E2: How to set up your paywall to convert more paying subscribers

Welcome to the Paywall podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies. We will talk with some of the publishers that we work with at Zine 101. The things that work and the things that don't. There are so many amazing things you can do in the digital world as a publisher to not only increase your digital subscriptions, but also engage your audience. Let's get started.

All right, we're back at the Paywall podcast. My name is Pete, and today we're going to talk about how to set up a paywall. And if you're thinking about starting subscriptions or memberships or you currently have them running, then this is the podcast for you, this is the episode for you, because we're going to talk about the basically four ways of setting up the paywall that are working today. And we'll cover. Cover some other other things as well. The question here is what type of paywall setup is working best? And what I want to do is I want to kind of go back in time a little bit and talk about the original paywall, which was the hard paywall or maybe the membership model, where a publisher would literally lock down their articles and you would just have no choice but to pay and gain entrance. And that has worked for a lot of membership sites with a lot of sweat. They get their members in there, they tease out the articles that they want to release to the public. So they're doing the job of choosing which articles are free and public and which articles are premium. And probably the best example, the hard paywall is the Wall Street Journal. And it works well for them because they are a big brand name. And when you have a big brand, you have the marketing to bring subscribers in. But if you're not a big brand like the Wall Street Journal, the hard paywall has proven to be difficult to start up. And we actually, I remember going through this with an old. This is probably seven or eight years ago, we had a national magazine client that decided one day and they were publishing, they were doing a good job publishing all their articles on their site. And one day I received the word that they were going to lock down all their articles. And I honestly couldn't believe it. Because, you know, the big thing about the hard paywall is Google cannot index any of the. You know, they can't really rank the content properly because they can't get into the content. And then people on Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram or whatever, they can't really share the content because it's locked.

Right?

It's just Locked down, there's nothing to send people to. So they said, okay, we're locking down all our magazine articles that we have on the website. And they were doing a good job. They were using issue M actually to post all their articles online. And I tried and I tried to get them to change their mind and I said, hey look, you know, you're going to take a huge Google hit and social sharing is going to be non existent. And they said, well, we need subscribers. So they did, they shut it off. And the first thing I did is I looked at what was Google, you know, was a, what was the traffic situation on their site? And it was like 30 days after they had shut it down, their traffic had dropped by 90%. I mean, I don't remember how much, you know, if they had a hundred thousand page views a month or a couple hundred thousand page views a month, all of a sudden they were down to, you know, 10 or 20,000 patriots. It was just, it was like, it was like watching a cliff drop, you know. And this was, this wasn't just Google numbers, this was all traffic that they had and you know, down. It didn't go well for them ultimately. And it's something that I'll always forever remember as the, you know, okay, let's, and it's part of, part of the reason where why leaky paywall was born is, you know, let's, let's make sure that we play along with, with proper digital marketing efforts, right? So you know, the three things, and this kind of leads into the three things that a paywall has to do today. And one is they might be obvious, but it's good to say them. One is Google needs to be able to index all your content, at least most of your content. And, and that includes social media sharing. So if you're, if you're allowing a few free articles, let's say with a metered paywall, then everyone, you know, one article can be shared in thousands of different browsers without any trouble. The second thing is something that's becoming very clear now and that is that you have to build your email list. And this is, this is really the number one priority for. So if you're a publisher and you're not really aggressively getting people to sign up to your newsletter, whatever type of newsletter you have, that's something you need to jump on right away. It will throw so many, so many benefits to you. And of course the best one being increasing your paid subscribers by 10x at the very least. So some publishers are saying 30x and of course, the third thing is just, is building those paid subscriptions. So those are the three things, and we're going to talk about that today. So let's jump into the ways you can set up a paywall, and I'm going to just jump right in with what is the best thing or one of the best ways working today. And I think it's called the free registration wall method. And essentially what it is is you with a, with a metered paywall. At least with our metered paywall, you can, it's very flexible. You can set up, okay, I want to give away five free articles a month, or three free articles a month or one or 20 or whatever. And then I'm going to get the person to pay or to register for free. And, and the registration method is kind of an intermediate step where let's say you set your meter to three free articles per month, which is a solid number for a typical news publisher. And then after those three free articles are consumed, the fourth article you get the subscription nag, that's what we call it says, hey, please register and we'll give you a few more free articles per month. And so what that does is two very important things. One is the person gets, of course, the free articles and they sign up, but you get that email address. And this has turned into such a big deal. So now you have an email address of a new person who's registered on your site, and you've also started the relationship with that person. And if you're doing your job with email marketing now you have that extra email address and free cells. I mean, you put up a free registration wall, which is, which is simple user registration. You'll be surprised at how many new subscribers you get. So you get that email address, it increases your email list substantially, and you started building the relationship with that new subscriber. And so like I said, the data suggests that for every email address you collect, that person has a 10 times greater chance of subscribing. Because if you're doing your newsletter marketing properly is what you're sending the content, all your new content that you're publishing via email to that new signup, and they're getting linked back to your site and they're consuming that article that they're reading and maybe other articles. And if they're now registered and logged in on your site, it's chewing up their free articles that they get. And then they hit the next subscription nag, which is time to pay. It's the one that says, hey, we really love that you love our content. Please support us by subscribing to gain full access or whatever that pitch is going to be. So you get this over time, you have the free registered subscriber. And over time, day after day or week after week, however frequently you send along the emails, they're being what I call organically pestered into subscribing because you're just. It's a gentle email comes out, oh, that's an interesting article. I go back to the site, I read the article, I try to read the next one and oh, I got to subscribe. No, I'm not going to subscribe. You know, a month later, it's the same thing, right? They're coming back to the site and eventually, like my wife did, they say, what the heck, I'm just going to pay and support these guys. And that works extraordinarily well. So getting that email is just so key. And as a side benefit. Well, it's not really a side benefit. Another big benefit is your email list will grow. And if you're. Which you should be selling sponsorships to your email list or to your newsletter, then that's going to help you because you can have a bigger email list and that'll be more attractive to advertisers. We worked with the Business Journal out of Youngstown, Ohio. We set up their free registration wall for them, and when we launched.

They.

Were pretty pleased in their first week and their second week, they got a thousand new registrations in their first week. I think about a thousand new registrations in their second week. And then it's likely been sort of curving down a little bit. But early on, when you set up that wall, you'll have a big influx of registrations and you'll get a mix of paid subscriptions at the same time. One of the questions I get is, gee, if I give away content for free, why would I pay? But the reason is because while the casuals, who really aren't that interested, they'll never pay. But anybody who's kind of a super casual, more towards a hardcore reader, you're going to be sending them your content every day or every week, and they're going to want to read that content. And that's the engagement that you gain by gaining that email address. So it's absolutely. I can't emphasize it enough. It's super powerful.

Yeah. And part of that as well is you're kind of building that trust over time. It's a lot lower barrier to entry as far as the sales process goes. There's not as much of a commitment for the user. So you get to build up that, that relationship over time. Kind of dip your toe in the water instead of, you know, asking, will you marry me on the very first date?

That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. They, the, you're proving to them that you're publishing good content because you're sending it to them via email every day or every week or every month, depending on what you're doing. And so they get to experience that and that is part of the relationship. So, yeah, so when it's time to pay, when they keep hitting that request to pay, you've earned that trust because they know they're getting good content from you. I'll also say that the other benefit of this registration wall approach is that it reduces the friction point of making a purchase. So typically you'd meter your content or lock it down and then they'd hit the, hey, you have to pay for full access and you pitch it right? And then they get to a long form and they got to fill out their name, their, you know, their email, choose a password, make a, choose the subscription that they want, monthly or annual or whatever, enter your their payment information and then hit submit. So there's a lot of steps that they have to go through. When there's no registration method, it's just, okay, it's okay, now it's time to pay. But with the registration wall, you're saying, here's more for free, you just have to register. Well, you're getting that step, which is like step one out of two steps out of the way, right? And people like free so that the motivation for signing up is high and they're registered, they're logged in. Then when it's time to pay, you as the publisher already have their, they're already registered on the site, so all they got to do is type in their credit card information. It's a much less painless step. And so it reduces the friction of the whole, the whole payment of the steps and breaking it into two actually helps increase your conversions for that reason. So one of the things that some of our publishers have started doing and is working well is being able to get more demographic data from their readership. So when you have that, and this is easy to set up, well, at least with leaky paywall, but when you're giving away your more articles for free, you're in a good spot with that person who's signing up. They're excited to give you their information and get in and keep reading because they're not paying for it, so that's a good time to ask a couple questions. So if you need to collect demographic information, you know, depending on the type of audience you have, you know, just some one, two, or three questions that would help you organize how you email your readership, it's a good time to do it during that registration process. And I know with leaky paywall, we've integrated with, like, mailchimp groups, so you can have readers sign into different newsletters and send out targeted newsletters to each group. So that's another way of kind of surveying who your readers are and what they actually want. But at the very least, just collect the data that you need. And for instance, we have a Portuguese news publisher in New Jersey we're working with now. And, and they have clusters of Portuguese communities around the country. And so they target their news. They're working on breaking up their news by country, and that is going to allow them to ask, hey, where are you located on that registration page? Which will help them target their newsletters down the road. So that's the free registration wall approach. The second one I'll mention is one that's worked for a very long time across all industries, and that's the free trial when it's time to actually ask for money. This has proven time and time again to be the best way to convert a paying subscriber. And that means you offer a free trial or a paid trial. So it's $0, but you have to enter your credit card in and you get, you know, 30 days of full access or something like that, or you pay a dollar for the 30 days or the two weeks or two months or however you set that up. And it's, you know, we live in this freemium world. We have been living it in it for a long time. And it, you know, the free trials have been around for decades in lots of other industries, but giving away something for free, like, you know, an app download or would be a popular one today, absolutely works. You know, you want to check something out, it's not going to cost you any real money right now, but you are. You are interested enough to offer a credit card. And then, you know, the content's good. Hey, this is pretty good. I'll just keep it riding. And you end up at that hopefully, recurring payment that charges on their card. And, you know, this. I'm going to take a little sideways step here, but sort of reminds me of that whole friction thing. Sometimes publishers say, hey, you know, I want to sell an article, or I Want to sell the PDF or I just want to sell this single item or should I, you know, should I set up recurring payments? And the, the friction is putting the credit card into the system. That's really the biggest friction point. And once, and, and that argues for setting up recurring monthly payments. If you look at Netflix, they're probably, probably the best example. They have a monthly recurring payment and once you pay it, you're, you're in and there's no more, there's no more friction, there's no more pain. That pain point's gone. So yeah, you put in your credit card, you start getting full access to the publication and that charge just becomes part of your credit card bill. So yeah, it hurts to pay the credit card bill, but that's the one, you know, you're paying the whole thing and that individual purchase pain point is gone. So yeah, yep.

One thing that trial does is it also helps get rid of spam users. Because one downside we didn't really touch on, on the free registration wall is that someone could put in just a fake email address. And so by offering the free trial where they have to put in the credit card, that helps remove those kind of, you know, fake users. One way around that on the free registration wall I just wanted to touch on is you could also do require email verification. So after someone signs up on the free wall, they have to verify in their email address by clicking a link. And so obviously they'd have to put in a valid email in order for that to work. So I just wanted to make sure that, that we mentioned that because we have had a few questions from publishers about fake emails on the free registration wall.

That brings up another good point. I get lots of questions from publishers who say exactly something like that, hey, what about spam registrations or what about incognito browser getting around the paywall or getting the login paying, getting your login and then sharing it with all your friends. All these concerns about getting around the paywall. Right? And maybe that's a topic for another day. But the real, the bottom line answer is that people that are creating fake email accounts, to your point, they're probably not going to pay you ever, right? They're doing extra work to get around your 5 or 10 or $15 a month or whatever you're charging. And it's worth it to them to spend the time. And in the world we live in today, time is really the most valuable resource we have. And most people, and this is who you're targeting is most people, they don't want to be bothered. They just want to, you know, if something looks good to them, they want a convenient, quick way to pay, gain access. And yeah, they're supporting the publication as well. So yeah, the whole, you could go crazy putting up walls to try to stop, you know, the, I don't know, I don't want to call them cheaters, the people that are getting around, you know, I mean, we all do it. It's, you know, you're not going to subscribe, but you do want to read that extra article. You're not really the hardcore subscriber. But is it really worth trying to fight that? No, not really. And it can create other administrative headaches for you too.

So that's part of the reason why you're trying to build that relationship. That's more important than trying to block all the loopholes is how can you build that relationship? And if you focus on that, that's what's most important.

Yeah, and the people getting around like it's the 5%, maybe it's the 10%, but that still means that 90% are people who would eventually want to pay just for access or potentially pay. All right, so that was the free trial conversion system. Now do you use a free trial in conjunction with free registration wall? I think that's a great approach. I can't give you any hard data, but it certainly would get somebody to pull their credit card out and say, okay, well let's, I have limited access now I really want more access. Here's a dollar or here's zero dollars, but I'll put in my credit card and I'll get that full access and then off you go. You have yourself hopefully a recurring subscriber. Do you have to do it? No, you could, you could have the registration wall and then you can, and this is, we have a lot of publishers that have, have it set up this way and then when it's time to pay, it's time to pay. And that was their free trial was, was registering on site and getting, getting a few more extra articles each month. Now the bottom line here is you got to test it for yourself, for your audience. And that's one thing that is really important is whatever starting point you pick, you don't have to stay there. You can offer three free articles per month in a registration wall. But what happens if you tighten down your free registration wall to two free articles or one, which we have a few publishers that are doing in it and it does great. So you know, take a, take a 30 day window at least I'd say, and make one change and see, see what it does. So number three, number three is typically being called the metered hybrid paywall approach. Okay, what does that mean? So metered hybrid, when you start, you'll likely start with the metered paywall and you might have the free registration wall as well. But ultimately all your content, or most of your content is metered. So you have limited number of free articles per month as the general public and then you take the subscription. Now this is like a kind of a step two for subscription strategy as you start gaining subscription subscribers and you, you'll obviously, you always learn more and more about what they really want. The hybrid part comes in when you start creating premium content that, that is only for paid subscribers. You actually lock it down separately for paid subscribers. And Jeremy, you had an example right with Catch magazine, is that right?

Mm, yeah, yeah. So with Catch magazine, which is a fly fishing magazine where they write articles with a lot of amazing photography, but then their big piece, every issue is they put together a video, you know, probably 20, 30 minute kind of almost full length video that describes a specific area or a specific location. And so that's the main draw for a lot of people. And so what they chose to do was the articles themselves are on the metered approach, where you can read so many before they ask, ask you to subscribe. But the videos themselves are always behind the paywall. So in order to watch the video content, you have to subscribe because that is their premium content.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I was reading an article about Le Parisian, French news publication, and they were doing a very similar approach. We're metering all their content and then starting to build out exclusive premium content only for paid subscribers. And they ended up doubling their paid subscriptions doing that. And they're actually now producing more paid premium only content for the site. And they're finding that a lot of this premium content is the trigger for the paid subscription, which is really cool. So I say for any publisher that's producing content, keep an eye out for what your subscribers are really reading, what they're gravitating towards, and figure out a way to, you know, once you have your paywall running and you're taking paid subscriptions, either create premium content exclusively for them, or you can even package up existing content. Maybe you have a deep archive of thematically similar articles that you can put together into some sort of a package or an issue. You could do that with issue M very easily and you could lock that down for paid subscribers. There's, there's lots to consider. I think there are a lot of opportunities in terms of content. I mean, video is certainly a good example. I haven't seen any audio like podcasts tend to be free. But I know, I have read that there is some premium paid, you know, podcast content coming, which certainly makes sense. So that'd be something to look at. And then thinking about articles or article series that would be subscriber only, you could lock down just for subscribers. So that, that's. Yeah, that's something to absolutely look at.

Yeah. I have seen one example where someone only specific piece of content within the article was locked down. In this case it was an audio file.

So in order to do subscription with leaky paywall. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, I've actually, I've seen that.

Too, where.

A publication will have like a premium document that they had to purchase in order to put it on their website and they'll wrap that around their paywall so that all the content around it you can read, but you can't download the PDF or whatever the special content is without being a paid subscriber.

That's perfect. Have you gotten any feedback from that approach at all?

Not yet, but they just started it and we'll see, we'll see whether or not that that works or not. It's really going to come down to whether or not people can find that content elsewhere for free.

Right, right. Yes, the monopoly of content dilemma.

And I think that also is a good point too. Like a lot of this is just experimenting, right? Yeah, you know, you gotta experiment and see what's gonna work for your particular audience.

Yeah, I see that a lot. It's like one publication, a seven day free trial might work and then you have to pay. Whereas I go 50 miles down the road to a different publication and it doesn't really work as well. So it's all, it's all about your audience and the target and what they're willing, willing to do.

Absolutely. Every audience is definitely different. Yeah, you got to figure, you got to figure it out. I'll move on to the number four. As far as a type of approach, this is another, a little more of an advanced approach. I don't really know what to call it, so I'm calling it the super premium approach. And that's absolutely not an official definition, but we had. And the idea is that you have your meter paywall, you have your premium content, you're getting subscribers and then, yeah, you can lock down content for existing subscribers. But what about creating a whole new Premium subscription level that costs more to gain access to something that's different than what you're producing. And so we had a great example, a great example. Ipolitics in Canada, they're a political news publisher. During the last election cycle, what they did is they created a super premium level for election coverage for three months. So basically it was three months of daily updates to what was going on with their elections and where their normal subscription was running. Actually, I kind of forget what their. If it's five bucks a month or whatever, their ten bucks a month or whatever their normal subscription is, but they were charging $100 a month. And in fact, if you signed up, if you signed up like on day one of the, of those three months, you paid 300 bucks for that information. If you signed up 30 days into it, so you only had two months left, you'd pay 200 bucks. You basically paid for the block of time. You know, it kind of prorated that block of time. And it was easy to set up. And they sold, they sold enough to be happy with it. And I mean, think about it. You go from a 5 or $10 a month product to, to a $300 product right now. Of course, it takes a lot of work for them to, to cover, cover all that, but it was something that they could easily, you know, bring, bring up and say you can, you know, you can access this and you know, the beauty is you, you have this, you know, you have your hopefully free registration wall feeding your email list, right, that's converting subscribers. Your base of your audience is growing. I mean, your, your digital audience should actually absolutely be growing right now. There's no reason for it not to be. And, and then you, you bring up this super premium product and say, you know, hey, growing audience, this is what we're doing now. And sign up and they do. So if you guys can think of a better term than super premium, let me know. This sounds a little corny. All right, and the Last 1, number 5, I want to say it's not really a pay. Well, I guess it is a paywall strategy. But one of the things that's becoming very, very clear as far as increasing paid subscriptions is offering apps to your readers. That is iOS and Android apps. And for a lot of, a lot of reasons, it's the best reading experience available today. I think 90% of phone use is through an app. The statistic is somewhere around that, you know, the app is on our phone. We can, we can, or iPad or whatever, and you can just tap it and it's convenient. You get push notifications so you can instantly communicate with those readers, and that's great. But there's also discovery, and that's the thing nobody realizes. We have our unipress app platform, which ties in with leaky paywall, so we can kind of monitor what's happening with discovery in the App Store. When we talk to our different publishers that are running apps, the numbers are getting pretty wide. We have some publishers that will say up to 50% of new subscriptions are coming in through the App Store, and some publishers that say, we look at looks about 10% of subscriptions are coming through the App Store, and then everything in sort of in the middle. And if you just start googling around, you'll see that apps are kind of on the table again because of the discovery, because of the convenience. It's the best way to read content. And. And there's one more thing that I keep hearing today is they keep you logged in. Right? And so regardless of what publishing system you're using, if it's on the web, there's always a login, right? And then you go to a different browser or you go on your phone or whatever, and then you gotta log in again. Right. And it seems like a simple thing. And to me, I was originally like, yeah, that's a simple thing, but it's not a simple thing because it's a pain to lock into everything all the time. So with apps, you, you, you solve that. You check off that problem right off the bat, right? It's like, okay, download the app. I log in with my existing email and password, and I'm in, boom, you know, forever. You just logged in, your device is connected to the publication, and you, you, you have this, this beautiful reading environment, and you don't have to worry about logging in, and you have the publication in your pocket.

Yeah. And I think, too, the value proposition of an app, even if your users aren't heavy app users, having that as part of your subscription, I think helps. It helps people make that jump to subscribe knowing that they have premium app access.

That's a great point. That's absolutely true. Right. So when you're, when you're pitching, when you're. I hate that word, but that is the sales word. When you're. You're encouraging somebody to sign up, that could tip the scales, that's like, oh, they have an app. Well, I could just download the app. Oh, that's. That's cool. That's great. You know, and then off they go, yeah, yeah, kind of.

It Kind of, it kind of levels up your publication in many ways.

It's like, wow, right? Right. These guys are serious. Yeah. The public serious. They're giving us apps. So those are the five things that we see working today as far as paywall approach goes. Just to reiterate the first thing and the second thing and the third thing you should always do is work on building that email list. And that registration wall is probably the answer for most publications. Another question I get is what do I set my meter to? In other words, how many free articles should I give away? And that answer is really dependent on your audience and your, the amount of the quantity, the volume of articles you produce each month or each week. And so if you're, if you're a producer of one article a week, maybe it's a long form article like T journey is, you're probably going to restrict access a little bit more. So you might have your meter set to just one free article a month that you're giving away before somebody has to register or subscribe. But if you're, let's say you're a news publisher and you're producing 500 articles a month, say as maybe like a weekly news publisher, well then you're going to need to give away more, maybe five articles per month. But maybe you're also, maybe you're producing sort of very technical or high end content and you know that your customers want access to it. That would argue for setting the meter to something low, like one article per month or two months. So that there's, there's just really a big motivation to either pay up front or to register right away and to follow up on that so you can look at the volume and look at your audience and the type of content you're producing. But the important part is to experiment with it. So from what I've seen, for a typical news publisher, local, regional news publisher, three free articles per month seems to be a pretty magic number. And that's a good starting point. But you want to know what happens if you Change that to 2 free articles a month or 1 free article a month? Or how about 0 free articles a month? Oh my God. Now we're making it a hard paywall. But I'll tell you. Military travel publisher and of course it's Covid now, so it's not so much travel, but what they were doing is during the summer travel season when their readership really swelled and they're all about military discounts for hotels and campgrounds and free flights or discounted flights for military and stuff like that or a database of information. So in the summertime, their audience swells. And, and what they did was, is they started mixing up their meter, knowing that they had this real strong influx during the summer, where each month they would have the meter set to like one week it was set for one free article. Another week it was set for four free articles. And then two weeks it was set for zero free articles, too. And by definition, if you set your meter to zero, that means you get no free articles. That essentially turns at least our paywall, the leaky paywall, into a hard paywall. And what they were doing is dancing with Google search because they wanted to be, they wanted to make sure all their content was indexed and they produce a fair amount of content. And so they would have the meter running during peak periods for a couple of weeks, but then for the other two weeks of the month, let's say they would actually turn the meter to zero. And it worked for them. You know, their conversions when, when, you know, they had the traffic coming in and then when they went to zero for a limited period of time, it forced people to make that decision, do I pay or do I not? And, and you know, and they, they got, I think they said they're, they raised their, increased their subscriptions by like 15% or something just from using that technique. So that's another way to look at it if you really want to be aggressively curious about what your meter does to your, to your visitors coming in.

I was just thinking too, that. And something we haven't really touched on is when it comes to a paywall, you know, it doesn't have to be either this on or off type situation. You can also give people a paragraph or two paragraphs of the content and then ask them to pay. So if you're struggling on what to do, there's a number of ways that you could go about this without making it a binary thing.

Absolutely. You could meter your content generally. And then for your premium articles, you could just set your excerpt to be, you know, half the article. Let's say it's a long form article. Right. Or a third of the article. And get, get people sort of invested in reading. And then it's like, oh, if you want to read the rest of the article, you have to be a paid subscriber. And that does work. I subscribe to a newsletter or a news site just like that. And it absolutely worked for me. I was getting into the article and, and it's like, you know, it was a technical article and I was into it and oh, I got to pay to read the rest of it. Look around and you're like oh the rest of this looks good too. I'm in. You know, and Right. Yeah no that's a, that's a very good point.

Yeah. And I think when you combine that a lot of the publishers that I work with are in small regional areas, they're newspapers and they combine this strategy with the free trial and or a paid trial and it seems to work work for the most of them. It seems to work pretty well.

Yeah I like that approach. Yeah. Excerpt. Yeah really like it's like super teasing your premium content.

Yep, exactly.

Yeah. Is that an official word? Can we use that one? I use the word super twice though. Super premium and super. I got it. I'm running out of ideas. All right, so let's why don't we switch.