5 Reasons to Put Up a Free Registration Wall

I want to talk about what Politico is doing. They're betting their future on setting up free registrations for their readers. Hi, I'm Pete. I'm from Leaky Paywall, and we're going to dive into why the free registration wall that you set up will be your path to the future. And I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but we've been working with hundreds of publishers getting these registration walls set up. They throw off a lot of benefits, and I want to dig in why.

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 LeakyPaywall. LeakyPaywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more at leakypaywall.com. And now for today's episode.

So Nieman Lab covered the Future of Media Technology Conference recently, and there were a lot of interesting things, but this one, this, this move that Politico is making really jumped out at me because it's something we've been talking about for a while and it throws off 5 really important benefits to you as a publisher. So when you put a registration wall up, and let me define a little bit first of all what it is. A registration wall is essentially a paywall, but you're The reader's paying with an email. So what Politico is doing is they're letting readers read a few articles, uh, and then they put up a wall that says, hey, drop off your email address. And, uh, with that, you get registered in through a password and you get access to their free content. So their approach is they're going to have a selected category essentially of free content. And that registration is going to give the reader access to it. That's, that's essentially how a free registration works. And You might think that is an annoying thing for readers to run into. And yeah, I guess initially it's a little bit annoying, but you get the benefit of getting the newsletter. You get the benefit of getting access to their great reporting. And this is how you should think of a registration wall. What happens with the newsletter? It throws traffic back to your publication. It gets delivered to that reader. The reader gets the value of that newsletter that you're sending to them. And something to keep in mind is that The newsletter really should be treated as one of your main products. It's, it's kind of the way the newspaper used to show up in your driveway or in your mailbox. It's the thing that happens automatically for the reader. They don't have to go to a website. They're not going to AI to ask for things. They're literally getting your newsletter in their mailbox. And just scanning the headlines of your newsletter is of value to your reader. So this is part of the reason why Politico is doing this. Email list growth. Now what you're doing And what we see on our end is we see about a 2x to 7x growth across our publishers versus just setting up an opt-in or a popup or something that says, hey, please join our newsletter. The time is really over for that approach. The time is for requiring the email to get access to your content. It's a fair trade and it works. And what you'll see is when you set up a registration wall, you'll see 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, maybe higher conversion rate where readers will give you their email address. They'll choose a password to log in, to get access to some of your content. So email growth is a really big one. And that's something that Politico is seeing. Okay. So we've covered email growth. We've covered the newsletter. The other thing is that when somebody has registered on your site, they are now logged in to your site. And guess what? You get to track their every movement. So the idea is that And the, and if you're in the paid subscription game, you want to know who's going to upgrade, who's going to pay. Right. And so the registration wall gets your free casual readers logged in and it lets you see who's engaged, who's looking at multiple articles every week on your site. And then you can, you can, you can see who, who these folks are. You have their email address and you can send them an offer, a promotion, something, or you could target them on, on your website and give them something that only they see because they're an engaged reader. No one else sees it. That's something that we're doing with our publishers today and it's working incredibly well for them. So I imagine for Politico, it's working very well as well. Okay. So you get email list growth. You have data now, engagement data from these free registered readers. The newsletter lands in their mailbox, let's say weekly or daily, whatever your cadence is. And that newsletter becomes a product that I would recommend you spend some time getting really polishing and getting right. And if you're really time-strapped, you can fully automate your newsletter as well. And there's several ways to do that. Another thing that publishers have discovered is that a big list is very attractive to advertisers. So you end up with Advertising growth. You can charge more, you'll have more, more advertisers are interested in your list. Your list is a really, it's a, it's a direct sales tool for that advertiser. Your, your list is, is, is your viewers. If you're local news, then you're, you're saying, hey, I have, I have all the important folks in this town. Or if you're a magazine or niche publisher, you have a specialty and an interest specialty, and you can get 10, 20, 30, 50, whatever, 100,000 email addresses out for an advertiser. That's what they want. So the, the growth in your list really does speak to advertising growth. And we've seen that and the industry has seen that. The 5th one is a little more subtle, but it's, it's maybe the most important, certainly down the road, and that's AI defense. So let me show you a little something I saw as well this week. I'm going to hop over to Nieman Lab here again. 2 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It's now the top news app in Argentina. Okay. So this, these are the things that are happening with AI. AI is letting individuals really create pretty interesting things. So what is this AI app doing? This AI app is scraping the top news publishers' websites, pulling the headlines, and then creating, automatically creating an AI audio briefing that, that's, that's going out to readers. It's the top app in the country. And it's a fully AI-driven approach that is pulling the content off of the work that local publishers are doing. Now for the, for their readers, this is great. They get a place to, to go to get sort of an AI-curated maybe news via audio. And, but for the publishers that are creating this, that might not be so great. So, and I've seen this as well with 6 AM Studios. They, they've been pretty, popping up local news sites in different towns in the United States, and they're doing exactly the same thing. They're scraping the sort of the top headlines from local news publishers, putting it in a newsletter, and then sending it out. It's not audio, it's just a standard newsletter. And so not only is AI scraping your content and putting the answers into AI overviews, and when you go to Google and you just ask for something, you might Get, get the answer without the click to your website. But you have entrepreneurs that are essentially going after your news content and putting together their own curated products, which are working. So back to the registration wall, you can set up the registration wall to block bots. And those AI bots that are coming in and grabbing your content can absolutely be blocked. And so we are, we are absolutely seeing some of our publishers do this, the ones that are kind of waking up early to this. And my recommendation today is if you do not have a registration wall up and you've never tried it, then it's time to put one up. And you'll find email list growth. You'll know who's engaged and who's going to upgrade. Your newsletter really just becomes more and more important and getting the cadence and getting the content structure right for it becomes a priority. You'll see advertising growth and then you'll be able to block AI bots. Now, Yes, you can pay AI companies to have access to your content. And that's starting to generate some revenue for the really big publishers. For small and mid-sized publishers, it's pennies. And you're also risking humans basically getting that data in, say, AI overviews versus paying you bigger dollars for the subscription. So it's a bit of a balancing act. You do have the 2 audiences, the AI audience and the human audience. And today I think it's a valid strategy to, sure, you can reach out and pay for, get paid for for the content AI pulls and have humans pay for your content as well. But at some point down the road, you want to lean into your own audience and continue to nurture that. Okay. So I'll just close with a bit of an offer if you've stuck around. And if you're running WordPress and you're looking for a registration wall, go to leakypaywall.com and you can go to the WordPress repository and find the Leaky Paywall plugin. It's free. You just download it. It includes a registration wall, includes upgrade messaging and paid subscriptions. It's prebuilt for Stripe, it's all free. You can, you can, but you can use that wall as a starting point just to build your list. And if you get in touch with us, we will set up insights for you at no charge. And you can start tracking the engagement of your free registered readers. Just send an email to info@leaky-paywall.com and just note that you heard this on the podcast and we'll, we'll get that going for you. So free registration wall, bottom line, let's get it set up and reach out if you have any questions.

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. Bye.