25 | How to succeed digitally with local news: An interview with Tyler Channel

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com where you can download Leaky Paywall for free. And now for today's episode.

Hi, I'm Pete, and welcome to the Paywall Podcast. This is episode number 25. Today we're going to talk about how to succeed as a local news publisher and what that secret sauce looks like. I'm here with Tyler Channel from Morganton, West Virginia. Tyler is a very, very interesting partner that we work with. He's the head of success here at Leaky Paywall, and he also taught journalism at University of West Virginia and manages a burgeoning group of local news publishers and has a ton of experience in helping very small local news publishers grow and make it, especially if they're coming from print, which most of them are, and making that transition to digital. And before we sort of jump into it, what we're going to do in this conversation is really focused on two local news publishers that Tyler works with closely. They're both in different markets, so that's what makes them interesting. And hey, welcome back, Tyler.

Hello. Hello.

Good to have you here. Okay, so now that the. Now that the intro is done with, we can kind of jump into the meat and potatoes here. And one of the big challenges that we see you and I see with a lot of publishers is, well, not only are maybe they coming from print and print revenues declining and having to switch to a digital source of revenue that actually works, but we also work with papers that they're free weeklies. Right. They're literally printing paper and sending out 40,000 copies to the area for. For free. Had been leaning on the ad revenue and are seeing that decline and making the switch to paid. So there's a lot of friction in this transition from the traditional local print model switching to digital.

So.

Anything that strikes you, Tyler, with that conversation, and why don't you just introduce a couple of papers you'd like to talk about?

Yeah, yeah. And when you talk about that, it makes me think about this shift from an advertising product to a content product. Newspapers have often. And those free newspapers that you talk about that get sent out and are covered with advertising, that's been their main source of revenue for a long time. But now there's a focus on content and people paying for that local content that they can't get anywhere else. And this conversation can go off the rails quickly. I mean, part of the reason that they have to do that is digital advertising is a wreck. Facebook and Google own virtually the entire market there. So publishers don't have many options. And one option that works really well is digital subscriptions. People actually paying for content that they read. And yeah, so a couple of different papers that I work with, one in particular, the Welch News, they're here in West Virginia. They're in a very small market in the southern area of the state. It's known as coal country. If you're familiar with West Virginia, Welch is known for at one point having nearly 100,000 people in the region during the height of the coal boom in that region. I grew up near there. I grew up near that part of West Virginia. And now their population, at least within city limits of Welch, is closer to about 2000 or so. Wow.

Wow.

Yeah. And access to broadband is not great. You're in a mountainous area, cell service isn't great. A lot of indicators would tell you that this is not a place to start a digital product. It has every. Everything about it is just not something that would tell you that you should start a digital product here.

So.

I got in touch with them back in 2018 and worked with them to essentially implement a website with a paywall. And this was just Pre Covid, barely January 2020, just before it all started. And since then they've managed to amass about 450 paid subscribers on their site. From from a digital only perspective, they don't even.

From zero. From zero.

From zero. From zero. Yeah, they, they didn't even have a website before January 2020. So. Right. This was their first experience with, with having content published on a website and giving people the option right out of the gate to pay for that content. And they offered a digital and print option for a while, but the data was clear that a digital only subscription was the most popular. People were signing up for yearly and monthly.

And really so even so, even in an area with limited Internet access and sort of the tradition of print, I guess that more people were actually choosing digital only. Interesting.

Yep. And you know, people still subscribe to their print products, but I think a lot of that comes over the phone or through, you know, walking into the office, that kind of thing. I mean, they still deliver their print product with their local team. So they have, I don't know how many drivers that they have, but they, they go out into these West Virginia hollows or haulers as they're Known locally and they deliver papers and keep their, you know, keep their readership informed. So.

So looking at their website, if you're with us on YouTube, I see that they're really producing, they're really delivering digital only subscription options.

That's right.

So how do they handle the print?

I told them to pretend like print isn't something that they offer on their website. Give people, if they're on your, if they're on your website, don't give them an option to make your life more complicated. As far as delivering a print product, if they want that print product, likely they're not going to be doing that through the website. And that's. And I think that's been the case with them. A lot of people tend to call or walk in off the street. They do have a public facing office now.

That makes a lot of sense. You're giving sort of reduced amount of options too. And the workflow for supporting digital is ton less than print. But how did you get them there? I mean that you talked about a shift in mentality earlier. We know that many, many publishers are very nervous when it comes to changing the way that they generate their income. How did you get them to not publish the print product? That sounds like a terrifying position to be in. Where let's say if I'm a publisher and you say, well, your main product, we're not even going to promote your previous main product on this website. We're going to go with all digital, trust me.

Right, yeah.

How did you manage to pull that off?

Yeah, well, that's the question I hear a lot from publishers is if I go digital, am I going to cannibalize my print product and put myself out of business with my digital product? And ultimately that doesn't happen because first of all, digital is a lot cheaper than print. You don't have to physically print this stuff and deliver it. And the print costs. A lot of publishers break even or they lose a little bit when they print and deliver their news product. And I do realize that some of them have to meet certain quotas in order to get the price, the rate that they have with their printers and stuff like that. But ultimately this is a new source of revenue for publishers. And some of it is people who had the print product and now they're paying you online, they're still paying you. They didn't disappear as far as how did I convince them to do this? Well, Welch has a millennial workforce in a lot of ways. They were eager to try something new and I think also never Having had a website before was a little bit easier to make that transition for them. They weren't sold on the idea that they had to offer print. And then also just in general, fewer options for people is, makes the process easier for your customer. They don't have to calculate, they don't have to do I want the print? I don't know if I want the print. What if I go on vacation? I don't know about the price, do I want to. It's too much to think about. So there's a reason that Netflix and Hulu and Disney and all these different streaming platforms offer limited options. It's because they don't want you to have to think more than just putting your credit card in. Yeah, yeah. So makes total sense and it helps, it helps increase the number of people that sign up. So keep it simple.

That I agree that data is coming out. It's pretty clear. I mean, we refer to the New York Times quite a lot. And if you go there now, you get, you get one offer, you know, that's it. When you're at, when you're out of articles. Well, your first offer is to register for a few more, which they, they won't even tell you how many more. Yeah, but then the second offer is one thing, you know, it's usually a free trial or paid trial or something like that. But, but yeah, there's no, you're not choosing from, you know, 12 plans, which they could easily provide. They're not selling cooking, they're not, you know, recipes. They're not selling games. They're selling, you know, the subscription to the content as a start, as, as really the gateway into their universe. Yeah.

And you know, the publishers, I know a lot of publishers aren't like Welch and that they print their print product in house and they deliver it. A lot of publishers outside of Welch tend to have a third party that prints it and then, you know that third party uses the USPS to deliver their print product. And I've never, I never ran into a newspaper that has a positive experience with the postal service when it comes to delivering the newspaper. And so a lot of, a lot of subscribers who go online and they're able to see that, that not only the articles in a digital link format, but also a PDF version or E edition version of their, of their newspaper the day that it comes out. It's just a much better experience. It's more affordable for the publisher. And long term, your profit margins are much higher on digital because often those costs are fixed for sure, for sure.

All right, so we promised we were going to talk about the tactics of what makes a local newspaper successful. But before we do that, let's talk about this. The other publisher that you're working with. It's in a very different demographic space. This is Point Reyes.

That's right.

And they're fairly new to your group.

That's right. That's right. Yep. So this is in California. It's, I believe, north of San Francisco. It's a small market. The demographics are much better than a place like Welch. The access, as far as I know, the access to broadband, and I don't know about cell service out there, but I would imagine that their broadband access is a bit better than what we have here in some of the rural parts of West Virginia. And they've done very well with. With their paywall. They were offering an option to subscribe for content before paywall project, but they were. I believe it was kind of a clunky setup with WooCommerce and a number of other systems trying to work together that was just complicated to manage, so. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, similar market, I think similar. Not similar market, but similar size. Like, I think there's only a few thousand people in the area, but similar numbers in terms of revenue, so.

Gotcha. Were they. Were they nervous about taking them in the direction you took them? As far as the subscriptions go?

Yeah. A lot of publishers are always worried about the bottom line as far as how much it costs per month. And, you know, there are some ways you can offset that, like selling local advertising and stuff like that to sort of offset a monthly fee that you're not wanting to take on. But generally, I find that that monthly fee is often covered in the first week or two, depending on the publisher. Oh, my Lord. Yeah. So it's. It's, you know, up front, it's kind of scary. I get it. Any kind of new investment is frightening because you're not entirely sure it's going to work or you're not entirely sure that people actually will pay for content. Yeah, that's local. And. And. But they do.

So in their case, it was more of, we're gonna. We're gonna switch platforms, let's say. And now we need to pay. They're gonna pay. We're gonna pay more for. For a better subscription solution.

So.

Jesus, is it gonna really work like that?

That's right. Yep.

Yep.

Essentially, Paywall project simplified their web setup and their digital subscription set up and took care of that so that they can focus more on content and Publishing their. Their stories and their E Edition and their newsletter and stuff like that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Simplified things, right? Work on the stuff that they need to work on. But now what happened? So they came off of one subscription system to paywall Project. Now, so what actually happened to the numbers? I know you probably can't speak about exact numbers, but was there growth? Did it stay the same?

Oh, for sure. There's certainly growth. That's all I can tell you as far as revenue and subscribers are concerned. But they've certainly done very well with it and continue to do well with it.

Okay, all right, cool. All right, so let's segue now into this last segment that I think everyone's been looking forward to. And that is what is the secret sauce to really making a local news publication work, even if they're tiny, like a tiny news publisher. I'm just going to list off a few things that we had talked about earlier. Earlier, but one is obvious, and that's a good paywall system or metered paywall system.

Starting with good tools is important.

Yep, absolutely. And then building an email list, I think is part of that. I wanted to talk about social media a little bit, maybe even about digital ads, good or bad, and then sort of a general approach to engaging your audience with sort of a call to support the publication. But let's start with. The meter paywall. We've covered this a lot, but let's talk about that as a benefit and we'll kind of go on from there. And maybe there's some other things that you want to jump into as well.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'll start with the meter paywall. That's kind of the PPA wall is kind of what we do. And if you're new to digital subscriptions, really the original and current benefit of a metered paywall is that you'll publish content on a website and you'll have real web articles, like what you're looking, if you're looking at my screen here. And all this content, regardless, pretty much regardless of the settings, get picked up by Google and other search engines so that the articles rank in search. And then also all the articles can be shared in social media, on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever the articles get shared. And that was the original concept behind a metered paywall, certainly behind leaky paywall, which was the step beyond the hard paywall, which really was for most publishers, not a good solution because it was hiding their content from search and social. It was forcing publishers to do the work of choosing which articles were Free and not free. And really the audience needs to choose that. And that's what the metered paywall does. So that's the, you know, from. And what you're telling me, that's really the core engine of the new revenue stream, the digital subscription.

Yep, yep. Definitely. Another aspect of this is most papers that I work with, if they come in with a large social media presence, generally local news, are Facebook centric users. A lot of their audiences are using Facebook. And by large, I don't mean, you know, 10,000. Sometimes having 1500 or less.

Right.

Is enough to generate interest when you post your articles on Facebook and there's some activity on Twitter, depending on the market that you're in, but being able to let people know that you have content and publishing that content and letting them find that content, and when they click on it, they're not, you know, they're not getting to read it for free. They're either being prompted to register or a trial or some kind of requirement.

Yeah, yeah. Social definitely drives traffic. And with some publishers like Facebook as a local news publisher can be a very, very important tool.

Yeah, yeah. And long term, you know, I have. I've always had this fantasy of publishers kind of using Facebook until they no longer have to. That's probably a different conversation that we could talk about forever. But Facebook's not exactly my favorite platform on earth. I think a lot of people would agree with that. But for local news, certainly, there's no denying that it certainly drives people to your content and ultimately to subscribe to your content.

So.

Yeah.

So let's dig in a little deeper with Facebook. So let's say I'm a local news publisher and I'm publishing my articles on Facebook, excerpts of articles. Essentially. I'm clicking the article and now I'm heading back to my website as a publisher, my local news site. That's great. Now what, what's. What's the strat?

Yeah, the strategy is getting them to register on the site. Maybe you give them one free article, they're able to see what they're. What, what you've. What, you know, the article that you posted, they're able to read that. Then they maybe meander over onto a different article, and now they're being prompted to register for. For additional content for free. Yeah, that. That is an excellent model that works. We, we talk about it all the time on this podcast.

Yep.

Another model that works that I found is offering maybe a bit longer of an excerpt. Give people, you know, a couple paragraphs of the content and Then ask them to sign up for a free trial. So taking the Netflix approach, which Netflix no longer does a trial, but most streaming platforms no longer do trials, but offering people a free trial. Put that credit card in, get their email address, get their name and information, get them into your newsletter and offer them free access for a few days. Not a discount, not a 30 cent for three months of access to discount or anything. Just a few days, maybe seven at the most. And give them access to everything that you offer.

Why not a discount?

Well, for me, it devalues the content, it devalues the journalism, it devalues everything that you offer, and it tells people that, oh, ultimately what you're offering me is really worth 30 cents for three months. So if I can just sign back up with a different email and a different credit card, ultimately that's what you're telling me that it's worth. You know, when's the last time you. Not saying that the values are the same, but when's the last time you test drove a car and you had to pay, you know, a dollar for it and you got to keep it for three months? You know what I mean? Like, it's better to treat it as a free trial. You're testing this out. We're not placing value on the content.

Right.

With 30 cents for three months. We're. We're doing it based on a free acclamation.

Yeah, I like that. Keeping. Keeping your brand, you know, especially for local news, you know, you have such trust. And, And I think the power. The power of local news is, is. Is it has. Because local news gets to know the community when done. Right. Right. It's. It's local people covering a local community, you know, who, who's writing. And you might not agree with everything, but at least there's a level of trust there you just can't get any other way. And, you know, we need that today. We need this level of trust to grow.

Yep. Yeah. I encourage a lot of local newspapers to do little things like, you notice on Point Reyes. I mean, they have a photo of the guy that wrote that article you're looking at.

Oh, yeah.

Personalize it as much as you can. Let people know that this isn't some newspaper chain, website, you know, from, you know, a corporate thing. This is a local, locally owned enterprise that reports locally. Here's the person that wrote it, here's the photo of them.

Yeah, that's actually a very good detail to.

Yeah.

Leverage the strength of being part of the community.

Yeah. Yep.

Showing that everywhere.

Yeah. And you know, please don't, don't charge 30 cents for, for three months or 99 cents for three months. Don't play that game.

Yes.

It never works out in the end.

Yep. Yeah. Capturing back to capturing the email whether, which way you do it. The free registration really is a great way to do it because free converts quite a bit more and you want that list to build and it's going to build over time. And you want to use your newsletter to send the articles, the excerpts. So people click and come back to your website and then hit the paid messaging over and over again that builds the email list. Have you seen any correlation with size of email list to success, in other words? Just from my neighborhood here, I live in an area called the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and it's about 30 small towns. I actually just looked up the population. It's a little under 60,000 people. It's a very, very wide geographic area. It goes from just about mid New Hampshire to central Vermont. It's a very broad region. I have a friend, Rob Gerwitt, who started Daybreak, and he covers local news and he covers it from the angle of Facebook and listservs and Reddit and all that good stuff and curating that into a great newsletter. And he's in over, let's see, a little over a year. He surpassed 10,000 subscribers. I mean, he really focused on his model now is free in donations. It might change, but he grew his email list from 0 to over 10,000 in just over a year. And that's allowed him to attract sponsorships now for his newsletter. And he's in the middle of building, building his website. And I know we're trying to push him along a little bit in that direction, but that, you know, that 10,000 mark for him I know was a really important milestone because now he's generating the revenue that he needs. And I don't know the details of his revenues, but I know he's quite a bit happier in a happier space with that. Do you see anything like with Welch or Point Reyes in terms of where you need to get your list to? Because let me just back that up by saying getting that email address, that is your direct marketing tool, right? Like that is the number one way to proactively push your news to your reader. And there's really no other good way to do that. I mean, push notifications is certainly a good one, but that's, that's a whole different ball wax. Everyone has email. So the email newsletter becomes a real, becomes the number one tool in the toolbox. Any gauge on where a small news publisher needs to get to?

Yeah, I mean, I can tell you that first that just by having a newsletter and having people that you send out your news to on a weekly or monthly or whatever basis that you publish, those publishers who, who move to a paywall have a lot easier, have an easier time attracting paid subscribers. You have a built in audience already, even though they're not on your website yet, you're in their inbox and they're reading whatever you're sending them on a weekly or monthly basis. So it's a lot easier to transition those readers into paid subscribers. Is there a number.

That.

Local news publishers need to attain to, you know, do. Yeah. Great with digital subs? I don't know. I mean, most of them are under a thousand. Some of them, you know, a couple thousand people that subscribe. It all really depends on how big the market is. Right. But honestly, if you could get everyone on your newsletter, if you had 500 people or 1,000 people, all paying $9 a month or whatever, as far as measuring success, to me, that would be success.

Yeah, that sounds good. You said weekly and monthly. I know that Daybreak goes out daily. Is frequency something you cover as far as newsletters?

Yeah, most of my, most of my publishers are weekly and most of them publish their newsletter on a weekly basis. So as far as publishing it more frequently, I don't know if it would help a small publisher or not, but if you have a lot of content like Daybreak, if they're, if they're, you know, they got a lot to distill, then yeah, I could certainly see that helping out.

Yeah, yeah. And I'll just mention them a little bit more. I mean, the concept there is, you know, they're, they're starting to produce original content. But the, the, the main motivation for the birth of Daybreak was that there's a lot of stuff happening in the community that the, the Valley News, which is the, the main local paper here, doesn't cover. You know, there's just too much happening in any community, even a small community. You know, you have Facebook groups, you have List List serves for, for, for towns, you have Reddit, you have Twitter, you have YouTube. You know, these are all producing content, right? These are all our social content producing platforms that somebody, you know, can keep an eye on and say, hey, this, you know, somebody saw a bear. And like, you know, up here we get bears in the spring and they do crazy things and they bring like the bear broke in the garage door, the Other day and at a neighbor. Well, for, you know, our little town we're in, we're just over 2,000 people. It's big news. You know, people want to know about it. So even covering small things like that need to. Need to happen in an organized way. So Daybreak does that. You know, he basically now gets a lot of submissions for. And combs the social media sites for the sort of the best of the day and then puts out the newsletter. And it's been a huge hit. Everyone I talk to is just. It's a huge hit. So, you know, I would say if you're, if you're a small local news publisher and you're producing original content, see if you can. See if you can find somebody to really put their fingers out on all the social media groups and listservs and YouTube channels and, you know, that are. That are local or slightly regional to the area and pull in the best of that way to really sort of firm up your monopoly on the, on the, on the content in the area.

Yeah. And what better. What a much better way to have someone local organizing that content and sending it out via newsletter versus it being on a social media platform. And yeah, you know, there's a lot of distrust on Facebook. So how, how cool was that to have.

Yeah.

A journal, a local journalist to.

Yeah. And if you, if you want to see how that works, just go to Daybreak News and that'll take you to their newsletter signup form. There's no website there, but it will take you to the mailchimp signup and just, I would recommend just sign up and start getting his newsletter and you can see how it's produced. It's super clean, super simple, easy to scan in the morning, comes in early, before 7, and he's really made a nice, nice business out of it. And it's new, something that I think any local news publisher can add.

Yeah. And if you're a local news publisher listening to this and you don't have a website or you're not really focused on your website, one thing that you can do right now is cultivate a newsletter and get people signed up. And you can do that on social media, you can do that on Facebook. You can, you can direct people to your mailchimp newsletter link and get them, get them on board for free, even if you don't have a website. Just get there, get their info and start growing that list. And then when you do eventually make the decision, hopefully to go to paid digital subscriptions on your website, you'll be At a much better place.

Yeah. And thanks for. I agree. And thanks for mentioning Facebook again. So, one last comment on Facebook and anything else that you may pay for. So there's a temptation to boost articles in Facebook or to create advertising in Facebook to send traffic your way. And the way to look at that is this is really not about sending traffic. This is about if you're going to pay for something, you need to capture emails. The goal of paying for anything on Facebook, let's say in social, is to capture the email. So a free registration. Yeah, that's, that's sort of your, your step number one. But you may also consider if you're going to pay for, pay for advertising in Facebook that you give away, you know, some content. Like maybe, maybe you offer a, a free registration, you know, that's sort of special and hidden. You're not advertising it, but it gives you more access because, you know, you're targeting so well in Facebook and if somebody that sends it, maybe they get a month of free access just from this particular Facebook promotion, but it takes, links them to a registration form with the, you know, with the, with the one month free trial or, you know, my point is whatever it is you want to target and grab that email address.

Yeah, yeah. It's not about how many people, how much, how many page views can we, can we send? Because, you know, there's, I've seen tons of examples where publishers get 20, 30, 40,000 page views in a single day and have zero new signups.

Yeah.

This is about the quality of those page views. You want local people to be reading your content, not just anyone on Facebook who happens to see your advertisement. And I know you can target a lot of that stuff, but I think your money can be better spent in other places versus Facebook.

Yeah, well then I think that's a valid point. The free registration, I think for most publishers will do the trick. Yeah. When posting content to Facebook.

Yeah. And it's even easier if you're in the community. You've been around for a lot of the publishers I work with, they're not startups and they've been around forever. So you've already got a brand. Leverage that brand and get your readers to sign up for free and get that newsletter going and get some paid subscribers.

And then as you, as that newsletter grows, you know where you have your, your list is growing, you'll be able to find sponsors for that newsletter and that'll be a nice additional revenue stream where you can put somebody at, you know, at the top of the newsletter. Or in the middle and say this, this newsletter is sponsored by and whatever local organization decides to sign up. And local, all organizations love sponsoring newsletters that target their market, their, their local base. It's direct, like I mentioned earlier, it's direct marketing. Email is blasted into somebody's mailbox, their logo and message shows up, you know, for them and they can't miss it because they're reading the newsletter. And that's the marketer's dream targeted email list.

And not only that, these local subscribers are paying for content. So that's, that's even more valuable to, to a local advertiser. Knowing that this list has already shown a willingness to pay for your content, maybe there's a good chance that there's a willingness to pay for whatever it is that I offer.

Yeah. All right, let's switch gears a little bit. Talk about advertising. So if you're coming from print, you're used to having print advertising carry the day, a big part of it. Now we're switching to digital. There's a strong temptation to put a lot of advertising banners on the website. Not going to say that it's a awful idea, but I will say that you have to be careful that you don't get in the way of the reader's experience. The data is showing just industry wide that digital advertising revenues are dropping because as Tyler, you mentioned before, Facebook and Google is really dominating the scene. Do you have anything that counters that argument in terms of what digital advertising is doing or do you. In fact, and I think that's, now that I say it, it's probably the reason for your being with Paywall project is helping generate real, a real revenue stream instead of leaning on especially like Google Ads.

Yeah, yeah. Google Ads are generally, they don't pay much at all and they're. If you're going to do advertising on your site, there's certainly local businesses who will pay for banner ads and stuff like that on your site. I've got a number of publishers who do that. But ultimately the shift here for publishers is charging for access to content. And the last thing you want to do is kind of muck up that, that experience for a paying subscriber. And you know, if you, if you're paying $9 a month for something, I don't want to see all this, this garbage advertisement from Google Ads. And you know, look at the, look at this dinosaur that just came back. You know, these trash ads that Google pedals in.

Yeah.

So it's just better to not do that and focus on the local advertising if you're going to do that and give your subscribers an option to pay for a plan that removes those advertisements. So yeah, so sign up. I pay maybe an extra couple bucks, maybe an extra five bucks. Maybe it's double the cost of a normal subscription.

Yeah.

And whenever this user logs in and they go on your site, it is a completely ad free experience.

And it works.

Most certainly does. I do it with discovery plus, I pay extra. I pay the extra, whatever it is, three or four dollars per month because I don't want, I don't want to sit through, you know, I don't know how many hours that we spend in our life watching commercials and being bombarded with that stuff. So it's worth it and your readers will feel the same way.

So yeah, YouTube Premium got me for exactly that reason. The previous episode, podcast episode talks specifically about hiding ads with Sam Neet, which is a news Swedish news publisher. And go listen to that if you're interested in that. The bottom line is they increase the price of their subscription by over 40% to hide ads and over 10% of their subscriber base took them up on. I mean, it's crazy. Over 10% of readers are like, yeah, heck, I pay a lot more to just get rid of the ads.

Yep. And to publishers who are worried that that might offset their revenue from their digital ads. I mean, you're making that money back with your subscribers and this is a small portion, a small sliver of your audience that will do. This is not, this is not going to be everybody, but hopefully it will be everybody because then you won't really care if you have advertising on your site because you are completely funded by your readers and your subscribers. So, you know, it's a win win for you and for the reader.

Yep, agreed. And just to wrap up the advertising conversation, really, digital advertising that works today is turned into digital sponsorships. So the idea being someone's like we mentioned before, sponsors your newsletter or somebody sponsors your free registration which includes, you know, getting their brand in your newsletter, or someone sponsors an article which used to be more popular. I don't see it as much. But in that case, maybe you write a series of articles on Covid or maybe local sports and you have a local sports organization that sponsors this series of articles. And so what you're doing is you're delivering a brand in a much more elegant way to your readers that really doesn't get in the way. And most sponsorships work their way into the content of your site. So it works on mobile as well as desktop. And so if you think sponsorship, where you can put a package together and have a conversation, and it's more money, so you need less advertisers or less sponsors. And readers, you know, readers react well to elegant, you know, messaging that's worked in instead of the. The banner ads that they're trying to block with ad blockers.

Yep.

So think sponsorship.

Yeah. So it's a quick way to generate some revenue. And my favorite is the newsletter approach. Local businesses love that, that option even more so than being on your website. So in some cases.

Awesome. All right, well, I think we covered most of what we wanted to cover here and more. There are rabbit holes to drill down as far as, you know, boosting subscribers. But there will be. There are previous podcast episodes and there will be more podcast episodes as we dig into things. But, Tyler, thanks so much for coming on and really, really digging in deep with local news. It's a very important part of our society. We all need to get together and help our local news publishers succeed. It's part of the foundation of really how we were built as a country. And this is one of the small pieces of it. Right. Just helping them succeed. So thanks for coming on.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

And yeah, thanks for listening, guys. We'll talk soon.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription strategy, go to leakypaywall. Com. See you next time.