7 Revenue Killers That Sank a 240-Year-Old Newspaper (And How to Fix Them)

Greetings. What's up, man? Hello.

2026.

That's right. It's the first podcast of the year. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, we have a big one here we're going to talk about. This one's going to be a tear down of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. They announced that they are closing in May. Ouch. And, yeah, painful. So it's funny when, when I heard the news a few days ago, I know you and I were chatting and we were thinking, okay, let's maybe we should take a look and see if there's anything that we would do differently. And I know, I know you went through it, but I, when I went through it, I couldn't believe the number of things that were just, how do I say it wrong? That were just destroying the visitor and experience. So let's get into it.

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 and now for today's episode, Foreign.

I'm going to share my screen here. And what we're going to do here is, yeah, we're going to pick on. We're going to pick on this on the poor Pittsburgh Post Gazette, but we're also going to talk about what should have been done to actually move the needle in their favor. So the thing about it, I mean, they're 240-year-old publication, right? They're the number one news publisher in Pittsburgh. And it's, you know, Pittsburgh has, the trading area is like 2.4 million residents or something like that. And the bottom line is when we go through this teardown, you're going to see that they kind of treated their visitors and readers like enemies. And, you know, I don't say that lightly. It was really hard to go through the site. I actually went through a paid subscription on the site just to experience that. And to be fair, it was okay. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either. But there are things on here that are obvious and there's some things on here that are really subtle but are absolutely operationally destroying them and confusing their readers. So what do you say? Should we jump into it?

Let's do it.

Okay. All right. So here it is. This is the website. Can you see it?

I see that, yeah.

Okay. So I run an ad blocker. About 40% of readers run ad blockers. And, and you know what? Before I even get into the tactics of this, I just gotta say something. One of the questions you might be thinking is like, well, like, what should the Post expectations be for reader revenue? And with a 2.4 million residential area, we have some data from Statista that looks at different publishers across the United States, what their, you know, the geographic area is, size wise, and it breaks down how many print and digital subscribers that they have. And we come up, if we do an average across a bunch of different markets, some really big markets like la, but some smaller markets like Little Rock. And we, we see that on average they're doing about 5%. Over 5% of the residents are paid subscribers. 5% is a, is like if you're doing a decent job and you're the leader in a city, like, you should be hitting 5%. And if you look at the. Through the numbers, you can see that some of them are doing a better job and going higher. This data is about a year plus old. I mean, Baton Rouge, you know, they're creeping up on 10% conversion. Right. As far as population that subscribes it. So they're really embracing their readers as community, you know, as members in this community. This is not what, what's happening in Pittsburgh. Okay, so if I go back to 2.4 million, if you, if they, if they were to charge $10 a month and they get 5% of their population to subscribe, that's a $14 million a year income stream at 5%, at 10% is $28 million per year. And they could do it. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about how.

Are you suggesting an acquisition that we should.

Sure.

Do you see an opportunity, Pete?

I do, I do. Not interested in being a publisher. But, but if somebody, if somebody, if, if you're listening to this and you're rebooting the Pittsburgh area, let's have a chat because, you know, we can, we can certainly help on some fronts. Okay. Where was I? All right, so let's get a little bit more into the tactics. I mean, you know, we have, we have. They had a chance to build a nice moat. I'm not sure. Well, I know why it happened. And there are a lot of operational things in the back end and that we know about that we don't know about. And I'm not really here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about as a paid subscriber, which I became like, what do. What, what do we see on the front end that can be improved? Okay. First thing here is ad blocker. Okay? 40% of people do have ad blockers running. Why would you annoy them right off the bat? If I'm blocking ads, okay, I'm blocking, I don't want to see ads. They're not going to work for me. Right. So just, you know, let me, let me through without having to figure out how to get past this. Right, right. So when I say like treating readers as kind of the enemy, this, this is what I, this is what I mean. Right. Okay, so now, now what do you gotta do to relinquish your ad blocker? You gotta click on this thing and you gotta say, okay, well we're not gonna block for this website. We're gonna hit refresh and now we're in to the site. Okay, so it's like here come the ads. It's like here come the ads. Right? Yeah. And, and you know, to be fair, like this layout, this is fine, right? It's a news style layout. It's got, seems pretty well organized. On the surface the design is pretty good, but when you start actually digging in, it starts to get intense. Okay, so let's go. And I don't think I'm logged in here. I'm going to go in and look at an article.

What happens right away? Hit with eight weeks for 99 cents.

I mean, how do I know I want to pay?

Right.

It's just, this is tough, right? This is tough to swallow.

And if you're only going to, if you're doing eight weeks for 99 cents, you might as well, if you're going to block all content, you might as well do a free registration and at least collect the email address in exchange for, you know, a couple of more articles. Because this is just, first of all, you do, if you, if someone does happen to sign up for this trial, you're already losing money on the credit card transaction fee. It's like, like 70% of it's going to the credit card vendor. So you've, okay, you made your, you know, your 30 cents or whatever from this subscriber and like, you know, it's a difficult task at that point to then get them to level up to a paid plan without giving much, you know, tasting.

So yeah, so the profits are terrible here. Secondly, it cheapens the whole brand. 99 cents. Are you kidding me? Like I see these 99 cent promotions and I know you're probably more pissed off about it than I am, but they do devalue the content, right? That's just don't do it, right. Give away time, not money. Like give away like pay for the full month but get three months instead of 99 cents.

It's like an impulsive thing I think for publishers in print because they're so used to that, like you know, kind of gimmicky, like low cost, you know, gas station style advertising. That's just like, it's a little, it's a little, you know, it's undervaluing everything that they're doing as far as content goes. But I think that's, you know, that's, that's been an issue for a while. It's like getting publishers to see value in their content where you know, for the last however many, you know, centuries it's been, the value is in, you know, getting people to come to your site and then look at ads.

Right, look at, right.

You're just, you're just, you're not here for the content, you're here for our ads.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that is true with a lot of publishers. And you know, and then the third thing is, I mean you have the instant pop up like pay now, I'm not ready to get married yet. It's too cheap. It cheapens the brand. There's no money in it. Right. I mean if it's a stripe transaction, Stripe takes 50%, $0.50 per transaction plus their 3% or whatever. And so you're, you're, you've just blown out all profits and the missed up. But the biggest crime is what you mentioned earlier. It's, it's the opportunity to grab an email address and say, hey, if you register, I'm okay with hard walls. They got a brand, right? Like they got, people know who they are, they got trust. But you know, hard wall, everything to keep AI out. Okay, That's a big part of it. But ask for an email registration to get to that article, build that email list like crazy, right? And then all that, all the newsletters get, you know, grow and grow and grow in size. Swarms, traffic back. Sponsors love big newsletters. I mean, if we do the Math Right, so 2.4 million population should result at about a, let's say 15 or 20% newsletter conversion, which would be likely. You know, you're talking 300 to 400,000 email addresses that you should have. And if you do the free registration here, then yeah, you would, you would, you would be building that list very quickly. And you know, do sponsors want to get in front of three or 400,000 local, you know, or people that are interested in Pittsburgh? Yeah, I Think so? I think so. But before we get into that, let me, let me jump to because we're in, we're talking about newsletters. So, so the other thing I did, I was like, okay, this is, I don't want to do this. I'm going to go back to the homepage here and I'm like, maybe I can get on their newsletter, see what their newsletters look like. Right now as a resident, I probably want to be on the newsletter. So I went, I went looking and I found this button here. I think it says newsletters, right? So when I click it, I get a login screen.

What?

That's what I said. What is happening here? I'm so sorry, but this is a disaster. Just at the very least have an email field and just let people put their email in and click. Right. If you're going to do a pop up, just make it easy. So the idea is though, put a registration, but this kind of thing, but a registration where that 99 cent offer is. So this was a huge miss. I don't know, I don't know how they're building their newsletter, but I mean, we've talked this, talked about this in previous episodes. If you're not building your newsletter, you're not going to grow paid subscriptions. Bottom line. I mean, you will, but not as fast. Yeah, not nearly as fast.

Right.

Okay. So, so that kind of was driving me a little bananas. All right. Okay. So you know, they're, they're gating. It's funny, it's like this is the first publisher I've seen gating top of Funnel. Right? So if you look at like from an Internet marketing, it's like top of Funnel is do everything you possibly can to reduce the friction to grab that email address. And they're doing the opposite. They're gating the top of funnel of the leads that come in that hopefully they turn into paid subscribers and maybe buy other products or join events or whatever. It's just, it's just the whole thing is insane to me. Okay, all right, let's talk a little bit about something else that's super. I'm going to use the word bad. And this is the subscriptions. They are running three different subscription platforms here. And this has got to be causing an operational collision and it's certainly causing subscriber confusion. Right. So I'm going to go find their subscribe button which is over here. And I get this. Now, speaking of collisions, their ad network here is overlaying their subscription cards. So these two systems are separate. They're not talking to each other. There's, you know, there needs to be a. You know, you need to get rid of this ad here. But back to subscriptions, you got two options. You got digital subscription, and you got the digital and Sunday subscription. Now, if I go to digital subscription, I get this pop up. This is what. This is what I went through. I went through a digital subscription. You know, it's. It's a little funky. It's a little clunky. It's. You know, it did work, though. And I got in and I was able to access content, so that was fine. Okay. But if I go to this, like, print digital combo, I'm all of a sudden on formstack. Right. Well, this is a whole different platform. Right, Right. So now they're managing. First, I'm confused as a subscriber because I don't know what formstack. If I'm just like, Pete, interested in subscribing, like, what is formstack? Why am I here? And have they been hacked? I mean, right?

It does look a bit. Yeah, it's strange.

Yeah, it's strange. And you don't want strangeness in your. As a friction point in somebody who's going to pull out a credit card. Like, that's right. That's a conversion killer right there. So this is obviously going into a circulation management situation. We know that. But it's. This is a whole separate operation. So, you know, like, what happens? Like, okay, I'm creating an account here, and I'm creating an account, a different account, and digital. And how does the print get access to digital? Also, you have all these. These. These challenges. They have just pure login challenges with two. Two separate systems. But now it gets worse. Tyler, this is. This is absolutely bananas. And so I was poking around. I'm like, all right, what else they got? Well, remember how I mentioned that they're 240 years old? Right. They've been publishing content. So what do they have? They got archives. I mean, we're talking juicy pile of gold archives from 240 years ago. If I'm a paid subscriber, like, and I get access to these old archives, and I'm a. I'm a resident. I love Pittsburgh, whatever. Yeah. Like, this would be amazing to look 100 years ago, 200 years ago, right? Yeah. What happens when I hit our Washington time? Yeah, George. Right?

It's way back.

Look at this.

Okay.

I went to Newspapers.com. newspapers.com is ingesting their content, and they're getting, like, pennies on the dollar for access here. So this is another login system and it's not even controlled by the post.

Yeah, they're not even controlling their own archive. And so therefore they're not even benefiting from the 200 plus years of content that they have available. That newspapers.com is. You know, obviously they're pulling it from their old PDFs or whatever. So I, and especially in the, in the age of AI, like this stuff can be converted like you know, into, into PDFs and even into readable articles.

Right.

So just lots of gold here. That's probably converting at the same rate of Google Ads. So.

And they're not. There's no social sharing happening here. This is, there's, there's little SEO value for what's left of SEO. It's, it's just a whole different. So if I buy a subscription here, then I need to buy a digital subscription or do I need to buy a print and digital? Do I need two subscriptions at least to get everything right?

Like, boy, that gets messy.

Yeah, it's, this is really, this is a problem and it's pretty clear. And the tragedy is that this is gold. This is a pile of content gold. If you bring it over on the main site and you gate it appropriately and you make it part of a single subscription, where you get everything like one subscription, get it all. You. Maybe you opt out of print if you don't want print now they're only running two days a week now. They went from weekly or daily to two days a week. Maybe, maybe if you don't want print, which some people don't, you can opt out. But one subscription, right? They have three. It's crazy. Okay. And just, I just want to say a little bit about that. I mean, we work with a lot of print publishers and you know, we worked really, really hard on integrations. That's how we got started 10 years ago, working with print publishers and taking their disconnected systems, which this is clearly an example of, and making sure that circulation is tied to digital access and the data lives in one place and the subscriber has one login on the main website. You're not getting kicked off to other. And you know what? It works. It's been working for years and years and years, for a decade with our print publishers that are selling digital subscriptions. And the fact that we don't have a cohesive system here drives me crazy. And I still see it today where we are 10 years. And I'm sorry if I'm ranting, but where we are today, 10 years later after where we started, is now not much further along than in a lot of cases with, especially with the print publisher sector. And why go to two? In 2018, they went from daily to two days a week. Print is a tough anchor to carry. Really tough anchor. And we have publishers that have converted, taken the plunge and gone and stopped printing and just leaned into digital and they're doing, they're doing great. So that the print thing, that's kind of its own discussion. I'm sure there's history and all sorts of politics and all sorts of things that I don't understand, but it is an anchor. It's hard to make money unless you're the New York Times and you can, your scale, your print scale is just so enormous you can actually benefit. Let's, let's talk a little bit about advertising here. You mentioned it earlier. The ads are coming in. Is it me or are these ads off point? This one, this one seems better hiring Pittsburgh, but this one.

Yeah, I mean they're not, they're not too bad. There's just a lot of them. And I don't, I don't think these are in house ads. They might be, they might be running through the Google Ad Manager system. It's.

Yeah, this one's clear to me. Yeah, yeah.

But it could be through Google Ad Manager. I don't know. But it's a lot, there's a lot of ads going on here. And I know that from working with publishers with millions of page views per month that even with that many Google Ads on their site, it's not worth the amount of money that you bring from it to just completely destroy the experience for, you know, a potential, you know, paid subscriber, which I guess in this case, since it's not the focus is not really on getting paid subscribers into a funnel then I guess. Yeah. What's. Go ahead and, you know, just flood the site with ads.

Right.

It's like the goal here is clear. Right. It's like eyeballs. We're still in the eyeballs game, which, you know, that game is, I think, long gone even for some of the biggest, highest traffic, you know, websites.

Yeah.

Millions of page views don't convert like they used to.

Nope, absolutely not. Yeah, it's a little bit of the print legacy in there, you know, the ad model for sure. Last thing I'll just poke at is event calendar. There is an event calendar here. I challenge you to find it. We know that a good local calendar is a good source of SEO and engagement and such. And they should have an AI powered event calendar. And if you're thinking about ripe with events. Yeah, yeah, go to LocalCalendar AI, which is our take on the solution. Check it out. But yeah, event calendar, there's opportunities there. Now, I think I've said enough in terms of all the issues that are on here from sort of a public facing and I don't know if you have anything else, but I kind of feel like just summarizing what we went through. There's a lot here. Okay, so first thing, registration wall, right? Don't ask for money, ask for an email. Right? You want to build a community, you want to engage people, build that email list. So in trade for access to an article, right? You know, ask, ask for it, ask for an email. Don't ask for money. Just get an email, get them registered, get them in the, get them on your newsletter and then, and swell that newsletter list. Because right now most publishers are saying, hey, please join our newsletter. But that's really wrong today. You can't do that. You have your superpower as a publisher is you have content and you have an audience. Those are really your two superpowers. You have great content and you have an audience for that content. Great. So if you draw a line in the sand on your content, you say, look, here's a very hard line, but it's an easy line. You just need to drop an email address and then you can get access to more content. And you get our newsletter. By the way, guess what happens? You know, 20% of people convert instead of 3% or whatever the newsletter pop up metric is. So that's number one. Get a, you know, stop with this, like take my money right away before you have built that relationship. The newsletter then becomes a value piece to keep the person, you know, interested on the content and what's happening. And if they click and go to the site to, to see more, then they get the upgrade messages and it's time to pay, right? So that's one thing. And please don't ever, ever charge 99 cents for a month of access.

Don't charge 99 cents for anything.

Charge the full month. Let's say it's 10 bucks. Do a 10 bucks for three months. Access. Give away time, not money. Preserve the value of your content. Give away time. You get three full months for the price of one. That works. We've proven it. It's worked for years. It's great. Okay? Make sure everything is tied together. Get things integrated. You have circulation, you have a CRM. I Mean, get all these things integrated so you have one login system on your site and that's it. Right. And that it's amazing what APIs can do to move data back and forth and keep systems in sync and give that reader the subscriber, especially the sort of that easy experience on the site. Own your own local moat. I mean, building your newsletter, grabbing those emails, you got AI coming for your content. You might need to lock it down. You know, Google's always been sort of a place where, you know, yeah, you want to be, but you know, it. 30% of traffic is, you know, as a reading this today, you know, publisher traffic is down 30% from Google search. 30%. You know, that was what came out today. So you got to build that, you got to build that email list. Social media, is it, is it important? You can still have social sharing work, but you can do it in a better way where, you know, with a bigger list and with subscribers, you can do gift links, subscribers will forward, forward emails, you know, or, or text messages. Hey, read this article. This is the viral kind of stuff that's really, really important, right? The stuff on social is not as important.

Of course.

It's got some importance. Direct sales, you know, I see these ads and I, I see the Pittsburgh one on the bottom. I think that one's pretty good. But it should all be really, really like the, it should be very Pittsburgh focused. Right? Forget national brands in there and really work on direct. Direct sales. That's where the money is. Forget the Google stuff. And I think those are the takeaways. Did I miss anything?

I think that that covers it. I think the. Without knowing what's going on internally, like, you know, these are some incredible digital strategies that have been proven to work, as you said, for the last decade that we've seen. And you know, I think if, if they didn't have just looking on the outside and you know, without that print anchor and the ginormous overhead, like I've, I've actually driven by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette before. It's a ginormous, you know, it's like multi, a multi story building in downtown Pittsburgh. Like, it's. I'm sure there's ginormous overhead with what they're currently doing. So it's like if this digital strategy is not in line, I can only imagine what the print side looks like. So if they're not working together at any level and they're as disconnected as we've seen, it makes it almost impossible to turn any kind of profit, which clearly we're seeing that, right?

Exactly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, gee, where do I start? That's a lot. That was heavy. What I would say is go to your own website, go fire up an Incognito browser, and then count how many pop ups you're delivering before you can actually read content. Or can you actually get to a piece of content if you have more than one pop up? You got some work to do. I'd say that would be a good place to start. All right, Tyler. Thanks, man.

Yeah.

Till next time. Catch you all later.

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.