Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
Okay, Tyler, let's talk about confidence today, shall we? Confidence, publishers' confidence in their content, in asking for paid subscriptions, and really doing the things they need to do to bump their revenues on the reader revenue side of the equation. And I would argue on the advertising side if they do it right.

Tyler (00:03)
Let's do it.

Pete (00:20)
What do you say? Let's jump in. And I know you're the right guy to talk about it based on the publishers that you ⁓ deal with. But let me say a few things first, and then we'll kind of jump into West Virginia and what's going on there. And we're going to also provide, and the promise for this podcast is we're going to give you a very simple roadmap on how to, and the tools, to essentially build your confidence to nurture your readers and everything else in your publication.

This has been a bit of a long time coming. been, I know you, I've been talking about this for months. Like we should do a podcast on, you know, going from couch to confidence, right? From really, really ⁓ listening to a lot of publishers' fears and rightfully so from where they came from in terms of turning on a paywall. Paywall sometimes is a little bit of a negative connotation. Like, my God, I'm putting a wall up in front of my best readers. This is scary and.

⁓ Especially publishers that are coming from print and migrating to digital But also publishers that have a lot of advertising on their site and they're really going kind of volume based and then all sudden It's like wait a second. got it. I'm turn on paid subscriptions now I got to make sure my content is valuable so that I hear a lot of this Here's some direct quotes by the way. This is and this first one is nuts Okay, we are not confident in our content

So I was in a meeting not long ago with a publisher that, yes, they did manage to get their paywall running with us. But this is what the publisher told me. We're just not confident. And they were coming kind of from a heavier ad-based model. They actually had a paywall in place that wasn't working so well. And I think they were sort of doubly scared of driving their readers screaming away. Here's another one.

⁓ We're in a low-income area, so subscriptions probably won't work. Yeah, I know this is the one we'll talk about in a little bit. ⁓ Answer is, nope, that is an incorrect ⁓ statement or whatever it is. ⁓ Next one, paywall's gonna hurt my traffic and my advertising. That's another one, right? We get that one a lot. There's a lot of fear behind that one. And when done right, the opposite is true. It you know, it actually...

grows your traffic, grows the audience, ⁓ which impacts advertising. Advertisers like big email lists and lots of traffic to your site, right? Hurting my reader experience, that's one that's sort of related. And this last one is for magazine publishers. And this is one I've heard a lot, over the years, I've heard this one a lot. ⁓

Well, we're gonna lock down our magazine articles because they are confident about their long-form journalism. But we're gonna leave all our quote-unquote news posts free. And the problem with that, of course, is their news posts, probably 80 % of their website and 20 % of the website are their magazine articles. So when you put a paywall up on 20 % of your website, nobody ever sees your paywall. And the reality is, is all your content is premium. If you've written it, like if it's your...

content, it's premium content. And you got to let the inbound user decide, know, what is, you know, if they're linking off Facebook or Google search, they decided this is important to them. so all your articles are confident. Okay, now, ⁓ and I will say that when you look around ⁓ publications, websites,

Tyler (04:10)
Yeah.

Pete (04:37)
that the ad-based publishers are in a tough spot. So let me just share my screen real quick and show, give you an example of what ⁓ a not very confident publisher is doing. And if you're watching this on YouTube, this may, you may relate to this, but this is a publisher here, Boca Raton, great news publisher for Florida, for their region of Florida. But what they're doing,

is they're essentially filling their website with floating, moving ads, slide in things at the bottom. I clicked into an article just as when I was sort of testing things out and I got a takeover, a complete takeover with a sneaker or something. I was like, wait a second, what is happening here? And then, yeah, mean, you can see they're set up for...

Tyler (05:29)
You ⁓

Pete (05:36)
for building their list with the free registration and paid subscriptions and all that. they're not, they're smelling a little desperation, a little desperate, right? It's like, ⁓ let's just jam advertisements at you instead of really embracing that their ⁓ content is valuable and worth subscribing to. Now, okay, so if you're doing,

If you have a lot of stuff running on your website, like a Boca Raton Tribune, ⁓ you need to dial back the slide ins and the pop-ups and that will help you build confidence in charging for revenue and building your list, which is better for advertisers because advertisers love big lists. Okay. Let's get to West Virginia. I promise this. ⁓ So the thing that we hear, I know you and I both hear

is, you know, my town is a low-income town. people don't have the money to pay for subscriptions. You don't know my town, right? So, all right, I'm let you kinda like launch into this a little bit.

Tyler (06:53)
Yeah, so anyone that knows anything about West Virginia knows that it's, ⁓ demographically speaking, all indicators would tell you that launching any kind of digital product in a state like this that struggles with access to broadband, that struggles with virtually everything to some degree ⁓ would be kind of a bad idea. ⁓ But we've worked with several publishers like

Pete (07:13)
Hmm.

Tyler (07:22)
literally Paywall Project started in West Virginia and I would argue maybe one of the hardest markets you could imagine for a product like this, for a tech product to launch. And one of our very first customers ⁓ was in ⁓ not only the poorest county in West Virginia, but the sixth poorest nationally in the US.

We're talking a pretty rough situation for ⁓ the local news ⁓ site in that community. When we came to them, they didn't have a website at all, ⁓ and they were still doing their print product. The lady who ran the operation is now retired, so the publication is no longer a thing. But they turned on this model that we preach, this free registration funnel. They were collecting emails.

sending newsletters, they were cultivating an audience and they were like, things were turning around with their paid ⁓ subscribers. People were paying, even in this desperate situation as far as financials go, like people in the community were still paying the five, eight, nine, $10 per month or whatever they had it set at ⁓ despite everything kind of going against them.

Pete (08:28)
Mmm.

How did they feel about that?

Tyler (08:49)
I think they were surprised that people would be willing to pay for what they were producing. And again, for local news publishers, especially those in these kinds of communities, you're often the only player in town. You might have some overlap with some of the regional, like statewide players, but none of them are focusing on the local school board.

the local county commission as we call it in West Virginia or the local city government or whatever. No one's covering that in that area. And they were. And so people were still paying for it. And they saw their local newspaper as sort of a beacon in the community and they wanted to support it. And they leaned into that story. So ⁓ all of that to say is that no matter the demographics, ⁓ no matter how small ⁓ the area, there's still

Pete (09:36)
Hmm.

Tyler (09:44)
there's still opportunity to grow out a paid digital subscription system. I thought we were long past the days of ⁓ having to convince publishers to move forward with this kind of model, but we still do get pushback that paywalls and paid subscribers aren't something that will work for us. It works for the times, but it won't work for us.

Pete (10:09)
⁓ How many ⁓ publishers in West Virginia have you worked with successfully?

Tyler (10:17)
my god. ⁓ It's in the dozens at this point. Yeah.

Pete (10:22)
Okay.

All right. So what I'm hearing is really one of the poorest sort of regions in the country. And yet these publishers are succeeding with setting up paid subscriptions.

Tyler (10:37)
And this holds ground in other areas. We've worked with other poor regions ⁓ throughout the US in different states. This holds up. This isn't unique to West Virginia. Are there some special thing about West Virginia's community that makes people want to pay for their local news coverage? That's not the case. We also see it in other parts of, know, rural parts of Oregon and other parts of the country where people are willing to pay despite. ⁓

Pete (10:49)
Right.

Tyler (11:05)
the demographics in the area.

Pete (11:08)
Yeah, okay, awesome. That's a strong message. All right, let's jump into the tool set then, shall we? And talk about how to actually build confidence and using the tools to do it rather than just saying, hey, I'm gonna be confident and do it. We're gonna give you the framework, ⁓ the flywheel to get this done. Now let's switch over and look at, oopsie, there's a pop-up. I just tried to get out of here and it screams.

It screams pennies, I'm sorry. ⁓ we'll hop over to our favorite here, Salem Reporter. Yes, they have advertising, but it's not ⁓ absolutely drowning me in pop-ups and slide-ins and such. One thing I wanna go back to real quick and cover is that as a mindset, all your content is premium. mean, if you're pulling in from third parties, sure, you're just repurposing someone else's content, but if you're writing your own original content, that is premium.

And ⁓ on the confidence side, like as a publisher, of your superpowers is, well two superpowers is content. It's the original reporting you're doing, whatever ⁓ it is. And it's also the traffic. You have traffic coming to your publication. You have a lot of traffic and your traffic is growing because people want your content. Every link that comes in from Google or Facebook,

your email newsletter or wherever or chat GPT is because somebody said I Need this piece of information it shows up wherever they are and they click the link Right that link takes them into the article that took you three minutes to write Right. I mean, let's assume that your article was produced in three minutes and you think it's a fluff fluff piece You might think that but your inbound reader does not think that

Your inbound reader wants that specific piece of information, so it's important to them. So all this inbound traffic are people that are saying, yes, please, I want this. This is important to me. So it's part of the confidence mindset. And now what do we do to kind of take the next step and set this up? Okay. First thing I just mentioned is strip your advertising down, right? Don't have any slide-ins, don't have any pop-ups. Your main mission here is to build your email list.

to build your, obviously up the newsletter list, and that means when you're sending your newsletter, you're sending more traffic back to your website. That will be your biggest traffic generator, period. ⁓ Facebook, social, all that, ⁓ Google is under fire from AI and algorithms and you name it. You can't count on it, but you can count on your email list. So build your emails, you control your emails, you own them.

They're yours. It's the one thing in the internet that's been true for 30 years or however many years the internet's been around, the email. ⁓ email newsletters are killing it. Still, they always have been and they, because they go direct to the reader's inbox. And when you have a big email list, guess what? Advertisers say, hey, I want in on that, right? That's where you get sponsors, might be a better word, ⁓ into ⁓ your flow rather than popping up.

⁓ This is now a more elegant solution for your readers. Okay. All right. So all your content is premium Your website if you look at Salem Reporter, you know, we've looked at this a thousand times But to me it speaks confidence, know, I'm not getting interrupted. I'm ⁓ I get to browse around without going crazy. I get to read an article as we know and then ⁓ when I get to ⁓ The second article I get an ask

A nice in-content ask works great on mobile, works great on desktop, whatever, and it's simply, hey, this story's free for you. And you'll get our newsletter, just drop in your email address and off you go. This works like crazy to build your email list as we've talked about over and over. 20 % your email list, even if you're doing a good job with newsletter pop-ups and asks in your content, this will grow your list about 20 % faster. It's just, we look at the charts and it's like, boom.

Tyler (15:28)
Yeah, yeah, and and you you can see in this site too if you're watching this They have ads right they've got ads on their site, but they're local ads if you look at all of them They're all community focused local ads that pertain to their region They're not Google ads that you know are showing you dinosaur eggs like these are like legitimate ads in the community that people want to see so Like if you're do ads do it that way

Pete (15:38)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Tyler (15:57)
Don't rely on the 0.00001 penny that Google is giving you for the ads that just completely destroy the experience on your site.

Pete (16:10)
Absolutely, that's just a super point. ⁓ as you have categories for your content, you can also match these local advertisers or if you're ⁓ more of a national product, you can find regional or national advertisers that match your categories more specifically, they're more relevant to your readers. And that kind of start falling into sponsorship kind of talk there. Okay.

The next thing is getting control and using levers of control. This will also help build your confidence. What do I mean by that? Well, what I've just shown you is the free registration that we talk about night and day. I mean, we dream it when we're sleeping because it works so well. The solution to the world's problems is a free registration. Just ask us, we'll tell you.

But all kidding aside, what you're doing here is you're building your email list and it's the first part of the of the it's the lever that you have ⁓ that will help you build confidence. When you see your email list starting to go grow faster, you will feel, wow, that's amazing. I just talked to a local publisher in Spain who started up and what they decided to do was be really careful with their audience. They had no subscriptions on their site whatsoever.

And what they did is they decided, we're going to put this free registration to capture email. Basically, after one article, they're requiring that email to view the next one and get that reader on their newsletter. And they said, okay, when we hit a thousand email addresses, and they started at zero, this is a brand new publisher. When we hit a thousand email addresses, then we'll start talking paid subscriptions, which they have done now. And now their paid subscriptions are taking off. But this...

is the, this is the confidence lever because you can set this up and let it sit for 30 days or six months if you need to, which we've worked with publishers that have done this, even in the B2B space. Let's build out that email list before we turn on the paywall. And so you set it so that when you register, you get full access to the website for a limited period of time. You're being really nice to your readers. You're telling them that a payment,

know, are coming, right? But in the meantime, you're going to get full access just for registering and you're building that up and building that up. And then as a side bonus, you know, on checkout, so they're already logged into your site, they can just check out with their credit card. ⁓ So this free registration is the first lever and it will build your confidence, will build your email list and ⁓ it will, for the most part, always exist on your site.

Okay, let's give you kind of the overarching picture of how this works, because this is always worth a review. And this is what we call the flywheel, our flywheel framework. And these are the tools that you need to use to grow that list, which grows the traffic, which grows your ad demand, which grows paid conversions, right? ⁓ So you have your casual readers coming in from Google and social and email and all your sources.

They come to your site and your first lever is that free registration we just talked about. Now you could be super, super generous and say, look, you can get five articles before we even bother you with a registration ask if you really, really want to. And we have publishers that do that and they come in and they say, here's five articles. And to be fair, the New York Times started with 20, you know, 12 years ago, right? They gave away 20 articles a month. And then they said, no, let's go to 10, then go to five.

Tyler (19:54)
Right.

Pete (20:01)
zero. But you still have to register with your email to get the next one. So yeah, you can start with five and then what will happen is in 30 days or in a week you'll be like where where are the email addresses right? Well no one's really hitting that registration because people pop in they read one or two articles. If you look at Google Analytics it's probably 1.7 articles per per user visit something like that. So you need to you need to pop that free registration on the second article right?

That's the, because most people are hitting the second article, they're gonna drop in their email to see that second article. Okay, so that's your first lever. And again, yeah, you can start generous and then sort of, and just change the numbers and be, and okay, go to five, then go to three, then go to two, then go to one. You should be a one, you know, typically, unless you're way, you know, have a big brand and you need to really lock stuff down, you should be a one or zero, I would say, and then you register. Okay, so you register.

got that, you got that person, they're on your newsletter. Now your newsletter, we have probably a number of podcasts on the newsletter, but we did one recently. The newsletter cadence is, know, if you're local news, you're probably sending a daily or more newsletter, categorical newsletters, know, sports or politics or whatever. If you're a magazine publisher, you're probably sending two or three a week, something like that. The cadence is up to you and your audience, of course.

But that newsletter is your direct marketing tool. It is landing in people's inboxes every day, a couple of three times a week. It's keeping your brand in front of your readers and it's sending those readers back to your website. And what happens when they come back to your website? They're landing on a different article. Now, have the big lever number two is you can decide how many free articles that you're going to give away after the free registration.

So if you wanted to, you could say, hey, if you register, like the New York Times did, we're going to give you 10 free articles, right, after you register. Well, they'll never see your subscription prompts, so you won't really get many subscriptions. But you could do it just as a way to sort of slowly tiptoe into the subscription waters. And then what you'll find in a week or in a month is you'll need to tighten up the number of free articles you get after registration, right?

and you go to five and you go to three and then you go to two and you really probably should be at one, maybe two, depending on how much, what your volume is. And then your newsletter is doing its job and you have this flywheel and it really is a flywheel where your random traffic ⁓ is forced to register. your best, most important random traffic, if that makes sense, registers with their email, get on your newsletter.

And then your newsletter is literally sending people back to your site over and over every day or two or three times a week. It's over and over. That newsletter is landing back in the inbox. People are seeing it. ⁓ this publication exists. that's an interesting article. I'm to click the article and go back to the website. And then you'll get one or two free articles a month. And then you get that upgrade messaging. Right. And as you tighten, use that second lever to tighten what happens after registration, ⁓ you'll start to introduce the upgrade messaging.

⁓ more more frequently to that ⁓ engaged reader who registered on your site. And you need to wear them down. I mean, this is the life we live, right? We need to see things 10 times, 20 times, whatever number of times to be like, ⁓ I should probably just pay and get access because I like this content. If a reader sees this upgrade message 10 times or 20 times, that means that they wanted to read an article.

10 times or 20 times. Like their motivation was like, I want to read this. I can't read this. Now you, you, you, get that emotion 20 times. Your chances of pain to just to get access goes up and up and up over time. And so what you're doing is you're kind of setting up, ⁓ don't know, farming is that, I don't know if that's a good analogy, right? But you really are, you're growing crops, right? You're growing your audience. You're, you're planting the seeds with the free registration.

And then over time, these seeds start, you you're taking care of them. You're not harassing them with advertising and pop-ups. You're giving them your content, which is, you know, your superpower. Great content ⁓ and a growing audience and lots of traffic. And you're nurturing all this audience and traffic into seeing the upgrade message and then converting to paid subscriptions. And it works like crazy.

Okay, where are we? That was a bit of a rant and I do apologize for that. But what we're seeing out there drives, I know Tyler, you feel the same way. It drives us crazy. There is so much nonsense ⁓ in the world of ⁓ badly set up subscriptions. And when you get it right, you're building your traffic, you're building your email list, advertisers are happier, you're getting paid subscriptions.

It's all, you're starting to worry. You have the confidence to worry less about social media and Google search and, we got to do SEO and let's hire somebody to optimize our social presence. my God, AI is here. What do we do now? Like all that stuff, instead of like, you're putting the fire out, right? Like it starts to simmer down. Like, ⁓ well, our email list is growing. Our subscriptions are growing. Our traffic is growing. You really don't have to worry about all these things that are not under your control.

Tyler (25:46)
Thank you.

Pete (25:50)
That's all I got, Tyler.

Tyler (25:51)
I mean that's our core message, free registration. ⁓ Do it,

turn it on and ⁓ your content has value. Some might say even more value now with AI. I mean your local content is so valuable. ⁓ AI relies on that content to come up with stuff. So ⁓ if you're producing local content and you think it has no value.

Pete (26:05)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (26:17)
Trust me, it does. It has value to your local community and maybe beyond. So don't be afraid to ⁓ ask for a little bit of something from your audience, an email address, like something to get some engagement, some, you know, your newsletter growing and eventually your paid sponsorships in the newsletter, turning the traffic on and off when you decide. ⁓ All of the things Pete just mentioned.

Pete (26:46)
Right.

Right. And if you're new to subscriptions, like you haven't turned on subscriptions, I work with plenty of these publishers, this Spanish local publisher that I mentioned earlier, they turned on paid subscriptions like two weeks ago, like just recently. And they got their first paid subscriber right away. And then they got their second and their third and their eighth and their 16th and their 22nd. And I'll just stop counting, but it works.

It works. It's confidence in your content. And then here are the levers that we just talked about.

Tyler (27:23)
Yeah, yeah.

And one last thing, like that publisher that Pete's talking about, that's not the whole country of Spain. Like this is a focused location, similar to a local news site. Like you're focusing on a region. So it's possible to start this up, grow your audience, grow your newsletter, grow your paid subscribers, starting from zero.

Pete (27:46)
Yep, and if you want to talk about it, you need help, you need that push over the edge, just reach out to us. And I think you may know where to find us at this point. So thanks, Tyler. Till next time, catch you later.

Tyler (27:57)
Thank you.