Pete Ericson explains how a drumming magazine moved from PDFs to a web-based subscription model with two tiers: current issues and full archive access. They built a custom post type to index issues as articles, added a metered paywall, and integrated an app through UniPress. Subscribers came quickly after launch.
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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 into full on digital marketing, selling online subscriptions to their magazine and absolutely killing it. So before we jump into the juicy stuff, I just want to share where this 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 flipbooks. You guys ever read a flip book? You get the noise when you click the corner and it turns. Anyway, I've never read a flip book, 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're publishing quite a lot of free blog content. It's called lower value content. Is that for me? Sorry, sounded like a thing. 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 the house in California called ESP Web is processing their subscriptions. Okay, so what are the problems? You guys know all the answers up here. I know you do, right? PBS and Lookbooks are landlocked. Google does not index them very well. Public key 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 have 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's the solution? There are four parts. I'm going to race through that one. We have a plugin called Issuerem. 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. There's this new technology called cut and paste where you the images and you move it into WordPress and everyone asks me what's the hey, how do you guys do it? Oh no, you know, upwork.com, you know that's a good spot. All right, so they're about three years back now, right, as far as issues. And every month they do want they go one issue back, go further. So as here's how it looks, you go to the archive. Kind of looks like a. Like an archive. These are the issue covers. If I click on the COVID let's talk about sticks and toss over there. Having a good time brings up the. This is a. Brings up the current issue. This is the first. The COVID 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. Okay. Number two, we installed a VIK paywall. It's our WikiPaywall plugin. It's on the repo, lets you give away a few free articles before you have to subscribe. Kinda like the 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 is 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. There's two levels of subscription. One is the current issue and one is archive issue. 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. That's pretty cool. Oh, and by the way, the meter is adjustable. We have publishers that are toying with going to zero, which is like a hard payable. And during peak traffic times and seeing their subscriptions triple. It's been amazing actually. 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 if you want in the 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 you can add the control in WordPress, doing it manually. And number four is we integrated leaky paywall with their performance. It's all API connected. That's the CRM. That's where the payment information goes and whole systems tied together. Almost one death for experience. WordPress and CRM and the results. So we launched this paywall, the leaked paywall. Two weeks, 900 subscribers in app subscriptions, 10% plus and daily digital subscriptions are in double digits.
