Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
Killing print is the scariest decision in publishing. Today's guest helped a 30 year old magazine do it and live to tell about it. And we're gonna talk about it. Welcome Wally, nice to have you on the show.

Wally (00:14)
Thanks for having me back.

Pete (00:46)
Before we jump into this drama over the past year or so, I just want to do a quick intro. So if you're new to this, Wally is a partner. runs a company called 50 Fish in Yarmouth, Maine, I believe. And we've been working together for many, many years with many, many publishers. And from my perspective, you know, you're

Wally (01:01)
for a.

Pete (01:12)
job has been essentially taking subscription publishers and helping them grow, grow things, grow their audience, grow subscriptions, grow advertising, the whole, the whole package. Is that sound about right?

Wally (01:24)
Yeah, that's right. We're a digitally focused company and working with the publishers is natural fit. So we've been around since 2007. So almost 20 years now, mostly in the e-commerce side, but for the last 10 years we've been helping publishers as well, which has been a lot of fun.

Pete (01:40)
Wow.

Yeah, absolutely. Lots of potential there. Okay, so we're going to talk about Brew Your Own Magazine. Here's the spoiler. BYO.com. I'll just pull up the publication here if you're watching this on YouTube. can you give me a little background of them? They deal with the Brew Your Own crowd, right? They've been around for a while.

Wally (02:15)
Yeah, it's a home brewing magazine that, you know, it's been around since the 90s. Tons of great evergreen content, which is, which is amazing. You know, mean, recipes, things like that. They're constantly adding to it, but the content is topical. If you're into brewing, this is the source and where to find information.

Pete (02:26)
Hmm.

Gotcha. And so they've been around for 30-ish years. They were originally a print publication, right? And... Yeah.

Wally (02:53)
They were. They,

I would say though, they have been doing digital for quite a while. For a long time, the digital portion was just a free piece. And then they went and they had a hard paywall before they joined you folks at Leaky. But digital has been part of their plan and their offering for quite a while.

Pete (03:00)
Okay.

Hmm

Okay,

now when you joined them to help them sort of really turn on, I think it's their BYO Plus product, what kind of shape was print in at that point?

Wally (03:35)
Honestly, we thought it was fine. So, you know, we started working and actually dug back through my notes to see we started working with Brad and the BYO team back in 2023. So not that long ago, but print print seemed to be OK. They were transitioning. Their fulfillment house had been bought by another larger organization.

Pete (03:38)
Okay.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Wally (04:02)
So

that added some complexities of tying everything together from the website ordering into the new company. But from our initial talks, print was a part of the mix and we were just gonna try to grow digital as an offering that we were gonna add into the mix as well.

Pete (04:20)
Hmm.

So what triggered the, let's kill the print conversation.

Wally (04:31)
I don't know, honestly,

it came to us probably in January of 2024. Brad and I talked about it and the decision was made at that point. So I think a lot of things go into it and I think it's something that all of our publishers who do print deal with.

Pete (04:42)
Okay.

Hmm.

Wally (04:59)
Pete, you gave us some stories of people who tried it and went back, a couple of your clients that maybe went back to doing some print in some form. But yeah, was January 1 announcement to us that we were making the move. And that sort of escalated a few things.

Pete (05:07)
Mm-hmm.

you

And so 2025, the whole year was digital only, is that right?

Wally (05:32)
2025 correct. Yep. So the last print issues delivered in, I think it was the January, February issue of BYO delivered in 2025. And that was it. That was from that point forward, we've been digital only.

Pete (05:34)
Okay.

Wow, that's wild. So it's been a year and almost a half, not quite where it's, it's, okay. So, so tell me, you know, give me the spoiler. Is it, is it working?

Wally (05:59)
Correct. Yep.

Bye.

Yeah, I think so.

mean, he his industry is is interesting because there is a little bit of a decline in people who are brewing beer, a little bit of a decline in people who are even just recreationally drinking alcohol. So the industry is tough, but I think, you know, he's making it making a good go of it. He has some really creative ideas. He's got a great product. And yeah, we're we're here to help him.

Pete (06:21)
Hmm.

you

Mm-hmm.

Wally (06:40)
it through.

Pete (06:41)
Okay, so what's the, let's talk a little bit about how you guys pulled it off. The BYO Plus bundle, as far as I can tell, he's got the web content, right? And I suspect there might be some archive content and some flipbook content and video. Yeah.

Wally (06:55)
Correct.

Yeah, yep, yep. So

there's two levels here. He has the BYO plus bundle, which includes all of the print content, you know, going all the way back to the, to the nineties.

And then we have the Nano Plus content. And Nano is really for somebody looking to start a home brewing business or there's really, there's in-depth workshops that you get access to content more around the brewing business rather than just being able to brew some beer at home. Yeah.

Pete (07:18)
okay.

And...

Okay, so it's

a mix of B to C and B to B then.

Wally (07:41)
It's

predominantly BYO Plus, but we do have some nano customers that are getting that. And I'm sure we have some consumer customers who are just genuinely interested in and pay for the nano content.

Pete (07:47)
Okay.

Gotcha. But the bulk of the subscriptions are BYO plus. Okay. All right.

Wally (07:58)
Yeah, yep. And

to add to this complexity, he also has winemakermag.com. you know, we were dealing with not only was BYO plus transitioning or BYO, but winemaker as well, which was an interesting, interesting task.

Pete (08:03)
Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Hmm.

I bet that it's a, it's a huge one. mean, you mentioned earlier, we, we worked with, uh, track and field magazine. And if you look back, if you, if you do the research, they, this was years ago, but we were in the middle of setting up, uh, their paywall and they informed us that they were stopping print. Like right in the middle of the project and, and I was like, Oh, no pressure, you know, uh, right.

Wally (08:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

you

Pete (08:48)
And they actually, they turned it off for nine months. They sent a zillion postcards to their list saying, hey, please log in. You'll get all the great stuff. We're doing it for all these reasons, know, costs, and we want to make a better product for you and sink our money into content rather than, you know, print and all that. And there, and I read their emails, like they were sending us.

Wally (09:04)
Yeah.

Pete (09:14)
emails to kind of like look over and see if it made sense. And they were really well written, really emotional emails, like really like, hey, please, we need your support. And at the end of the day, they could not get 50 % of their paid readership to log into anything. Like they just didn't want to log in. So what they did after nine months is they went back to print on demand. So they really...

Wally (09:33)
Right.

Pete (09:40)
are still at a fraction of where they were in terms of print and the number of print subscribers, but there was there's a crowd there that is, you and they went from like the $29 a year model to now $150 a year. And that that seems to be working pretty, pretty well for them. So that was that was somebody that jumped and then pulled back.

Wally (09:55)
Correct, Right.

Yeah, it's interesting and I don't see that happening here. I think just the print costs, shipping, ink, paper, all of it's going up and I feel like for this industry, the online piece is where it's at.

Pete (10:15)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. This is, mean, this is a how to enthusiasts category. So yeah.

Wally (10:30)
Exactly. And this is evergreen

content. I know the track stuff and we work with those folks a bit as well. Track and Field is more based on current events, know, results, things like that. Whereas this, a recipe for some IPA, whatever, or a clone of something is going to be valuable for a long time.

Pete (10:37)
Hmm.

Yeah, for sure. So what, now I know a little bit about print readers, know, especially the ones that want to not deal with digital. In the transition, were there any like painful points there where readers just churned? They were just like, hey, I'm out. Or was there something in the transition that kind of helped smooth the way?

Wally (11:16)
Yeah,

I think we had, there was some of both. I think the big thing that the BYO team set out to do that was successful was they came in with a plan and it wasn't a two month plan like we're shutting this down. We had a bullet point plan with

Pete (11:39)
Hmm.

Wally (11:44)
an immense amount of bullets that laid out everything from like when they were going to stop blowing in cards for renewals, when they were going to, you know, update the wrappers on their magazines for it being the final print issues and where to go next. I everything was really laid out well and well thought out. And there was work to do to kind of massage it.

But having that plan was huge. We definitely had pushback from customers. mean, there's people who just don't want a digital product. And there were people who we didn't even have email addresses for, who had signed up, written a check to the fulfillment house or whoever it was, and got their print subscription. dealing with that puzzle and trying to get those folks moved over, if we could, was interesting as well.

Pete (12:16)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Mmm.

So what happened to like, let's say we speak in a percentage way, like what happened to overall paid subscribers during the print, then there was the conversion, there was some churn, and then the digital kicks in. Was there a huge drop off and then slowly building it back? Was it sort of modest? Like how did that go?

Wally (13:06)
Yeah, I mean,

I guess I would speak to...

The most troubling folks were the folks who were print only, who were really legacy subscribers. Some of them had accounts that were out many years. They had bought several years and there was that liability still owed to them that we have to fulfill. And we are doing that on the digital site. We had people who...

Pete (13:19)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Right.

Wally (13:41)
just decided that this was a good time as any, that, you know, Brad and his team dealt with folks that just decided, well, I'm not brewing beer anymore anyway, so now's a good time as any to just stop. And they had some of that too. So I don't think anybody was really...

Pete (13:54)
got it yep yeah

Wally (14:01)
I shouldn't say anybody. I'm sure there were some upset folks, but I think people are understanding where they can find updated information and relevant information is online now.

Pete (14:05)
Mm.

Yep.

Yep. So I'm hearing, what I'm hearing is that the transition went of course with hiccups, but it wasn't, it didn't kill the publication. Right.

Wally (14:23)
No,

no, I think it went better than expected. Not, you know.

Pete (14:27)
Hmm.

Wally (14:32)
not perfect. There's always little things that pop up and you're adjusting on the fly. for the most part, I think at the end of the day, we all thought that everything went smoother than we anticipated it going.

Pete (14:34)
Right.

Right. Okay. Good. It's amazing. mean, it's a great story. And I mean, talked to print publishers and they have, they tell me these things like, we're thinking about dropping print. all of them, but some of them. And, you know, there are even with some really, really big print runs, you know, just, just looking at efficiency and like you mentioned before, the cost, the cost of running print today is, is gotten out of control. So

Wally (15:11)
my gosh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And there's things that went into this that that kind of made that possible as well. And one of those things was outreach to advertisers, you know, and making sure that that we could.

keep them in the fold and keep them in the mix as much as possible. you the subscriber portion is one thing, but you know every issue that goes out, you know, a chunk of that is paid for by advertisers. So that's a big thing to let go of and strategies were built to make sure that we tied that back into.

Pete (15:33)
Hmm.

Right. Right.

So how, yeah, how did, how did BYO retain advertisers? What was sort of the, there a main push?

Wally (15:56)
Well,

the big thing for them was that they still produce a print replica. So while they're digital only, and Pete if you scroll up and go to the issues page.

Pete (16:04)
Okay.

Okay.

Wally (16:14)
top right

there you'll see issues. So while they are print only we still produce up till current date a print replica issue and if you're logged in and I can give you a login if you don't have one you can view the issue in a flipbook.

Pete (16:37)
Okay.

Wally (16:37)
We also paid very close attention to our advertisers and we have rotating banners both top and on the side of the content here and then within the content as well. you know, special attention was paid to make sure that we're giving these folks the presence that they should have. And then every flip book, we're using a flip book reader in here.

Pete (16:46)
Okay, yep.

Got it. Got it, got it.

Yeah. Yep.

Yep.

Wally (17:09)
has links out to the advertisers and we have built in analytics that we can track these now. So we're able to flipbook opens and really kind of see where people are going and how they're using it and what's important to them. And the advertisers, not all of them stayed, but a good portion did and we're giving them a good value for it.

Pete (17:11)
Right.

Hmm.

Hmm, that's amazing. And I assume that if somebody, if you're tracking a link that's clicked in a flip book, that's probably a really high, that's like a high intent click. Somebody's, somebody's like open the flip book and they're like into it. They're, they're engaged cooking through it as much as you and I might not like a flip book, or at least I don't. Some people do, they love them.

Wally (17:48)
Yeah, it should be.

Correct.

Yeah, it's

not ideal in all scenarios, but here it works. I think the content, and we could talk about content organization as well, but the content in a magazine is organized different than the content on the web. And some people just prefer to kind of flip through it. And we can give them that experience.

Pete (18:14)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So you do see engagement on the flip book. That's what I'm hearing. That's amazing. That's amazing. Any idea like what the ratio is for flip book readers versus web readers?

Wally (18:31)
We do. Yep, we do.

It's

not as much. I don't have the exact number in mind. would think 20 % of the people use the flip books, but it's enough to kind of keep it going. The majority of the content hits are on topics that they're interested in.

Pete (18:47)
Okay, yeah.

Hmm. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. Let's, and let's talk a little bit about content structure. Cause I think I know what you're talking about. where the, you could explain that like print versus web. Yeah.

Wally (19:10)
Sure.

Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of times when we deal with print publishers who have been print publishers forever, they tend to organize things by departments or by content type. And they think of it in the way that they build out their magazine. What we really want to do is organize it by topic. What are people looking for? What are they going to engage with? So previously, BYO, their navigation had, you know, articles,

videos, things like this. And it wasn't really top, like you may want to see a video, but a video about what, you know, it really didn't explain to us what it was, but that was like the sections that they had laid out and how it was going to be organized. So we, did a really in-depth audit and dive into the content. And this is probably the biggest part of the project was just, we reorganized all the content.

Pete (19:45)
Hmm.

Right.

Gotcha.

Wally (20:10)
and put it in buckets that made sense both from an SEO perspective and from just a user experience perspective.

Pete (20:19)
Yep.

Yeah. I see that on the site, you know, styles and recipes, brewing tips and troubleshooting ingredients, equipment, resources, nano brewing. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Yeah. That's something that, that's, that's strikes very, very true. People are, it's like, I want to know about this style of beer. Where do I find that? Right.

Wally (20:27)
Yeah, you want to learn about kegging or whatever it might be. It's in equipment, you know.

Right.

Pete (20:48)
and then you can find it.

Wally (20:49)
And if we're taking away print, we need to make sure the website is a really valuable tool. So if we're going to take something away, the site better be good enough to kind of support that business going forward. And the BYO and Wine Maker team bought into that. It's a beautiful site, and it has really worked well.

Pete (20:58)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

You did a great job. mean, you always do, but it's, it's, it's a, it's like eye candy for beer makers. It's good. All right. So I'm going to kind of shift gears a little bit here. Did a little research on, some subscriber feedback in the forums, which was interesting. you know, people, people who, were like you mentioned before they had renewed to, you know, like

Wally (21:22)
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Pete (21:42)
for two years before the announcement. But the thing that I sort of pulled forward was sort of an anxiety, like I lose access to the content I've paid for when I stop paying, that type of a feeling. So was that sort of anxiety addressed by the flipbook or is there a PDF download available as well?

Wally (22:09)
Yeah, I mean I think that that helps from the flipbook being able to you know access it wherever and there is a download capability in there and you know part of that is some people want to read this if they're traveling if they're on a plane or whatever it might be and you need to be able to download it to be able to look at it and

Pete (22:23)
Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Right.

Wally (22:38)
and kind of keep it? That's a great question though, you know, because you do when you're collecting back issues, you have them all sitting there in front of you. But I think what we're trying to do, instead of providing you a library of things to kind of dig through, we're providing a resource now. If you need, if you have trouble.

Pete (23:00)
Hmm.

Wally (23:02)
doing something or you need help or advice or a recipe, you know, it's a pretty inexpensive cost to have this resource with thousands of recipes and thousands of troubleshooting articles at your fingertips.

Pete (23:12)
Mmm. Mmm.

Is there a way to reach out if I'm a subscriber and I get through an article or something and I'm like, oh, I got a question? Is there?

Wally (23:30)
We have

a contact button and I'm sure they get questions like that. That would be probably something from the customer service folks and I'm sure their team gets a lot of questions like that.

Pete (23:36)
all the time.

I'm always looking for like, you know, added value to sell a subscription, right? You know, and it's like, a place where you can get a, get an answer. I mean, and today with AI, you know, I get, I've had publishers say, Hey, you know, is there a way to like search through the articles and, and you don't even need AI for that. can do that right through WordPress search, but, but that, that kind of stuff. Okay. so let's keep going here.

Wally (23:48)
Yeah, that's a great idea.

Pete (24:16)
All right, so it's been a year and a half, advertising's doing okay, that's cool. I got kind of a weird question for you. Is there anything that BYO can do now with your new setup that they couldn't do when they were running print or had their old website? Were there any advantages to coming up with a more modern architecture? I guess.

Topics is one that you you know that you came up with

Wally (24:48)
Yeah,

I think so. I think there's twofold here. So we are still doing a print replica in digital format, so you can still view it as if it was a magazine. But the content strategy and this took months to get it right and then more months to kind of implement it.

Pete (24:57)
Mm. Yeah.

Wally (25:13)
was the big thing and really breaking things into buckets that they did not have before. There wasn't a section about ingredients or equipment or the basics of brewing beer, which is a great SEO piece. That stuff sort of got lost in a site that was really built on departments. So it comes really back to that content strategy and layout. Though in that respect, the new site...

Pete (25:29)
Mmm.

Yep. Yep.

Wally (25:41)
done a lot of heavy lifting to keep people engaged and keep people coming back.

Pete (25:49)
Did you also notice a traffic change? So you went from the old site to the new topically arranged site.

Wally (26:01)
Yeah, we did. We've seen traffic go up a bit. Traffic was starting to go up a bit anyway. Just before. So there was a transition. we the new site came after the new site came late 2025. There was an interim like an MVP site that we put up that had all the digital issues.

Pete (26:20)
Okay.

Wally (26:27)
things like that in it, but we didn't actually get to launching this brand new look until later in 2025. The big reason for that was just the effort that goes into the transition. That took up a bunch of our time early on to kind of get that right and make sure we had everything in place.

Pete (26:29)
Hmm

Mmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. Okay, here's another tough question for you. So if you put yourself back to the end of 2024 when things were gonna basically get, you know, the print was gonna get turned off and digital only was gonna be turned on, is there anything you would have done differently in the whole?

project and the process of migrating somebody from print to digital only and I asked this of course because I get publishers that you know, they're always curious like what did somebody do or what actually worked? What were the what were the hitches, you know?

Wally (27:30)
Yeah.

Yeah. I give credit to the BYO folks for being as organized as they were from the outset. like I said, when he announced and told me that this is what was going to happen, there was the basis of a plan already on paper.

Pete (27:41)
you

Wally (27:55)
there's always things we would do differently after seeing how people react to them. There might have been an email flow that was not quite right, that we should have changed. And that comes back to every client's unique and different. And as you transition, different needs are gonna require different efforts. So there's not one thing I think we would do differently.

think maybe getting outreach a little sooner on the paid people, the print-only folks would have been good. We did that a little bit later in the game. But I think part of that was part of the strategy as well, to kind of ease them, you know.

Pete (28:35)
Okay. Okay.

Wally (28:49)
get them to a point where we had enough infrastructure built out that when we told them this was going to happen, we had all the digital flip books and everything in place to show them that here, look, this is what we have. So that might have been one thing. But the planning part, I can't stress it enough.

Pete (28:53)
Mmm.

Mm-mm.

Okay, okay.

Wally (29:12)
the planning for a year and getting everything right down to the little minutia of an email renewal flow that needs to be changed to make sure we're transitioning people to the right product level is huge.

Pete (29:25)
Bye.

Right. So what I'm hearing is if you're going to make this jump, obviously you have to, you have to organize for it. but you also want to be able to present a new product, right? Which will be like the replacement and that in BYO's, instance was really a big focus on the, the, flip books, getting everything digitized.

for them PDFs that they could then they could also download as PDFs. That sounds like a big one. And then of course you did the topical work so things were easier to find, but that was later, right? mean, that was kind of in the middle of it.

Wally (30:13)
That came later. Yeah,

we didn't have the bandwidth at the time to pull that all off at once. The topical work had already started. Actually, we were we were sort of in the process. Brad had the BYO team had decided that we were going to build a new website anyway in late 2023. So we had started on topical work and

Pete (30:19)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Wally (30:43)
looking at content. And then it was, we shifted efforts to make sure we had enough pieces in place to get, to keep people in the fold when we stopped print. So that was, you know, it, yeah, that could have been something we did a little differently, but it was good. It all worked out in the end and we had enough pieces in there between, you know,

Pete (31:00)
Right.

Wally (31:13)
special renewal pages that had QR codes in the print, postcards, all the stuff had to be kind of laid out just right so we were able to keep them in play.

Pete (31:23)
Yep.

Yep. Yep. So now that it's been a year, I'm to push you for some numbers here. If you don't have to answer, if, if, if it, you know, I don't want to, I want to be respectful of, of privacy, but if you were to look at, you know, uh, 2024 and today, about a year and a half in terms of the, the, you know, print subscribers, uh, some of them churned, some of them stayed, and then you had some digital growth as is the

Wally (31:28)
Okay.

Yeah.

Pete (31:54)
sort of like a before after is it, and, is it trending in a, in a healthy direction as far as, the number of subscribers that the publication has had?

Wally (32:05)
Yeah,

think in some ways we're excited about the future because we are digital now. So that's our growth pattern and we can now implement different marketing strategies to really go after digital folks, which is great. And that's this summer that will be our effort to really kind of push that.

Pete (32:17)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Wally (32:31)
But you do lose quite a bit. mean, you have to reconcile if losing, you know, and I don't know the exact numbers would have to would have to talk to them to get it. But if, say, losing a third of your subscribers is worth, you know, the transition away from having to produce a print publication.

Pete (32:45)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Wally (32:56)
and the costs associated with that. And they told us if we'd kept doing print, the writing was on the wall. We weren't going to keep the ship floating forever by just doing print. So a change had to be made at some point. It was just when the change was made. And I think they did a great job by aggressively pursuing it and going about it the right way.

Pete (32:57)
Right. Right. Right.

Mm. Mm. Right.

Yeah. And how, how about I noticed that there's a registration wall on the site here. Has that been helpful in building, building audience kind of like making up for that lost print traction.

Wally (33:33)
It has, yep.

It has. Yeah, Leaky

has been great. You know, having the quick register feature, we've actually transitioned on WineMaker to your new feature. List builder, there we go. Yeah, that looks great. If you pull up a WineMaker page, winemakermag.com, you'll get that. So we're excited about those changes. And it's a...

Pete (33:51)
list builder

Sure.

Wally (34:07)
It's for the long term. It's a long term, there we go. So yeah, this I really like. And I think we'll transition BYO over to this as well at some point in the near future.

Pete (34:12)
Mmm, gotcha, nice.

And this is, this is, before you answer the BYO question is this has made a difference on winemaker as far as building emails.

Wally (34:27)
Yeah, absolutely. Yep,

yep. It's definitely, you know, between this and some OptinMonster forms and things like that, we're able to kind of gather as much as we can. But ListBuilder has been great. We've definitely seen a bump on WineMaker with free registrations.

Pete (34:40)
Hmm.

Nice, nice. Okay, so anyway, so the back to the original question. Would you recommend that publishers, you know, really lean into the free registration?

Wally (35:00)
I would. And I think those that aren't are really missing the boat. know, we, we, we see that email, email almost becomes your product at some point because you're that's your now you don't have print. Your email is sort of the way to get in touch with your people. A new article is out, you know, your video, whatever it might be, that really becomes your product.

Pete (35:14)
Hmm.

Wally (35:29)
And the more of that we can get out to people, the better. So all of these things like, you know, the old quick register and the new list builder. mean, it's really about just building an audience for your product. And then we start to tailor messaging based on what sub level they are in. So if they're a free sub, we want to wear them down and have them hit that paywall as many times as possible. I mean, that is the game.

Pete (35:55)
Wait.

Wally (35:57)
they're into the content, eventually we're gonna get them. And I think the bigger your list, the better. So absolutely, think that going forward, that's a huge win for folks.

Pete (36:07)
Mm, it's awesome.

You know, as a, as a side note, I've been, I'm actually working on a study, a big study on the free registration and the impact. Cause you know, traditionally publishers, whether you're a subscription publisher or just a content publisher have leaned on things like OptinMonster and, and, know, MailChimp, you know, pop-ups and, and Optins and what whatnot. And they do work for sure, but

The data that I'm pulling across a whole bunch of different publishers is showing that, and the number is basically you get like a 2X to 7X bump in list building, kind of depends on the industry. it's not, this is just an average. There's some on the low side, but there are also some on the higher side where, especially with AI come in as steel content and SEO is not as effective as it.

Used to be it's still effective, but not as. And like you said, email is the product, right? So in my opinion, the focus is on like, you have to build your email list. it becomes a controlled channel that's not, a social algorithm isn't gonna put you out, right? Like no one's gonna take your email list, it's yours. Yeah.

Wally (37:29)
Yeah,

and I think there's strategies, and I totally agree, and you and I have talked a little bit about the AI piece and how that plays in, but we even have publishers who have a couple great pieces of content out there, and they drive hundreds of thousands of views to this one or two pieces of content.

Pete (37:49)
Hmm.

Wally (37:53)
And the trouble is, if you have a metered paywall and everybody gets one article free, most people are just reading that article for free. Because they'll hit that article, they might bounce to another and be like, ah, no, I'm good.

What we've done with those is if we have a couple pieces of content that are just huge drivers of traffic, we will give away about half the traffic, half the article using your Leaky Paywall lead-in block, and then we'll put up like a quick register block and say like, get them hooked. Like you wanna read this article? Great, here it is. Give us your email. So we're not locking it down. We're really trying to...

Pete (38:36)
that's a, that's great.

Wally (38:39)
give them all the bait we can, you know, and get them to subscribe. So there's little tactics like that that can make a big difference.

Pete (38:48)
Dang, that's a good one. I'm gonna steal that one. if you're listening to this, find a few pieces of content that are like your big magnets for search or social or whatever. You know you're always getting traffic on it. And then we have an extension called Lead-In. Is that what it's called? I forget. But...

Wally (39:10)
Yeah, so we use the, it

sits at the bottom of the, I can't remember what the plugin's called either. If Jeremy would hear, he'd know. It sits at the bottom of the WordPress blog and it's just a leaky paywall lead-in. And that allows us to put as much of the article in as we want. And then we just lock that article down. So the leading gives them about half of it. And then we ask for the paywall.

Pete (39:16)
Yeah.

Right.

Right, so you gain reading momentum, especially on a long form article. like, especially for a niche publisher like BYO, so you have, you get reading, you read a number of paragraphs, you're into it, and then boom, you have to register to finish that.

Wally (39:39)
Absolutely.

Yeah, and you can strategically,

if there is like an H3 partway through with a neat headline that you end it there. So then they're like, I want to read that part. that's worked really well for a few clients. If they have these three or four pieces of content that always work, lock them down, put the lead in and drive subs that way.

Pete (39:56)
So...

Awesome, stealing that one. That's a great tip. That's awesome. So Wiley, where can people find you if they're looking for you and they say, hey, I need help with my publication?

Wally (40:16)
Yeah, go for it.

Sure, you can email me, Wally at 50fish.com. We are really bad at doing our own website, but 50fish.com is out there. It looks like an e-commerce agency, which we are, but we do tons of marketing and publication work as well. So yeah, that'd be great.

Pete (40:36)
I

Awesome. All right, well Wally, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom. This is a topic that I know a lot of publishers in the print space are gonna find super interesting.

Wally (40:55)
Yeah, mean, where

did we just start the process early and look through everything. Every flow, every renewal, every piece of content and contact with the customer is important.

Pete (41:15)
Yep. Yep. Awesome. Yeah. And get your, get the digital side, the digital product really shaped up beautifully.

Wally (41:24)
Absolutely. Thanks Pete. Yeah.

Pete (41:25)
All right, Wally, thanks a lot. Catch you later.