How content restrictions drive subscriptions

Yeah, make these exceptions. Make the obvious exceptions for content. Yeah, you can always sort of overrule the way the meter is structured.

Yeah, yeah. Because we do see publishers who are still a bit hesitant to consider the word paywall at all. And so this is one way to sort of. Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode.

All right, we are talking about restrictions, how to set content restrictions. This is a question that I get constantly, and we always talk to our publishers about is how do you restrict. How should you restrict your content? Should you lock everything behind a hard paywall? Should you put everything behind a metered paywall? Should you mix it up? Should you have some content categories as free? Should you have, you know, your premium content as paid? And the answer is, of course, it depends. It depends on the part of the journey you are with your content and your audience. So there really are three. I've been looking at sort of all the installations and setups that we work with. I've been looking at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and some of the bigger publications. And there really are three phases of restrictions. There's the. The original sort of hard paywall phase, which is generally for bigger brands, well established mailing lists, and that works well. And we, we, and I know you and us, we work with publishers that have hard paywalls very successfully. The biggest category, or I should say phase, is the metered paywall in combination with a free registration, where you're a little more generous with your content in order to build your mailing list. That's really the bottom line with that. And then there's this face that's I don't see a lot, but I do see it where a publisher that is new to setting up a paywall restricting your content will offer a free registration for a limited period of time that allows all content access in order to really sort of pour gas on that email list, really grow that email list. So those three phases we're going to talk about. How's that sound?

Let's do it.

Let's do it. Okay, so the original gangster, the OG Wall, was the hard. The hard pay wall. And that when we got our start about 10 years ago, this was the paywall that was running. We looked at it and said, yeah, that's not great for a lot of publishers. It's good for some, but not for a lot. We built leaky paywall. And what are the downsides and upsides of a hard paywall? Well, the big downsides are nobody will share an article if it's locked down. And Google generally by default will not be able to rank these articles that are blocked in search right now. You can, you can create exceptions for that, but it gets a little more complicated. But by definition. Now, the benefit of the hard paywall for the publishers sort of further down the road in their, in their content journey is that you're blocking like the remove paywall services that are out there and they can't get to your content. You're blocking AI from crawling your content, which is a, which is a growing concern for many publishers. But the biggest benefit is that it increases your conversion rate. So you're basically saying to your future paid audience, hey, you pay or you don't get anything. And that increases your conversion rate. But you kind of be in a special spot for that. All right, the second one, the metered paywall. This is the most popular method of gaining content for a lot of good reasons. Basically, it's, you allow X number of free articles, let's say per month. Let's say you, you allow one or two free articles per month, and then you have to subscribe, and that's the meter paywall. What are the benefits of that? Google index is everything, right? Your articles rank in search. Your readers will share every single article you produce in social media. They'll email it around because it's open to a limited point, and that's the metered paywall. One thing I will mention is that if you are running a metered paywall, make sure you have our incognito browsing blocker switched on so people can't just right click and get around the meter paywall. That's, that's a, that's a big one. Okay. The third one is the free registration only. Again, See Business Journal in Youngstown, Ohio, we work with. They essentially turned that on, this is a few years ago, for six months. Basically, if you register, you get access to everything. They ran after about six months, they built their, they, they like tripled their email list. It was a huge growth to their email list. And then they went to, to a more typical metered paywall. Okay, so which way do you go, Tyler? What do you think? Yeah.

Without any consideration for your publication, what if we're not thinking about where you are? I would Start with the middle option, which is a metered paywall. Give away some free content, then ask for an email address. Get people on the newsletter, get them, you know, inside of leaky paywall as a registered user. And then, you know, like you said, you get all of the benefits of, you know, having that content metered for Google and for sharing and for all those things. And as we know, most people, they don't get to Article 2 or 3 very often.

Right?

So you know, by, by doing this, you're, you're getting them in, in that newsletter and you know, getting them, getting, getting them through that funnel faster than you otherwise would with, you know, kind of a free registration only approach, which is you're still building the newsletter, but you're just getting, you're getting access to all content, which, you know, it's not, it's not my favorite. Yeah, it's going to be harder to get them to convert later on.

Yeah, yeah, I'd say that you're absolutely right on. If you, if you're unsure, that's the answer, right? If you're, if you're really not sure where you are in your journey, the question that I like to ask is how are you happy with your size of your email list? Like, have you really exploded your email list to the point where, you know, you've captured a really healthy chunk of your potential audience and most publishers have not. Right. And so that's why they fall into that sort of, that metered setup and that nurturing setup. Now let's take a look at some examples. Different publishers and sort of different journey states. We're looking at Ming Tiandi here. This is a real estate publisher. We work with Asian real estate. And you can see on the bottom here, if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, you know, you've read one out of 10 articles. So essentially what they're doing is they're giving away 10 free articles before they ask you to subscribe. Now, this is not the way to go about it. There is, this is like the extreme end of generosity, right? And what you just said earlier is if you look at your Google Analytics, the average reader comes in for 1.678, 1.8 articles per visit or something like that. And you have to capture that email address at the very least. So if these guys are early in their journey, they're being super, super careful about, you know, I don't want to piss off my reader. I don't want to take off my reader. Okay, yeah, that's fine. But we're kind of gotten used to paywalls and how they're, how they're set up these days and realize that, yeah, content's valuable and at some point we might have to pay for content. But 10 articles, you know, no one's going to reach 10 articles in the next number of months, typically speaking. So your, your conversion rate, super low. Right. And I mean, there's this very simple formula. The more restrictive you are with your content, the higher your conversion rate. It's just, it's by definition, you lock down your content, people have to subscribe, but boost your conversion rate. You give away 10 free articles per month. Super low conversion rate. Because people don't really, they're not forced into doing anything until they've read 10 articles. Right. So, and then, and every single month, it's, it's just way too generous.

Yeah. That could take years to get someone through that, that funnel. If you're able to get them there.

Yeah, I'm trying to convince them to change this, but. Okay. All right, so then we look at, on the other side of the coin, we have like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Right. And what are the big publishers doing? Been watching the New York Times for a long time. Wall Street Journal. New York Times started very generous. They were giving away 20 free articles per month. 10 years plus. 10 years, 10 plus years ago. They shrink that to 10 free articles per month. They shrank that to five free articles per month. They shrink that to one article. And then you have to register. And now what they're running, if you go to their site is 0 free articles. But if you register, you'll get a few more. And they've been actually running this approach for a couple years now. Been looking at this because it works. Now New York Times is in a special place. They're a huge brand. They're the biggest subscription brand on the planet as far as news goes. And. They know that they don't have to meter their content anymore because they've, they've done it. They've gone through the phase of metering and getting folks to register, building that list. And if you look at their, their subscription chart over the last 10, 11 years, which I have, it's. Their subscriptions are actually accelerating now in the last few years. Right. They've been growing steadily for, for a decade. And the last, you know, four or five years, the curve is actually accelerating. It's, it's very impressive and it makes sense. Now they're, now they're being very restrictive. Hey, you can still read some articles. If you create a free account, they get to track the reader in terms of what articles are being read and you have more engagement. So this, if you're sort of at the, at the mature end of your subscription journey with your readers, this is a good approach. This works really well. Most publishers, no, but New York Times, Great Wall Street Journal is even more restrictive. They've always been super restrictive. You just, you click in and, and into any article and just says, pay. There's no free registration. Big brand content value you could argue is higher. You know, it's a sort of financial approach to news. They're, they're expensive. They've always been expensive. They know their audience can afford to pay a more expensive subscription, so they just lock stuff down and say, you want in, you. You pay. Okay, so let me just check my notes here. All right, so let's. So it's a journey. Let's, let's go back to the journey. We'll talk about Salem Reporter, which we, we talk about and how they've been progressing. So, Tyler, what you mentioned earlier is this concept of a free registration. And if you've been hiding under a rock on our podcast, you, maybe you haven't heard us talk about it, but this is probably for most publishers that are in the middle of their journey somewhere. They know they haven't built up their audience, their email list to where they really want it to be. And you want the balance of being able to convert paid subscribers. This framework that we employ on 90% of our publishers, I'd say, is the framework that does three things amazingly well. One is it grows your email list because you're employing a requirement to drop off an email address to read more content. And this is what it looks like. Two, it builds your traffic because as your email list grows and if you're doing a good job sending your newsletters to your email list, it's swelling the traffic from your newsletters back to the site. So it actually will increase your ad revenue. And now that you have engagement through a free registration and your email list is growing, it naturally bumps your conversion rate up to. For paid subscribers. So you, you get all these benefits. You don't have to rely so much on social traffic. You don't have to rely so much on search traffic. You get the, you get your control over your own list. These readers are sharing for you in social media. You don't have to worry so much about it. This really solves all your problems, this framework. So, Salem, correct me if I'm Wrong. Tyler Salem lets you read one free article per month. That's it?

Yep.

Okay, so I've read my one article. My second article says, hey, this story is free for you. This is the free registration, right? I put in my email, I put in my password, I hit submit and it unlocks this article and I get the next article we send the email address into. In this case, flow letter could be mailchimp, could be whatever email system you're using. And now you have yourself a higher engaged pre registered reader that's on your newsletter. And you're getting, they're getting a high value newsletter and that's what you're, what you're telling people with the pre registration is, hey, this story is free for you but you're also going to get on get our newsletter. Which if they're not getting the newsletter and they're willing to put in an email and a password, they want your newsletter and that's valued. And one thing to keep in mind with this, with this approach is that we get a lot of newsletters in our lives, right? Like we're constantly bombarded with email newsletters. But that's okay. We've opted in to most email newsletters, not all, but the value is in. I get a newsletter from the Sound reporter. I live in Oregon. I'm interested in what's going on in the area. I don't need to click through every single article and read, you know, and try to read every article. I, the value is in, I can read the title, I can read an excerpt in the newsletter and I can get a general feel for what's happening, right? And then I might say, wow, that's, that's an interesting article. I'll click on that and it'll take me to the website and then I'll get the second message that says, hey, upgrade, you know, pay for access, essentially, right? Nope, not ready to pay for access. That's okay. Get the next newsletter. Interesting stuff. You're, you're top of mind the brand. You're building a brand. Occasionally I'll click into an article, I'll go to the website, it'll tell me to subscribe. I do that 10 times, I do that 20 times, then my chances of subscribing go up, right? So if I've clicked on 10 or 20 articles and I'm getting the message, that's 10 or 20 times that says hey, if you, if you support us, you'll get full access. And I really like this content. My chances of actually pulling the trigger on payment goes up a lot. And that's the power of the free registration and then that nurturing process that's so important. So instead of giving away 10 free articles a month and hoping and praying, you sort of set it as restricted. It's one free article, then you register and you can give a couple a month if you want. I mean, there's levers here, right? Like if you're, if you want to tiptoe into this, you could, you could let, you could offer two free articles a month. You register and you get two more per month. And then you can change that at any point. And what we found in the formula that works is one in one, one free article, register, get another free article, and then the third article, you have to pay. And so that's the framework, that's the subscription funnel, as you might call it, for most of our publishers. Does it work, Tyler?

Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. If you turn this on, you're going to see an increase right away in the number of people that sign up for free and also get added to your newsletter. And then if you're sending a newsletter on a regular basis, hopefully every day if you can, if you have that much content, you're going to see them eventually convert to be paid subscribers. So it's one thing to get them to sign up for free and to get them to get additional free content, it's another thing to get them to convert to paid. And that mechanism, and we talk about it all the time, is the newsletter. And one other point I want to make, I often get the question, well, you know, we're a non profit or we have stories that we want because it's maybe a story is a public interest or it needs to be out there. It's a Los Angeles fire story or something. If it needs to be free, you can market free in leaky paywall. There's no need to put somebody through that funnel just to read some, you know, timely story about an emergency situation. So for those of you who are concerned about that as part of the aspect, mark the story free and bypass this funnel. But for everything else, all the deep dive, the city council investigations, all the stuff that your team is working hard to produce content around, don't make that free, but sit within the meter and let, let the meter do the work and let your audience decide when it's time for them to sign up and under what circumstances. And then eventually you'll get them into the funnel and hopefully get them into that paid side of things.

Yeah, make these exceptions. Make the obvious exceptions for Content that's. Yeah, you can always sort of overrule the, the way the meter is structured.

Yeah, yeah. Because we do see publishers who are still a bit hesitant to consider the word paywall at all. And so this is one way to sort of easing into the process of setting this up.

Yeah. So I want to speak specifically to magazine publishers just for a minute in terms of restrictions because they fall into sort of a special category where when we work with quite a lot of print publishers, some that are still running print, some that have migrated from print to digital editions only, and what I see is they'll come in and they'll, they'll want to restrict the magazine articles because they are the, it is the top content, it's the long form content. But at the same time they're publishing a blog with other valuable content. It might not be long form, it might be sort of a shorter format. But the reaction that I get is, yeah, we'll gate the magazine content, but we'll leave the blog content open. That is a huge mistake. So what we find works a lot better and is you basically gate everything. So as long as you're producing original content on your blog, it's your content, your readers want it. Right. And the, the power of the meter is that you're letting the inbound reader choose what they want. So if I do a Google search for, for a topic and I find an article and I go to that article, it might be a short form article on your blog as a magazine publisher. But to me, because I did this, the search, this is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the specific answer to this. If it's a three word answer, I don't care. I just want the answer. Right? Right. It's valuable to me. So what I encourage all content publishers to look at, as long as you're producing original content everywhere is gate everything. And with the meter, you don't, you're, you're not in charge of deciding what's important. I mean, you are, of course you are, but you can, you can lean on the meter to, you know, for 99% of the time, let that reader into the content that they choose because it might be a search, it might be a social post that they click on. It's something of interest to them. You don't have to guess anymore because they, they know what they want. They, they're hitting the article they want to read and you want to. The problem with gating just your magazine content is your blog probably has a fair amount of traffic to it, and you're going to essentially not be building your email list at all. And you're, you're not going to have your hey, I want, hey, please subscribe messaging. Show up as frequently as you need it to to actually convert paid readers. So, and we've done this with a lot of our, a lot of our magazine publishers where they're getting everything except for sponsored content, like the sponsored content categories, sort of a typical one that they'll leave open for obvious reasons, but everything else, put that free registration in front of it, send them the newsletter, and then when they come back, you have it upgrade messaging to paid. Okay, that's my rant for magazine publishers. I want to finish up on hard paywall. When it's time to use a hard pay wall. When you sort of reach that point in time where your, your brand is strong enough, whether it's local, local news, magazine, niche news publisher, whatever it is, you have this really strong brand, you have a big list, you feel confident in your email list and you're ready to kind of take the next step and say, look, if you want access, you gotta pay. And we have, we have news publishers that are doing this, we have magazine publishers that are doing this, industry trademark magazines that are doing this. We have quite a number of financial publishers that are doing this. And there's some commonalities here. Audience growth, branding, content value. So if you're a financial publisher, you're producing content that's timely, high value, and most of our financial publishers want to lock down access to that content. You pay, you get access. They know their audience has money because they're in the financial publishing space and off you go. But even local news, Tyler, you and I have talked about Upper east site quite some time. They have a hard paywall running, right? That's right, yeah. So I remember talking to them about their strategy over time. And when you look at something like this, now they're based in New York City area and they cover a neighborhood or three or what, what not. I forget. Exactly. But they didn't just turn on a hard paywall. They actually started with a free registration. They built their list over time, and then at a moment in time, the publisher decided, hey, we're gonna, you know, the audience has grown, the brand recognition is there. We're going to go to hard paywall. So now you have to pay to get access to anything on here. And does it work for them?

It does, yeah. Certainly does, yeah. Once you, once you go down that long path of growing your audience and growing your brand. And, you know, like you just said, once you have confidence in that, a hard paywall can work, even for news publishers who aren't, in his case, not focused on financial stuff at all.

Right.

So it does. It does work.

What are they focused on? 2.

Two main categories. And they figured this out over time based on their analytics when they started, I believe crime and food, two very polarized, interesting categories of content. But that's what their audience wants. That's what they read. That's where they linger on. The content and the analytics give them what they want. And if they're willing to pay for that, which we know that they are, then there you go. You've got a winning strategy for your audience. And again, this isn't something you figure out in your first year of your publication. This takes time to figure out and put a strategy behind and eventually get you to this point of a hard paywall. You may never get to a hard paywall. It might not ever be right for your audience or for your publication.

Yep, that's right. It depends. All right, I think that wraps it up. I will say, if you are listening to this and you want to talk about your restrictions, your framework, I absolutely love to talk about this stuff. It's my favorite stuff to nerd out on. I know it is Tyler's as well. My email is pete101.com z e n101.com that's my personal email. Send me an email. Let's talk and enjoy the journey. Thanks, Tyler.

Thank you. See you.

Catch you later.

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.