Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete Ericson (00:00)
So, Google traffic to publishers is down over 30%. AI is answering the questions that your article is used to, and social media is just not what it used to be. But the one thing that no one can scrape from you is a direct relationship with your audience. And what I'm going to show you in this video is how you can really foster more direct relationships, build your email list, build more traffic.

Build subscription revenue and even build your ad revenue. And this will hopefully let you stop worrying about social and AI and the things that you don't have any control over.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see that I have the Publishers AI survival guide up. This is a report that I just recently finished. I spent months on it. I worked with hundreds of publishers over years to figure out what kind of a system actually lets publishers take control and grow everything in their business. And the result is something we call the publisher flywheel. And what I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you with a live example.

a live publication, how this flywheel works, why it works, And how you can get started to getting it to work for your publication. You're probably doing some of the things in this flywheel, but we're really going to focus and make sure all the levers are pulled.

If you head over to publisherrevenue.com, you can grab this study for free and check it out. You'll find a lot of data in there that we pulled from. This video is going to use exactly the data in this guide.

Okay, let's get started.

so the live publication we're gonna look at, is delivering results like this. Revenue is up, new free registrations, that means emails are up, and significantly they started up just over a year ago and have really turned on the flywheel in order to grow. We'll take a look at them in a minute. Before we do that, I'm gonna show you what this flywheel is all about.

Now, if you're looking at this, you see a bell curve. There are three parts to it. And this is really kind of subscriber focused, but it really works with building your email list too. And you have three types of traffic essentially. You have traffic that comes in and they will register and subscribe right away. They love your content. They they just want to connect with you. And then on the right side, you have random traffic that hits your website.

And will never subscribe, they'll never pay you, they'll never register. It's just stuff you have to ignore. And in the middle, we have this big opportunity here. And these are readers that will subscribe and interact with you with proper nurturing. And this is the opportunity that most publishers miss. And they really, and what you need to do is you need to focus on these readers that may not be ready to pay you yet.

But they still love your content and they still want to be engaged with you at some point. And just to give it away, that means they want to be on your newsletter.

Okay, let's jump into the actual flywheel. So, what is this? This is really, there are four major parts of this. If you think about your publication, this is what this is what you need to do to engage your readers and then nurture them and convert them. So, step one, engagement, right? This is really all about setting up a registration wall. Forget pop-ups, which where you're asking.

politely to drop off your email address, you have valuable content. In fact, you, your two superpowers are content and audience. You have content that readers want and you have an audience that's hitting your website. So the registration wall is really the key in engaging traffic. And what we find, and you'll see it in the study, is that registration walls will convert anonymous traffic into

Known readers, known registered readers, two to seven times faster than pop-ups. And this is an important number, and it really is the cornerstone of how you grow your audience, which translates to growing everything else. Step two is all about nurturing. This is where we get into the newsletter. This is your direct traffic tool. Your newsletter gets to send your your readers that you've captured back to your content where you can message them appropriately.

This works for both subscription based publishers and donation based publishers. It w it just does the trick.

Step three is okay, you have captured an email address, they're on your newsletter, they're coming back to your website, and now you have an opportunity to target them. Whether it's for paid messaging, whether it's for paid subscriptions, whether it's for donations, depending on your publication, this is where the targeting happens. You have a known reader that's logged in because they registered on your website, and now you can appropriately go after them.

The fourth and last part of this flywheel is intelligence. We call it insights, subscriber insights. And this is where you get to look at the data of all this logged in traffic, which means registered readers that are logged in that haven't paid yet, registered readers that have logged in and haven't paid yet, and also paid subscribers that of course, are are logged in. And you get to see what their behavior is around your content and your messaging. And that gives you insights.

where you can make changes to your publication to improve your content, improve your messaging. And that furthers the flywheel and makes it spin faster.

Now, these are all different levers that we're going to talk about today. And you can set these levers up pretty loosely in the beginning, and you can start tightening them over time as you as you build confidence with them. And that's really how most of the publishers we work with do it. It's hard to just turn on everything in one shot and really restrict your content. That seems like a little too much of an ask. Some do, but most publishers come in and say, hey, this sounds like a good idea.

Let's start lightly and loosely, and then it's like a dial. You just sort of tighten the restrictions and you tighten up your messaging and you learn and you improve. And then over time, you end up with all these levers pulled and it starts to double your traffic in a year. It starts to double paid subscriptions in a year. Advertisers like it because your email list is bigger and they want to be a sponsor in your email list. All sorts of good things happen because of this. Okay.

Now I promised we were gonna look at a live publisher, so let's jump in and do that.

Okay. Here we have the Spanish Eye. This is a local slash regional English speaking news publisher in Spain. they've been around for about a year and a half or more, and so it's a fairly new publication. it's it's a super interesting story. We were here from the beginning, and essentially they started covering an area called Andalusia in the southern

part of Spain.

So the first step here we're going to talk about is the registration wall. And they have this wall set very tightly. In fact, it's kind of set up like the New York Times, zero free articles, and you see the registration wall. So if I go in here and I hit this article, what you'll find is instantly, hey, I got a free create a free account or log in to continue reading. And this is something that might terrify most publishers and

you shouldn't start there. And they didn't either. So what you can do with this registration wall is set it so that a reader gets one or two or three or four free articles before they even see this. And then once they register, the reader registers, then you can give them one, two, three, or four articles after the registration before they have to pay. If you're a donation based organization, then you

Pro can provide unlimited articles after you register. But what this does, and the important thing, is it gets the email address into your newsletter.

So what's the ideal here? What should you be doing as a publisher? You can start generously with a few articles in front of the wall and a few articles behind registration. But ideally, you're going to want to get to one free article, then the registration wall pops, then maybe one or two free articles after that, depending on how much traffic you have. And then on the third or fourth article, you're going to ask for payment, unless, of course, you're you're going to provide full access.

Because you're not you're not a subscription publisher. And what you do is you have dials and you can tighten that. You can set that, let's say three and three, three articles in front, three articles afterwards. And then over time, as you learn, okay, people are starting to register, no, nothing's blowing up. this is okay. I'm not getting terrible feedback. These are the things that you probably have have to go through and learn and understand, and then you can tighten it over time.

So that you get to that magic one free article or zero free articles in this case before the registration wall. And why is that one or zero free articles important? Because if you look at your analytics and you look at your average article views or page views per session, what you'll see is that the number will float around 1.7 pages per session. What does that mean?

That means that when a reader comes into your website, the average reader will look at almost two pages or two articles, which means the registration wall needs to come up at the very latest on article number two. That will help you capture more registrations, two to seven times more registrations than all the pop-ups and opt-ins that you have running on your site now.

Starting at two, three, or four free articles before this, we'll c start to feed people into the registration wall. But just change the numbers over time and tighten it to get to that one. And what you'll see is like I showed you with the charts earlier on, is you're gonna you see email list growth like crazy, which then obviously translates into everything else.

Okay, so let's actually go through this. I'm gonna come in here and we're going to

Can I just

Email address in here, and then we'll choose a password. Okay. And by the way, in this case, if I already had an account in here, it would recognize it and then it would just ask for a password to log in. Okay, I have now unlocked this article and I can read the entirety of this article. And what happened? Yes, this email address goes into their email service provider. So if you're using MailChimp or Kit or

Beehive or whatever is yep, the email goes into the list and gets targeted. Ideally, what you do is you set up a free segment. So a free registration segment. So anybody that comes in through this, you know they're they came through the registration wall. So they have a higher level level of engagement. because they had to choose a password in step two.

You also have somebody that's logged in to your website now. And the way we do it is we track every movement that reader makes. So now that I'm logged in, if I go to another article, so let's go back to the homepage here, and I'm gonna go into let's pick a a different article. It's tracking this then. I I now went to this article, right? And as an example, if I'm hitting

This, the I'm getting the upgrade message now. If I'm hitting the upgrade message over and over again, that gets tracked. And you know that I'm hitting, I'm interested, I'm engaged, I keep hitting this upgrade message. I may be open to a promotion, which is what our publishers are doing: sending promotions to those higher engaged readers. Just one thing that you can do. Now, back to the registration wall here. So again, the Spanish eye has built confidence.

they know that they can get the email address right off the bat so they don't allow any free content. and then I got my free article. They have my email address, and now I get a message that says get the insiders on the Musea, subscribe today. So I get the upgrade message and I have to pay for access. And what will I likely do? I will not pay, right? Like we don't pay for access right away. Some do, a small percentage absolutely do.

They love the content, they want to support you, they give you the money. But it doesn't matter because now the Spanish eye has me in on their email list and they're tracking my actions on the website. And so I'm gonna get their newsletter. And the newsletter is step two of the flywheel. So let's talk a little bit about step two. And again, this registration wall.

If you if you're gonna do anything after listening to this today, this should be the n if you're not doing it, is this is the number one thing you should be doing is installing a registration wall.

Okay.

let's hop over to the newsletter in the flywheel. You can see it's step two. And this is the nurturing phase, right? So step one, you've got the registration wall up, you're engaging readers. Step two, you start to nurture them with your newsletter. Newsletter is a super, super important part of your platform. It it really is your product. If you think of it as a product and you really pay attention to it.

you'll get great results from it. So what does that mean? Well, first you really have two lists, two main segments. You have your free registered reader segment, you probably have a free newsletter segment from that you've had in the past, and then you have your paid subscriber segment. And you need to keep those two separate. It's very easy to do, certainly with Leaky Paywall and I'm sure other platforms. And when somebody comes in,

From the registration wall, you need to get them on that free list, and you and your newsletter gets put to work. And you have two newsletters: the free newsletter that goes out to the free folks. You have the paid newsletter, it goes out to the paid list. The purpose of the free newsletter, if you're a subscription-based publisher or donation, is to sell the subscription or donation. That is the entire purpose of this newsletter. Yes, it will drive.

traffic back to your website where you you have messaging that kicks in and that's great. But you need to use the free list as the way to sell the subscription. So and then the paid list, just finish is you obviously don't have any, you know, subscription promotion on that paid list. You might not have donation promotions as well. But it's a it's a that that is a different newsletter

And you have opportunities with the paid list where you could you could add more content, you could add a more personal introduction in your newsletter, you could have archives, it could be or as simple as a second newsletter, like an early delivery newsletter. So as an example, we have a publisher we work with that has a morning and an afternoon newsletter.

Only paid subscribers get the afternoon newsletter. So that's a premium benefit of a paid subscription. And it doesn't take any extra work. They're just, and it can be fully automated, right? You can set it up so that the morning newsletter goes out on a schedule, everything new, everything new gets published. And then the afternoon noon afternoon newsletter also goes out on a schedule, but only to paid subscribers. And it only pulls the new articles that were published that day. You don't have to do any work. You set it up, the automation runs.

And you're you're golden. This this works really, really well. It saves you a bunch of time. Okay. So here's here's the Spanish eye, and here we have a personal welcome from subscribing that I I just did. And then I'm just gonna kind of hop into some past newsletters from a different account that also flows in here, and you'll see that you know it looks like a pretty standard.

newsletter. Here's the subscription messaging in the newsletter right in the middle. And then let's see what they have. We have some events and then okay so I'd say that there could be some more subscription messaging on the bottom here to really kind of flesh out the the benefits of of joining. Okay, so here's here's the newsletter. Now one thing I just want you to to to notice here if you're listening to this is they send out the

newsletter twice a day. There is a morning edition and there is an afternoon edition. And this is fully automated. So yes, you're touching your when you when you know for a a a news publisher, daily newsletter makes sense. For let's say a niche publisher or magazine publisher, you're probably talking two or three times per week. Not once a month, not once every two weeks.

But you need to get your cadence up. This is one of the mistakes that most publishers make is they're not sending frequently enough. I think local news has gotten pretty good at it, but if you're in the niche space and you're in the or in the magazine space, it's easy to kind of fall into the, okay, I'll do one every couple of weeks, which I hear about maybe once a week, which is too low. And you also have archives available to bring forward during the week where you can pull.

a couple of articles from your newsletter every week which and archives by the way we've looked at this they actually they actually are treated as more valuable content they get higher engagement bigger click rates than the archive content does than the fresh content which is super interesting and of course this is for evergreen content okay

So get your cadence up, automate it if you can, and and and get this engine going. Because if you think about it, and and by the way, the data says that when publishers get on the right cadence, or news publishers are doing daily or twice daily, and and niche publishers are running two or three times a week, is that is that conversions conversions jump, engagement jumps.

You want your brand to land in readers' mailboxes as frequently as possible. You need you want to keep your brand in the mailbox. And you might say, geez, there's so much email out there and everybody's, I feel like a spammer and all that. Well, hang on a second. Your newsletter is a product. It's got inherent value because it's convenient. It gets dumped into my mailbox every day or whatever, a few times a week, and I get to see it.

And I that brand, here's the brand again. I like this brand. Am I gonna read this brand? No, I don't have to read the brand. You don't read every newsletter, right? But you scan them. If if if you if you're like a publisher, you click on it and you're like, okay, well, let's go back here and I'll just kind of read the headlines real quick. Headlines, headlines, headlines, headlines. And if I don't click, that's okay because the newsletter comes tomorrow, right? But if I see something I like, then I'll click in.

And I'll say, hey, that looks really good. And then guess what happens? The newsletter triggers, right? Is triggering the behavior and saying, hey, you gotta upgrade now in order to get full access. Subscribe today. And that's what you want as a subscription-based publisher. Same with donations. You want that message for subscriptions to show up over and over and over again. So I might not subscribe right now, but in a month.

I've seen this message 20 times because I wanted to read 20 articles because they're valuable to me. And I think, my God, okay, maybe then I finally pull the trigger. The Washington Post is great at this. They have their newsletters fabulous. I would take a look at that. They do offer genuine value in their newsletter. And I find myself constantly clicking to read the article and then being reminded that I have to be a paid subscriber in order to read the content. So they're they're working on me really well. I would take a look at that. So that news free newsletter.

driving traffic back, driving traffic back, seeing and then then you you have a logged in reader here and you're you're s you're targeting say me with the upgrade messaging and I'm gonna see it over and over again. And that's what it takes today to cut through the noise of today is you need things to repeat. And often, right? So if you send one newsletter a week, it's just not going to repeat enough. You send a newsletter every day as a news publisher, now you're repeating enough. Now the messaging comes through. And

Just remember, your newsletter is your product.

Here, let's go in here and talk about conversion step three. And this is where you get to target your readers. So, step one, you have a registration wall that pops up after an article or or so, and people give you their email address. That email gets sent to your newsletter. Your newsletter is doing a nice job sending people back to the to your website. And now step three, you have the opportunity to target and convert your readers.

So back to the Spanish Eye here, I am getting this upgrade message over and over as the days and the weeks and the months go by. What the data says is the first 30 days for an engaged reader reader, about 40% of them will subscribe. And then that sort of fades over over time. But I might click this upgrade now button.

And I'll get a I'll get what looks like first three months for the price of one promotion, which works really well, by the way. And I might decide, you know what, no, I don't, I don't, I don't think so. But maybe I'll decide, you know what, one day I'll be like, you know what, I think I I need to support these guys and I can start checking out. And the thing is, when you have a logged in free registered reader, you know when they're checking out. So on the insights, which I'm gonna show you in a minute.

You'll see that I started the checkout. If I abandon the checkout, which happens all the time, then you could actually follow up with me because I was logged in and because you know that I started the checkout. And that's what matters. Now, if you look at it from an advertising point of view, the ad networks are looking for, or at I should say not the ad networks, but the sponsors and advertisers are looking for known, a known audience to go after. So

Being logged in, you have a known audience that's growing. That's what sponsors and advertisers want. You have a bigger email list. They want to be not only on your website, but they also, preferably, want to be in your newsletter because your newsletter is a direct sales engine that's sent that's landing inside people's inboxes. They don't have to go anywhere, it just shows up right in people's inbox.

So we're targeting. Now, if I'm a donation-based publisher, and let's say the registration wall gives me full access to all the content, that's okay. I am still logged in and I can and you can target me as a register as a registered reader that hasn't donated yet. Right. And so you can you can see my behavior, you can look at engagement, you could say, well, this person's looking at X number of articles, you know, per week or

or whatnot and then send messaging through the through the website or send an email campaign to the readers that are engaging in a in a big way. So you have the ability to target. You might accumulate data that says I like sports and you know in the in the in the region. Great. Okay, well the messaging that shows up on the website might say something like get more sports. You have so much opportunity to really

target the reader and get the and move the needle to get them to take the next step with you.

Okay, let's go now to the final step.

Which is insights. Okay. So to repeat, we have the registration wall that pops up, grabs the email address. We have the newsletter that's firing those emails back to the website. We have targeting messaging that knows that this these readers who's logged in and sends them the appropriate messages in order to convert them to donation or paid subscription. And then the last thing is the information itself, the insights.

So on the insights, you can connect with your readers directly because you can see how they're behaving on your site. You can see how your content is doing. When your free registered and paid readers are interacting with your content, these are your best readers. This is the data you need to pay attention to in order to produce better content every week. So let's take a quick look at some of the data here.

And I'm gonna share some intelligence. This is just a snippet of what we do with our insights, but you'll get an idea for it. And the idea is is you want data that you can act on. So one that's very popular with our publishers is how many free readers are hitting the paywall. So if you're listening to this, basically looking at it at four data points plus some a growth, a growth chart here as far as subscribers.

that have that have come in. And we are looking at data from the Spanish eye, just so you know. I've hidden all the numbers so you can't tell what the what the the numbers actually are, but you can see the growth. And so one of the things we do is we look at okay, who's hit the paywall three times in the past seven days, right? These are and these these are adjustable, but who's hit the paywall? Well

If I've hit the upgrade message three times in a week, I'm pretty engaged. I'm engaged enough that you might want to click, click the link and grab the list and send a promotion to anybody who's in the higher engaged level. Now, we also have the ability to automate this. So you can set up a standing promotion for those that are higher engaged, and then it's just hands-off once it's set up. Another thing is okay.

What if readers are going quiet? So these are readers that in 30 days, they haven't done anything on your website. They haven't, they haven't read an article, they haven't logged in, they haven't, they haven't done anything. And they're going quiet and for, you know, probably some valid reasons, but these are folks you can message with, you know, maybe the hot content of the month to make sure that they re-engage. failed payments is another thing. This is all part of churn reduction.

go after those that are failed. Again, we have an automation for this. So you can just set up email churn reduction campaign once say Stripe gives up on on charging payments. And this is what the insights gives you. This is just kind of scratching the surface of it. there's a lot more data behind the scenes in terms of you know, filtering and and how to get your hands on what highly engaged people are doing.

readers are doing and lower engaged readers are doing. And what what you can see with this bar chart is what's happened really since the early part of the year with a hard paywall essentially, that the the subscriber growth has been very steady and good. And, you know, one one thing that I I do wanna mention.

here after this insights is talk a little bit about AI blocking. I do get questions from that quite a bit. And I'd say the the answer right now is at this point in time, there's still value from search. There's still value from social. and there's some value from AI insights that are sending you traffic. So you have traffic coming from different sources. And so the registration wall is is how you capture that traffic. And yes

The AI bots are stealing your content. They're reading all your content and stealing it for their use. But as far as actual hardship to the publisher, it's not really kicking in just yet. And when I say yet very carefully, in a year or two or three, I think things will be very different. And that's where you where you lock down, like the Spanish eye, you lock down the the hardwall.

And you s and and you set it up so that nothing gets in, right? No bots, no SEO, no social sharing, nothing. And then, but you still have your registration wall, which can capture humans who want to get your newsletter and stay in touch. And that sounds a little, that sounds maybe a little extreme, but as if you look around, you'll see that there are plenty of publishers that are doing that, large publishers that are doing it. And we see a bunch of smaller publishers doing it as well.

But the key is in building confidence, right? You set up this flywheel properly, you'll start growing everything. Everything grows. Traffic, email lists, paid subscriptions. it attracts better advertisers and sponsors. Everything grows because you're in charge of it. You've you're capturing the email. You have a you have a fan now in the system. Even if they don't pay you or donate, they're still there, they're still.

Email is viral. They're sharing your emails to others who may subscribe or donate. And that's what's important is you're controlling the engine and this flywheel that keeps growing as as the registration wall captures and as your newsletter sends and as your messaging gets more and more discreet and as your your insights tell you what to do next. so yes, you can lock down.

over time when you're ready, when you've built the confidence, you start with a loose registration wall and then tighten it over time as you get confident with it. And then at some point you do what some of these publishers do is you say, okay, that's it. Keeping AI out, keeping everything out. And I, you know, you have a big enough of a list and you don't have to worry so much about search and social and all the platforms that are trying to keep the attention of your reader. And that's the job of social media.

And search now with AI overviews is they are they are trying and doing a good job of just hanging on to the attention without releasing them to your site with your content that you've worked so hard to create.

So let's just go back to the flywheel real quick and review this.

Here we go. We have engagement. Yes, the registration wall. That sends the email to the newsletter. The newsletter fires all your content every day or a few times a week back to that reader. The reader comes back to your website here and there. You you know what they're doing because they're logged in. You're targeting them. You're getting the insights, you're getting the data that lets you make better decisions for your publication. That is the publisher flywheel. We've seen large

regional news publishers more than double their traffic in a year with this method. We've seen small neighborhood urban local news sites grow their traffic in the 50% range in just six weeks. And Spanish Eye, which we've been talking about, their active users grew about 800% over 12 months. These are these are things that are actually working. And what you do need to do is kind of take your take a breath and get it done.

if you want more information about this, head over to publisherrevenue.com, grab the study, grab our leaky paywall plugin. It's free with List Builder. and this is what I've been showing you, is this in action? And you have all the tools to get your flywheel going. And of course get in touch if you want to talk.