Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
today we are gonna talk about whether a paywall will hurt your SEO, your social sharing, maybe even your AI traffic. How about that, welcome Tyler. All right, awesome. we're sort of still at this point in time where you have publishers that are

Tyler (00:11)
Hello, hello.

Pete (00:18)
publishing great content, but they're still hesitant about putting up a paywall. ⁓ I saw it 10 years ago, I see it today. And what's amazing is the number of publishers that are in that boat, that are still really, really hesitant about a paywall because they feel like it's going to hurt their engagement with their audience, it's gonna hurt their traffic, it's gonna hurt their SEO, it's gonna do a lot of negative things. And the bottom line,

after working with hundreds of publishers, ⁓ I know you're in the same boat, is we see the exact opposite. We see growth all around, but you have to set up a paywall correctly. ⁓ It's a little unfortunate that the word is paywall, think. So I think the connotation is that you're putting a wall up and ⁓ yeah, if you do it wrong, yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna blow up your audience relationship. So I'd say this.

podcast is for the publisher that is considering putting up a paywall or you have a paywall and it is not working for you. is actually hurting your audience experience. And so let's, let's jump

I want to jump in with some data from a publisher. I'm going to share my screen here from a publisher, a regional news publisher, and this publisher. Can you see my screen?

Tyler (02:13)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (02:14)
Okay, this is a regional news publisher. They have a fair amount of traffic and they are ⁓ What we did is we went back two years. We had two years of data and we looked at Year over year what happened the last 12 months as far as and we're actually looking at sessions number of overall sessions on the website ⁓ Versus what happened the previous 12 months? So last 12 months versus previous 12 months now that the big change

for this particular publisher is they set up Leaky Paywall ⁓ about halfway through that first time frame. So about a year and a half ago, they turn on Leaky Paywall, they set the restrictions to allow one free article, and then you have to register to get a second article. And that free registration that we talk about a lot,

you know, helps build the email list. So what happened, right? So you can argue that, oh my God, that's pretty restrictive, right? You're only metering one article, then you have the free registration and in order to see the second article and get on the newsletter. Well, what happened was super, super interesting. And this is the chart we're looking at. So if you look at organic search, you can see that we're looking at the last year of traffic, September 9th through September 9th of 25. We got 4.2 million sessions.

on the website. The previous period of time is September of 23 through September of 24. We have 3.2 million sessions. Now, this is actually a gain of 34%. So they put up a paywall halfway through the first timeframe here, and yet they still grew their number of sessions to their website.

from Google, this is organic search we're looking at by 34%. How does that happen? Now, a little more background. So ⁓ when people registered on their site and people have been registering like crazy, ⁓ they get sent to the newsletter. They sent out, and we've talked about newsletter cadence a lot, like how frequently you should send your free newsletter out to your readers. And

They only sent their free newsletter out once a week all the way up to this this August. So nothing really changed in the way they handled their general newsletter and their free registered readers. They were they were sending daily newsletters to their paid subscribers once they started, but they were only sending a weekly newsletter to their free, their original newsletter subscribers and their free registered newsletter subscribers. And yet

just that once a week cadence, which is way too low, was able to drive enough user sessions to make a significant increase in how much organic, how much traffic is coming in. Does that make sense? Am I making sense? I mean, the newsletter is doing a lot, but, you know, newsletters get ⁓ pushed around. People go to Google, they type in ⁓ the publisher's name and you get, ⁓

and you get people coming through organic search. What do you think? Is that, it, I, am I crazy here? What, what, what's going on?

Tyler (05:42)
Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, I just want to add too that when you put up a paywall, especially one like leaky paywall and you restrict it in the way that, you you do one free article and then they have to register, it's, you're not blocking Google from all of your content. So, you know, and as we've mentioned in previous podcasts, like it's rare that people get to page two anyway, right? So,

Pete (06:13)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (06:17)
If anything, nothing should change that much. I mean, it is a surprise that it went up. I think people will be surprised by that. But by putting up ⁓ a gentle, free registration framework, you shouldn't expect really much of anything to change in terms of traffic. The big change that you'll see is the number of newsletters that are on your newsletter list, and then you have control over the traffic that you send to your site.

For publishers that got a bit cold feet on setting this up, just know that it's not like a restrictive paywall, can't enter, it's very gentle, even Google can still rank everything, people can still see your content, they can still sign up for free, and growth still occurs.

Pete (06:51)
you

Yeah. Google looks at a lot of signals and there are a lot of signals. We do not know the professional SEO world just doesn't know because Google has to be secretive of what their, formula is for sending traffic. So I think bottom line is yeah, 34%. That's great. But the, the meaning here is organic search did not drop. Right. Like there was, there was, I think we can comfortably say there was no drop.

inorganic search traffic to this website when they put up a paywall about somewhere about halfway through the year.

Tyler (07:46)
Yeah, and I'll just add one other note. Like we've worked with publishers that are a bit more established. They've got a brand and they decide to go full out hard paywall. Like you have to sign up, you know, for a paid account in order to see content. And even those publishers haven't seen drops in their traffic from Google. So there are ways to allow your paywall, you know, access to.

Pete (08:01)
Yeah.

Tyler (08:12)
search bots and other things like that to prevent this drop in traffic. So ⁓ who knows what the signals are from Google in terms of what they're looking at. I'm sure there's hundreds if not thousands of different indicators that they're using to rank your site on Google. But if people are coming to your site and they're signing up for a paid plan and they're like, know, perusing for a long time, that's probably a good indicator to Google that, this stuff's some pretty high value stuff.

Pete (08:37)
Yeah, for sure. think, I think the trust.

of a news site that's been publishing for a while is very high with Google. ⁓ mean, the thing we're seeing now is across all publishers is a slow decline in SEO because of AI. That's not because of a paywall, but because of AI. So AI overviews in Google search is showing up and ⁓ it's stealing a bunch of the traffic that would normally click through.

But the click-throughs that we see publishers getting through, really everyone getting through, ⁓ is higher intention traffic. you look at an AI overview, you get the summary, you get some links in the summary, you click the link, now you're really digging in because you've sort of been pre-educated with the AI summary. You're like, ⁓ I want to take the next step. And you end up being a higher engaged visitor to the site. So there's some pros and cons here. ⁓

We do hear publishers complain about traffic drop like now because of AI overviews, but it's still there and it's not the paywall that's harming it. Okay. So let's, so the paywall is actually something that, let's talk about, cause there's a, there's a framework here. We call it the flywheel that, if set up correctly, which we're going to show you right now, we'll actually grow your traffic, your email list, your paid subscriptions, your ad revenue, everything.

It lifts all boats and it puts you in control of growing your publication because it's really leans on growing your email list, which is really the one sort of direct marketing, direct sales things that you do control. Okay. So there's the data. Paywall put in. Didn't matter. Things grew. ⁓ Not a thousand percent sure why, but it didn't hurt the organic traffic. Okay. So.

Let's start with the basics. Okay, you're gonna need a metered paywall to start and that will let in ⁓ and you need to have the restrictions set so that ⁓ you are Letting one article in typically you could go sort of hard paywall and still use a free registration But but if you're kind of in the middle of this your journey with a paywall, that's it's a good number one article

second article you have to register to get to and if you look at i'm just gonna kind of show this a little bit here if you look at the opportunity that you have as a publisher when you put up a paywall you know and you probably if you already have one up you probably noticed that you got your loyalists subscribed pretty early you know you know they hit the paywall maybe a few times boom we're gonna support you here you go you have a lot of traffic that will never subscribe just

thousands of random types of visitors. And then you have the readers on your newsletter. And that's the big opportunity. If you can build your newsletter and you can then send that traffic back to your site and target them appropriately with upgrade messaging. ⁓ mean, advertisers love big newsletters. Your traffic swells. There's all sorts of good things. So ⁓ the big opportunity is building your newsletter. And when we talk about free registration, I just want to show you real quick.

what that looks like. ⁓ So the reader comes in, reads an article, no fuss, goes to the second article, they get something like this, right? This converts really well. If you're listening to this on the podcast, it's our free registration that we talk about a lot. ⁓ The two main points are, the title is, this story is free for you. Free is a keyword that resonates with people.

They like people like free. They want to read the story. They wouldn't, you know, they click the link. Their intention is I want to read this because I'm interested in it and it's free. Great. Put in your email, choose a password, hit submit and you register someone in. This is the free registration. The second main point is that you tell them that they're going to get the newsletter too. So if they're not on your newsletter, they've read one article with intention. They're looking at a second article with intention and that you're going to get that article and get the newsletter. The chances of

of them actually ⁓ filling this out, when we look at our data, will grow your list 20 % faster month over month than what you're experiencing now. This works because you're drawing a line in the sand and you're saying, hey, you want access to the content? Great. Your content is your superpower. You want access? Great. Register will give you some more access. Now, you can be generous just to be clear. Like if you're really worried about

that relationship. can be super generous in the beginning of this free registration journey where you can decide, hey, okay, after somebody registers, we have publishers that just give full free access to all content for a period of time. And then down the road, they decide, okay, in three months, I'm going to warn everybody that we're going to start paid subscriptions. Or you could give five free articles a month, which generally is probably too much.

But if you really want to tiptoe into it, you have the levers, you have the control, right, to nurture these readers the way you think it should be done. Now, we look at the data and we see, okay, one in one, one in two, you know, you get one free article, you hit the registration wall, then you get one or two free articles afterwards. That works 99 % of the time.

If you go to zero free articles on this, in other words, you pop this registration before you even get to an article, that works really well too. So be aggressive with your content. You have great content, be confident in it, put up the registration wall. Okay, all right, where are we in this journey? So.

Let me just show something quick here. when you, I'm gonna go one more actually before I, so then after someone's registered and after they get on your newsletter, your newsletter is basically driving ⁓ those readers back to your site to read more articles. And when they click those links to go back to your site, you want the majority,

of the results to be something like this, which is an upgrade message that says, hey, support us. You get all these benefits and you need those free registered newsletter subscribers to see this messaging, you 10 times, 20 times over and over again, till you're kind of wearing them down is what you're doing over time. And it's part of the nurturing process. And then they decide, okay, if somebody has seen

message 20 times that means that they have wanted to read 20 of your articles with intention and their chances of paying goes up and up and up.

Okay, let's go back to the framework here. So this is the way it all works. We call it the flywheel. You have readers coming in from Google and social, right? They land on your site, they read an article, you require them to register to read the next article. That automatically sends ⁓ their email into your email service, like MailChimp or whatnot.

And now you have a list of pre-registered readers, higher intention readers that is growing organically. And then you make sure that you're sending your newsletter out. If you're a news publisher, it's probably daily. If you're a magazine publisher, it's probably two or three times a week. And everybody's cadence is a little different, but you want to figure out how to get those newsletters to send people back to your site so you can target them with the upgrade messaging. And this creates a flywheel.

your free registration grows your list. Your ⁓ email, your newsletter is pushing people back to your site. It's swelling the traffic back to your site. And don't forget, email is viral. People pass around emails all the time. Hey, read this article. And then they'll send it to a friend and then the friend will get the free registration. And it builds your list very quickly, which really drives traffic, revenue, advertising, everything.

Tyler (17:08)
.

Pete (17:09)
This is the flywheel framework. And if you're not set up this way, then you probably need to make changes like today. Okay. What do you think? Did I cover everything?

Tyler (17:24)
Yeah, yeah, this is how you fortify against AIs, social algorithms, Google algorithms, any other thing out there that's out of your control that directs traffic to your site. This is how you take control of your site's traffic and collecting email addresses that you can then target at any point, every day, every other day.

advertisers will like it, your readers will enjoy it, your newsletter. There's just all kinds of benefits to going this route. And then over time, you'll care less and less about whatever Google decides to do, whatever Facebook decides to do. It won't mean that much to you over time. So there you have it.

Pete (18:11)
That's right.

And so let's say that I, a publisher, I start, I'm a little nervous. I start with this, I set up this framework. I start building my list. My list starts to grow nicely. My conversions, my paid subscribers starts to grow nicely. And I get to the point where I've built some confidence and I'm like, okay, list is growing great. Super excited about that. Paid subscriptions are coming in. ⁓ I know that

I know that I'm in a much stronger place than when I started. Maybe it takes a year, a couple years, whatever it takes, but I get to that place. Then what do you see publishers doing from there as far as tightening things up?

Tyler (18:58)
Yeah, and that's where that part of the process starts. So most publishers will come in, they'll do one or if we're lucky, they'll do one free, but usually they're not interested in starting that restrictive. So they'll do like five free articles before they see the registration prompt. And then if they do register for free, they get five more. So you're looking at like 10 page views before they're ever getting to the upgrade messaging even.

Pete (19:07)
Yeah.

Tyler (19:27)
So, ⁓ know, going, that kind of funnel could take months if not years to get someone through. So, you're delaying everything ⁓ with that kind of setup. So, crank it down sooner. It's not as restrictive as you think based on user behavior. Build the list, contact the list often, yeah.

Pete (19:31)
Yeah.

Yep. I was trying

to lead you into your experience with publishers that have locked down the content in favor of free registration or just a hard paywall altogether to beat. ⁓

Tyler (20:02)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I honestly, I would never recommend a hard paywall. unless you're, unless you, even like, I feel like even if you're the New York Times, like it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a hard paywall because you're cutting off your email list flow, ⁓ like severely because you're requiring people to pay before they even get to the content plus get on your newsletter. So.

Pete (20:17)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Tyler (20:30)
It's a very difficult strategy to go that route.

Pete (20:36)
Yeah,

that's a fair point. Yeah, after you build confidence, can just flat out restrict everything, but still have the free registration to give away an article or two. And that does kick off the benefit of keeping Google and AI out of your content, which is a growing concern, and I think rightfully so. All right, Tyler, thanks so much. ⁓

Tyler (21:03)
Yep.

Pete (21:05)
Be confident, get your paywall right. If you need help, just get in touch.

See ya.