Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
So this one is a little bit of a, this is sort of a personal topic for me. want to share with how you as a publisher should be really leaning into the benefits that you provide your audience versus showing off features for access.

the last couple of weeks I've been going through different sites and looking at the subscription, ⁓ subscription pages. And I see lots of stuff like, you know, get full access, get 24 hour access, get access to archives, you know, all these features, which don't really tell me how it's going to help me as a subscriber. Right. and that's just driving me crazy because the role of the publisher today, whether it's local news or your niche news or your magazine.

Publisher is super important to your crowd, right? I mean, you're providing incredible amounts of value, enough value so people are willing to pay you. So, but that value is not being expressed on sites as real benefits to, to readers and, and, and features are good. Like it's good to get full access, you know, 24 seven and archive access and whatnot. That's all great. But what does that, what does, how does that benefit the paid subscriber? How does it?

that make their life better. And that's the kind of thinking that needs to happen. And so let me tie this to the personal items. Let me share my screen a little bit. When I, let's see, about two months ago, an article came out for our local school system, not in our town, but in a town, a couple towns south of us, the Claremont, New Hampshire school system. And what they found out, I won't,

jump into all the details is that for three years, they've been running a huge deficit. Nobody knew about it. ⁓ 5 million bucks in the hole, something like that. After three years, I think there may be some corruption going on. And if you're looking at my screen, you see one of these articles that they're in such dire straits. this is, this is, ⁓ this is a town. It's a good sized town, but it's, you know, it's not, you know, it's financially challenged, but there's, there's, they're so desperate that they're

setting up a GoFundMe campaign to keep the school afloat. And they are open now, but they have a very sort of limited timeline. And one of the things that happened in Claremont is, I think as you know, is the Eagle Times shut down for whatever reason. But they were the local newspaper of the town and ⁓ the Valley News, which is a few towns up and kind of covers.

Tyler (02:46)
Hmm.

Pete (03:12)
Claremont a bit, but they're not in town. ⁓ They didn't, they weren't able to really catch anything. the, you know, we talk about benefits, like, like as for talking about local news, the benefit here is if there, if, if, there was a news outfit that was, you know, digging into things, this is probably something that would have been caught a lot earlier, you know, three years in a big, big deficit.

There's, you know, if, especially if there is some corruption going on, like that's, that's a problem. And so the role of local news here is pretty big. And I would argue that as a benefit to the community, ⁓ it can be massive. And I think that publishers need to think about like how, like, what's the big benefit here? You know, if you're, if you're here, maybe, maybe, maybe taxes are going to go up like crazy because of this.

nonsense that's happening and maybe it could have been prevented if it was spotted earlier, which is really part of the role of investigative journalism, right?

Tyler (04:18)
Yeah, yeah, I've heard that before that if you think of your subscription to your local newspaper as sort of a, obviously it's a check on your local government, but it can also be a tax reduction tool as well because it's keeping an eye on stuff like this so that it doesn't become a problem and ⁓ you know, if there's oversight, you typically are able to catch it and

That's what most local newspapers do, right? They're watching your local government, your local school boards, your local city councils, your county commissions, whatever structures that you have in your community. ⁓ talk about a benefit, you know.

Pete (05:01)
Yeah,

huge benefit. I know this is a bit of an extreme example, but this is how reporting stays on top of what's going on in a town and really helps. ⁓ And if you're in a different space in a niche news like financial news or your sports magazine or lifestyle magazine, you are dealing with maybe not this type of extreme issues, but...

You know, you're covering topics that are near and dear to your audience's hearts and there's a lot of benefit that you're providing. so what, ⁓ what I actually did is ⁓ I built a tool, which I'm going to show off at the end of this, which if you're listening, you're going to be able to go and use, which will help you ⁓ rewrite all the features on your website into nice benefits.

that you can copy and paste onto your site. It will actually build a subscription page for you, which you can grab. And we'll talk about that. Now, when you get your benefits right, and when you really deeply understand what your benefit is to your community, that helps you build confidence in what you do. And it also affects your pricing. So I mean, one of the hacks for me is anytime I'm

I'm thinking about pricing a product or service or something is what I do is I sit down and I write all the, all the like features down, right? Of, of what, okay. What, what am I producing? What does this product do? What does this service do? And we were an agency, we wrote lots of big proposals, you know, and you sit down and it's like, well, what are you going to, what are you going to charge for X? I don't know. Okay. Well, let's sit down. What does X do? What does it do for the customer?

right, in this case, the subscriber. And sit down and just write out the things that you're doing, that your publication is doing, make a long list and just look at it, right? And just let, you need to take an hour and just have some focus time and figure out, like deeply figure out, like all the things, think about the things you do, think about the work you do to go to sources and get.

get the information and write it and publish it and all those things. And it will help you understand what a benefit you are to your audience. And it's easy to not do this because day to day we're all busy and we're just dealing with deadlines and work and needs to get done and all that. But that's how you come up with pricing. And what happens to me is, you know, I might start with a number for a price and then I'll go through this exercise of thinking about what we're actually delivering here.

And I'll be like, ⁓ wait a second. Okay, this is actually worth more than what I wrote down initially, right? And it's because it's really defensible now that I've gone through thinking about it. But now I need to translate that into the benefits to the customer or subscriber or whoever it is. ⁓ It works. It really, really, really works. ⁓ we have a tool here that I want to show off ⁓ on how to actually turn your features.

into benefits ⁓ in using some AI stuff. I've been using Claude here. It's pretty cool. ⁓ It's not pretty cool. It's pretty amazing. But it's going to help you build that confidence. It may influence your pricing and certainly should help you update your landing page. okay. So if you're looking at ⁓

this on YouTube, you can see that we're looking at Key Biscayne Independent. This is a publisher we work with and I'm just going to kind of hop over to their subscribe page. I'm going to take a look at it. And what I see is what do I get for my, let's see, I think it's 10 bucks a month, right? Is what their normal pricing is. So, access. Okay. Well, I get best journalism. I get unlimited access.

I get premium content archive and I get cancel anytime. Do these sound like benefits to you?

Tyler (09:25)
There's a lot of features.

Pete (09:29)
Those are. So let's go to, I'm going to scroll down. They have three cards here. I'm going to read the biggest, highest level card, the news guardian. Okay. So I get unlimited articles. get archive access. I get multiple devices. I get limited ads. get archive access again. And I get a t-shirt. Benefits or features?

Tyler (09:55)
Sounds like all features to me.

Pete (09:57)
Yeah, all features. Okay. This is not unusual though. This is pretty typical. Like, okay, well, what are you getting? you get access to that. You get access. Okay. But you got to take that next step and it's got it. You got to translate it to how is, you know, how is KB independent ⁓ benefiting the paid subscriber. Okay. So how do we do this? All right. Well, we built this tool just to make it easy for you. And we were just calling it the Leaky Paywall Copy Lab.

Okay. So here's a working version. I'm just going to hop in here and the

thing it's asking for is a subscription page URL. Great. Okay. So I'm to go in here and I'm just going to literally copy this URL in here.

And the second thing is the About Us mission page URL. So if there's like a who we are page, this is great for AI to take a look at and say, wow, okay, this is all the good stuff. And so there's a little About Us link here and you probably have an About Us page. So I'm gonna copy that. I'm gonna drop this in here. Okay. And then there's kind of a free form box. Hey, what makes your paid subscription valuable? ⁓

Do have any thoughts on that Tyler? should I put in here? Whoops for KB independent.

gonna say ⁓ let's call it KeyBisc. I'm just gonna give it a little something just to fill out the field. Let's call it, ⁓ you know, Leading ⁓ News Source just for fun. And that's it. Okay, so I'm gonna click the button that says Generating Your Benefits Copy and it's gonna grind away for 30 seconds or something like that.

Pretty simple, you put in your subscribe page, put in your who we are page, put in any kind of ⁓ context that you want. ⁓ You want AI to know about what you do and just wait.

Tyler (12:07)
All right.

Pete (12:08)
So we're waiting.

Okay, what do we have here? We have a result. So...

All right, transforms features into benefits that convert casual readers into subscribers. Get an in-content subscription prompt for your articles, fully designed subscription landing page. Okay, so let's start with the first part here. In article upgrade message. This is the nag, we call this the nag. This is, know, hey, you've run out of free articles. ⁓ If you have a free registration, it shows up after that. ⁓ And so here's the copy. Stay.

Island Smart. Never miss Key Biscayne News again. ⁓ Break stories before they trend. Award-winning investigative reporting exposing corruption, environmental coverage protecting your property values. That's a good one. Real-time village council meeting updates, unlimited access from any device. Okay. So this is now leaning more, I think, towards benefits. ⁓

You know, exposing corruption. Yeah, I want that. you know, like, know like, know about breaking stories before they trend. Like you kind of getting, getting in front of it, but that property values is good. So what happens, ⁓ what happens here is, we're outputting an actual nag. can, you can literally copy the HTML for this, ⁓ for this nag and paste it into the, ⁓ upgrade message, field in leaky paywall.

and it'll generate this for you, then you can obviously go in and edit it as you need.

Okay. Okay. The next section here is, okay, let's, let's, look at some subscription page copy. So you go to your subscription page and take a look, you know, be the first to know what matters most award winning journalism that protects your Island investment. Okay. So that's kind of interesting going after, and I won't read all this, but, ⁓ you know, as a Key Biscayne resident, you depend on being informed about the decisions that affect your property values, safety and quality of life.

That's really benefits-oriented messaging. Key Biscayne Independent doesn't just report the news. We break the stories that matter most to your community before they become problems, right? So I think that's making more sense. And is that more compelling? It's like, that's.

Tyler (14:45)
for Yeah, you actually

know what you can do with this or what this does for you, right? It's like, great, I get access to this stuff, 24 hour this, access to the archive, that's great. But how does that actually improve my life or what kind of benefits do I get as part of that? So yeah, that's great.

Pete (15:06)
Right.

Yeah. How does it,

how does it improve my life? mean, I think that's the key there. So you have your, your, your, your, how do you improve your paid subscribers life? Right. Um, you know, I did this for, for a fishing magazine, uh, yesterday and it came up with verbiage, like, you know, find the best fishing spots, which is really what this particular magazine is all about across the new England, uh, and, sort of North Northeast coastline.

Tyler (15:31)
Yeah.

Pete (15:39)
⁓ it's like, ⁓ duh, of course. Like that's the main message. And yet it wasn't really clear on the website. Right. So instead of getting access to content, you're, you're now out, you're out in the ocean, you know, like, like going to the hotspots, right.

Tyler (15:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's...

Yeah, yeah, and that's a lot easier

to sell to someone than just like unlimited access to our fishing magazine archive. Like now I'm going to know exactly where I should go to catch XYZ types of fish or whatever. Like that's a totally different thing.

Pete (16:02)
Mm-hmm, right.

Yep.

Yep. Yeah, no, absolutely.

There's some key benefits here ⁓ that I'm not gonna go through all these benefits, but these are really nice bullet points that publishers can use in their copy.

Pete (16:22)
So head on over to leakypaywall.com slash copy dash lab and ⁓ feel free to check it out.

Alright Tyler, anything else?

Tyler (16:35)
That's all I've got.

Pete (16:36)
Okay. All right. Let's get some benefits copy going. It will impact your, your, ⁓ subscriptions, ⁓ help build your confidence and, you know, keep producing the good, the good content. All right. Catch you later. See you.

Tyler (16:52)
See

ya.