Episode 8 | Local News Publishers: Subscriptions vs. Memberships vs. Donations

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's 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.

Okay, so welcome to the next episode number eight of, of the Paywall podcast. This is the new year and we're going to talk about something under hot debate, certainly the last couple of years. And that's whether you as a publisher should sell subscriptions, memberships or ask for donations from your visitors that come to your website. And I want to focus this on the local news publisher. Of course, if you're a magazine publisher or other type of content publisher, you can absolutely consider all these options for generating income. But I want to pick on sort of the local news publisher because in conversations over the last few months, I've talked to a lot of local news publishers who, who have basically said, hey, we're setting up not subscriptions or setting up memberships, right? So you know, the, there's a lot of movement to sell, you know, promote memberships instead of subscriptions as far as local news publishing goes. And I think that's, that's really interesting. And sort of the vibe that I get from news publishers is, is that what I should be doing? So in a way they're asking the question. I thought we'd really answer that question here and before we jump in and oh, and just to mention, when Jeremy, you and I were out in work camp for publishers in Columbus pre Covid, and that's really an assembly of we had local publishers there, news publishers, we had national publishers there, and a lot of them being news. And that was really the hot debate at the time was, you know, geez, I think, you know, we should be really making this mission based and promoting donations instead of selling subscriptions. And you know, at that time, which was not that long ago and still today we really, I mean we work with all types of approaches for income, but subscriptions being really probably the main thing that gets marketed with local news publishers here. But that was a really hot debate. So we're going to answer that question now. Before we answer that, let's define what these three types of income generation are. And this comes from the Columbia, I think, Journalism Review. And let's look at what is a subscription. A subscription model requires audiences to pay money to gain access to a product or service subscription. Convey. Conveys a transactional relationship. So it's you product, you produce content. Let's say it's local content. You can't get it anywhere else. People want it. It's the transaction. It works especially for local news publishing and we see lots of success with that. All right, number two, donations. A donation model encourages audiences to give their time or money to an institution in support of a common cause or common values. Donation conveys a charitable relationship, mission based. And number three, membership. A membership model invites audiences to give their time, money, connections, professional expertise, distribution to their networks and or ideas to support a cause they believe in. Memberships represents two way knowledge exchange between journalists and members. You might think of membership as more committed, a more committed relationship that is robust and active. So these are, this comes from a reliable source. These are three definitions. And I'm going to say right now what is the answer? The answer is all three. And Tyler, you were really the, the one who came up with that. I think as, as a, as a concept and it absolutely makes sense. There is no reason you cannot have all three in the mix. So let's, let's break that down a little bit. And first I want to say that if you're a local news publisher, really just about every publisher, you have a mission. Right. And part of that mission, from what I see with conversations with publishers, is, is, you know, with local communities. Yeah, the mission is to, you know, deliver news and information, but also you're doing it in support of the community and those, you know, when you subscribe, when I subscribe to our local newspaper, I am now part of the community. I live in the community. I am contributing to the newspaper which is involved in the community. I, yeah, I feel like a member. Yeah, I'm a subscriber. Yeah, I will donate, I will do all of those things. So. And we'll talk a little bit more about it. And that mission based approach needs to be promoted. So Tyler, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. You came up with, with this. I think it's brilliant. When you talk about generating income with subscriptions, you call that a need to eat, which I thought was. And which is, yeah, it's like you, you know, you have all you, you put your resources, you put time and money, you pay for staff and you have to, that money has to come back. You know, you have to make a profit with that model. And so this, when you require a subscription for content, you're essentially telling your audience, hey, we, we, we just need to pay People, you know, to get stuff done, we need to pay for our expenses. And I think need to eat is a really great way of framing that.

The donation simply. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I mean, simply put, you can't have a publication if you're not bringing in revenue. So like, nothing else matters if you aren't bringing in revenue, whether it's from traditional print or from digital or whatever it is.

So advertising. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and right. And so because, you know, advertise, digital advertising and print advertising are really sliding down a slope. Subscriptions are, and other forms of, of generating income are just becoming more and more important. So yeah, paying subscriptions, you need to eat. Absolutely. The second thing you coined, which I thought was great, was for donations and that is support us more. Right, so yeah, so you have, yeah, you have like. Yeah, you could set up a donations only subscription on your website or paid newsletter or something. But you can do that in, in conjunction with subscriptions. Right? Where you. Okay, I'm a paid subscriber, but I can also support the publication more. I think that's great.

Yeah. I mean, essentially giving customers or just supporters an avenue to support you and to give you as much money as they want can't hurt the cause. And I actually saw this on the Welch News. Someone contributed money. I'm not sure they were an actual subscriber or not, but it was, you know, far beyond the $5 per month that they charge.

Yeah, that's true. And, and, and as far as donations go, they can absolutely outperform subscription income, but they do work very well together. There's, there's, there's. Let me just jump right to Twitch. Twitch. For anybody who knows what Twitch is, it's a streaming service for gamers and esports. And essentially you compete in an esport, play a video game and you have people watching you live livestream while you're playing the game. And you can do two things. You can subscribe to that, to that streamer's Twitch channel and pay a recurring monthly fee and you can donate. So there are two options built right into the interface. Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for a billion dollars. Right. They're the, they're ranked like the top 20th in terms of popularity in terms of site visitors in the world. I mean, this is a massive subscription donation system basically for, you know, and the content is streaming video. So Amazon knows how it works and I don't know how the revenue actually splits apart, but you clearly what you're doing as a publisher is you're giving Your audience. The choice. I can, yeah, sign up and subscribe. Great. And. Or can donate. It's very, and with leaky paywall, you can, you can, you can set up both very easily and the don't. And you can even decide to give people who donate a full subscription. Like, that's easy to do. You're just, you're just positioning the two to give the, Give your audience a choice in how you do it. So I think, I think for me the bottom line is do both. You're a local news publisher at the very least set up your paid subscriptions and, and request donations. And a paid subscriber is look at, you know, look at the political organizations that are out there. Npr. You know, you get somebody to pay you money, they're the perfect person to go back to and say, hey, we need your support. You know, please donate. So you just target subscribers for donations. Again, it falls back to the mission base. Right? Like, and let me get off on this tangent a little bit too. You. Whether, regardless of how things get set up, you, you need to promote and aggressively promote your mission to, to your audience and where your income comes from. So these are things that I see publishers fall down on a lot. And I talk to publishers who, you know, they think that, oh, the government pays for all our staff and expenses. Like it's a government funded project. Like, why, why do you know where, where newspapers are struggling to survive? The general public is, is thinking that they're. Okay. I talked to a, a high school sports publisher, right? Local 4 high schools. He covers local sports, kind of a local, you know, newspaper, but, but just for, for high school sports. And you know, he surveyed his readership and his readership was like, oh yeah, well, the schools pay you, right? Like, no, no, you guys, maybe like we survive through subscriptions. And so, you know, what I would say is on all the touch points, you just need to be clear. You know, when on your subscription page, your signup pages, in your welcome emails, it's important to broadcast your mission. Mission's very important. And the support of the community and the back and forth and, and, and educating the local audience in terms of where the revenue comes from and how, how much you count on the community. Support is really a big key to the success. Okay, sorry, I went off the rails there a little bit. And then membership. So the third, we talked about the subscriptions to the donations and then three. The membership model. The membership model basically is where members want to be part of the support cause where there's a, there's A, there's a two way, two way communication. So let's, so those are the three. Let's talk now how to integrate. And we've talked a little bit about it already and we talked about the education of your audience. But let's kind of step through it on how you could set up all three income avenues to work for say a local news publication. And the first thing I'm going to say right off the bat is for the funnel, the sales funnel, the lead flow, the start of the relationship with the new subscriber. And typically we'll start with a free registration and we've beat this to death and we continue to do it doing so. And this week I was talking to someone and I said, look, if I could make this mandatory, I would, but I can't. But setting up a free registration where you offer something for free, typically like a few extra articles per month is so important. You're missing a huge opportunity if you don't have it. Because free is easy to sell. People sign up, they don't have to pay. It's they only have to cough up limited information and they get registered in your system and you have their email address now you can now you can communicate your content and your promotions to them. So that's all I'm going to say about the free registration. Set it up. It's the start of, of, of 90% of everything in terms of the, the audience relationship today. It works. So once you have the free registration rolling and your lists start to build, well, you will encourage the paid subscriptions, right? They will come naturally and the donations as well. The paid subscribers, like I mentioned before, are really the likely future donors and you're giving them access to your content. You're giving. You might have a premium newsletter or other products to sell. As an example, if you Ipolitics has a premium newsletter that is a full text newsletter, but you can only get it if you pay. If you're actually a paying subscriber. We're going to talk more about premium newsletters down the road as they're really growing pretty fast. But typically it's your content and then getting on the right email lists and then we'll talk about other products. Membership is where you might give access to your writers or access to like a group, a Facebook group, maybe the community. You can chat with your community in Facebook. And I'm just going to say is it okay to use Facebook? Yeah, it's okay to use Facebook. Most everyone uses works really well. You don't have to build anything it's free and, and you can just start it up right away instead of building, building your own. Some cases it makes sense to have, have your own forums, but they, they do take a lot of management. Let's see, events members obviously can join events workshops and maybe include them in content generation or editing, which some publications do. And there's this cool new service called Subtext which we have a publisher that's setting this up right now. And it's a text based two way communication between your journalists and, and your audience. So you can, you can set this up as a premium plus level of subscription or call it a member level. Like if you, if you sort of step up from, from your, you know, you start with free, then you subscribe and then you step up to premium plus or becoming a full member or however you want to sort of package it. And with Subtext it's pretty cool. They have a framework built where you can give those members text, direct text messaging access to your journalists. And they have it all set up. They're not using their own private numbers, they have a whole other set of numbers, but it all feeds in through an app. And then you get all these sort of two way conversations that of course you have these nice conversations with your audience and they're paying for it generates more content. Right? You have really deep conversations through text messaging essentially, which will generate a lot of new ideas for you as well. So check it out. Subtext. Okay. Yeah. De correspondent, their members, they actually are technical proofreaders on select stories. So the staff, you know, trains, trains some of their, some of their members to do that and they moderate comments and their podcast editors, all sorts of stuff. You could, you could put your audience to work through membership, you know, given the right mission.

I just want to say in general, publications should be doing this non stop, like all across the board, pursuing memberships and subscriptions and donations and you know, try to get past the debate of whether you should do one or the other. Just do them all, see what works. And if something's not working, then you can always readjust. But giving people more options to give you money isn't a bad thing, isn't going to hurt you. So.

You know, I couldn't have said it better myself. I think that's an excellent place to close. Just do it. Yeah, set up your subscriptions, set up your donations, figure out a way to include people in the work you do with memberships or premium plus products and absolutely get that free registration wall set up first to start building your email list.

One More thing, I'll just say that, you know, you can always look to what the national players are doing, and a lot of them use that free registration wall, and they do very well with that. So it's, it's. It doesn't hurt to look at what other national players are doing, because oftentimes, at least what I've found is that those national strategies will also work in a place like Welch, West Virginia, where there's a population of roughly 2,000 people.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when we started this whole metered paywall development years ago, it was the New York Times that started the metered paywall. And remember thinking, geez, this will work great for any publisher, really. I do, I do read that about. National newspapers are in a different position and you shouldn't model your, your marketing efforts as like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would do. And I've read these articles, you know, like, don't, don't copy what the big guys are doing because you're, you're very different. Well, yeah, you're very different. Your audience is very different. But the tech, the tactics that the publications use, which is what your point is, absolutely work. So why not use them?

Yeah, the technology is exactly the same, right?

Right.

Yep.

Well, it's not. Our technology is not exactly the same, but it does accomplish.

I think I would say it's. It's better. We just. I'll go on the record and say, that.

Sounds good. Awesome.

A plugin that Welch uses in order to accept what they call contributions, the name your price. Essentially, this allows anyone to go to their website and contribute any amount of money that they want. They can type in $100 5000. The newspaper can set a minimum. So if you want at least $5 for these contributions, you can do that. And in addition, you can tie that to a subscription. So if someone gives you, you know, whatever amount, you could give them a year of digital access or two years of digital access as a thank you for contributing to, to the paper. So I love this option. There's no reason you shouldn't be pursuing this. Regardless of whether or not you can't hammer that point away enough.

I want to add to that when you add a name, your price, a donation level, it's just another subscription level in leaky paywall. So you can have your monthly recurring, your annual recurring, and. And your donation level as three cards if you wanted to keep on your subscription page. And there's a new update where you can now send custom welcome emails based on subscription level. So with the leaky paywall multiple levels function, you can set up your free registration, send a custom welcome saying hey, thanks for joining us. And then when somebody upgrades to a paid subscription, they can get a different welcome email that says hey, really thanks for contributing. And when they, and when somebody donates, you can craft a third email that has a thank you. You know, and mission based language. They should all really have mission based languages language in there. But you can, you can craft separate emails based on the subscription level. But my point is, is that free registration is just one subscription level and leaky paywall, paid subscriptions level levels, monthly, annual, whatever, print are different subscription levels. And then you just add that, that donation level and, and customize your welcome emails and boom, you can do it all. Put that big donate button at the top and, and you know, build, build your list with the. Free, build your email list with the free registration that'll bring people into paying. And then now those are your future donors. You'll have people that just donate and yes, Tyler, what you said, spot on. Give them access for donating. Easy to do anything I missed there.

One thing you can do with that.

As well is you can also tag them. Like if you have it connected with mailchimp, you can tag them as people who've donated. Right. Versus someone who's paid for a level.

So you can send them separate email newsletters based on that tag as well.

Yeah, that's pretty fantastic. Yeah. So each level can have a separate newsletter and then you can go, you can get fancy. Right. And you can set up opt in newsletters using mailchimp groups so people can check off different newsletters based on the level they're subscribing to. And that would also include a premium newsletter. So if you wanted something that only went out to paid subscribers and as soon as somebody canceled they were unsubscribed, you could do that as well. Super, super simple with leaky paywall.

Yeah, And I think all of this is about personalizing the experience and building that long term relationship with customers and, and contributors. That's really the goal behind, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, behind being able to send different emails based on the plans and categorizing things in mailchimp based on what people do.

Absolutely, absolutely. I won't Talk about the 2021 cool feature of customizing content for, for logged in subscribers, will I? Oh wait, stay tuned. Cool stuff coming. Yeah, yeah, I think that about wraps it up. Anything else, Jeremy, you want to add? That's all I got.

Tyler, that's all I got. Oh, by the way, go check out the pay per post plugin. If you haven't done so. So if you're like, if we haven't sold you on donations and subscriptions and memberships.

Yeah.

Go check out our paper post plugin. Super cool.

Yeah, yeah, that was. Yeah, I'll say a couple more things about that. So if you're doing live streams, if you're into, let's say you're into music and the music business and you want to sell live streams, which is what we did for Universal Music for their classical Deutsche gramophone division, you can now do that through the pay per post. So you can put put on live streams on a, on a page and charge access to it through pay per post. Doesn't matter what someone's subscribed to, whether they, you know, if they're subscribed to like other content on your site, you can have that subscriber or non subscriber, just pay for access now. Livestream is just one example. Could be any content on those pages. Pretty cool. Yep. All right, well guys, thanks for the chat. If you're still listening, thanks for being here and yeah, get your free registration on start, you know, upgrade, add donations if you're, if you don't have donations running and think about what our membership might look like, you can absolutely do all three. So if you need to chat, please reach out to us. We're here and we're happy to talk about it. Have fun doing it. So talk to you next time.

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