Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Paywall Podcast (00:00)
Good morning, Tyler, how are you? Excellent, excellent. Yeah, nice snowy day in New Hampshire. Tyler from Newsletter Glue, and we are going to talk about AI, what it's doing to publishers, what Google says it's doing to publishers. And we're gonna actually look at an example that I dug into earlier of one of our publishers.

Tyler (00:02)
Good, good, good morning.

Paywall Podcast (00:23)
and how AI is affecting their search results and what they're doing about it. This is pretty cool stuff. So if you hang on, you're gonna get the breakdown for that.

All right, so are you ready to jump in? This is crazy days with AI. We did this podcast before, but this is an update with a lot of new information. So let me just share my screen. And we're gonna talk about the fishermen in a minute.

Tyler (01:03)
Let's do it.

Paywall Podcast (01:17)
They are a niche publisher. cover basically fishing along the coast in the Northeast. They've been doing this a long time. They have three print editions and they're leaning into digital and they're kicking butt. Now, let's get to some bad news, shall we? ⁓ so what Google is telling us and what publishers are...

⁓ telling us are very different google had a record quarter ⁓ they announced that they had their their search revenue across four hundred billion for the first time ever and ⁓ that quote they quoted this ⁓ that it's an expansionary moment for them because of ⁓ search and a i overviews and all that

And really what it is is it's an expansionary moment for them, but it's a contractionary, if that's a word, moment for publishers. So just, and there's a lot of data out here. I just want to hit a couple of high points. When I was doing the research, I almost got overwhelmed by like how much bad news there is in terms of how AI overviews are just sucking content away from.

Tyler (02:11)
Yeah.

Paywall Podcast (02:26)
Publishers websites and and folks are getting stuck in AI overviews and never even landing on the website, which is the which is the big problem So, you know, this is this this is from Chartbeat originally and it's essentially that Google traffic has has dropped About 30 % maybe 38 % in the US To publishers websites. They look specifically at publishers. This is probably the only number we need to talk about there's a there's a lot of stuff. I mean

If you're not nervous enough yet, AI mode queries, people are hanging out three times longer in AI mode versus just hitting search and then doing the research. Follow-up questions are common. Click-through rates have dropped 61 % on queries. That's a ridiculous number, absolutely ridiculous number. And now we're getting into the world of what they call zero-click searches.

You're doing a search for something in Google, their AI overviews gives you the data and you just read it and we're like, that was nice. Thank you very much. And you go away. You never click anywhere. Right. So for a publisher, that's, mean, that's just, that sounds like a hellscape. Right. my God. All right. So, ⁓ there's a lot more stuff here. I'm going to jump into, ⁓ and there are a few things you can do. ⁓

I guess I'll get right into it. Like licensing, I know that some of the AI companies are offering licensing deals for content, right? I don't know if you've run into that with any of your publishers.

Tyler (04:02)
We've had questions about it.

Paywall Podcast (04:03)
You get questions about it. Yep. ⁓ And, you know, the idea is I'll give you a fraction of a penny for, for content consumed, but, you know, then you're, essentially not ⁓ getting the advantage of subscription revenue, a bigger email list for your newsletter, ⁓ ad revenue or sponsorship revenue, ⁓ because your, audience, you're not controlling your audience and your audience is technically turning into one big AI company.

You know, your events suffer and whatever other products you have, like it's just a cascading effect of disaster. ⁓ and, not getting paid a lot for it. I ran into this article, ⁓ you know, this is a Nieman lab article. Publishers will see no meaningful AI licensing revenue. Period. Right. So, I mean, the numbers just, just don't add up. all right. This is something that's driving me crazy with this is, this is like classic internet.

there's a new KPI stack, they're calling it, right? The industry is talking about pushing share of answer or citation visibility or brand recall, which is like Google saying, hey, you wanna be part, you wanna be a share of our Google AI overviews answer, right? So when you look for something, you get a bunch of stuff, it's like, yeah, you wanna like be in there a little bit, right? That's what you should be targeting.

Tyler (05:21)
Hmm

Paywall Podcast (05:29)
my God, my head's gonna blow up. Like this is like a distraction, right? Like don't go after share of answer. Don't spend your energy there. I mean, it's good that you show up there, but don't go after it, right? So that was driving me nuts. Robots text we've talked about. It's like, it's supposed to block bots, but it really doesn't. even, I mean, that's tough. ⁓

Tyler (05:33)
Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, you can block, ⁓ they have various AI systems, but again, it's not bulletproof, ⁓ AI has to listen to those rules, and sometimes it doesn't. there's no bulletproof way to prevent AI from...

Paywall Podcast (06:10)
Right.

Tyler (06:15)
know, scraping content on your site outside of maybe one thing that we talk about all the time and that's adding a free registration, you know, prompt across the entire site, which would then only allow AI to scrape maybe a sentence or two of your content. So, yeah. Yeah.

Paywall Podcast (06:34)
Yeah. Yeah. Locking it down. Yeah. Let's talk about that in a bit. That is

absolutely something that you can be do that you can do. One of the things I've been hearing too recently is, niche media fairs better. Now to be fair, yeah, it does for the most part, but, but you know, for now, like it, they like niche media, you know, AI is coming for everything. It's not, it's not just going to focus on general news. I'm going to show you in a second what I mean.

And you know, we did our last podcaster to couple podcasts ago. talked to Mexico and news daily and they're a niche media news provider. They actually haven't seen any search traffic drop, organic traffic drop, which is amazing yet. Right. ⁓ so they're, they're a little bit insulated at this point, but, but it's coming. And so even if you're in a deep niche, you still need to pay attention to what's happening to AI. And I'd say the one thing is like, look at your organic search.

and just track it over time. Like what happened in the last year? Did it go up? Did it go down? Did it stay the same? Like these are things you should really pay attention to. Okay, so now let's jump into ⁓ the fishermen here. So what's going on with them? So earlier I went and I decided I'll do a search. ⁓ Let's pretend I'm someone who's looking to go fishing. ⁓

And I typed in, if you're listening, I typed in, where is the best fishing today off of Long Island? So I know for a fact that Long Island is one of the regions that they cover exclusively. They actually have a print edition focused on Long Island and they have their website focused on Long Island. And you get the AI overview, right? And then it talks about, for the best fishing off Long Island today, Target, Montauk Point, Chinook,

Inlet, Cap Tree State Park, Jones Beach, it's throwing all sorts of links. I can hit the show more link. Now I got a whole bunch of stuff. ⁓ They do show up in one of these links. I can't remember which one it is, but the fisherman is listed in this. So they have a share of attention in here. But look at this, right? I mean, how do you get found in this? How do you survive this AI overview?

Tyler (08:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you might as well be on the 15th page of ⁓ Google if you're that far into the summary because as you said, people are searching and then they're not clicking. They're just kind of getting the answer and, ⁓ okay, great, I'm done. The AI is benefiting from all the content that the publisher's created and just coughing it up in a natural language way and that's it, right?

Paywall Podcast (08:58)
Right?

Right. Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and you can hit the dive deeper in AI mode and just go absolutely bananas. So the reason this really hit me hard is because if you think about this, you know, the fishermen, it's fishing, it's, it's ocean, generally ocean fishing news from the Northeast. talking Maine to Connecticut, Long Island, and then New Jersey to Delaware. That's, that's their.

regional focus and they have three, you know, three print editions still that are focused on that, that are doing fine. And then they have set up their digital presence to really ⁓ target ⁓ that information with live fishing reports, right? Like they have real time data. have people out, captains out on the water that every day text in to a number saying, hey, caught some fish today or hey, no fish over here.

And so they're like accumulating this live ⁓ reporting, is amazing, right? Absolutely amazing. This is better than anything. Cause you're talking about boats that are in the water that are reporting in the moment, right? But yet how do you bring that data like ⁓ to your reader, not to AI overviews, but to your reader, right? So it's like, it's just nuts. yeah, niche, you know, you're a niche publisher. Great. You're probably.

have a buffer for a while. ⁓ You're a local news publisher, that's really niche, right? You'll probably have a buffer for a while. But at some point, know, AI is just getting so powerful so quickly, it's going to start sniffing into your content and start delivering this niche data ⁓ to everybody. And it's just sucking your content away. Okay. So now we've painted this grim picture, but what's the bright spot here? Okay.

How do you take control of this and deal with this? ⁓ I know you know the answer, this is Tyler. It's forget about this and focus on your audience. The only things that save you from AI is your audience. Right? It's the only thing, your audience. So have to connect to your audience. All right, so let me show you how Fisherman does it. Okay, so I'm on their homepage. I've clicked around a little bit, but I'm just gonna go to this main article here.

2026 Marine Electronics Buyer's Guide. Okay, great. So I'm gonna scroll down. what do I get here?

a free registration prompt. I don't get any content. I get a, this story is free for you. I put in my email address. They even have their three fishing regions available. So can check off New England or Long Island or New Jersey and Delaware and get the newsletters that I want and then register for free. So tell me what this does, Tyler. Give me, give me the breakdown here on the free.

Tyler (12:19)
Yeah,

so let me just put this in context of, ⁓ you remember when publishers used to panic about ⁓ like losing traffic to social?

Paywall Podcast (12:31)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (12:32)
Right? So AI, in my opinion, is sort of an iteration that's obviously a more powerful iteration of that, right? It's like you're losing control of distribution, right? Where you can't really, you can only do your best to get traffic from Google, right? ⁓ But it's not something that you can count on as a sustainable thing that happens over time. And so this free registration,

can help you control that distribution. So if you can get them on your website, that's a massive success that you've been able to do that. And if you can get them to sign up here, and in this case, signing up for particular newsletters that you offer, ⁓ and get their email address.

then you can control distribution back to your website whenever you decide you want to do that. So you've got a newsletter for the week, for the day, you now have an audience that's inside of your ⁓ email service provider.

Paywall Podcast (13:35)
That's

right, control and your audience. Those are two really important points. So your superpower is content and audience at this point in time. You produce great content, your audience is willing to pay for it. ⁓ They're certainly willing to register for free to get more content. And so ⁓ when you do like a newsletter pop-up, like, please join our newsletter. ⁓

I think the opt-in rate is like three or 5 % or something like that. It's, I can't remember what it is. Um, you're, you're. Yeah. You're, you're saying, please, please, but that doesn't really work as well as saying you have to drop off an email address in order to get access to this story. And of course you get our newsletter as well. That conversion rates are around 20 % is a massive conversion rate, uh, bump. And I'm to show you a chart in a second, which is pretty cool. So, um,

Tyler (14:06)
Yeah, please. Police is not enough.

Paywall Podcast (14:31)
Email and password is a good place to start. You put in your email address, put in your password. ⁓ That reader then gets registered in the system. And now that email gets sent to MailChimp or Flowletter or NewsletterGlu or whatever, wherever it goes. I know it doesn't technically go to NewsletterGlu, but... ⁓ And you have the email. And now you have your list, your email list is your...

like mountain of gold. It's your foundation of really everything. It's your audience. And your newsletter is now sending people back. You publish your content, ⁓ sends readers back to your website. They don't get lost on Google and AI overviews. You're nurturing them, you're sending them back, and you're giving them upgrade messaging over time to get full access to all your great content. It's as simple as that. Powerful, but simple.

So that registration wall it's called, ⁓ we call it a free registration, it's something if you're not doing it now, that's probably the first thing you should be setting up. ⁓ Yeah, it grows your list, you get control of your list, grows your traffic. I mean, one of the other things we see is that a bigger list and an active newsletter, ⁓ it's hard to pick numbers, but I can't tell you how many publishers I've talked to that have literally doubled their traffic in a year.

just because they're growing their lists so fast with the registration.

Tyler (16:04)
And again, this will prevent AI from scraping up the entire article here. having a free registration box that gates the content, especially if you're gating all content, ⁓ especially this high value stuff like this, this buyer's guide, this prevents AI from sucking that up and you're not really benefiting at all from all the work you did. So yeah, set this up.

Paywall Podcast (16:27)
Right, right.

Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about how to set this up because there's really two ways. ⁓ And one is where you have, you meter the content, right? In this case, this is a hard lock on this buyer's guide. AI does not get to it, great. ⁓ However, if you're metering your content, let's say you let one free article through per month or whatever, and then you have to register and then you get maybe another one or two or something like that. ⁓

With that soft paywall or leaky paywall setup, you ⁓ let Google ⁓ index your content. You let AI in at all your content. ⁓ And so you have to, which is kind of how most publishers are set up today. I'd say the minority of publishers really have a hard wall locked on their entire site. Some do, but I'd say 80%, 90 % do not.

And you're still gaining the benefit of Google's SEO, showing up in search. Yes, of course you show up in AI searches, ⁓ but not as much by a long shot. And you get social media sharing because if you leak one article, then anybody can grab that, throw it in Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever it is and share that. So those are the benefits of having sort of the soft ⁓ paywall set up.

And, but you need to look at your own organic traffic. need to look at your, how big is your, is your newsletter? you, are, do you have 20 % of your market on your, on your email list? Like that's the question I would ask. And if we look at, we've looked at the data, right? So if local news is easier to track than niche, niche publishers, but if you look at a local news market, say 100,000 people, you should be able to get at least 5 % of those people to pay for subscription. Right. We look at, we've looked at lots of.

⁓ Metro markets and the leaders in those markets and they're getting five to ten percent right now today of the population paying for subscriptions How many folks should be on your newsletter? Well in a hundred thousand population ⁓ Target market you should you should target 20 % of those readers being on your newsletter I'm gonna track I have friends who run newsletters, you know, they they live locally. This is these are the numbers that they're ⁓ So if you're for the fishermen

you have to look at the coast and how many people are enthusiasts, know, fishing persons. And then ⁓ that's your target market. Sometimes you have to take a guesstimate and figure out what is 5 % paid and 20 % should be on your email list. So back to the original thought of, know, if you listen to Tyler and you say, okay, I'm ready to lock down my entire site to block AI.

You're also blocking search, you're blocking social sharing, ⁓ cold social sharing, I would say. And ⁓ you should have, ⁓ you should feel confident, you're gonna do that if you feel confident. If you have an email list that ⁓ is pushing at least 10%, 20%, paid subscriptions are cooking along, that's great. If you're not there, you're probably looking for that social sharing, you're looking for SEO.

You're probably going to want to leak an article ⁓ or two at the most, but actually one at the most. ⁓ And then you'll get the advantage of everything for this window of time, I would say. And then as, as AI starts to suck and suck more of your content up and you, but your list is building through the registration wall and your subscriptions are building, you'll gain the confidence to eventually say, you know what, that's it. Get, get AI out. I'm going to focus on my list. ⁓

One thing to keep in mind is Google SEO and Google AI overviews are the same bot, right? They're the same thing. So as soon as you lock down and hard wall your site, you lose SEO, you lose the bot, you lose everything. You can't target the bot and say, Google, please don't send your AI bot, just send your SEO bot. No, they did that on purpose. They know that publishers want SEO.

leave it leave it out there for their for sure they get some SEO benefits still of course and ⁓ put the bots come in and pull the content

Okay, so ⁓ just for fun, let's look at this chart that I promised. So I'm not going to reveal any numbers, but you can see kind of the chart here. So not that long ago, the fisherman put up a registration wall. Can you tell when it happened?

Tyler (21:18)
Yeah, if you're looking at this on YouTube, January 25th, something happened.

Paywall Podcast (21:25)
Yeah. So the registration wall went up and things were going along pretty decently ⁓ over the last year or so. But as soon as the registration wall went up, looks like their free registrations tripled.

Tyler (21:38)
Yeah, for sure.

Paywall Podcast (21:39)
I they, you

what they did is they tightened their wall. Sorry, I was incorrect. They're tightening their wall. Just like that article we looked at. Zero, zero abuse. And what's funny is that when you tighten your walls, not only does your pink line, free registration, just go up, but your paid subscriptions also tend to go up, because you're forcing people to make a decision.

It's, it's, it's an amazing thing. I, you know, somebody's talked to a publisher a little while back who, you know, put up a registration wall. started getting like hundreds of registrations started coming through and then they took it down. And somebody up the chain who wasn't involved in the process, looked at Google analytics and said, Hey, I see a lot of bounces off our site. You know, like our bounce rate really, really escalated. So we can't have this.

registration wall up. So they took it down and now they have nothing. They just have AI sucking all their content and they may come back and do it. But it's, you want highly, do you want highly engaged readers that your registration wall grabs? Right. Or do you just want random traffic? Right. And if you, if you don't put up the registration wall, you, miss the opportunity, you lose the ability to, to capture highly engaged readers.

Tyler (22:48)
Right.

Paywall Podcast (22:59)
just you yeah you get the newsletter pop-up and that'll get three to five percent or whatever but you're losing like over 15 percent ⁓ of list building ⁓ ability if that makes sense

Tyler (23:12)
Yeah.

Well, it goes back to the whole reason for having a subscription model and that is traffic on its face is not really that valuable, right? It's, I mean, it's great. And especially if you've got some local advertising and if you're able to cultivate that, but traffic for the sake of traffic and bounce rates for the sake of, you know, bounce rates don't really mean much to you as the publisher as far as income, right? So you, want to, you want to convert people into this free registration. want highly engaged people as, as you just

point it out and then you want them to convert to paid because you know that $9 or $19 per month subscription is worth way more than the point zero zero zero zero one that you're going to get per actually it's probably less than that probably like you know 15 zeros for for for ad impressions or even for Google AI or any other AI licensing of content that you know it's just way more valuable so

Paywall Podcast (24:08)
You

get the subscription revenue, you have a bigger email list by a long shot. have, know, sponsors want big email lists. They absolutely do. You have the opportunity to upsell a bigger subscription base and a bigger email list, like gift subscriptions or corporate subscriptions or whatever products you come up with. You may have events, you know, that, that, ⁓ get fueled by your, you know, big, bigger audience, your own list.

I mean, there's so many, there's like a domino effect once you really start cranking up your audience numbers. Everything goes up, traffic included.

Tyler (24:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that's sort of underrated is that there's a lot of predictability, right? So you've got subscribers who pay monthly who pay yearly and...

you can count on that, right? More so than you can count on like what Google or any other platform decides to do with their AI models. You who knows what's going to happen tomorrow or in two years, how those things are going to change. So if you can start building your own sort of fortress of emails and paid subscribers, you're going to be less, you know, worried by all of the noise that's out there with AI. ⁓

Paywall Podcast (25:10)
Yeah.

And I'll say it again, you have, you know, as a publisher, you have two superpowers. You have your content and you have your audience. So you need to really leverage both. Right. And so your content, you restrict it. That's how you leverage your content. People want your content. That's why you're in business. So you have to, you have to put in an aggressive restriction, but it's a fair trade. Right. And you can, you can decide, if you give me your email address, I'll give you, I'll give you 10 articles a month. I wouldn't do that, but you could do that. You could start there and then tighten things up.

And I'd say generally speaking, if you have a registration and things are going really well, keep an eye on your organic traffic and considering at some point locking down your entire site. But still run the free registration so you can still build your list as people hit it and want to unlock articles. If you don't have one, I would start with the free registration. Leak one article per month so that...

on the second article, the registration wall hits and you start building up your email list. And you'll see once you, once you do that successfully, you'll see your needle will move a lot traffic, right? ⁓ subscriptions, everything goes up ⁓ sponsors, ads, whatever, everything, everything moves up. And so the other thing too is

Like we have a new extension that we were using now on some sites. We haven't released it yet, but soon, I believe. And it's like article sharing for subscribers, right? So another benefit. if you're a paid subscriber, can share articles. New York Times does it and some other bigger publications. And we've looked at it for a while and it makes sense, right? Especially if you're going to lock content down, you can still get your super fans to share as a benefit, your content to friends and the

other people that are really important to you that you may want to get on your email list at the very least and maybe convert to a paid subscriber. So, so that's, that's the, so do what the fisherman's doing. meter your content, set up a registration wall, start locking things down, requiring, ⁓ email addresses there. I'm sure that at some point down the road, the fisherman's going to hard lock the whole site, ⁓ because their list has grown so nicely and their revenues are.

growing along with that list ⁓ and then just to just to keep AI out

and that's the message of the day. Did we nail it?

Tyler (27:55)
I hope so.

Paywall Podcast (27:59)
Yeah, it's well, it's something to pay attention to. ⁓ You might not be in an emergency situation yet, but ⁓ you know, AI is coming for your content. And so you definitely need to think about how to deal with it. So Tyler, that was good. Thanks for that. Catch you next time.

Tyler (28:16)
Thank you, thank you.