Episode 3 | 6 Examples of Successful Publication & Product Launches

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.

Hey, this is Pete again at the Paywall Podcast, talking about all the great things you can do with your paywall strategy to generate more subscribers. Today we're going to have a really interesting talk about what we're calling six successful new publications or new product launches in the digital space. And we're going to look at some different publishers and what they've done, and we have a history with all of these and kind of discuss where they are now. And maybe you as the publisher can cherry pick a few pieces of success that they've had here in order to grow your publication. So the first one I want to talk about is a really interesting one. This is the Austin Monitor down in Austin, Texas. And they, they're not brand new. They started, they started up five, six years ago, but their approach is pretty new. Well, very new and, and still new today, which is amazing to me. But what they do is they cover town hall decisions, essentially what's going on with real estate development and local business and governance. And what they're doing is they're actually building a database of articles so that anybody who works in governance or real estate or doing corporate acquisitions or whatever needs to get their hands on this kind of information. They will actually have to pay extra for archive access. So that's the whole. They have a premium subscription level for sort of a standard access to subscriptions, but any content that is over 90 days old immediately falls into an archive or premium level status now. Now they use leaky paywall and they're using our archive function to do this. And they've been doing this for over five years. And the interesting thing is we actually built this archive function for them. So they were the first publisher that we did this for, and it was kind of an experiment at the time. And if you look at their subscriptions, it's pretty interesting. They have three levels. They have a very low level premium level, which gives you ten articles per month and it's about five bucks. And then there's a unlimited articles per month, which is $22, but it still doesn't include the archive access. And you have to buy the third level, the All Access level, which is almost $100 a month, in order to access all the archive content. And this model has been working for them. They've been growing their subscriptions. You know, their. Their subscriptions are as far as the levels go, they're varied. But there definitely is a group of dedicated subscribers that are. That are willing to pay the hundred dollars per month. So, you know, if you're in local news coverage, this is, this is something absolutely to consider and just to tell a little story. I was at the New York Press association conference. This was year and a half ago or something like that, and I was one of the keynote speakers. He had worked at the New York Times. He was currently at the San Francisco Tribune. And the audience was about 300 news publishers. So the New York News association has about 700, 800 members. It's the biggest state association in the country. And he was talking about think revenue generation ideas. And he asked the audience, so who's out there covering town hall stuff? To build up a database of information that you could sell to entities and people that needed it. And he had everybody raise their hand. And the amazing thing is not one publisher rank raised their hand in the entire room. And I was sitting there thinking, wait a second, we just went through this project like a few years ago. Why isn't everybody doing this? And it takes work, obviously, to get this done. But I think that if you're in the local news space, get in deep with the town, sort of the town hall decisions, get that database and consider selling an archive for access. It absolutely works. Anyway, it's austinmonitor.com you can go take a look at it and check it out for yourself. Okay, so that's awesome. Monitor. And Jeremy, I think you wanted to talk about Universal Music, which is one of our other clients we did some really interesting work for.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did some really fun stuff with them. So whenever the COVID hit, obviously all the live concerts for the year were closed down. And so they were looking for a way to drive user engagement to how do we take these live concerts, bring them online, and not only do that, but then also sell access to try and recoup some of the losses from that. And so what they did was really cool is we implemented this pay per post functionality for them. So basically what they can do is sell access to individual pages easily. And a user can pick and choose what it is that they want to have access to. So, for example, they'll take a live stream of a concert and they'll embed it on a page. And then they'll say, you know, this concert starts in X number of days. And then the user can choose which concerts they want to buy access to. And then so they purchase the access, they get access to that page and then there's a countdown on the page. It basically says, here's when the concert goes live. And then, you know, once the concert's live and they're able to view it right there on the site. And so it's, it's really cool because, you know, leaky paywall handles all the access side of things. And then Universal Music can control what the site looks like, how they want the experience to be for the user as far as the live stream goes. So they have complete control of that. So it's just a really cool way to use the access part of leaky paywall in a way that's, you know, it's kind of out of the ordinary, out of the unconventional paywall process, but, you know, has worked really well for them and it provides another, another revenue stream for them.

Yeah, that's, that's super cool. I remember when we started that project, that was kind of the first time we got involved in something like that. And with COVID running, you know, the comments were, well, you know, people can't go to live concerts really like they used to. So let's do this live streaming thing and see if people will pay for it. And you know, Universal Music, I mean, this is Deutsch Gramophone is the label that's actually running this. And Universal has, I don't know, 50, 100 brands. I forget it how many they have, but I actually got it. I got an email back from them a couple days ago because I asked them, hey, how's it going? And they said it's going well, good enough for them to continue the project and try, try a few new things. So I thought that was, that was some, some really good feedback on it. And, and it makes sense. I mean, we are absolutely spending money. You know, the data is telling us that E commerce is exploding right now. People are spending money online because we're sitting at home.

Yep, yep. Yeah, I saw a stat the other day where the, the, the gross spending for the US hasn't actually changed. It's just going into E commerce versus retail, you know, so the actual amount that people are spending hasn't changed. You know, despite everything that's going on, everyone's just purchasing things online and figuring how to doing things online.

Yeah.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity there Just to think like, okay, how can we, you know, think outside of the box a little bit with content access and, you know, to, you know, see what other kind of ways you can do. Do something similar, you know, selling access to something that's, you know, even outside of your normal just kind of like news feed style. Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity in that space because people are used to even more than they were. There was read somewhere that basically this has pushed us like two or three years ahead of where we would have been with people used to using E commerce if we hadn't had the whole Covid shelter at home stuff. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in just figuring out new ways to give people access to things that we haven't even touched on yet.

Yeah. Yeah. I was just talking to Broken Pencil magazine. They're in Canada. They're. They produce a publication to help arts publishers, comic book publishers succeed with their enterprises. And they're. They have this Canzine festival that they usually have every year that's a live event. And this year, of course, it's. There's no live event. But he's still having the Canzine Festival and you know, you have to, you. You have to be. Be a paid subscriber to access certain things. He's also got a. He's embedding a Twitch live stream onto the site and he's also has another, another platform. I forget what it is to. To run some of the events that are. That are going on. So maybe that's something we can report on in a future episode. But yeah, it's time to definitely time to think about what kind of products you can put together to sell in addition to paid subscriptions. For sure. Okay, I'm going to jump into one that's near and dear to me because it's where I live. This is about a local email newsletter that started up in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire. So I live in this area region called the Upper Valley. It's a lightly populated region. It covers geographically it's pretty big. It sweeps into a chunk of Vermont and has a big chunk of New Hampshire. But There are only 78,000 of us in this Upper Valley. So it's still pretty lightly populated. And we are served by the Valley News, which is the local regional newspaper for the Upper Valley, which we do subscribe to digitally. And they, they produce original reporting. So it's, you know, it's important for us to, to read that. But Rob Gurwit, a friend of mine, started up Daybreak as an alternative newsletter, email newsletter. There's no website yet, it's just an email newsletter. And you start up a little over a year ago, I think. And what he does, and this is a trend that's happening across probably across the world, but what he does is he curates. I don't really like that word, but he curates what's happening not only with like the Valley News and Dartmouth College is sort of our center point of schooling here in this region. What's going on on Reddit, Facebook groups, the local town listservs, there's always some nice high resolution photography from like mountainscapes where we are that are into this newsletter. And every 6:30am the newsletter shows up and it's got a link to the source, so everybody gets credit, right. If you want to click and read the article. But he writes kind of a personal review slash opinion on sort of his take on what's happening with this piece of news. And, and then, and it's always, it's. He's got his so personal positive spin to it. And I quote him by saying that he, he looks at, you know, when he started this over a year ago, it was just like he and his friends who subscribed to the newsletter and when I met him, he had like 1500, maybe a thousand email addresses. And he, and he said, you know, it's like I'm writing to my friends in the Upper Valley, like this is our neighborhoods. And I'm writing it very, in a very sort of friendly tone and, and with, with some humor. And now he's up to 8,000 subscribers. So in a year or so he's gone from zero to 8,000 email subscribers. And for, and it's just him, right? He, he started it, he's, he's doing it, he's accumulating, he's getting a little bit of help now. But you know, he's bringing in all the, you know, all the different sources of local information into one spot and then, and then throwing his spin on it. And it's been, it's been amazing. It's really just amazing. You get it. It's the thing that personally I, it's the first thing I read in the morning what's going on in the neighborhood, you know, and he reports a little bit on Covid. He recruited a local doctor to come in and sort of screen the COVID information of the, of the area. But most of it is, is really breaks into two major sections. One is the kind of the news, what's happening and then events and pre Covid it was, you know, all the, all the events you could go to. Now it's a little more virtual, but it's still sort of like Covid slash events. And that's the way the newsletter breaks down. His website is going to be daybreak news when it's ready. And I wish I could give you a link but I keep bugging him to get his website launched and he keeps saying I'm too busy so maybe we have to help him with that. So anyway, so his revenue model, let's get to that. He's a donation and sponsorship revenue model. So if you look at his newsletter, usually every day there's a, there's a sponsored article, quote unquote in the middle. In other words, just the title. And it's the same format as all the other news items. It's just the sort of the subject of it. And then his take on it, which is sponsored and, and that's it. It's very lightweight. It just fits right into the content of the newsletter. And then he's got a donate button at the bottom really in the middle that says hey, support us. And he offers one time and subscription donations and you know, without giving away any numbers, he's pretty pleased on the reception he's gotten. He's still obviously working on the revenue side of it, but he has a lot of supporters that are willing to help him financially. So, you know, I was thinking that once he gets his and he needs to get his website up and I'd say if you were building an email newsletter, that's great and that'll absolutely help blow up that email list which we'll always talk about is super important. But the website is where like hey, go to, you know, this web address and sign up. It's the easy thing to refer people to. And then the articles that are on the site are easy for Google to index and easy for people to share in social media, which are, you know, you really need all that cooking along. And then it's so, you know, with, it's easy to connect. Well, at least with leaky paywall it's easy to connect to a. If you subscribe on the, or register on the website, maybe it's free registration that hands off to mailchimp, which is what he uses. And you're just feeding people, you know, that register to the website, to the mailchimp list. You could even create a premium paid newsletter if you wanted to do it that way. And that will in turn grow his email list with the traffic that comes to the site and the new registrations that come through the site. So this, and like I mentioned before, been reading about this and this is, this is definitely a trend that's happening where local towns, you know, the local newspapers that are in these towns should really be driving this. Right? You know, not don't just do original reporting, you know, curate from social media groups, list serves, you know, Reddit groups, all those, you know, whatever's on Instagram, like just look everywhere that your population would hang out in and start, and start being the sort of the center for like the hub for that information. So you're creating a convenient place for your local population, your, your neighbors to go to. And that, that's a, that's a big new revenue opportunity for, for anybody who's either going to start up or who's already a local publisher. Okay, so, Tyler, you have an interesting project with the Welch newspaper, I believe, in your neck of the woods.

Yeah.

Talk about.

Yeah. So I, I'm in West Virginia and I work with a lot of local news publishers in small towns with limited access to Internet. I always, I think of these areas as places where paywalls should not work. So I'm going around to all of these towns and small areas where a digital product should not work at all. The Welch news, it's about 100 years old or so. It's in the southern part of West Virginia. I believe the population's under about 2,000 people or so. And I met them through a workshop and before 2020. So they started their website in January of 2020, I think at the end of January. And the goal was to, let's see if a paywall will work for them. Let's see if they can get their original content on a website. Let's see if people will actually pay for this access. I worked with them a few weeks before we launched, getting them up and running, getting them used to publishing articles on a WordPress based site. Within 10 days. And keep in mind, the market's pretty small. They had 100 new subscribers. These were paying subscribers, not a trial, not a free subscription. This was 100 new paying subscribers. And this has increased. Obviously they had a thousand new Facebook followers in the first 10 days after they launch their website. And what I think is really interesting about the Welch News, I mean, I love working with them, I talk with them all the time, is a lot of their subscriptions are out of the region. So they see maybe 30 to 40% of their digital revenue from out of state. So perhaps people who Are, you know, from the region or have grandparents or whatever, have family in the region who are no longer living in the region, are subscribing to their digital products. So it's, in a way it's opened up their market. You know, it's now way beyond the county in which that they're, you know, that they're in.

So that's amazing. 30%?

I think so. Yeah. That's. It's been a while since I've taken a look at it, but it's, it's high, it's. It's a high amount that surprised me, to be honest.

Yeah. Interesting to know, you know, why, like, I don't know if they have a handle on, you know, why people are subscribing out of state. If it's family or some people move.

Yeah, well, I think in West Virginia there's definitely an emphasis on community and home and family and that sort of thing. So I think you could probably attribute some of that to that. It was also a region in the 1950s where I think they had nearly 100,000 people that lived in the community. It was a booming coal town. So there's, there's history in the area. So I'm not exactly sure, you know, what to attribute it to exactly, but those are, those are some of the factors.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Cool. All right, so thanks for that. And Jeremy, I think you wanted to talk a little bit about the Heisenberg Report, is that correct?

Yeah, yeah. So there's a site we've been working with for a while called the Heisenberg Report, which is really interesting. So it's kind of an opinion news website that was started as a hobby and has kind of taken off. And it has gone from just kind of a side project type thing to being almost basically a full time, full time gig with, you know, paying subscribers and everything. So it was really cool. It's a very niche, you know, niche publication, talks about very specific thing. But it just goes to show, you know, even having kind of a niche audience can be enough if you get enough, you know, if you find the right people to bring in a full time income. So there's people that are actually making this work that normally wouldn't be your normal traditional publisher news group type thing that are still able to take the paywall process and apply it to what they're interested in, what they like talking about and connecting with people around the world about that specific topic and they're able to take that and, and make a good, make some good money off of it. So it's, it's pretty, pretty cool to have seen the, you know, over the years to see it grow and see how it's turned into what it is and to be able to help with the, with the paywall side of that.

Yeah, they, they have definitely a very unique angle on the world of finance and a little bit of politics too, basically covering the markets in their own special way. And you know, we also know that from their feedback that has now turned into a substantial income. It's been a good income for them. And if it started off as a hobby, I think that speaks a lot to chasing something that you think other people would like, that you find interesting, that other people would like to know. They do get a fair amount of commentary on their site, so there's definitely a lot of engagement from their audience. And of course you have to be a logged in paying subscriber in order to leave a comment, which is easy enough to set up. The other thing I also actually just realized is that they like the Austin Monitor. They only allow, you know, paying subscribers access to archives and they also have the archives set at 90 days, which is interesting. So there's a, there's another benefit to giving archive access and apparently there's some value into, you know, digging into the past when it comes to financial markets.

Yeah, I've always liked the idea of archives selling that at a premium. And I know that for a lot of newspapers, the target market for that is usually like attorneys or people who are looking to do research.

Yeah, yeah. Business, corporates, governance, maybe. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And that I think that, you know, kind of speaks into why it's important to know kind of who your different demographics are. And knowing that there could be, you know, while that might not be important for some, you know, you could have a target market that it is. So, you know, knowing what all of your different verticals that you're going after and your demographics is an important part of running a successful paywall.

Absolutely. Speaking of new products, I almost forgot to mention Ipolitics. So they're a Canadian political news publisher and they sell premium access to their content. They run leaky paywall, it's a metered paywall. But during election season last year they created a three month product. I think I mentioned this maybe in an earlier podcast, but it's absolutely a new product. And they cover daily, covered what was going on with Canadian elections for three months. And while they charge a nominal amount monthly, I forget what it is. Five bucks a month for their regular content. They were charging $300 for access to their election coverage. And it was sort of a sliding scale. If you signed up in the middle, it would be $150 of the three month period. But they did well with that and you know, they turned it on for the three months. They got a bunch of subscribers from it, then they turned it off and you know, they'll probably do it again. And that's, that's another, another example of maybe having a special focus on some event going on in your community that you can charge access for and charge additional access for and price accordingly. Okay, so the last publisher that I want to talk about, I think that we have on the schedule for today is DK on Pittsburgh Sports. Or now it's called DK Pittsburgh Sports. And we worked with DK years ago to get him launched and this was truly a startup story where he worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune as sports writer, nationally recognized sports writer. And he decided to go off on his own and start up a sports blog all about Pittsburgh sports. So Steelers, Penguins, et cetera, including college sports in the area, but really more focused on professional sports. And he got the jump on this. And I remember and he was charging $3 per month for a subscription. And I remember in the, it was like in the first, the first year he hit, he just about hit 10,000 paid subscribers and I just couldn't believe it. We were in the middle of developing apps, the paywall was running and it turned into a full blown business very quickly. So one of the lessons learned for me was that, wow, we love sports in this country. The fans are just amazing and obviously willing to support good sports writing. And so that was pretty cool. And now the model has changed quite a bit. He's got a large staff, he's got some known sports writers, he's covering, creating a lot more content on the site. And he's taken a, a sponsorship approach to income generation. And I'm not, you know, I'm not 100% in on exactly where, where the revenue is coming from, but the major sponsorships is a, is a big part of it for the content. But what's interesting is, is that he's got, and he's published this on his site. He's got over 60,000 app downloads. So you can see that his audience had continued to build and build and build. And the thing I find most interesting, and this sort of wraps back to email list building, which is we will sound like a broken record for a very long time talking about, but it's that important, is that he doesn't have a free registration wall or anything like that on his site. All his content is open right now. But if you want to leave a comment, and from what I understand, if you're, you know, if you're a sports fan for a team, you kind of want you to share your opinion on that team, that has been the gateway for people registering on the site just so they can leave comments and participate in the discussion. So I think the moral of the story here is, yeah, you can do a free registration wallet and that works great. But if it's sports related or you are serving another really, really passionate audience where people absolutely are, you know, running over themselves to comment, then maybe comments is your. Is your gateway to collect those free registrations. And then you simply attach your, you know, anybody who registers to leave comments gets added to your email list, whatever you happen to use. So I think in that way, that's a pretty neat way of continuing that list, building practice. And he's been doing this full time for a bunch of years now. And it's just one more example of a startup. And to wrap this up, I would say that if you're thinking about starting something, whether it's a new product or whether you just, you have some very, very strong opinions that, you know, this information, you know, this particular, whatever your set of information that you have an expertise in needs to be brought to an audience, then, then you, you can absolutely do it. Whether it's an email newsletter approach, whether it's, you know, you're focusing on a niche, whether you're creating, whether you're already selling subscriptions and you want to create a new product and really, like Jeremy said, just really ratchet down the focus on the super niche that's willing to pay you 100 bucks a month or whatever you decide to charge, these are all really pretty easy things to do from a technical standpoint. I know it's not easy to do from a content standpoint because you have to create all this content, but creating, you know, creating products today from the tool side, from what we see is very easy, especially with the tools we work with on our leaky paywall platform. And we'll get into more of that as well in future podcasts. And one of the things we're going to cover is what you can do with your existing content and repackage that. So build that email list, start the new publication, start the new product, and if you have any questions or just reach out to us, you can reach me personally at Pete101. I love chatting about anything digital marketing in the publishing space.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player of choice and we'll see you next episode.