35 | It’s your subscriber. It’s time to control your data.

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.

Welcome to the Paywall podcast. This is episode 35. I'm Pete with Leaky Paywall and I'm here with Tyler from Paywall Podcast. And once again, we're going to rant on subscription strategies and in this case, we're going to talk about the three things or more. But what I see three things that you need to do to take control of, of your data and why taking control of your tech stack really is so important to your future. Now, I actually just watched a webinar from fip, James Hewitt, I think, or Hughes, and he had a question from a small magazine publisher who said, I'm a small magazine. What's the first thing I should do? And his immediate response was, take a look at your tech stack. Take a look at your data, get control of all of it or you're going to be in trouble. And so I think that was. And you know, I was watching this this morning. I was, I sort of stunned me like, wow, okay, there's a good segue. And I, I had done some research into what I had written about 10 years ago. And if you're looking at my screen, which I hopefully you can see here. Can you see my screen?

Yep. Yep.

Okay. So 10 years ago I wrote an article called what platform should you use for your online magazine? This is when we were more involved in actually building digital magazines with issue M. And the thing I want to call out is number five here. And I. This article is about why WordPress is great. Now WordPress dominates publishing, right? And 50% of publishers are using it for lots of good reasons. It's an enterprise level product. It's got huge community support. But the really, the big, the big thing in this article was that if you use WordPress, you are in control of your data. That was really the bottom line. And at the time, the, one of the reasons I wrote this article was we were working with a local nonprofit. They had invested about $30,000 in a proprietary content management system. And they, you know, they used it for a couple of years and then they were not with it. And we couldn't help them because they couldn't get their data out of their Proprietary content management system. And it, you know, their, their, their relationship turned legal. It's not good. Right. And so on. You know, fast forward 10 years and this just a few weeks ago, we were working with a publisher that was working with a proprietary SaaS product, SAS type product, and they were not happy with it and so they wanted to get their data out of it. And this particular product wouldn't let go of the, their email list.

Right.

And the relationship has, I think I'm not 100 sure. Or was under threat of turning legal. And I mean, it doesn't matter. It was bad, it was just bad. Right. So Tyler, you had, you kind of started this whole thing, by the way. You were, we, we were recording the predictions for 23. You made a, you made a comment. Open source and controlling your data and don't get stuck on a platform you can't get out of. Which I think. Which rang a bell for a couple of publishers I talked to afterwards. And you had mentioned I think you might have run into somebody, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I run into publishers all the time that are hemmed up in SAS platforms that they can't get out of or that it's very complicated to get out of.

Yeah.

Even for someone like me who does migrations all the time for my clients, for leaky paywall clients. And when you're inside of a SaaS platform, you don't control the dashboard, you don't control how the data gets exported, you oftentimes don't control how the subscriptions are created for your clients. Sometimes they're created on the SaaS platform side, sometimes they're created inside Stripe bundled with a transaction fee. There are so many things you do not have control of.

Right.

And that's why it's so important from the very beginning. Even if you are considering a SaaS platform, you should look at other, maybe higher monthly fee. Like a 299 from Leaky Paywall might seem like a lot compared to a free SaaS product that's only charging 5%. But think about that. I mean, you get, I don't know what the numbers are. You get 300 subscribers at $10 a month. I mean, you're already there, right? And so in the future, as you grow, those numbers are only going to get higher on a percentage basis. And then also with something like leaky paywall or any other open source type software, you have complete control of the Data. So if WordPress disappears next year, which is highly unlikely, but if it ever does go away, you have control over your data. You can, you can move to something else.

Absolutely. And you're. So if you're listening, Tyler deals with a lot of migrations from, you know, other platforms into leaky paywall. And I hear him cursing all the time through Slack.

Yeah, it's a mess. It's a complete and total mess. And every platform does it different. And so it's, it's complicated and it takes a lot of time. And not only the data for your subscribers, but just your simple, like, content data can be complicated to get out if you're publishing within that vortex of a SaaS platform. So those are all things to think about, especially if you're a brand new publisher and you're about to adopt a platform. Just, you know, take a few steps back and think about how this will affect me maybe two, three, four, five years down the line.

Yeah, it's hard to think about when you're, you know, when you're in the moment, whether you're a startup or whether you're just, or whether you're transitioning to a new platform.

Yeah.

But if you're transitioning, you probably have a lot more questions. You're digging a lot deeper. You have experience don't like you're looking for. If you're a startup, that's it's more difficult because you're really under the gun to just to get going.

And I totally get that. And that's why a SaaS platform has such an appeal for those who are starting up. I mean, usually they're cheap, they don't charge a whole lot, but as you grow and as you kind of get involved in the ecosystem, you, you kind of get trapped.

Yeah, well, I would say, you know, they're great SaaS platforms and we live in a SaaS world. I mean, we all subscribe to a jillion, you know, Netflix and on the consumer side, and then if you run a business, I mean, we probably subscribe to 50 different SaaS products just to run the business. Right. And just on all levels. But you have to make sure that the, the platform that you have lets you get at your data in an easy way. I think your point about complicated to get out is really well taken because it's easy to say you can, you can export your data, but what does that really mean? Yeah, you know, what are the, are you really getting all your data? Are you getting, you know, can you get passwords out of, out of a subscriber accounts? Right. Usually you can't with WordPress, you can with Drupal, you can with Joomla. You can with anything open source, you actually can. Yeah, it's really easy to move things around because you have total control over your own data.

Yeah, I think that's a good point too. It's not like all SaaS products are evil or bad or anything like that. I mean, I use them all the time for my, my business as well. Virtually everything we do is in life, we're subscribed to SaaS platforms all over the place. But for publishers, you know, certainly when you're, when you're collecting data and you're expecting to grow that data and also just based on what your goals are, SaaS products can tend to change their dashboards, they can change their, their focus, you know, and sometimes you don't have much of a say in that. Whereas with something like WordPress or Leaky Paywall, not to keep plugging, Leaky Paywall, but you have control over updates, you have control over, you know, when you, when you implement something, you have other softwares that you can plug into. There's, there's just a number of things that make it what we used to talk about all the time, and that's flexibility. So it makes it flexible.

Yeah, yeah. And, and like your point about publisher specific things, you know, I, I sort of hone in on, okay, content management. Like publishers have content. You're, you know, you're producing article content, maybe it's video content, whatever podcasts, but it's content. And you need to be able to get that. You need to control the, that content and the way that content, not only can you get your hands on it, but how it's presented. And that's, you know, we're, we're very WordPress biased here, but it is 50% of the, of the market for good reason because it's a great enterprise system. It's complicated now, sure, but in the right hands, it can really sing for a publisher. So there's content, then there's like in our world, and I think in the growing world of publishers, there's subscriptions, there's subscriber data. Right. And where does that data live? And how do you, how do you make sure you always have access to it? And that's something that's super important. And I think that's, that's a piece of friction that I know that we all, you and we all run into in moving subscribers from one platform to another. So if you're using a SaaS product, okay, just, you know, get, get an export. Like what's the process if you're making A decision on, on a platform. You know what, how did, the great question to ask is, you know, how do you get the, the payment gateway information out to match the subscribers subscription? You know what I mean? And you want to be able to put your hand on that and your email list. I know it sounds crazy but, you know, we've seen this happen. It's like make sure you can get your email subscribers. Right. Make sure you can pull out the data in a way where you get, you get all the, the metadata, the tagging that goes along with your emails as well. Right. So like mailchimp's good. You know, they tag everything going in. You have free subscribers, you have paid, you have premium, you have whatever and they're all tagged up and print and then you can pull all that data in one shot if you're using something else. Just make, you know, you have to make sure you can get your hands, hands on this because at some point in time you're probably going to switch platforms.

Oh, for sure.

Just the way it is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, let's, so that we've, I think we've talked a lot about, number one, that's up on the screen, you know, content management system. Okay. Most are using WordPress, some using proprietary systems. I know some are using proprietary and you know, and subscription systems for content and subscriptions. But let's talk about the payment gateway per se. And I know you talked about this, but the number one thing here to consider about your payment gateways, make sure it's in your own name. Make sure you, it's your account.

Yeah.

That's taking the subscription.

Yeah, yeah. And what, what Pete's talking about in this case is there are some platforms that will actually create what we call payment intents and they'll, they'll, you know, charge on, on the platform side and then there are some that will actually generate a subscription inside of Stripe, for example, and let Stripe do the charging, which is preferred. If you can, if you can set it up in that way, that is almost always the best avenue because it will allow you to export your subscriptions. It will allow you to change pricing easily. Like, you know, maybe not easy, but easier down the road you'll be able to sort of manipulate that, that data and you'll be able to move around.

Yeah, let me, I want to say that again because that was, that was so important. So Tyler said, is that some platforms will do the job of charging every month your monthly subscription. So the platform will say it's this time of the month and then it will charge in. So let's say Stripe. So the platform has that. The charging data. Don't want that.

Yeah. And oftentimes those platforms are just simply sending you an ach every month or sometimes even a check to you. And you don't want that because you don't. You can't see the subscriptions. You can't see the subscribers. You can't control how that, how those things are processed. So yeah.

And you can't continue the subscriptions if you change platform. So Stripe won't let you, like, you know, even if it's your Stripe account you have now, you have a mess on your hands. If you're going to go to a different platform that. Because that platform might not work that way at all. Like leaky pail. We don't work that way. Like we. And so the. What you want is you want, let's say. And Stripe's a great example. Awesome platform today. Number one choice by far for many reasons. But one of them is this, this reason of let Stripe actually set up the subscription and let Stripe make the charge and then communicate back to the subscription platform that says, hey, this charge went through. Let that person have access for another month of content access. So then if you're, no matter what platform you're on, if you go to a different subscription system, that's okay. You can match the Stripe subscription or customer ID as we. We do with the, the subscriber in your platform. And, and the charge just Stripe keeps charging it and sending the data to the subscription platform. In our case, that's how we do it. And, and then you can literally quickly move to a different platform because you don't have to worry about those recurring payments. They're just happening with Stripe, not with a third party.

Yeah, yeah. It just makes your life a lot easier if, if it's all inside of, of of Stripe and letting them handle the recurring data.

So one more plug for Stripe too. It's, you know, I know some, some subscription platforms, they'll take a percentage of revenue and they use Stripe Connect to do that, which means that Stripe will like charge the money in your account and then send 5 or 10% or whatever it is off to the subscription platform and that's fine. But if you move, then you have to disconnect that system. Yep.

I do it all the time, man. It's a nightmare. But it's doable. If the subscriptions are created inside Stripe. Oftentimes the product inside of Stripe is where the 5% or the 10% transaction.

Fee lives.

It's a pain in the butt, but you can go in and you can disconnect those transaction fees for your subscribers and start fresh and create new subscriptions for them and then tie it all back into your new platform and keep going. So it is possible, whereas if you let the platform do the payment processing, you're left without really any options.

Yeah. And just to, just to finish up on this, we, we actually built, Jeremy built an auto, an automated tool for price increases. So we have publishers this year that for some reason this is the year for price increases that want, want to change their plans. And with Stripe you can do that pretty easily. It's, it's just, it'll take upwards of a day to get it done. But we just, we just automate it, create the new products. Boom, you have new, new pricing. And for, if somebody needs to create new products to get away from a revenue share, we can, you know, handle that as well. Yeah, and automate that. Okay, so that's number two. Number three, we've talked a lot about already open source software. You know, we, our philosophy and this is where we get kind of nerdy about open source. Leaky paywall is built on for WordPress only. I mean that's our wheelhouse, but it's also our philosophy of, you know, it's your, it's your data, it's your revenue. You know, we don't revenue share and it's, it's your control and that's what it is. So as you, as you saw 10 years ago, this is how we felt today. This is how we still feel that publishers, you know, need great tools and need great control over those tools so that they can be flexible. I mean, you know, you need to, you need to change with the, with technology. The Internet has disrupted everything, especially for print publishers. And so you need good tools that you can, that you can Modify and, and WordPress has this incredible community of developers that are, you know, we have a recommended plugins list for publishers that's 30 plus plugins long or something like that. Just because there's so many incredible, you know, plugins that publishers can just grab or maybe pay for that are already built and solve their, you know, the problem of their pain point, whatever it is like how to log in as an experience, the site as a subscriber, or how to change your venue, you know, so that when you're, you know, you're, you're, somebody logs in, it's the login link changes to my account, like little details like this. These things are already Built. Right. These solutions are, are here. And so the open, you know, the open source world, because it's such a large community, adjusts so quickly to all these changes in technology and changes in, and subscriber and customer habits.

Yeah, and a lot of those functionalities, like those 30 plus add ons, not that you should use them all, but you know, those are usually like 95% of them are probably free, maybe all of them are free. And that's, that's just how the WordPress community works. There's a lot of free functionality that if you were locked into a proprietary CMS that you would have to have your developer develop custom for you each and every time. Because the community, I can almost guarantee you is nowhere near the size of the WordPress developer community.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Leaky Paywall has a, we have a free version, it's only one subscription level and it's non recurring and no sweet enterprise features. But it's, it's available for a startup somebody wants to get. Yeah, okay, so number four, I thought I'd throw it, throw this in as a bonus because it's just the rage and that's all that's about AI and chat, GPT and control of content. So I hear a lot of publishers and I read a lot. I spend time on LinkedIn talking about, you know, okay, AI is going to scrape all my content and then, you know, I'm going to lose all my content. And right now in the state of, the state that AI is in, don't worry about it. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, this is kind of like I remember when RSS feeds were a thing and, and they were scraping content and you'd have websites that would like pull content and it didn't matter, it never really mattered. I mean you're, especially with, you know, you have an email list, right? Control your email list there, that's where your subscribers are, that's where your community is. It's your voice, it's the way you put content together, it's how you email and talk to your subscribers. And yeah, your content's important and people will pay transactionally for your content. But there are also tools to lock down content if you really need to. We certainly work with publishers on that all, all the time. So as, as far, as far as AI goes and you know, I've used, I subscribe to a couple of AI software, we actually use it to produce summaries for these podcasts like the, like there's some good use cases for it. Where, okay, we get the transcript for this podcast and then it gets fed into Jasper and the summary gets spit out. And then we go. Well, I go after it's drafted and I edit it. Like you gotta read through it. And, and you always edit. Right. Like you're always changing stuff. So and so for making summary of something, it's great for like producing original content. Forget about it. It's a long way off.

Yeah.

Especially content that people want to pay for. That's, that's going to be under human directive for a long time. And maybe AI will help assimilate things, but man, you still need a human to get in there, really make it single, you know?

Yeah, yeah, I don't have much of an opinion on either. Like, you know, on, on chat, GPT or. I mean, I see a lot of it on Twitter. It's almost every other tweet someone is talking about it still. Yet I haven't really played around with it much. But I do know that publishers are somewhat concerned about their content being scraped and then sort of fed into the broader universe of AI to bring about content and knowledge to whatever those platforms are doing. Yeah, but I, like, like you said, I don't think I'd worry too much about it in the same way of RSS feeds and you know, ultimately, if you've got content that you think is super valuable, I mean, you can always lock it down and require someone to pay for it. I mean, that's. Or at least sign up for it. That's right. So it's, I don't think I'd worry too much about that. It reminds me of when publishers are worried about people sharing passwords and stuff. Yeah. Is it possible?

Sure.

And do people do it? Absolutely. But is it the majority? No. You're in the business of creating a community, building a newsletter following, and then converting those folks over to paid subscribers. It's less to do about these transactional type things.

As a publisher, you have a, you have a brand and you have a domain name, and that name is what you're promoting. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and money to promote that domain and get people to it. Get, get, get good at SEO and build partnerships and, and you know, get referring traffic and all that. You know, someone starts up a new domain with stolen content, it doesn't work. Just.

Yeah, yeah. And keep in mind, I mean, search engines are already doing this to a large degree. I mean, they're, they've been scraping websites for more than a decade at this point. So it's, it's not entirely new. It's just in the way that the data is being presented, I think, and the way that it's, it's being outputted in the end and how, it's, how all of that magic is being put together.

So, yeah, and I would say on the, you know, if, if any community is going to figure out tools to help manage AI, it's going to be something as large as WordPress, which is open source. And again, another reason why we're, we're fans of it. And you know, the AI, the AI tools are coming already. Coming. Yeah. And you can, you can help put them to work.

Yeah. I was recently at WordCamp Asia and Thailand and fantastic conference, a super dedicated community of WordPress folks. And you saw a lot of vendors in the AI space, but a lot of them were in sort of the content, like editing, blogging area of AI, like assisting you to write content. And that seemed to be the most popular use case right now as far as WordPress goes for something like, you know, AI.

Right. Yeah, it's, it's an, it's, it's assistant, but it ultimately needs that human editing.

Yeah.

Any good? All right, so to wrap it up, control your content, control your subscribers, make sure it's your payment gateway, make sure you can export all your content, make sure you can, you know, ask the question, can you move your subscriber data from one system to another? That's, that's one of the largest pieces of friction we see right now. You know, do you, do you, do you know that you have total control over all this, all this data and don't worry about AI, play with it. I would, I would encourage anybody to go to ChatGPT, create a free account and just start feeding questions and yeah. You know, and just have fun with it. It's, it's, it's pretty neat and, and it'll give you an idea of what's happening.

Yep. That's the best way to approach new technology. Sort of just hop in and see what it's all about versus trying to prevent it from taking over. Yeah.

If you, if you cook, ask it, you know, give me a recipe with zucchinis and, and, you know, mushrooms and see what you get and you'll be all right. Well, thanks for listening and if you have any questions, specific questions about data.

Or.

You know, moving your subscribers around, please send them in. Happy to chat. Or I was also thinking about maybe we should make these open sessions too, if anybody wants to join in and ask questions. While we're talking about a specific subject. I think we'd be open to that. It'd be fun to have. So let us know and. And talk to you next time. Thanks, Tyler. Catch you later.

See you.

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.