Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Paywall Podcast (00:00)
So today we're going to talk about the friction of all the little things you're doing on your website that are hurting your revenue, both subscription revenue and ad revenue and list building and all the things you actually want to do. But your website is letting you down on.

This is a bit of a followup to a previous podcast.

10 reasons your website's annoying people or something like that. don't remember what the title is, but anyway, welcome Tyler. Glad to have you back. Tyler from newsletter glue is here. The newsletter expert of the day of the year of the decade. okay. So let's just jump into this and, ⁓ this is going to be a bit of a, a homework assignment. If you're listening to this and you're running a news or magazine, ⁓ publication, ⁓ we're going to.

Tyler (00:50)
Hello, hello. Yeah, thank you.

Paywall Podcast (01:13)
Take this part two is kind of a deeper dive into the things that could be, or are hurting all your revenues. And at the end of this, we're going to talk about the framework that we profess and employ with hundreds of publishers that actually lets you ⁓ build your lists, build your traffic, build your ad revenue, convert more paying subscribers, engage better, do all the things that you want to do as a publisher.

On your website. All right, so let's jump in. First thing I'm going to, and these are pretty random, just so you know. ⁓ These are things that, ⁓ you know, I have meetings with publishers every day. We talk about, we do a very robust onboarding process. So we're, we usually do about five to 10 meetings to get, get the paywall set up so that it's building the emails, driving the traffic, converting paid subscribers, all that good stuff. And we run into these sort of weird.

like UI things on websites constantly. So I started making a list of like, hey, okay, this, shouldn't be doing this. You should be doing this other thing instead. Started making a list, turned into a podcast. Here we are. Okay. First one is ad blockers. ⁓ If you happen to be on YouTube and you're looking at this, we're looking at the Boca Raton Tribune. I've had several conversations with these fine folks about this ad blocker. ⁓

pop up. And what we're seeing is a site, the homepage, just go to the homepage and instantly is this big white screen that says, please allow ads on our site. Now, what is the problem with this? Keep in mind, this is a subscription based publisher, right? Like they're trying to get me as a reader to pay, to give them money. And yet they're throwing this like ad screen in my face. What do think Tyler? Is this?

Tyler (03:02)
It's not exactly

the most inviting ⁓ experience because I would imagine, I don't know how many people use ad blockers in their browser, but I would assume it's a pretty high number. A lot of us use them to prevent ads from just blowing us up and following us around the web. But this is really, especially this particular setup, they're already targeting subscribers, so they've introduced friction for me as a reader.

Paywall Podcast (03:19)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (03:28)
who may already be a subscriber who's just not logged in or a potential subscriber who's just being blocked right out of the gate with this pop-up about allowing ads on their site. And one other small point to make here, most of these allow ads on our site pop-ups tend to block the Google ads. Like most of our browser... ⁓

Paywall Podcast (03:42)
Hmm.

Tyler (03:55)
ad blockers are blocking the Google ads on sites. And so really by clicking this allow ads option, which is kind of turning off your ad blocker, the publishers just allowing Google ads, which if anyone is using or running Google ads, you know that it doesn't really pay that much unless you've got like a congelion page views per month. And if you do have that much, you're not going to be running Google ads. So ⁓ I would highly recommend not.

Paywall Podcast (04:05)
Right.

Tyler (04:23)
not taking this approach, if you can tell by my thoughts.

Paywall Podcast (04:24)
Yeah.

So the number I've heard is a little over 40 % of people run ad blockers on it in their browsers, something like that. So there's a pretty big cohort of people that are saying, thank you. And yet you're forcing this down their throats. ⁓ and the bottom line is that you're a, you'll just drive people away. So you'll never get a chance to engage them be getting them to cough up an email, no less a paid subscription is just, it's a harder pill. like, and your point about.

I didn't even think of this, but your point about like, I'm already a paid subscriber. I'm just trying to get to the news and you're, you're, you're, you're not only do I have to log in, but I got to get past this garbage. Sorry. That that's, that's a deal breaker. Um, so anyway, and you have to do a lot of work to, you know, click the, the, the ad block plus or whatever you're using and turn it off and refresh the page or, Oh man, you're making, making your reader do a lot of work to get to.

content that you're gonna lock down at some point anyway, so.

Tyler (05:21)
Right,

right. And for what reason other than just showing some ads that are going to make you pennies on the return when you should be focusing on collecting that user's email address, which I would argue could be worth hundreds of dollars or more ⁓ should they ever convert to a paid subscriber. So there you go.

Paywall Podcast (05:28)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Bingo.

Yeah. All right. That's a, that's great. Okay. Next one again, kind of, kind of random, but this is something you should be looking at your website. Is your CAPTCHA working on your site? Is it too aggressive and stopping people from signing up? So part of the, when you get into paid subscriptions, you're, you're doing, you should be doing two things. One is of course, you're selling a paid subscription and you have a CAPTCHA on that, but you also should have a free registration to capture and build your email list, which we'll talk about at the end.

a little deeper ⁓ and that sometimes what we find is CAPTCHAs will get in the way of an actual ⁓ registration. Do you see this Tyler? Is this something that happens?

Tyler (06:17)
Absolutely.

This was such an issue for us that we reached out to a non-Google reCAPTCHA, non-turnstile CAPTCHA startup that's prevent these kinds of issues where the CAPTCHA bars are too high or they're just not great at capturing actual humans that are trying to read content. So yeah, for sure, you should certainly be checking your CAPTCHA. It could be reducing

not only your free registration signups, but it could be hurting your conversions on the other side of that. So you should be checking it everywhere to make sure that it's working. And you should be doing it on a routine basis because the algorithms that drive those captures do change and they could disrupt ⁓ the setup. So you should keep an eye on your capture setup and on your site.

Paywall Podcast (06:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, if you, if you, people are having trouble getting through your capture, you're just literally sending them, sending them away. You're just saying, thank you. I don't want your money or I don't want your email address. It's really important. So what do you recommend? What do you recommend for.

Tyler (07:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paywall Podcast (07:25)
setting up captures that actually work.

Tyler (07:27)
Yeah, so I reached out to a team. It's a startup, kind of a new age take on CAPTCHA. It's a team by the name of prosopo.io. And these guys are fantastic. We've been running them for a few months with Paywall Project customers, and we've not had any issues with customers.

Paywall Podcast (07:39)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (07:51)
checking out, customers signing up for free, ⁓ and it's stopped all of those bot attacks that you can sometimes see on your, not only your free registration, but also bot testing on your credit card page. That's the reason we set them up, right? We're using CAPTCHA to help prevent bot card testing on your sites typically. So their new age approach ⁓ is working quite well.

Paywall Podcast (08:04)
Hmm.

That's awesome. I will shout out to TurnStyle. That's a good solution, too. It's a Cloudflare product. And then also, ⁓ email verification service, which we do install on some publisher sites. So it actually checks the email that's inbound. Is this a real Gmail or Yahoo address? Does this look right? And that helps stop a lot of garbage from coming through as well. That is a bit of a nuclear solution.

And we find that's good with larger publishers that have a lot of traffic to the site. ⁓ OK, so captions. Take a look at your caption. Make sure it's working. All right, another, again, random thing, something that came up asking, ⁓ I think we might have covered this on a previous podcast, but asking for too much information on checkout. ⁓ So as an example, we're looking at Bluegrass Unlimited magazine here.

And if I go to subscribe, what they're doing, it's a couple of things happening here. One is I'm going off to a different URL. So that's a little bit of an issue. People get a little nervous when you're not remaining on the website. So there's kind of strike one, and that will lower your conversions. I will also say that younger, more tech savvy generations are really, they have a sharp eye for this.

If you're trying to capture that demographic in particular, you definitely need to keep the experience on your website. But the main point I want to show here is that there's some ⁓ options here. There's print, ⁓ subscription, and digital subscription. So if I select the digital only subscription, I'm presented with ⁓ address information. I need the city. I need the zip code.

I need the state, I need the country. So this form isn't giving me just sort of the bare minimum fields that I need. It's giving me kind of the legacy print information, even though I'm just signing up for a digital subscription. What do you think Tyler? Does this hurt?

Tyler (10:18)
⁓ definitely. there's so if you're offering a print subscription, yeah, totally. You're to have to ask for an address that's to be expected. But if you're also offering a digital only type subscription and you're still asking for the address, you are hurting your conversions ⁓ out of the gate because of all of the information that's required to do that. So what do you really need with a digital only sign up? Maybe their name.

their email and their credit card, but you don't need all this information. If you need their address, you need all this information, do it after. Send them a survey, send them a confirmation page that says, we'd like to collect some blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can do that after they check out.

Paywall Podcast (10:50)
Yeah. Right.

Yep, exactly. ⁓ One of the things that happens is for every extra field that you display that someone has to ⁓ fill out, it lowers your conversion rate by a small percentage. So each additional field

that you add. And I would say for a digital subscription, ⁓ you don't need company. That's one. You don't need address. That's two. You don't need city. That's three. You don't need country. That's four. You don't need state. That's five. And you don't need zip code. That's six. That's really, that's six additional fields. Each one is killing your conversion percentage by a touch. And the other thing too is I might simply refuse to provide my address information.

To to sign up for a digital subscription like this is a privacy issue too. Like why do you want my address? I'm not giving up my street address my mailing address to This publication when so it feels a little almost a little suspicious. I don't want to get too dramatic here, but

Tyler (11:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

for sure. And it's also not that common in other streaming services and other digital products. We're not used to having to give up an address for that kind of stuff. So when a website's asking for all of this information just simply for a digital subscription to access content, it's a bit of a high bar and kind of raises some, let's say, yellow flags for your potential subscribers.

Paywall Podcast (12:22)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Yeah, for sure. And by the way, if you are Bluegrass Unlimited, just get in touch and we can help you set this up so that you don't have to provide this address information on the digital checkout. Okay. Next random UI piece. So a couple of weeks ago, we were onboarding a news publisher, very concerned about content theft off their website. As a lot of publishers are, you you work hard to produce content and you don't want

people to steal the content and republish it as their own. There's now AI to worry about as far as content, grabbing content and all that. So what they had done, and this has been running for quite a long time, is disabled right click on their website. So you can't right click and copy, do the quick copy text thing off their website, ⁓ thinking that was a way to protect their content. ⁓

Tyler, what do think?

Tyler (13:26)
Seems a bit unnecessary,

honestly. mean, given that anyone can screenshot your content and, you know, and there's ways around those right clicks. Those are, I would say those are old tactics from the early 2000s that were deployed to prevent these kinds of things, but they're not that effective. If someone wants to distribute your content and share it with someone else, they're gonna do it regardless of whether they can, you know, right click or not.

Paywall Podcast (13:34)
right.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. One of the things, I mean, the AI will scrape your HTML. So it doesn't matter what you're disabling on the front end. If you're displaying web content, it's there. ⁓ Anybody who's a coder can just grab the content off the HTML if they're scraping it. ⁓ the other thing, too, is that you get in the way of password pastes.

So if I'm logging, a lot of people will literally paste their past or copy it from another source and they'll paste it into the, ⁓ which I think we all do from time to time, even with the password manager, gotta sometimes do that. And so now I'm like, okay, I need to right click and paste the, password into the password field. I can't do that. I mean, that's, that's a destroyer of, of, ⁓ engagement on your website, especially for a paid subscriber. ⁓

Tyler (14:29)
For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, not everyone's going

to know how to do command V or whatever it is on Windows to like paste their passwords. So yeah, for sure.

Paywall Podcast (14:50)
Right.

Yep. Yep. ⁓ the other thing too, I was told, well, it hurts accessibility. So if you're, if you're, ⁓ relying on tools because you're visually impaired, as an example, ⁓ and you can't run your normal tools to, to read the content, ⁓ that's, that's a, that's a problem. that could be a liability too. And then you can't like, let's say you want to open an article in a new tab, right?

Like you want to, you want to save this article for later because it's a good article, but you're not, you don't have the time to read it. So you're just going to article, open this and you can't even do that. I mean, it's don't do it. Okay. All right. Next random piece, requiring strong passwords for subscriptions that are hard to remember. ⁓ so depending on the CMS that you're using, ⁓ we, we work in the ⁓ WordPress world. ⁓

Sometimes, strong passwords get enforced by, let's say WordPress, and you want to not do that. You want, ⁓ for a paid subscription, ⁓ you want people to be able to use their ⁓ simple, not super secure passwords. It's not going to make a big deal because it's just paying for content access. There's no real risk on that side. And you want to make it convenient for folks. There are some plugins available for

for WordPress that remove that requirement and let you use really any simple password that you want. if you are requiring long complex passwords to register or to pay for a subscription, you probably want to stop doing that right away.

Tyler (16:37)
Yeah, you could check your if you're using WordPress, check any of your security plugins. Oftentimes they will allow you to disable that for the subscriber role. So yeah, you certainly don't need that. And another point, if you are using something like Leaky Paywall, all of the really sensitive data like the credit card data, all of that stuff's living in Stripe anyway. So the only day if someone ever did hack a subscriber's account.

Paywall Podcast (17:01)
Right.

Tyler (17:02)
The most they would see is their email address and whatever is in that account. You would never see the sensitive credit card data that a hacker would be after.

Paywall Podcast (17:15)
Exactly. Okay. ⁓ next random thing. So working with, with another news publisher and they were, they were teasing their premium articles. They, they, they were set up so that they were locking down some premium articles and then they had sort of their free content.

And since then, they've been changing that. But ⁓ the way they approached it is they would have a teaser text, and then they'd have a Read More button for their premium article. So you'd have to read the teaser text and then click the Read More to go and read the rest of the content. So if you're doing that, ⁓ honestly don't see that very often, but I did see it. And I was thinking, OK, we should add this to the random UI list.

don't do that use an instead if you're, you know, we're talking about paid subscriptions here, ⁓ just set it up so that the excerpt text shows up and then the subscription message or the subscription nag shows up right away. There's no need to click and you need to get your messaging in front of people without them having to click as well. So that's something to stop right away. don't, this, this used to be a thing to, I remember back in the day, this used to be a thing to measure engagement on an article.

Like you would read a certain amount of the text and then you'd hit the read more button or link and you click that to read it. And then that would send some data to Google analytics. And then the publisher would know, Oh, this long article got a lot of engagement. I think that's what I think that was the original intention.

Tyler (18:42)
Right.

Yeah,

yeah, I think some publishers also did it to get their ads to be a bit higher up in the placement. So like if there's a tiny little excerpt and then there's a read more button, the ad would be nearby that read more button. And so it be visible and getting eyeballs and then therefore generating some revenue. But again, we go back to ads. I don't want to go on a tangent on that, but it's not worth the payout that you're seeing from that for the disruption that you're causing to you.

Paywall Podcast (18:52)
Mmm.

Yeah. Yeah. If you're going to disrupt, ask for an email address, right? Like get them to register on your, on your, on that article so they can read that article and they'll give you an email address. And then that email address is worth infinitely more than any kind of an ad view. Yeah.

Tyler (19:26)
for sure, regardless

of whether they ever subscribe. I tell publishers that all the time. This isn't about getting 100 % of your free subscribers to pay. This is about building a list, the list you can advertise to. There's a number of ways to convert this. So yeah, the email address is worth way more than the ad. Anyway.

Paywall Podcast (19:46)
Absolutely.

Building the list. ⁓ One thing, hang on a second.

Okay. Um, social, like just a quick mention, um, social icons, get them off your, your header of your website, please. Um, you can see here on the book of Rattan, uh, that there's some, some Facebook and X and whatever icons here. You want to keep people on your site. You want to get them to engage, give you their email address, pay for a subscription, view your ads, do all the things that you want them to do. Why would you give them a,

a Facebook icon to click and go away from your site and never come back. Don't do that. If you have to have social icons, just move them into your footer. So if somebody is actively looking for your Facebook page, okay. That's a motivation. Great. They'll scroll to the footer. They'll find it. They'll click on it and then they'll follow you there. That's fine. But I can't tell you how many publishers I see ⁓ with social icons plastered everywhere, just leaking traffic off.

OK. ⁓

Next one. Ooh, let's see. ⁓ if you're displaying an opt-in for your newsletter, like this is pretty typical. You'll go to a news publication and there'll be a sidebar and it says, Hey, join our newsletter. Or there'll be a pop-up right away. Kind of like the way this ad blocker pops up and it'll say, join our list. Right. If you're doing that, you're doing it wrong. If you're doing that.

What you're doing is you're asking for an email. Please, please, please give me an email and get our newsletter. That's not the way to do it. What you want to do is you want to, your content is your superpower and you need to leverage your content with a free registration so that you require the email address in order to read more content. I know this is something that we literally revolve our entire publishers, entire marketing strategies, digital marketing strategies.

Cause it works. So don't annoy people when they come to the website, give them an article, let them read a full article without any hassle. But when they go to the second article, require an email and password, a registration to read that second article that will convert your traffic. 20 % faster month over month, somewhere between 10 and 20 % easily. And you'll grow your list, which is

going to be responsible for driving more traffic. if you're asking for a newsletter, stop asking, require it.

Tyler (22:14)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Paywall Podcast (22:15)
asking for an email. Did I say email? More coffee.

Okay. So that's that. Okay. Advertising. Here's, here's the next random UI thing. So I'm on a website here. I have, I have a takeover at the bottom here and add on the bottom. I have a slide in a video. This was a video. It stopped playing now and some kind of other random UI icons. ⁓

If you're in the subscription like business, if you're asking for money, you have to, and you have to nurture your readers into paying you for access. Don't give them reasons to hate the experience. The thing about advertising is it's a balance, right? You're, you need the revenue, you want the revenue, you want to, you want to drive more eyeballs to it. I get it. That's fine, but there are different ways to do it. And when you, and

In my opinion, when you're crossing the line, when you start taking over ⁓ the UI of the website. So I can't see, you know, this is a fixed banner at the bottom here. I can't see the bottom of the website. And the thing that slides in is a fixed item that slides in and just stays there. The video, the video ad, and I can't see what's behind it. And it gets in the way and it just gives me this icky feeling, Tyler. And so.

⁓ recommendation is, you know, focus on the ads in content. They're fixed. Fine. ⁓ maybe up at top, like at the, at the banner, but if you scroll down, it sort of scrolls, scrolls away. And if you're growing your newsletter aggressively, then you can have sponsors for your newsletter content. And, ⁓ if you can do direct sales, do direct sales, you'll get you have better ads that fit your audience. I understand the network ads are.

are very tempting, they're easy, you don't have to deal with them. But if you cross the line into ads that are literally taking over the UI of your ⁓ website, you're going to really wreck your subscription conversions.

Thoughts? Did I say it all? Is that everything?

Tyler (24:26)
That's everything, yeah. Just don't do it. Don't do it. ⁓

Paywall Podcast (24:31)
All right, and we're going to talk later as to why you want to focus on really that nurturing and grabbing that email address versus, which is actually better for advertising than showing, cramming more ads on your site. Okay, we're getting towards the end here. ⁓

All right, last thing, if it takes more than two articles to display a subscription or registration message, then too few are seeing your registration or subscription messages. Now, I know this can vary depending on the amount of traffic you have to your website and the type of your audience, but in general, Tyler, would you say that you should be less generous with your content to get a registration message or a subscription message in play or more generous?

Tyler (25:16)
less. Generous. ⁓ for sure. And the reason for that is because most people who visit your site rarely ever make it to page two. So they get their free article, they're happy, they've read your content. Hopefully, they like it enough to see something on the sidebar, in the footer, read more related stories, and they meander to that second article. But oftentimes they don't.

And so by extending your free content from one free article or up to five, they may never reach that threshold in a given month, week, or whatever your time frame is on your particular meter set up if you're using Leaky Paywall. So fewer articles is much better. We want to trigger that free registration as much as humanly possible throughout the site.

Paywall Podcast (26:11)
Now that'll build your list. Okay, so that's a great answer. ⁓ This is under debate constantly. I can't tell you how many times and I know you deal with the same thing on your side is, you

Publishers want to be generous and they're nervous about, especially if they're first time paywalling, maybe second or third time paywalling and it didn't work very well. And so they're looking for a better solution. They're nervous. And, ⁓ I will say this, you know, you have the levers, like you can be generous upfront, but very, but you just need to go with your eyes open, knowing that it's not going to trigger enough email subscriptions and it's not going to trigger enough paid subscriptions. And you need to really tighten it up to like a one free article and then register and you get one more.

Situation. Yeah.

Tyler (26:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

And the truth is one article is very generous based on the habits of most of your traffic. So like they're not getting to page two very often anyway. yeah, in your eyes, maybe you're like, yeah, I want to give them five, 10, 15 articles because we know they want to see our content. But in reality, they're just not getting that far down the funnel.

Paywall Podcast (27:13)
That is true. That is true. Okay. So this, this segues into the conclusion of this. what I do want to just package this whole ⁓ podcast into what should you do? Like, what is the strategy? And this is something we repeat. We can't repeat it enough, but this is what works. So you have random traffic coming in from Google, social email, whatever. And you need to do the thing where you give them one free article and then you

Stop them with a registration, email and password, that's it. It's free, it gets them on your newsletter. So you're automatically sending those registrants into your newsletter. They're segmented as free registration. That's a higher level of engagement. Your newsletter is doing a great job of kicking traffic back to your site. If you're a news publisher, it's every day practically. If you're a magazine publisher, maybe it's three times a week or more. what that traffic is doing is...

Seeing the subscription messaging. They're seeing the upgrade to a paid subscription message the newsletter adds value The newsletter cadence is sending more traffic back to your website What we find is when this free registration funnel is set up is that publishers see a lot more traffic to their website So I get the question from publishers saying hey, well paywall hurt my traffic because they're concerned about They're concerned about ad revenue concerned about ⁓

SEO, concern about all sorts of things. And what's amazing is if you set it up the right way, this way, you actually will swell the traffic back to your website. Imagine every single email that you capture that's, that has a slightly higher engagement because of the free registration is now getting sent back to your website every day. Or three times a week or whatever it is. And they're, and they're looking at, you know, one to two articles per visit. And that means they're triggering ⁓ the ads that are on your site. So you, you get.

you get a, you get a faster growing email list with higher quality readers. You get more traffic back to your website. You get more ad views and technically clicks. ⁓ and you get the subscription messaging that pops up, ⁓ more and more, which is a requirement to converting paid subscribers. People need to see things 10 times, 20 times, to be nurtured into or annoyed into being paying for a subscription. And that's the whole, that's the framework that works today.

Tyler (29:24)
but

Paywall Podcast (29:28)
So incredibly well. there's, there's, there's subtleties to it and there's levers and you can be, you can be as generous as you want. And eventually you'll tighten it up and get it to where it's really performing, but you can have it all your magazine publisher, your news publisher. You can get more traffic, more ad views, bigger list. Sponsors love that. ⁓ more paid, more paid reader revenue subscriptions, and then you can also work on new digital ad products.

Just go do it. Okay, that wraps the pod. Thank you, Tyler. Awesome. See you next time.

Tyler (29:56)
Thank you.