Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
today we're going to talk about a case study that we just produced. took a year to get here. have two publishers, two news publishers that are, have very, very similar markets. We're not going to reveal who they are. We're to call them publisher A and publisher B as kind of we did last podcast.

And, ⁓ but what we found when we dug into the data was there were some really striking differences, ⁓ in the performance of building their email list and, ⁓ converting paid subscribers. One publisher was building, is building their email lists like crazy, ⁓ but not really converting paid subscribers as well as, ⁓ the other publisher who is converting subscribers like crazy and is not building their email list. And it was like, it was a real head scratcher.

So today what we're gonna learn, what you're gonna learn if you're listening is how to build your email list, ⁓ how this publisher, ⁓ publisher B, we're gonna call this the list builder ⁓ publisher, how to do that and then how to convert more paying subscribers. That's publisher A, we're calling the conversion champ. So welcome to the Paywall Podcast. All right, Tyler, let's dig in.

Tyler (01:18)
All right.

Pete (01:48)
All right, so going to share my screen and then we're going to, and I know everyone just absolutely loves spreadsheets, but I'm sorry. This is what we have to do today in order to get the data. Cause we've, we've, we've marked the data and I'm going to, if you're listening to this, I'm going to go through this as best as I can. It's a deep dive. But I promise you it's going to be worth it if you get to the end. All right. So we have, this is one year of data, roughly.

little more than a year. Two news publishers, very similar markets. I'm calling publisher A the conversion champ. Okay. This is the publisher that's outperforming paid conversions ⁓ by quite a lot for X versus publisher B. I'm calling the list builder and this publisher is building their email list at about two times the list growth. All right. So here's some, here's some basic stats.

The both publishers started a little over a year ago with about 23,000 email subscribers on their list. Both publishers somehow magically had about 1500 paid subscribers each about a year ago. Now the traffic to each publisher is a little different. Publisher A, the conversion champ has a bit more traffic. 436,000 visitors per month.

versus 256,000 visitors per month for Publisher B, which is the list builder. But what's funny is that as our list builder publisher here, even with less traffic, is signing up two times more ⁓ email list subscribers through their free registration, which is pretty wild. Okay, so what happened a year later? A year later, the conversion champ,

has about 8,500 paid subscribers. So they went from 1,500 to 8,500 in about a year. Not bad, right? Publisher B, our list builder, went from 1,500 starting paid subscribers to about 2,100 paid subscribers. So it's not horrible growth, but it's quite a bit less than our conversion chip. Okay. And then as far as free registrations are...

Conversion Champ ⁓ brought on board about 27,000 free registrations over the year. And our list builder brought in about 62,000 emails through free registrations in the last year. So pretty interesting numbers. Our Conversion Champ, kickin' butt with paid conversions. Our list builder, kickin' butt with free registrations. couldn't, same news publisher.

couldn't have more different outputs. All right, so why is this happening? Right? Why is this happening? All right, let's take a look at ⁓ the free registration ⁓ performance first. So we have our list builder outperforming ⁓ in the free registrations. Well, why are they doing this? Okay, a couple of reasons. One, and probably the big one, is that their paywall setting is different. So...

They're very restrictive when it comes to their paywall. It's set at what we call one-in-one, which means you get one free article on the meter. You don't have to do anything. just get inbound reader comes in, reads the article. But on the second article, that reader has to register with their email and a password, right? And then they get access to that second article. So, and that's it. They get one article in front of the registration wall. They register. They get one article after the registration wall.

So that's driving two times more free registrations than our conversion champ who has the wall set to two and two, which means two free articles, register, get two more. This is on a per monthly basis, right? So that's a huge difference. And if you're listening to this and you're looking at your Google Analytics and you look at average ⁓ article views or page views per visit, you'll probably see a number like 1.7.

somewhere in that range. That means that for each inbound visitor that hits your site, they're gonna look at about 1.7 articles per visit. Which means that at two and two, on average, that average visitor never sees your registration. Right? They don't get a chance to sign up.

Tyler (06:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, and it might look like super restrictive, but it's really not based on everyone's habits in terms of landing on your site and looking at the content. try to see it in that view. Most of us are not super fans where we're going through 15 pages of content. And if we were, we'd already be paying anyway.

Pete (06:53)
That's right. That's right. And these, yes. And so, I mean, your point is it does sound restrictive and yeah, I mean, your superpower as a publisher is your content and your audience. So you got to leverage your content to build that list. And you're basically saying, hey, can get a little more content and get our newsletter, by the way, don't forget that, right? Because once you register, you get sent to the newsletter and that's how the, and then the newsletter is value to that free registered reader.

But ⁓ at the end of the day, you have a much less, much lower performing ⁓ free registration sign-ups because that average visitor just isn't seeing the free registration that much. Okay. So that's the main thing. So moral of the story here is tighten up your meter to one-in-one. Now I say that knowing that every publisher is in a bit of a different journey with their subscriptions.

If you're early to mid in the journey, then one-on-one is really a good way to be. If you have a strong brand and you really need to lock stuff down, that's great. You know, go even further restrictive. Okay. Now, second thing, article views per visit. Our list builder gets about 2.1 article views per visit looking at their Google Analytics versus our conversion champ is getting that average of 1.7 article views.

per visit on the nose. And so why is that happening? Why is our list builder have more article views per visitor than our conversion champ? Well, let me show you. I'm going to pull up an image here of a typical article and what it looks like. So you have ⁓ related articles. Don't forget the power of teasing your reader that's on an article into reading other articles on your site.

And, ⁓ I see this across, I don't know what you see Tyler, but I see a lot of publishers really just put the article out there and there's nothing else. So once you hit the end of the article, you're done. And then now you're kind of left scratching your head. Well, don't let your readers scratch their heads. Give them a place to go. Right. ⁓ in this case, they have one, one, one to three links that says read more in the right in the middle of their content.

Tyler (09:10)
but

Pete (09:22)
If you look at some of the larger publishers, they're doing this, this works well. You don't need to get fancy when you're in the middle of content. Just, you know, read more, offer some other related articles by category. And then at the bottom, they have three related ⁓ article thumbnails. So every single article keeps that reader on the site longer, which makes that reader hit the registration more frequently. And that's, and that, that's, that's the game. Okay.

Tyler (09:47)
Yep.

Pete (09:54)
back to the spreadsheet. All right, so hopefully you're hanging with, ⁓ we've talked about the free registration setup, why our list builder is really outperforming. Okay, now, let's go to the second big topic. Why are paid subscriptions converting more for our conversion champ versus our list builder? ⁓ And it's pretty significant. So publisher A, the conversion champ is getting

five on average 5.9 paid subscribers per day. That's their cadence. And our list builder right now is running about 2.6 paid subscribers per day. That's, that's a, you know, that's a hundred, you know, our conversion champ is doing a hundred percent better than our, our list builder revenue. ⁓ right now per month is running $44,000 for our conversion.

champ and about $12,000 for our list builder. That's a pretty significant difference, I would say. Okay, so why is this happening? All right, the biggest thing that's happening is that the newsletter is not being fired enough to the free list. Our conversion champ is sending and

Tyler (10:56)
Yeah.

Pete (11:18)
fairly recently in the last few months, they upped their game to send two newsletters per day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. They're splitting up their content to about 10 articles per per send So about 20 articles per day. ⁓ And it's working incredibly well. It's driving all these clicks back to the website to see upgrade messaging and ⁓

And that's what's making the conversions happen. So our list builder has been sending one newsletter per week to the free list once per week. I just learned this by the way, recently, I had a conversation with them this week. I thought they were actually sending one a day, but they're sending one a week. So double ouch.

Tyler (11:58)
⁓ out

Mm.

Pete (12:18)
they are sending their newsletter every day to their paid list. So that is going out. And their view on it was it's kind of a paid benefit. You're a paid subscriber, so you get access to our newsletter every single day. But is that the right way to look at it?

Tyler (12:36)
Yeah, I don't think so. the reason... I can understand their point. I totally get that. You definitely want to keep your paid subscribers engaged. Consider the email they're getting as a churn reduction tool as well. You want your content to be in front of them so they know that they're paying for something and getting it in their inbox. ⁓ But if you're building a massive list and then it's just sort of sitting there...

Pete (12:54)
Mmm.

Tyler (13:06)
for week and you're not pinging that audience with anything, then it's sort of going to waste a little bit. What's the point of that free list building if you're not going to send them some content?

Pete (13:25)
Exactly. The free readers need to see the upgrade messaging in order to convert to paid subscribers. That's the difference. So at two emails per day with links, know, basically titles and excerpts, right, ⁓ it's sending ⁓ folks back to the website to see, hey, upgrade your account.

So much more often and today we're busy. We're distracted And we need to see messaging, you know, 10 20 whatever times to Act on something because it's not gonna take one message to get that done. I mean it can but it's

Tyler (14:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, and we have hard data on this with the article views per visit. Most people aren't getting past that two page account. So they're never getting to that third article which would trigger that upgrade message. So the only way to do that, to get them back without relying on social and Google and other outlets is to send them an email. You've got their email address.

Pete (14:26)
you

Tyler (14:39)
That's your protection around the social and the search engines. Send out to your free list and generate some traffic and hopefully generate some upgrades.

Pete (14:52)
Yeah, it's, amazing. ⁓ you are building a fort. You're, you're building your own list. You're that you control 100 % email is the sort of common denominator that we all have. ⁓ as AI kicks in and social and search, course, it's going to matter less and less if you build your list and then of course send those newsletters to the list. So not only do they get to see the upgrade messaging on the website over and over again, as they try to gain access, but

they need to see the upgrade messaging in the email as well. So one of the other things that when I, we took a look at the layouts of the two newsletters is that the, our conversion champ here had on average about four upgrade messages in their, in each newsletter that went out. So, Hey, you know, upgrade and become a paid subscriber, get full access, get all the benefits, four messages per email. Our list builder had about half

message per email. Not every email had an upgrade message in it. So that was a miss right there. ⁓ One of the other things that's important to remember is that when you're sending out your free, when you're sending out, know, you have a big list and you're sending those free newsletters out is you're driving your own traffic. Like you're increasing the traffic to your site significantly. So

This week we had a conversation about sponsored advertising, advertising in general. They're network ads. This was our list builder, Publisher Bee. They're running network ads on their site and they're complaining that their ad revenue has really dropped significantly, $8,000 a month to $1,000 a month, like complete crash in ad revenue.

Tyler (16:43)
Hmm.

Pete (16:45)
And not only that, but ads were popping up over the site when you landed on it sliding in and sliding up. And so they're going to get rid of all that nonsense. And that's going to help their conversions as well. Um, but we talked a lot about, I know this is a little off topic, but we talked about sponsored, uh, working on sponsorships rather than leaning on network ads. And they have, they have sort of the typical news categories, right? They got, they got sports, they have, they have travel, they have real estate, they have.

They have all those things and they're working on coming up with a game plan on finding a sponsor for each of their major categories. And they also happen to have a newsletter that matches their categories as well, which is very smart. So they have the list, like they really did a good job building their list. Like you said, they just haven't been using it. ⁓ So that's gonna make a big difference.

Tyler (17:36)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah for sure. And newsletter advertising generally goes a lot further for the advertiser, just given how targeted those lists are and how engaged they are compared to just a random sidebar image ad. So yeah, definitely lean on those sponsorships inside of your newsletter because you you've built a list. There's more than one way to monetize your...

your newsletter list beyond just paid subscribers.

Pete (18:04)
Yeah.

Yeah. It is, it is your direct sales engine. I mean, it is the one thing you can count on that you send out and lands in people's mailboxes that want it to land in their mailbox. And they do look at it. They may scan it, but sometimes they, they engage with it they click and they dig in. ⁓ it's direct, it's your direct marketing tool. And one thing that I noticed amongst publishers is confidence, right?

Like you, your superpower is your content. You know your content, you know what you're publishing, you know what your readers want, and you're building an audience. You have an audience. so sponsors want that. Like they're drooling for that. They want to cut through the noise. know, yeah, they can go and do social and Google ads and things like that. But when you have a, when you're serving an area, especially as a news publisher, if you serve a city or a region or a town,

Like you're, you may have a monopoly situation on your hands and that's what your, your advertisers want. And you, you know, if it were me, I would make it limited, you know, just, just, ⁓ figure out what works for you. In this case, you might have one, one sponsor for travel, one for sports, one for real estate. And as I was talking to them this week, they were like, yeah. And they were coming up with ideas. this would be the perfect match for real estate. Like this real estate company that they're, they've worked with.

Tyler (19:32)
Yeah. ⁓

Pete (19:33)
or this would be a match for the travel section. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And you can command a lot more money for those sponsors.

Tyler (19:35)
this resort, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

For sure, it's so targeted,

like it's like so much more targeted.

Pete (19:47)
Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, ⁓ so as far as the paid conversions back to the topic at hand, we're actually talking about, ⁓ is make sure your newsletter is doing its job. This is a place where, you might want to consider redesigning it. if it's not doing the job, you want to make sure you have upgrade messaging on your free newsletter. The purpose of your free newsletter is to promote.

paid subscriptions, full stop. That's the purpose. Yeah, you might have some sponsors in there, great. But the main purpose of this ⁓ free newsletter is to get people to pay you for a subscription, which, and subscription revenue outperforms ad revenue by a long shot, especially network ad revenue. Okay. ⁓ One thing I completely spaced out on, which I just want to show.

gonna go take us back a little bit is that free registration. So our list builder publisher here, this is what their, ⁓ this is what their ⁓ free registration looks like. This story is free for you, email, password. ⁓ This converts very well. The psychology of free really, really works. Keep it simple. Tell them you're going to get the newsletter and you're done. Our ⁓ conversion champ, the one that is

⁓ converting paid subscribers, but not as many free readers as a different approach to their free registration. They have a wall of text. If you're listening to this, there's a lot to read through. ⁓ And it's too much and it doesn't have that word free popping out at you in the header text. And it's just underperforming. So this needs to be cleaned up. Okay. All right. If you're on YouTube, then you're seeing what I'm seeing.

Tyler (21:14)
Hmm.

Ha ha ha.

Pete (21:44)
All right, so I think that covers what we wanted to cover. The takeaways here are, if you're a news publisher, target sending twice a day, your newsletter twice a day. I know it sounds like a lot, maybe, but ⁓ if, ⁓ what we see is people want to opt into newsletters, especially when it comes to local regional news, news you're interested in, and twice a day is great. It delivers fresh news.

People want fresh news. If something's ready to go, send it. And also ⁓ might clean up your list a little bit. You might not be sending 20 articles in one go. You'll send 10 and we only have it. Readers only have a 20 minute attention span anyway when they're reading through, when they engage with an email. So keep it short. And yeah, so twice a day. And then make sure you have plenty of upgrade messages in your email.

⁓ so in your free emails and then you, you have a paid email list as well, which offers other opportunities. We can talk about it another time, but your free email, send it to everybody. Make sure there's, there's a, maybe a slim upgrade message at the top and at the bottom have ⁓ a beefy upgrade message with benefits, features and benefits. Well, you'll, if somebody gets to the bottom of your email, they're highly engaged.

tell them all about, you know, it's the chance to tell them all about what the subscription paid subscription benefits are and tighten up your restrictions. That's the last one. If you're if you're sort of in the beginning or middle of your journey, yes, you have options with how restrictive you want your your paywall settings to be. But generally speaking, if you're in that sort of list building mode, you got some kind of you're building confidence with your content.

One and one is your number. One free article, great. Register, email and password ⁓ for the second article, third article you have to pay.

All right, I think that covers it. Any other last words of wisdom, Tyler?

Tyler (23:46)
Yes.

I was just going ask briefly, these both of these publishers in similar target audiences? they targeting the same groups of people?

Pete (24:01)
Yes. Yes, they're

the demographics are almost identical. ⁓ so we looked at, ⁓ what markets each one serves and other than the amount of traffic they get publisher, a getting more traffic 400,000 plus versus 250,000 every other met everything else, is identical. So

This is a very fair comparison. ⁓ And as far as I look at this, this data is pretty clean, pretty clear as to what to do next. So in any case, yeah, get in touch if you wanna talk about ⁓ building the list and converting paid subscribers. Hope this was helpful and we'll catch you next time. See ya.