How a drumming magazine is killing it with digital

Hi, I'm Pete from Zine 101 and I want to talk to you today about how we took a veteran print publisher with very minimal digital subscriptions, if any, into full on digital marketing, selling online subscriptions to their magazine and absolutely killing it. So before we jump into the juicy stuff, just want to share where they started. So they had about 40 years of back issues that we were dealing with and the subscriptions were tied to PDFs and those really fancy things called flip books. You guys ever read a flip book? You get the noise when you click the corner and it turns right. Anyway, I've never read a flipbook, but their apps were issue replicas. So you load their app and you can go and buy an issue and you wait to download the issue before you can read it. And then they were publishing quite a lot of free blog content. Let's call it lower value content. Is that for me? Oh, okay. Sounded like the ding in order to get search and sharing, because PDFs don't really do such a great job for search and sharing. A lot of blog content is being published, but their issues are being locked in PDFs. So you can imagine the problem they have. And they have a fulfillment house in California called ESP that was processing their subscriptions. Okay, so what are the problems? You guys know all the answers up here. I know you do, right? PDFs and flipbooks are landlocked. Google does not index them very well, although they do, but not well at all. They don't get shared. They don't really read well on mobile. That's a problem. They're relying on lower value content for discovery. Their workflows were a disaster. You can imagine. They had to do everything separately. App content, flipbook, fulfillment, blog everything, email, everything. And they were selling with woo. They were selling individual PDF issue sales, but that did not turn into really any revenue for them. Okay, so what was the solution? There are four parts. I'm going to race through them. One, we have a plug in called issuem. It's on the repo. It creates a custom post type called articles. You can create an issue and then just bang out web based articles, attach them to the issue, publish them live, and now you have something that's discoverable and shareable and all that good stuff, right? They're working their way backwards. So there's, there's this new technology called cut and paste where you grab the cut the text and the images and you move it into WordPress. And everyone asks me what's the hey, how do you guys do it? Oh, well, you know, Upwork.com, you know, that's a good spot. All right, so. So they're about three years back now, right, as far as issues. And every month they go one issue back, they go further. So here's how it looks. You go to the archive. Kind of looks like an archive. These are the issue covers. If I click on a cover, let's talk about Sticks and Todd over there who's having a good time. It brings up the. This is the current issue. This is the first cover article, basically. And if I could actually scroll down on this, you have all the rest of the articles below it. And they're just regular live web articles, the way it should be. Okay, number two, we installed a metered paywall. That's our leaky paywall plugin. It's on the repo, lets you give away a few free articles before you have to subscribe. Kind of like New York Times does. You get 10 free articles, then you have to pay. What that does, of course, is it lets Google index all their content, and you could share one article to a million different readers, no problem. As soon as the individual browser starts to comb through other articles, that's when the meter starts ticking. And then they get dinged with a subscription prompt. They still serve up PDFs to their readership. They demanded their readership get PDFs. So we restrict the PDFs to subscribers, paying subscribers only. And we have something pretty cool that we did is that there's two levels of subscription. One is current issue and one is archive issues. So you can pay less. And if I subscribe today, I would get the current issue and all issues going forward. But if I paid more, I could get access to their entire archive. So that was pretty cool. Oh, and by the way, the meter's adjustable. We have publishers that are toying with going to Xero, which is like a hard pay wall during peak traffic times and seeing their subscriptions triple. It's been amazing, actually. So you can play with the mirror, and here's what it looks like. I've read three articles. Here's my fourth article. Whoops, I gotta pay. So if you notice, I'm in the article, but also in the sidebar. Our plugin outputs the issue cover, the issue name, and the table of contents. You can quickly get to the article that you want to read in that issue. All right, number three, we have a service called UniPress, which is iOS and run out of time. IOS it's apps, integrates the whole platform issues paywall. You subscribe on the web, you get instant access to the apps. Okay, that's kind of what it looks like. And by the way, it's WordPress driven. That menu is controlled in real time in WordPress. Push notifications are controlled in WordPress, and even ads are controlled in WordPress if you're doing them manually. And number four is we integrated wiki paywall with their fulfillment house in California. So all API connected. That's the CRM. That's where the payment information goes. And the whole system's tied together almost one dashboard experience. WordPress and the CRM with ESP and the results. So we launched this paywall, the leak paywall. Two weeks. 900 subscribers in app subscriptions. 10, 10% plus. And daily digital subscriptions are in the double digits for that. Thank you.