27 | How would WE build a local news publication?

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Welcome to the Paywall podcast. This is episode number 27. I'm Pete. I'm here with Tyler again and we are going to finish up the conversation about local news publishing. This episode is going to be part three and the topic here is how would we build a local news publication? So welcome back. Tyler.

Hello. Hello.

Let's dig into it just to refresh a little bit. We work with a lot of local news publishers. We've looked at the successful ones and what is working there. And we're going to share with you how we would build, actually build, and the tactics behind it. A local news publication to succeed in today's news digital age. And before we jump into it, this is something we talked about in a previous episode. There's really one main decision point, in my opinion anyway, and that is to decide whether you're going to take a donation based approach where you offer all your content for free and then upsell maybe some perks, or if you're going to draw a hard line and say, hey, we're going to sell membership here and if you become a member, then you have a certain number of perks. Both ways work. We prefer the membership model which we discussed last time, and that is essentially requiring members to pay for all the perks that they're going to get. Okay, so Tyler, you made a comment this morning. We were chatting earlier about digital subscriptions and the future of local news publishing. And I know you have a very strong opinion on what survivability looks like for local news publishers. You want to riff on that a little bit?

Yeah, sure. The whole, I mean, for those of you who have heard me talk about paywall project, the whole idea behind that was to generate revenue for local news publishers and to show that there actually is an appetite for spending money on local news, that the people in your community will actually spend money on that and to show that there's value there. And I know there are a lot of startups especially that have gone more of a nonprofit route. And I just have a couple of things, not that that's a bad route to go. It's certainly an option and it's certainly a way to Continue to provide local news in a community which is very much needed. However, I will caution those who are thinking about that route, as when we think about local news or just news in general, the model has long been advertising has driven our revenue, and then we provide local news content as part of that. If you shift to a nonprofit model, essentially you shift from advertising to revenue to philanthropic donations. So a lot of times nonprofits are funded by large donors who just want to support local news, which is fantastic. I support that. I love that. I love that there are people out there who will do that. However, just keep in mind that when you make that shift, you're essentially moving your revenue from ad dollars to now donors, large donors, who could at any point decide to change their mind or change their funding, and then you're left with no revenue stream. The reason that I like to focus on digital subscriptions as a primary source of revenue is that that shows that people are willing to pay for the content that you produce. And even though the amounts are small, they do add up. And I think about it in terms of, like, political campaigns where people are giving, like, 10 or $15 a month to their candidate of choice. It's very similar in that it's getting everyone in town to chip in a few bucks to essentially gain access to what's going on in their community.

Right.

And it's way cheaper to do that than it is to not have it and to have local news in your community at all. There's actually research to support this, that when local news disappears from a community, there's. There's more corruption and local government taxes can go up. There's a lot of. A lot of things that. That happen when government's not being held accountable. So, yeah, I like that. That's where I'll stop.

Cheaper to pay for local news than to do.

That's right. That's my point. That's my point. It's cheaper just to pay a little bit for a month to have local news journalists cover what's going on than it is to not have it at all.

Yeah, well, local news gets fed to regional news, which gets picked up by national news. It's definitely the bedrock.

And to me, local news is more valuable to me than national news because virtually any publication can report on national news anywhere you. But local news is much harder because it's localized to one specific spot on a map. So to me, there's more value in knowing exactly what's going on in my.

Community.

In this little bubble versus a national spec. Awesome.

All right. So let's dig into that. The subscriptions model. We, as you can tell, we're fans of local, hyper, local content. One of the things we've looked at is in terms of who's actually making it work, is when you're publishing content that is laser focused on your community, on your local community and you're not going broadly. We do see regional publishers covering multiple towns, but you're giving up the ability to go deep into local reporting. So you have to be very careful of the area that you're reporting on. And if we were to do it, I were to do it, I would have, you know, two, three, I would have separate websites, one for each town. You can hook them together with our multipass if you wanted to give all access to all the separate websites. But that's how you go deep and really engage the local community.

Yeah, and especially for local news publishers, those who were used to making a lot of money from ads in a different era, going digital and having a digital presence, you might not ever make as much as you did when advertising was paying the bills. But the overhead of running a digital operation doesn't necessarily require building. It doesn't require a massive staff, it doesn't require a lot of things. So your margins will be higher and so, and your content obviously is laser focused. So.

Right.

Hoping, hope is that people will subscribe to that.

Well, I'll also say that when you've engaged your local community enough, which means you have a huge email list and you know, you have a, probably a mix of free registrations and paid subscribers or paid donors. If you go that route, you have a huge sponsorship opportunity. So the advertising, the traditional advertising shifts a bit where you can advertise on a website and you can generate a few bucks doing that, but you certainly run the risk of alienating your, your, your paid subscribers with a lot of advertising. So the, the shift is going more towards sponsored products where you might sponsor, you know, an email or you might have an article series where you're, someone is sponsoring that article series you can sponsor like your free registrations. You can, if you have apps, you can sponsor the apps. There's, you know, there's a lot of creative ways to generate ad revenue, quote unquote, with a sponsorship model that's just a lot more elegant.

Yeah.

And then these advertisers, they love the sponsorship model because they, you know, they know that they're, they're coming in with a quality, quality, you know, sort of approach to, and an elegant approach to the readership instead of Just, you know, blasting. Blasting ads. Yeah. Okay.

And I think you can make a decent living having a small, public, digital only publication relative to the local community that you're in. It's certainly possible.

Absolutely.

But the days of making millions of dollars, it's a lot more difficult to do that on a local level. But you can certainly make a decent living providing hyperlocal news and going the digital subscription membership route.

And that's today. I mean, today you can do well today, which means tomorrow you can do better if you keep your eye on the call. All right, so I want to jump into a little more into tactics and let's start with content briefly, and then we'll jump into actual subscriptions. So, okay, what do I publish? I want to start a. And I've talked about this. I'd love to start a local news publication for our little. Really our three towns, which are very tightly knit together, Grantham, Sunapee and New London. And really go deep with, with these three. They're all very, very small towns, but they're all geographically connected and socially connected. And so that would make sense. Local news, what's actually happening and creating unique reporting. So reporting on the news. Absolutely, that's the traditional way. But I would also add the curation model of curating social media, curating what's happening on listservs Locally, if there's YouTube videos, if there's college news, that affects the local area. We've talked about Daybreak in the past. I think, Tyler, you also brought up Madison Minutes, which is another one to look at, which looking at on the screen here where very similar to Daybreak. They're curating local happenings from listservs and Facebook and Reddit, all these other social media destinations where local news is being talked about, and then curating that content and putting it together in a daily newsletter. It's absolutely fantastic.

You know, if there's any positive byproduct of social media algorithms, it's that there's now opportunity to curate content that's otherwise you would never see or you would see it. You know, maybe you see part of it people are now willing to, to pay for, for curated content because there's just so much stuff online for people to sift through and so many different channels, you know of places to get it from. So having it in the inbox is pretty convenient. And being able to sift through it quickly.

Convenience is everything. Time is getting worse and worse for all of us on this planet. We have less and less time as things move faster. And so if you do a good job curating news for your local area, people will sign up in droves. It's just saving time and saving money today.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Okay, so that's, that's the content approach. Yes, create, create unique content to your heart's content, but don't forget to curate what's already happening in your local area.

Yeah.

Okay, so now I want to jump into the actual subscription portion of it, which obviously we get involved with every day. And so what I would do is I would set up a membership model on the website that includes a free registration, which we talk about all the time, which you should absolutely have. You give away a few free articles and then you require a free registration which captures the email address, sends it off to say mailchimp, which I would use and then you would get maybe a little extra access. So that free registration builds the list. But the, the membership, once somebody is receiving your newsletter daily, let's say daily newsletter, and it's driving them back to the website to read more content and essentially prompting the pitch to join as a member and support, you know, support the publication, support, which supports the community and engage with the community. All that messaging, even though it's paid subscriptions, the messaging is membership, the messaging is community and joining and supporting. It's all, you know, it's the same messaging as if it were donation based. But this membership model, if you take the paid membership and you're drawing a line in the sand saying you have to pay and, or the, it's the same as a donation model except for, you know, the donation model, you're letting people at your content, your full content and asking for a donation. But the perks that you offer can be exactly the same to encourage people to, to pay, to give you, you know, payment for your content. But we're going to, I'm going to choose membership, I'm going to require the payment. And these are the perks that I would offer. One, it's pretty obvious that's full access to content. So that free registered user, which is your more casual but engaged reader, you want them to have full access. Two, I would offer the ability to engage with others in the community and our publishing staff, our authors that are writing the content through comments. So premium comments, you can't read any.

Comments.

Until you pay. And I have a screenshot here. This is, this would be, if you're watching this, you can see that you can offer the ability to participate, ask, ask questions, comment on issues. And I would show the number of comments that are available, but not and not let you read the comments unless you're a paid member. Essentially that's the second perk. The third perk would be a premium newsletter and that is essentially a full text newsletter instead of excerpt newsletter. And that speaks to convenience. Four would be hiding ads, a clutter free experience and five would be like a buy one, get one free. So in other words, if I, if I buy a membership then I can give one away. So those are the five perks. And you and I, Tyler, we've been chatting about it and I think we've settled on these five as a good starting point to really motivate that whole like subscription funnel from start to end. So your website, and you know, I'll just mention this because it's always worth mentioning, your website has a metered paywall set up. So with leaky paywall, you're leaking a few articles a month. Maybe it's one article a month, maybe it's two articles a month. Google can index everything, everything can be shared in social media. Then you ask, you require a free registration if you want a little extra access to content. You still can't, still wouldn't be able to comment. You would not get the premium newsletter, you wouldn't get any of the perks, but you would get a few more articles. And then that builds your, that gets handed off to mailchimp, builds your list quickly, works really, really well. Then your newsletter gets fired off daily. It's excerpt based, sends people back to your website to read more articles, which triggers the paid messaging, the upgrade message essentially. So that's, that's the funnel and then the, and then the upgrade message is all about, you know, joining the community, supporting local news, staying informed really that, that local feeling of belonging. And then of course you get your perks. Okay, so let me keep, let me just check my notes here. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the premium newsletter perk, a little bit on how that would work. Just want to clarify that. So when you get somebody to join your, your, your email list, the way I would set it up is you have your free registration and you can certainly have a, like a mailchimp pop up or something. How you collect the email address is important. Better to have an email than not. The free registration starts the relationship though. It also forces somebody who is a casual visitor to give up their email address to get that extra content and stay engaged. And when you set up the free registration, what you're doing is you're sending a free tag off to mailchimp. So you know you can target everyone on your mailchimp list for free that's tagged as free and send them your excerpt based newsletter. In other words, your newsletter has just the excerpts of the articles that are in there and then you have to click the link. Usually it's the title of the article or the read more button that takes you back to the, the, to the article and then you can read the full article if you, if you're still have an allotment on your free registration on the website. So that's the, that's the free registration. Now when somebody pays for a full membership, it sends on payment. It would send a paid tag, call it premium or you call it member, whatever, whatever you want to name the tag that, that pay tag goes to mailchimp. And the way Leaky Paywall works is it's the tags get mirrored between Leaky Paywall and mailchimp, which is sweet, right? So now the, the free tag goes away, gets replaced by the paid tag. If somebody cancels or if the credit card fails or whatnot. Then the paid tag gets removed with and replaced by a cancel tag. Now that once you have the paid tag on the list you can send those. And this is all, you can fully automate this. You can send a full text email to everyone who's listed as paid. So I get this. So if I pay and I'm a member, I get an email. Maybe it's one article, maybe it's 10 articles or whatever. I can have an email with, with full text on it.

Right.

You might have a little navigation up top if it's, if you're publishing a lot of news. But if it's just a few articles, you probably don't need to bother or, or just have like what's, what's in this? And then I can just read the whole email without having to click, without having to log in. It's just a convenient, you know, saves me time. It's a perk. It's a great perk. And you know, we've seen with other publishers that offer this, this perk that their, their readers, they love it. Maybe they're getting ready in the morning and this is, you know, this is how they're consuming their news. They don't, it's, it's, it's no clicking, no logging in. They just know when they get their email they get everything and it's all in one, one place for them.

Yeah. And speaking of having things all in one place, I just wanted to give a shout out to newsletterglue.com oh yeah. If you want to publish your newsletter using Mailchimp, but doing it inside of the WordPress dashboard, I would highly, highly recommend this. This product. It allows you to target your tags like we just talked about. You can target the paid people, you can target free, free people. And also it creates an archive of all of your newsletters on the back end of WordPress. You can publish that. You can let people check out your past newsletters. It's all around an ingenious product for, for whatever system you're using. Whether it's mailchimp or something else, they have a lot of integration. So worth worth checking that out. It's called newsletter glue.com yeah, that's a great tip.

Yeah. It will save you time. Cut your workflow down. You don't have to touch Mailchimp. You just work out a WordPress and send everything out.

Just let Mailchimp do the sending and you can do everything else inside of WordPress and not have to worry about going into that clunky back end of mailchimp.

Exactly. Yep. Definitely use newsletter glue. And then the other. The third part of the premium newsletter approach is. And this is, this is optional, but if you want to get sophisticated, you could also send out your premium newsletter earlier than, let's say your, your free newsletter. So your free newsletter could go out at, you know, 8 o' clock or something like that. And your premium newsletter could basically you could promote early access. So it goes out at 6. Again, depends on your workflow. Do you need it? Probably not. The full access, full content newsletter is probably enough. But that's another thing that we've seen publishers promote and works.

Yeah. Especially if you're a publisher who's in like the stock world. Your latest information, your latest take on stuff, if you have an audience around that sector, it can certainly be a good thing to have.

Yep. So it's easy to all. All these, all these perks. Obviously we're talking about leaky paywall and whatever other platforms to integrate with like mailchimp. All these are super easy to set up out of the box with the exception of one that's the comments. So the premium comments. Just a, just a quick note. You do. Because every theme is different. You do need and comments are integrated with theme functionality. You do have to make a couple of tweaks in the theme. It's not hard to do. But comments is one thing that you'll have to have a WordPress developer just make a tweak to.

Yeah. And I'LL say this too. If you're a mailchimp hater, you just don't like it. It's terrible. You know, just too much going on. You can use whatever you want, use any other newsletter platform and we do have an option to send subscribers to those other newsletter platforms through Zapier. So if you have a really odd newsletter program that you, you like to use, then if it's integrated with Zapier, then we can integrate with it, so.

Yep, exactly. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about another perk which we mentioned and that's hiding ads on your website. This is something that's been actually talked about for years, but we haven't really seen publishers engage on it. The argument is, hey, we want our best readers, our paid subscribers to see our sponsors, to see our sponsor ads. Because sponsors are saying, well, wait a second, you're hiding ads to all your best readers. That's the argument. However, I'll give you a counter argument here on why hiding ads is the way to go. First of all, we are starting to see it happen now and the numbers are. I think we might have talked about this in a previous podcast or definitely in an article where the, the opt ins between hiding ads and not hiding ads were significant. It was the number that was, it was over 10% of paid subscribers for a local news publication. This was in Sweden. Decided to pay more like 40% more just to hide ads. So they had is very, you know, as a 1, 2 test pay, pay x amount for full access with ads. Pay second was paid, you know, for full access, no ads. And 11, it was 11% of readers decided to pay 40% more just for that one feature. I mean.

Yep.

Right.

And we see it everywhere, like not just with, you know.

Yeah.

In the, in the news industry. You see it with, with Discovery plus, Disney plus. All of them are, that's true. Running some kind of, you know, spend three more dollars per month and you don't have to deal with these ads. So it's certainly. And it also reminds me of something. We, we had a publisher. I don't know if they're still with us or not that they had a print product. Maybe you could tell this story better than I can, Pete. But they had a print product and they were actually charging more for digital only. And people were actually, people were actually navigating towards digital only even though it was more expensive. More expensive than digital plus print. Yeah, it's like, I don't want this paper. Stop sending it to me.

Yeah, yeah, that was that was Modern Drummer magazine. Yeah. For a few years, very successfully. They were charging twice the price for digital only, half the price for print and digital, and 20% of their audience decided to opt for digital only.

Yeah. So, so if you're worried that off offering the option to hide ads for a little bit more revenue, you know, it's, it's going to be a drop in the bucket in terms of how many people stop seeing those ads and your advertisers won't even notice a difference really. You'll just notice a difference in more revenue from people who are willing to pay more money to stop the advertising.

That's right. Well, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're switching to a, you know, subscriber, you know, member first revenue model versus an ad first revenue model. So you need to really take care of your subscribers, your members first and make sure they have an excellent experience.

Yep.

When you hide, if you, if you, hey, I'm not saying don't have ads. We would absolutely have ads sponsored, we take a sponsored approach. But they would be, you know, you wouldn't have a wall of ads across the site. You'd have, you know, you'd want to publish in a nice elegant way, but still there'd be ads. And if somebody wants to drop the ads as a premium member, that group is very small. You're less than 1% of your readership. You're probably pretty far less than 1% of the readers that land on your website, from social, from Google search, go directly there to see what's going on. So it's actually a very small percentage. So yeah, it doesn't really, even if you're doing network ads, which I wouldn't recommend at all, especially for local news, the percentage of your paid, it's just a fraction of your total volume. Now how do you handle that? The advertiser that says, hey, well we want our ads to be shown to your readership? Well, the answer is of course, yes, absolutely. And you're going to do it better, you flip it because the reality is now you know who your pre registered users are, you know who your paid users are. And when an advertiser wants access and you take a sponsorship role, then you, what you do is you, you, you build a, a special campaign for that advertiser and say, yeah, we have, we, here's how you reach our readership. You know, and this is where, you know, it's my, not my level of expertise, but if I were to do it, I would talk about, you know, doing email sponsorship for you know, like maybe free and paid free registered subscribers and paid members or the other thing you can do is, which is ad targeting on the website. So we have a couple of products. One is ad Dropper. The other is what we call conditional display notice like a header bar or footer bar that you put on the bottom to target. What you do is you target who's logged into your site as well as casual. So you could do a campaign where it's like look, all right, you can reach our readers costs X amount for the package. It's a sponsorship. We're going to put you in on X number of premium only newsletters. We're going to put your sponsorship information in content using Add Dropper. You can just, you can target a specific level and you can also do it through like a header bar, footer bar where only paid subscribers get shown this and then you create a creative campaign which promotes that brand in a nice way. So what you're doing is you're not just shotgunning ads all over your website. You're being more targeted and that allows you to create nice and more expensive sponsorship levels for your, for your advertisers.

Yeah, there's, there's certainly more value for, for the advertiser if it's more targeted, maybe more.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not about impressions or, or clicks. It's about how many times does it convert and you know, if, if it only seen by a hundred people and all 100 people want that product then fantastic. So that's right.

That's exactly right. Yeah. You can get away from measuring clicks and views which is, which is proven to be completely pointless especially with the amount of ad, ad spamming and fraud going on in the ad network.

Yeah. And not to mention it's hard to, to filter out bots and crawlers and there's just so much that, you know, it's just easier to measure conversion. Yeah.

But it's also, you know, there's brand awareness. You know, if you're, if you're, if you're publishing local news and there's a local store that's advertising or a local organization and they know they're getting in front of not only your general readership, but getting a laser targeted campaign with your paid readership through email or specific website targeting, that's value and you could just sell that as value. It's like brand recognition.

Oh, for sure, for sure. And these are people in a community, in your community that have shown a willingness to pay for local news. And it's, there's a good chance probably that they'll pay for whatever product that you're offering, so. Right. Or that advertiser's offering. Yeah.

So let's, let's. Speaking of, we're talking about advertising here, sponsorships. So another thing you can do is, and with targeting is let's say you have a paid member, you know your local news, you're a mission based publication. There's, you want to ask for donations. There's nothing that says you can't ask for donations while you're selling paid memberships even if you're for profit. I had this conversation last week with a local publisher who was tiptoeing. I think I can still ask for donations even though I'm a for profit organization. Like. Absolutely you can because you're mission based, you're helping the community. And so what you can do is now that you know who your paid subscribers are in your email list, now you know what, you can target your paid subscribers that are on your website with messaging easily through our two targeting methods. Ask for a donation to only those that are logged in as a paid subscriber. Right. To only those who are on the paid newsletter list because then you can really get very specific about who you're talking to. Hey, thanks for supporting us as a, as a, as a, as a member. We, you know, we're, we're mission based, we appreciate it. We're doing a campaign for donations for the next, you know, 30 days or whatever and then ask them to donate and send them to a, you know, a payment page where they can pay more and you could use, we have a name, your price extension you can use to automate the payments on that keeps them in the system and you will raise more money through a donation campaign. And you can dip in and out during the year as you need.

And you'll end up making, giving people the option to pay more for what you offer is pretty powerful. So you allow your end user to decide with our name your price tool to essentially put whatever number they want. Right.

Okay, let's move on. So we've covered ads, donations, buy one, get one free perk. So I might start with testing a, like a giveaway, like a six month membership. So let's say somebody pays to become a full member. In the welcome email I might send them a coupon that says hey, here's your, here's a six month premium membership, totally free, no credit card required. And that coupon and then a link would take them to, let's Say a hidden subscription level or membership level that you create in leaky paywall and that just links directly to that registration page. Whoever that person is just fills that out, uses the coupon and they get a six month, let's say access. And I'm just making this one example up. You can make it as long as you want, as short as you want, but a buy one, get one free. What's the purpose of that? Well, it adds value. Oh, that's nice. I can give this to a friend or family member, but it's the viral nature that you want of this approach to happen. So if you have a friend and you're sending this coupon off to a friend or someone else, you have new eyeballs on your website, on your publication, you have that person, then, you know, let's say they set sign up for the six month plan, they're on your mailchimp list, right? And they get tagged as, you know, six month or whatever you want to call them. And then you can send them the premium newsletter and off you go. And then they may convert to paid down the road, you know, if they get used to enjoying your content and then all of a sudden they can't have full access and the full newsletter and comment and engage. Now you got somebody who's really considering it, right? Okay, so I think we've covered all the perks. Another thing I would add is a family plan. You could use our groups extension to easily do that. You subscribe, this could be a perk. You subscribe and get access for three or four more family members and that would be a huge perk. One of the things that we hear about a lot is, well, password sharing, let's talk a little bit about that. Somebody pays for membership, then they just give away their login to someone else, right? And they're getting around the paywall. Well, what we've just described as far as a setup covers a lot of engagement for commenting and is a big one. And if people are commenting and engaged, they're not going to give away their login because they don't want anybody else commenting as themselves. So that's a defense against password sharing. But a family plan, it offers a huge perk. It could be two more seats, one more seat, three more seats. Whatever you decide gives that person the ability to basically just drop in an email and send off an invitation to join as a family member. And massive perk, gets more emails on your email list and you know, at some point maybe, you know, they're not part of the family plan anymore and they, they pay or they refer someone else. You're, you're growing this virally. Okay, family plan, family gift subscriptions. Let's chat a little bit about gift subscriptions. Offer them. Let's. And I will say that you want your paid membership revenue. You want to set a goal of 20% for your paid membership revenue. If you're not bringing in revenue, if gift subscriptions are not 20% of your revenue, you have a big opportunity to sell them. When somebody pays for a membership, make sure you promote a gift subscription included in your welcome email. Include a button right on checkout that.

Says.

Get a gift subscription for someone else. And we, I remember talking, we had a nice, had conversations with, with marketeers in the magazine space, the print magazine space. That number is, is rock solid. There has been for decades that if you're in a giftable publication magazine and Your paid subscriptions, 20% of your paid subscriptions should be gifts. And so that in local news you absolutely have a giftable publication and target that 20% level. Really? Look at your website. Is that obvious? Are your welcome emails promoting it? Are your continuous emails down the road promoting it? Something to grow. All right, Tyler, how we doing?

Doing good.

Okay. All right, I'll just keep, I'll just keep ripping here. Corporate and group memberships. I sell libraries access or schools access to your publication. Easy to do by IP address, whether IP extension by email address or use our groups extension for someone to buy a certain number of seats. Another great idea for sort of corporate sales is coupons and real estate agents. This is a big one. Sell 100 seats, a coupon with 100 subscriptions to a real estate agent and the coupon is in their name and they can give that, they can give that their coupon away to all their, you know, prospects and you know, get there, keep getting their name out front in the community, which is really what they, their mission is. And you can, you can help that. So that's, that one's, it's, that's a good one. And that one's easy to, easy to set up. Here's another one I'd like to see tried. I haven't tried it myself, haven't seen it. But how about letting local eateries offer free access to your publication in exchange for them simply telling anybody who comes in, hey, by the way, while you're here, you can have free full access to your publication, your local news. And just, and that might be, this might be something you would do as a startup maybe early on, I'm not sure about news publishers that have been around for a long time, but in the beginning I would absolutely do that just to get the word out. Let, let the restaurants and you know, anybody that's coffee shops, anybody that's sitting down, you could do it through our IP exceptions extension. Just set up their IP range in the back end of leaky paywall. And anybody who's sitting at the coffee shop or the restaurant can get full access. And you just need to talk it up to the restaurant. Maybe they'll put up a sign for you, a card. But what you want is you want people to leave, come home, get used to going to your local news site and then, and then getting the free registration and the paid membership thing going. You ever seen that, Tyler? Anybody ever?

I've had publishers talk about it, but no one's really knowledge actually pulled the trigger. Yeah, okay. But yeah, certainly an interesting idea to promote your content locally.

So yeah, if you want to get the word out, that's a good one. Good way to do it. All right, let's talk about offers. So you're going to sell paid membership and you're going to want to keep your offer simple. Simple sells. One offer is the best. You don't want people to do math. You're not going to have different price levels. You're going to have one price level with one exception. So in other words, if you're a print, if you're, if you're selling print subscriptions and digital, let's say print, digital and digital only price is the same. Don't, don't make people do math. Just it's, it's your, it's your content. It's the value is in your content, not on the physical delivery. And just keep the price the same. But let's say we're talking digital only. You're going to have your price to run the business. So around here Valley News charges $15 per month for digital only access. You could say that's expensive. I would, but we pay it. We want access to local news. You know, that price may go up over time. So you know, don't be afraid to charge for access. If you need to start at $5 a month, that's okay. But keep in mind you probably want to raise your price over time, which is easy to do. People don't like it, but you can do it. So here's how I would position my local news. I would have a main offer which is essentially the support the real cost of publishing and explain what the real cost of publishing is. The time you spend, the reporting and keeping everyone informed. And then I would have a second offer, which is pay what you can afford. In other words, use our name, your price extension, to let people opt into something that is less than, as an example, $15 a month. So if I come to the site and say, God, I really want access, but 15 bucks a month, oh, my God, that's just so much. But I'm willing to pay five bucks a month or half of that, maybe 750 or what, or something like that. If you let people choose what they're going to pay you, they will generally choose what they feel is fair. This works every time, and I'd love somebody to prove me wrong. But in general, now, some people are just, hey, they're just gonna not want to pay anything, and that's the way it is. But most people, you're gonna get them to pause and think about it, and they can think about what's fair. They want to feel good at the end of the day and what's fair. And they might feel like, well, I really can't afford the 15, but I can afford 5, so I guess that's better than nothing. And they'll feel good about that, and that's great. Now you got somebody at $5 a month. And by the way, the choices are recurring monthly, not one time. So just stick to that. And. And they can choose. Maybe it's $1 a month. Maybe really they just can't afford to pay anything. But they'll do a dollar a month because, you know, it's better than zero. And. Or maybe they'll pay more. You know, if you're. And if you can afford to pay more, you will, and you feel that's fair. It's like you really want to support this organization. I mean, they're knocking it out of the park. They're keeping local news flowing. Maybe they'll. Maybe they'll be one of your recurring donors, essentially, and they'll pay more than what you're asking for. So those are the two levels that I would offer. What do you think, Tyler? Would you do that?

I think I missed what you were talking about, to be honest. Say it quickly one more time.

I talked too long. I would have two levels. One is the real cost of publishing price. Call it 15, just as an example. And the second level is pay. Pay what you can afford. Pay what you want. Yeah.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

There's actually research to support this. I don't know where. Where this was from, but people actually don't realize to the level, you know, local news is struggling to stay around and a lot of people think that it's funded, you know, through nonprofit or government funded or. So, yeah, I think the more that you can make the case to people about obviously what you offer and stuff like that, but be honest with them, let them know what this is actually paying for, let them know your situation, and they'll. They'll reward you for that, right? Yep.

Yeah, that, that means, especially if you give them a choice like, oh, I can. I can pay what I want monthly to support this organization.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's such a clever strategy, giving people, you know, this is what it would take to keep us around. But if you can't do that, and we understand that not everyone can pay this, you know, this higher amount, would you at least consider this rate, which also helps us continue the mission?

Yep, exactly. All right, last thing I'll mention, and before we wrap it up, is something that I'm a big fan of, and that's Incognito blocker. So we have an extension to keep readers from going incognito. To get around the paywall, it sort of hardens the paywall a bit for you. We have financial publishers that swear by it. They tell us that their subscriptions generally go up over 10% once they turn it on. And it's very simple. There's no configuration. You just turn it on and it tracks the IP address of the visitor. So if you go to a different browser, even a different machine at home on the same WI FI network, that IP addresses already said, hey, you've already, you know, read your one or two articles, so please register or please pay for a subscription. So yeah, and this is last one.

Yeah, I'll say this is a very. To my knowledge, this is a very unique feature that you probably won't find with other platforms. So certainly a great tool to. To increase revenue and harden the paywall a little bit.

So, yep, takes about a second to turn it on. That's it. So that's it for this podcast. If we built a local news publication, we would offer the five perks that I covered. We would price price with, you know, that name your price option. We make sure that the website was socially, you know, engaging with comments. Target we'd be targeting based on how some. How you're logged in. If you're a free registered user, you get, you know, you get promotion to upgrade to paid. If you're a paid member, you get occasional promotions to donate to, you know, contribute more and then work with sponsors to target these, you know, the casuals, the free registered and the paid members, and maybe even the donors. You target them as well. So that's it for today. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions, have any ideas, please get in touch infoen101.com and hey, thanks, Tyler, for sharing your wisdom and we'll talk next time.

All right, take care. 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.