How a non-profit news publisher maximizes revenue with a groundbreaking new model

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So today let's talk about nonprofit profit news. Welcome to the Paywall Podcast. I'm Pete. Here's Tyler. We are back to talk about the nerdy things that makes subscription subscriptions profitable in publishing. Welcome Tyler's Paywall project. His specialty is turnkey solution for local news publishers. If you're looking for something turnkey, he is your man. And what I want to do is jump into KB Independent, Tyler, which you manage. You just told me that they're based down in Key Biscayne.

That's right.

Florida.

Yep. Off the coast of Miami, I think is where that is.

Okay. How's the income level down there?

I suspect this is an affluent community for sure.

Awesome. Yeah. So what I learned from you, and we need to share with our publishing audience, is that you can actually take the strategy, the tactics of subscription publishing that we, we tout and we know works and apply it to the non nonprofit sector. Does that sound about right?

Yeah, it. I get a lot of questions from nonprofit publishers that come to me and they're like, we're not really sure about a paywall. Is that like, how do we do that? We're a nonprofit. That's not really. That we can't do that. That's against the law.

But yet you found a way.

Yep, there. There is a way. Excellent.

So I want to dig into that. And as a way of digging into that, I want to show off the experience that I'm getting as a reader on Key Biscay because it's unusual, it's an unusual flow, but I can see how it works, and I'd like to hear more about it. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll. You'll be able to see what I'm doing, but I'll say it while I do it. So I. I brought up the KB Independent.org website, and I'm not logged in. I'm just looking at the homepage. And if I go down and load up an article, I get stopped, I get the nag. And is that. Is it 00 free articles or is it one free article?

I believe it's one free article.

Okay, so it's one free article, and then on the second article, you get Stopped. And what I'm seeing here is a, is basically our subscription nag. It says, this story is free for you. And then I can register. I got first name, I got last name, put in my email, choose a password, and then I can hit submit. And the promise here is that I'll be able to read this story and I'll get on the newsletter, right?

That's right.

And this is our, this is our framework. This is our standard approach. I did that. I entered my, my information and I got access to that article. And then I went back to the homepage and I said, okay, let's read some more articles. This is where it gets interesting and different. Let's see. I'm going to go in and pick another article here. And I get it stopped again. So I get the next nag. This one says, hey, you've reached subscriber only content. You're on the free access plan, which requires periodic renewal. Become a donor today and skip this step. All right, what is happening here?

This is like the nag of all nags, right? So if you want to be a free registration reader, you're going to have to do a little bit of work from time to keep that free status. And so that, that was their idea of helping nudge people to donate. While they can't require it, they can certainly make it a desirable thing for their subscriber, for their free subscribers to do.

Gotcha. So what I'm hearing is that just to be clear is that you can get. I could get full access to the content here as a free registered reader, but I have to do. I have to jump over some hurdles to do that.

That's right. That's right. So if you click on this, in this case, they call it the Read More button. It's really just a redirect you to their subscribe card page, as we call it.

Yep, yep.

Brunton Center. There's three options. They're all very similar. They're all donations, they're all suggested donation options. They're not required. You don't have to do it. You scroll down the page a little bit. Okay. And you'll see a gift option. You could gift a subscription to someone. Then in the fine print, articles may be obtained free of charge.

I see.

Yeah. So if you want to continue to renew your service for free, you could do that and by clicking on that link, that will give you three days of unlimited access before it expires and then gives you the okay and then gives you that option to then again go back to the subscribe card page and restart the process over and over.

Nice. Okay, so let me back this up and see if I can spit this out correctly. So I register for free. I to get access to the article I'm reading. On the next article it says re register essentially or donate. It's telling me to donate which is the primary call out. On the subscribe page I'm looking at a member card, a News Guardian card, a News Champion card. These three cards are all paid donations, but it's not required.

That's right.

So I get, I go to this donation page, it's telling me to donate. I can do a gift subscription. But if I click this link that's not super promoted, let's put it then it's essentially gives me three days of access.

That's right. And that access that they offer for free on, on that three day like rolling three day access is limited to the last seven days of content. You can only see the last seven days of content for free. Now should you want to see the whole site then that. Then you'll have to donate. So there are some per other perks beyond just being tagged to death. Okay. You do get more access to content.

That's interesting. So there's an archive benefit here too. So if you donate, you're paying money.

That's right.

You get access to all the archives.

That's right.

But as a general reader and let's say I just want to keep up on day to day stuff, I actually can read all this content for free. I don't have to. Yeah. Cough up any money. But it's just, it's a little level of friction that, that they're introducing so that I have to go through this sort of re. Re. Reconfirming of the registration, clicking this link and getting my three day window of access back. That's right. That's super clever.

Right?

That is super clever. Okay, now that it's super clever, how does it actually work?

Yeah, yeah, it does work very like. It's very similar to what any other subscribe card page would see for a local newspaper that's for profit. They see a number of free signups like our free registration tends to do. They have quite a few that will upgrade on the spot after they get nagged once. Okay, fine, I'll. I'll donate whatever. And then there's quite a few that will just continue that renewal and do it multiple times. It happens. It's common. Right. You're not going to win everyone over obviously even in this case. But having These three donation options, front and center. It really does. And being nagged a lot.

Right.

Really does get people to jump over and do the paid. And in this case, people can choose what they want to donate. Like that member option on the left. You do have an option to donate more or less on this.

Oh, that's cool. So why are people paying? What do you think the motivation is to pay here?

I think beyond the nagging, it's the local content.

Right.

We go back to this every single time. Like, why should I pay for this stuff? Where else are you going to get these Hyperlocal Key Biscayne. It's a tiny little area.

Yeah.

Where else are you going to get that stuff? And most of like the, I don't know, the papers down there, maybe the Miami Herald. I'm not really sure what. What still exists down there. But conc.

Life is in Key West.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're not like, even those regional city outlets aren't going to be covering neighborhood like content like this. And, and they have a lot of. Of stuff that's happened in the last week. They've had drama with scooters in the city. Someone got killed and it was a big, like, issue. Yeah. And there's also this front and center story around this, this person that's on the. I don't know the context of it. But anyway, these stories were hot, hot topics for, for the local community and they're told within the local community. So that's a long way of saying the local content is. Right. Local content is king.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

And it works. And we do know it works. This implementation with the nonprofit model. I see these guys are INN members as well.

That's right.

Is really pretty, pretty amazing. I just want to say that what they're doing is they're taking a traditional subscription model where you're stopped. You can't have content unless you pay for content. But what they're doing is they're just putting in one hurdle. You're saying you can have the content, but you have to just jump over this hurdle. You have to click a couple things and refresh your access to it. So the fact that you. That they have people that are saying, you know what, here's my money, argues so much for convenience. And basically you're paying for convenience. Yeah, you're paying to support the. I agree with you gotta support the publishers. You're supporting the content. You want the content. That of course is the biggest pull. But I get a lot of argument on the flip side of, oh, we got a. We got bots and we got people switching browsers and we have AI now and everyone's running to try to lock down. I can't have more than two readers logged in at the same time. And you can do all these things, you can really restrict content. But the reality is we're just too busy to bother with stuff like that. The most of us, yeah, sure. The 1, 2, 3%, whatever it is that want to jump over the hurdles, they will do that. And here we. What you're saying is go for it. Jump over the hurdle. Like, it's totally. You don't even have to go incognito. You don't have to fuss around with tech. You don't have to go to. To copy paste URLs into free page readers. You're just saying, here, just do this and it's free. Right. Like, you're literally saying, if you don't like paying for stuff, that's awesome. Here's an easy way to not pay for stuff. And yet people are still paying for stuff.

That's right.

I'm sorry, but we are, we're so busy today in, in the world we live in. And we do want to support organizations that do a good job and provide value. And that's really the bottom line. Right. And if you make it convenient, if it's a good, you know, system, then people will pay. So I think this just speaks to how we operate as humans and it really targets like, our desire for something that's convenient and something that has value. And then boom. Yes. It doesn't surprise me at all that people are donating. Okay, cool. I'm sorry, I just got. You just got me excited about that. How does this compare? Like, how did the. How does the. This is a small island, the. Off the coast of Florida. Southern. Southern Florida. How does the revenue compare versus the standard? I don't know if you can answer this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. How does this donation model, this unique model that you have here, I don't know what you're going to call this. Should put a label on this. And versus the standard for profit subscription model where you're just gating content and then you're paying for access to the content.

Yeah.

And there's no other choice.

Yeah, it's similar, really. You could probably draw a straight line and compare them apples to apples in a lot of ways. Wow, it works. It's just. We're just changing the strategy a little bit. Changing the Wording, changing friction points a bit. But ultimately it's, it's, for the most part it's the same. It's not locked as tight, obviously, because you can jump through the hurdles, but it's more or less the same thing.

Right.

And it works.

That is amazing to me. Yeah.

And it just. And you have to just tweak it because it's nonprofit, but. Right. It can still operate in the same form. I think this is. I don't know. We'll see how they do in the next six months and see if things continue to accelerate. But I think this is a good model for nonprofit publishers that are a little bit sketched out by the idea of we don't really want to do a paywall. Like we're nonprofit, we're public service. But you can still be nonprofit and you can still be public service with a paywall.

Right? Yeah. You can take the, really the best of the paywall tactics, which is the pre registration and then the motivation to pay for access and just, you're just making it more convenient even though you can get around it for free. It's like you've taken all the tricks to get around paywalls and just created a better trick right on the site. You don't even have to leave to get access to all the content. And yet people are still pay donating.

Yeah.

You look at like Guardian. You look at. We work with other donation only local news publishers and they do well. And they do well if their messaging is right. If their content is good, their value is good. People are willing to, to donate. But what we're doing here is you're tightening the screws a little bit more. You're making giving them one, one hurdle to jump over to get to all the content for free. But you're using the power of, of a sort of paywall nurturing system to. And then gating the content in a very soft way. So it's. This is cool. This is super cool. I definitely look forward to this story in six months. Where is this? So what are you going to call this, this model?

Good question.

It's like the, it's like the, it's like a donor wall.

It's like a hybrid paywall. I don't know what the, like, what the actual term will be for this, but.

Anybody listening, you have an idea, let us know. This is, this is very cool. All right, Tyler, I think that's probably great for now. Let's. Let's see if anybody else takes us up on setting up this donor slash paywall hybrid donor wall and really implement the best tactics of nurturing with a paywall into a donation model. This is great. All right, catch you next time when we nerd out on the next conversation. See ya.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com see you next time.