. Now they're only running two days a week. Now they went from weekly or daily to two days a week.

Maybe you maybe if you don't want pretty much some people don't you can opt out. But one subscription, right? They have three.

Okay. And just, I just want to say a little bit about that. I mean, we work with a lot of print publishers and you know, we worked really, really hard on integrations. That's how we got started 10 years ago, working with print publishers and, taking their disconnected systems. This is clearly an example of, and making sure that circulation is tied to digital access and the data lives in one place and

The subscriber has one login on the main website. You're not getting kicked off to other and and you know what it works It's been working for years and years and years for a decade with with our print publishers that are selling digital subscriptions and The fact that we don't have a cohesive system here drives me crazy and I still see it today You know the where we are ten years, and I'm sorry if I'm ranting, but where we are today

10 years later after where we started, it's not much further along than in a lot of cases with, especially with the print publisher sector. And why go to two, like in 2018, they went from daily to two days a week. Print is a tough anchor to carry, right? Really tough anchor. And we have publishers that have converted, taken the plunge and gone and stop printing.

and just leaned into digital and they're doing great. So the print thing, that's kind of its own discussion. I'm sure there's history and all sorts of politics and all sorts of things that I don't understand, but it is an anchor. It's hard to make money unless you're the New York Times and your print scale is just so enormous, you can actually ⁓ benefit.

Tyler (19:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Pete (19:59)
Let's talk a little bit about advertising here. ⁓ You mentioned it earlier. The ads are coming in. ⁓ Is it me or are these ads off point?

Tyler (20:09)
Hmm.

Pete (20:18)
This one seems better, hiring Pittsburgh, but this one?

Tyler (20:24)
Yeah,

I mean, they're not too bad. There's just a lot of them and...

I don't think these are in-house ads. might be. They might be running through the Google ad manager system. It's not clear to me. Yeah, but it could be through Google ad manager. I don't know, but ⁓ it's a lot. There's a lot of ads going on here. And I know that from working with publishers with millions of page views ⁓ per month, that even with that many Google ads on their site,

Pete (20:39)
Yeah, this one's Google here. Yeah.

Tyler (21:01)
it's not worth the amount of money that you bring from it to just completely destroy the experience for a potential ⁓ paid subscriber, which I guess in this case, it's not the focus is not really on getting paid subscribers into a funnel, then I guess, yeah, let's go ahead and just flood the site with ads, right? It's like the goal here is clear, right? It's like eyeballs. We're still in the eyeballs game, which that game is I think long gone, even for some of the biggest.

Pete (21:25)
Hmm.

Tyler (21:30)
highest traffic websites, millions of page views don't convert like they used to.

Pete (21:38)
Absolutely not. it's a little bit of the print legacy in there, you the ad model for sure. Last thing I'll just poke at is event calendar. There is an event calendar here. I challenge you to find it. We know that a good local calendar is a good source of SEO and engagement and such, and they should have an AI-powered event calendar. And if you're thinking about it, go to...

Tyler (22:00)
So yeah. ⁓

Pittsburgh's ripe

with events. Yeah.

Pete (22:08)
Yep. Yep. Go

to localcalendar.ai, is our take on the solution. Check it out. But yeah, event calendar, there's opportunities there. Now, I think I've said enough in terms of all the issues that are on here from sort of a public facing. And I don't know if you have anything else, but I kind of feel like just summarizing what we went through.

There's a lot, there's a lot here. ⁓ Okay, so first thing, ⁓ registration wall, right? Don't ask for money, ask for an email, right? You wanna build a community, you wanna engage people, build that email list. So in trade for access to an article, right? ⁓ Ask for an email, but don't ask for money. Just get an email, get them registered, ⁓ get them on your newsletter and swell that newsletter list.

Right now, most publishers are saying, hey, please join our newsletter. But that's really wrong today. You can't do that. Your superpower as a publisher is you have content and you have an audience. Those are really your two superpowers. You have great content and you have an audience for that content. Great. So if you draw a line in the sand in your content, say, look, here's a very hard line, but it's an easy line. You just need to drop an email address and you can get access to more content. And you get our newsletter, by the way.

guess what happens, 20 % of people convert instead of 3 % or whatever the newsletter pop-up metric is. ⁓ So that's number one, stop with this, take my money right away before you have built that relationship. The newsletter then becomes a value piece to keep the person interested on the content and what's happening. And if they click and go to the site to see more, then they get the upgrade messages and it's time to pay.

Right? ⁓ so that's one thing, and, and please don't ever, ever charge 99 cents for a month of access. Charge, charge the full month. Let's say it's 10 bucks. Do a 10 bucks for three months access giveaway time, not money. Preserve the value of the content. Giveaway time. You get three full months. The price of one that works. We've proven it. It's worked for years.

Tyler (24:19)
Don't charge 99 cents for anything.

Pete (24:39)
Okay, make sure everything is tied together. Get things integrated. You have circulation, you have a CRM. mean, get all these things ⁓ integrated so you have one login system on your site and that's it, right? And it's amazing what APIs can do to move data back and forth and keep systems in sync and give that reader, the subscriber, especially the sort of that easy experience on the site.

Own your own local mode. mean, building your newsletter, grabbing those emails, you got AI coming for your content, you might need to lock it down. Google's always been sort of a place where, yeah, you wanna be, but 30 % of traffic is, of reading this today, publisher traffic is down 30 % from Google search, 30%. That was what came out today.

So you gotta build that email list. Social media, is it important? You can still have social sharing work, but you can do it in a better way where with a bigger list and with subscribers, you can do gift links. Subscribers will forward ⁓ emails or text messages, hey, read this article. This is the viral kind of stuff that's really, really important, right? The stuff on social is not as important. ⁓

course it's got some importance. ⁓ sales, you know, I see these ads and I see the Pittsburgh one on the bottom, I think that was pretty good, but it should all be really, really like the, it should be very Pittsburgh focused, right? Forget national brands in there and really work on direct sales. That's where the money is. Forget the Google stuff. ⁓ And ⁓ I think that's, I think those are the takeaways. Did I miss anything?

Tyler (26:41)
I think that covers it. think without knowing what's going on internally, these are some incredible digital strategies that have been proven to work, as you said, for the last decade that we've seen. I think if they didn't have, just looking on the outside and...

Without that print anchor and the ginormous overhead, like I've actually driven by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette before, it's ginormous, it's like a multi-story building in downtown Pittsburgh. I'm sure there's ginormous overhead with what they're currently doing. So it's like, if this digital strategy is not in line, I can only imagine what the print side looks like. So if they're not working together.

at any level and they're as disconnected as we've seen. It makes it almost impossible to to turn any kind of profit, which clearly we're seeing that.

Pete (27:43)
Right, exactly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, gee, where do I start? That's a lot. That was heavy. What I would say is go to your own website, go in, fire up an incognito browser, and then count how many pop-ups you're delivering before you can actually read content or can you actually get to a piece of content ⁓ that if you have more than one pop-up, you got some work to do.

I'd say that would be a good place to start. All right, Tyler. Thanks, man. Till next time. Catch you all later.

Tyler (28:20)
There you have it.