Episode 9 | Exciting Things We've Been Working On

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.

Well, welcome to the Paywall Podcast, episode number nine. I'm Pete and I'm here with Jeremy and Tyler. And we are going today to talk about stuff that we're working on. One of the things that I. We look back at 2020 and realize that a lot of things happen and it's funny how life goes by and you do things but you don't really track it. We had released 14 new add ons to our platform last year and a whole bunch of other stuff. And we tend to work during the day, at least I do, where we're working on so many interesting things that we thought, hey, well, why don't we just have an episode about the things that we're working on. And the motivation for me is that if you're listening to this and you hear something that you're interested in or you have a question on, or you just want more information on, please get in touch. This is definitely a two way conversation. And you know, tell us if you, if you think something's a great idea, tell us if you think something's not so great or you have a, or you have an improvement suggestion. And for me that's, that's part of it. So I'll jump in with the first one. Unless someone wants to.

I was just going to say that that's where all the cool ideas come from actually are the help desk. So when you, whenever you're thinking of something, shoot it our way. It might actually be something we can put together.

Yeah. And what email address?

The infoene101.com awesome.

That's it. We're all on it. It looks like a regular email address but we're all there on the help desk. So I've been working on our Insights platform for quite some time. I was actually working on it all morning, cleaning up some charts and graphs on it. We're going to release our version one. We're actually slow releasing our version one now. And the idea with Insights is we want to start tracking subscriber behavior in our case. And in your case, you might be having a free registration set up and then paid subscriptions as a follow up with your publication. And that's exactly the kind of stuff we're tracking. Okay, well, you know, what are people doing that are, that are logged into the system? What are people doing that are, that are paid subscribers? Does the data change between what the general public looks at in terms of your articles versus what a paid subscriber is looking at with your articles? And I'll tell you right now, looking at some preliminary data, yeah, it's different. It's pretty interesting when you start to taking a look at it, things like what articles encourage people to click the subscribe link. And this will probably give you some good thoughts in terms of the types of content that you put out down the road. So keep an eye out for that. If you're desperate for analytics, please send an email and let us know and we'll put you on the list. It's something that we're rolling out for PubCare customers and that's, that's our starting point. So that's insights. Another thing I'll keep going here that I've been quote unquote working on for a couple of years now is the idea of a sponsored issue with our Issue Microsoft toolkit. And where digital advertising is really doing well is in the sponsored content arena. So instead of plastering banner ads all over your site, you're working in branding into your content, into your emails, into your podcasts, into your videos. And these are areas that work really well. And so with Issue M, if you're not familiar with that toolkit, that was our first plugin that we developed ever 10 years ago for Dartmouth College. And what they wanted is, they wanted, they wanted, they had a WordPress, it was the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth Engineer magazine. And they wanted their magazine on the web. They were using WordPress, but they did not want a PDF, they did not want a Flipbook for, for good reason. So PDFs are terrible on mobile. They don't show up in search or sharing. And same with the flipbooks. And so we ended up building Issue M that was born out of that project. And so now that you can publish web issues, which I encourage you to do, even if you're a news publisher, you can easily migrate, you know, thematic posts into a special issue, consider taking the next step and selling a sponsored issue. So let me give you an idea. If you, let's say you're a local news publisher and you're going to do you want to do an issue on like fitness during COVID which I know gets a lot of discussion around here, you know, what are the safe things to do. What can you do? Maybe you've written a bunch of articles already on this topic and it's time to just assemble them into a special issue. What do you do? Well, we have a migration tool where you can literally create an issue. It just takes about 10 seconds to create an issue m issue and then check off the posts that you've written and just hit the migrate link and migrate those posts into the issue. You've created a special issue and we have a couple of publishers that are doing this now, so we just started this process. But what you do is you find a sponsor for that issue and this can be a bigger sell. So what do you do? Write a sponsored article as a starting point. So that sponsored article becomes the lead article in that issue. It joins the other articles that are in the issue. And sponsors love to have articles on trusted publications to link out to. So that's a high value for them. And then of course, you can add some banners or branding to the header of your issue and you have yourself an evergreen sponsored issue that for the paying sponsor that may pay off for them for years because it's evergreen, you know, it'll always be on the site. Whether it's evergreen content or not is another question. But maybe it is. And then the follow up on that is of course you, the publisher, are going to email your list announcing the sponsored issue and that sponsor gets branded, let's say at the top of the email, so you can offer a really nice package. You know, the idea being you're reusing repurposing content you've already created to create a special issue, whether you're an issue publisher or not. These special issues are great packages of content. And if you're, if you are a local news publisher, I strongly recommend getting that going, be a whole other revenue avenue for you. And so you put that issue together, get the sponsored article written, which will take a little effort. You already have your email list and you have yourself a nice, a nice sponsored package. And again, if you have questions on that, email us please. Happy to talk about it. We're really. And we'll talk about advertising a little bit later too. But there are things that are working in digital advertising, things that clearly are not working. So you know, we're trying to really bring forward the things that actually do work and generate revenue.

Well, I mean, I could talk a little bit about what we're seeing through our help desk, some similar themes. And this tends to happen all the time. One person will ask something and then five Six, seven. More people will ask the same question. And that question recently has been centered around increasing pricing for subscriptions. And I, you know, I am a fan of valuing your content, especially for local news publications, for magazines. You know your content. If you're going that subscription route, that's where all of the value is for your customers. And so raising your pricing for your subscriptions is a good thing. It means you're placing value on the content that you create and that you deliver. And it's something that we've seen a lot of in the help desk recently and it's something that you can do with leaky paywall more. So it's something that's done in stripe, but it is something that you can do. And if you're considering a price increase, whether it's because you're delivering more content or you just feel the need that your content needs more value for whatever reason, it's something you can do with our platform.

Netflix does it all the time, right?

Yeah.

I don't know how many price increases. They keep adding new content and that's where they get their money from. They realize the value is there.

Yeah, it's like, don't be afraid to value the content. I mean, in my eyes, the local news content is much more valuable than the national content. And you know, that comes down to the content at the local level really isn't being produced anywhere else. Whereas national content, you can just about get it everywhere. So value that content even if it's more than national news. Like, don't be afraid to increase pricing for, for that hyper local coverage.

So, yeah, and, and go back to messaging too. You know, you're, why you need the income. You know, remember, people don't know. They don't, they think you're paid by the government or whatever. They just don't know.

I see that all the time, especially, you know, here in West Virginia. I've, I've talked to newspapers who tell me that their customers think that they are grant funded and funded by the local and state and federal government. So, you know, tell people that you're not.

Absolutely. Well, we had, we had a publisher go through a price increase across the board and it was, if you work the numbers, it was a, about a 25% increase in pricing, roughly. So it was a big, you know, with the monthly recurring fee, I think they went from five bucks a month to seven bucks a month or something like that. And, and I've experienced this too, with price increases. Nobody, nobody says anything. You know, it's like oh, okay. So I like, I like this. I, you know, the two bucks a month isn't going to kill it for me. But yet from the publisher standpoint, that's a big, that's a big increase. You know, that's a big revenue gain. And also, you know, I would also recommend, you know, just reading up a little bit on pricing. And I, I find I, I still find some odd price points. Like someone's charging like, like $3 a month. Okay, well, why not four? I mean, it's kind of this, psychologically the same number. And that's psychology of pricing is just an interesting rabbit hole and you can go down forever. But, you know, I see people charging, you know, $7. Well, why not charge nine? Right. Like, psychologically speaking, these are very similar price points. And it goes all the way up to, you know, like 14 is sort of the next one and then 19 is the next one. So if you're falling short of any of these, these major price points, you know, it'd be worth looking at and saying, well, it could be an easy way to just go from, I just was looking at a $25 a month price point, said, well, one, let's go to 29. Okay. Psychologically, zero difference. That's four more dollars a month per subscriber. It's a big jump.

Yeah. One interesting thing with that too, that I've seen work really well for a publisher is offering to grandfather people in if they sign up by a certain date. So I know that kind of goes against the whole just raise it on everybody. But they did a deal where, you know, they were raising the price, I think by like 10 or 20 bucks or something like that for an annual. But they said if you sign up by this date, then you'll get, you'll lock into our old rate. And they sent that to all their free subscribers. Right. So if you have that big mailing list of free subscribers, so they sent it to that. And that was the biggest motivator by far for them to get new signups coming in. And they saw a huge influx of new subscriptions just simply by having a deadline and saying, you know, hey, get the grandfathered price before it goes up. So, you know, even if you do, you know, increase your prices, there could be some marketing you can do around that to get the free, free subscribers to, to finally go ahead and pay for a subscription.

That's like, that's like fence sitter discovery, right?

Yeah.

How many people would actually pay you but just haven't yet make them pay you? I Like that. Like that a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

Weren't you working, speaking of working on things, Jeremy, weren't you working on something that would. People could pay via an email to gain access?

Yeah, yeah. So one thing been, been kind of experimenting with is offering a piece of content. In this case it was a video where people could get access to it, to that particular piece of content just by entering their email. So it's right there on the actual page. They don't have to go to a registration form they don't have to go to. Doesn't take them off anywhere else. It's just a pop up right there on the site. They enter the email and then they get access to the content right away.

Hmm. Yeah.

That's awesome.

Have you gotten any feedback on that at all?

They've gotten quite a few, quite a few signups. So it's been pretty cool. Yep. So it's something that, you know, it's offered to their paying members by default and then instead of putting it behind the paywall, so to speak, they just put it behind this free registration pop up. So, you know, doesn't matter if you've used up any articles or not, if you come to this particular piece of content, you have to put in your email to view it. And they've gotten quite a few added to their mailing list.

That's great. And it's just the email address. There's no like password required or anything. Just, just.

Right, okay. Exactly. Yep. Just keep it as simple as possible. So just the email address.

Cool, I like that.

Yep. And it's a good way to send it out, like if you want to put it on Facebook or something like that. But you don't necessarily want to just give it away for free. But you also don't want to, you know, charge people money for it. You know, that's a good way to kind of find a middle ground.

Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Let's keep an eye on that. So that sounds like something, something that'll be coming down the pipe then.

Yeah, yeah, we're playing, you know, the whole, the whole. For me, doing a lot of research on friction, removing friction for the checkout process, I think Shopify does a really good job of that across their ecosystem. And so just looking at how we can implement some of that kind of standard frictionless features into the paywall experience.

Yeah, friction is brutal online. Any touch point, you have to always look at it saying, can I save the potential subscriber time in any, you know, ease, increase ease and reduce time because that's, that's the ultimate, you know, sort of friction point across everything in life is time. We just have less and less time for things. So those, yep, the, an email address is probably the bottom of the friction curve right now. It'll be a thumbprint at some point in the future. Right.

But yep. So we're working on improving that experience for sure. Then speaking of the help desk and kind of trying to gain feedback from that, another thing we're working on for this year is releasing leaky paywall 5.0 and we have three main sections that we're focusing on. Number one is we're focusing on the subscriber dashboard. So increasing the usability of that for the admin, for the site admin so you can manage your subscribers a lot easier, see data about them quicker, do different actions within the admin. So we're really trying to focus on that experience because we've had a lot of feedback that a lot of publishers want an easier way to manage subscribers from their dashboards. So we are working on that functionality. Number two is a new profile for users. So some, some new settings to help make user the user profile page easier to set up. Different, better ways for them to manage their plans, the levels are connected to so they can upgrade downgrade switch levels right from their dashboard. So we're working on getting all that stuff set up to make the, you know, again the user experience, focusing on the subscriber, making it as frictionless as possible and as easy as possible. And then the third thing we're working on is some revenue reports. So I know Pete, you talked about kind of the insights earlier about the pages that people are viewing and you know, how your subscribers are interacting with your content. But the revenue side of things is also important. So we're going to be able to take some of the data that's being stored inside Wiki paywall and build some reporting out for that. So you'll be able to get a quick, high level view to see, you know, which levels are making you the most revenue over a period of time and you should start seeing some interesting trends there and be able to make some, some publishing decisions based on those trends that you're seeing. So we'll have those kind of three main things coming out soon with Leaky Paywall 5.0.

I just want to say that I somehow managed to get a sneak peek at this effort and they look really good. The reports are cool. The subscriber dashboard's super cool. Yeah, looking forward to that for sure. That'll be. Yeah, 5.0. That's a big release.

Yep. Long time coming.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're the one who mentioned the word polishing. You know that that was a big, big push. That is a big push for us this year is polishing the system so.

Making it ready for the next, you know, next five to 10 years. Getting it, getting all the stuff we need to, to make it, you know, continue to be a good, a good platform for managing your subscribers.

Yep, yep. So another thing that I, we actually set up, I think last year, probably last year sometime was. And something that is in the, definitely in the channel of new products, but it's a custom news function for your publication. So we actually built this for Landline media. It's a landline media and you can't see it when you go to their homepage unless you're a logged in subscriber. Now you can register for free, but they're going to make you jump through some loopholes because they're selling memberships ultimately to independent trucking drivers. So if you happen to be an independent trucking driver, go for it. That'd be easy, easy for you to check it out. Maybe I'll send some screenshots or something if you guys are interested. But essentially the way it works is once you're, once you're registered, you go back to the homepage, you get a whole new box that says custom news just for you. And the way it works is so for, for Landline they have, truckers are driving through different states. And so truckers are interested in different areas. So if I drive from Texas to California, I'd be interested in Utah, Texas, California, Arizona. And I, let's say, and I would check those boxes off and then they have some featured news and politics and things like that. And so you could check off essentially the categories. And it's all driven through WordPress categories so that when they, when they go to the homepage it pulls the most recent articles from those categories right into the homepage and it's only the last five articles. So it's not, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a, it's not taking over the homepage. It's, it's adding a custom new section for that subscriber that really sort of shows the high points of, from the categories they're most interested in. And it works, it works really well. It's very lightweight, it's slick. Now the thing that's really cool, I mean that's pretty cool already. And if you guys are interested, please let us know. But what's really, really cool is we're building the apps for Landline now and we're implementing the same functionality of the custom news feed into the apps as well. So if somebody registers on the site, you know, chooses their, you know, Texas and California or whatever categories that they want to show, once they download and log into the app, they'll get those. That custom news block will show up in the apps as well. So that, that's pretty neat. So we're all looking forward to, to launching those apps and hoping that's going to be in the next next 60 days or something like that.

Just to go back to pricing really quick, I have an example of a publication that started running a promo for their yearly digital plan. And they started this in late December. I was looking at some of the reports and they made more money in January than they have in any other month since. They've been running leaky paywall, which has been about a year.

Cool.

And so just to add to the conversation on pricing, run promos. Run them all the time, never stop them.

Right.

So just something to think about.

Yeah. And there's a lot you can do. I mean, you can do free trials, paid trials.

Right.

And then use the. We have an add on this awesome, awesome add on that. If you're listening, you probably are not using, called the conditional display, notice that you should absolutely be using. What it does is it puts a little header bar at the top and you can change the message based on the login, the subscription level someone's logged in. So if you're doing free registrations, you can have a promo to sign up for paid. You could include a coupon, even if you wanted to. If someone's logged in as a paid subscriber, you could encourage gift subscriptions in the header. If your publication is giftable, there's so many cool things you can do with that.

In this particular case, they were offering 30% off and they still are with their digital only plan. It's working really well.

We love promotions and we love. With promotions comes.

Oh, you're looking for deadlines. I just. I thought you forgot.

Yeah, I thought the audio cut out.

That's very possible. Yeah, lots of stuff.

Yeah.

Never a deadline. Awesome. Thanks, guys for chatting and thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time. I think we're going to dive into social media marketing with an agency from Portland, Maine. That should be an interesting conversation. See you next time.

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.