How magazine publishers should approach reader revenue

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 where you can download Leaky Paywall for free. And now for today's episode. Today we're going to talk about why magazine publishers are not going to grow their audience as they need without nurturing reader revenue. We're going to talk about reader revenue for magazine publishers, specifically, if you're not a magazine publisher, this, my episode, might not be for you. Just kidding. There's lots of gold in here. But if you're a magazine publisher and you're printing a magazine and you're tiptoeing around reader revenue or you decided not to really look at reader revenue, I'm going to make some of you a little angry this morning when we're recording it because you're going on a rant. Welcome to episode 44 of the Paywall Podcast. I'm here with Tyler again. Welcome, Tyler. Hey, Pete. How's it going in West Virginia?

It's a beautiful sunny day. Love it.

Excellent. Excellent New Hampshire. We're finally warming up. We actually might hit 80 degrees this weekend.

My goodness.

I'm ready. Okay, so here's the story. I went down to the niche conference with Jeremy down in New Orleans, which is essentially a magazine publishers conference. I did a presentation on subscription revenues to a room of magazine publishers, which was very, very interesting. And we work with a lot of magazine publishers on the reader revenue side of things and have amazing stories to tell with successful stories on growing their audience and growing their revenues. And I expected to have sort of a similar conversation down in New Orleans, but guess what? I didn't. What? What I found out to my surprise was that the room had only about 10, maybe 15 of the publishers in the room were actually going after reader revenue and. And didn't have plans on doing so, which kind of blew my mind completely out of the water. And what we learned, and maybe we should have, I should have learned this earlier in. At this stage, but we're kind of in our own bubble of subscription revenues with magazine publishers and news publishers. But we learned is, and I quote this from one of the publishers in the room, I want to build my audience to serve my advertisers. Right? So in other words, this translates to, I want to fill my CRM to please my advertisers. Now, I totally get that ad revenue is the dominant source of income. And I would never suggest to hurt that revenue stream in any way. But what I will suggest is that not only can you grow reader revenue, but you will. You need to grow reader revenue now or you're not going to survive and grow your ad revenue. One grows the other. So if you focus on your readers and really take care of that, their experience on your website, you're going to grow your reader revenue. You're going to, you're going to, you're going to lean into digital subscription revenue and you're going to be able to take care of your advertisers better because you're going to be able to grow your audience and you're going to engage better because you're taking care of your readers. Okay, so let's just step back a little bit. So what does your audience want? What is your reader, you know, the, what do the readers want? They want a nice experience, right? It's like if you, if you, if you've been printing a magazine for a long time and you're selling subscriptions via print, you are offering a nice experience, right? And still today the print, a print experience is a great experience. It's a lean back experience, it's a relaxing experience. You like all the content, you like the articles, you like the ads that are in it, you like, you know, all the, the, all the editorial everything. It's, it's a nice experience. But on the web, the advertising, the pop ups, the ad blocker notices, the autoplay videos, these are not nice experiences. So I'm going to lean a little bit into what is actually happening now on, on websites, which is causing real problems. And I don't think that publishers are seeing this clearly because they're looking, they're the, the advertiser has your ear, right? As a magazine, the average you, you're, you're, you. I get it. They're giving you big money. They want results, right? You're under pressure to build your audience, right? Collect as many email addresses as you can to please those advertisers. Okay, so, but hold on, are you really growing the right audience? Right? Is, Is, is this, is this a long term strategy? And so let's just look at an example. We're looking at a, a pop up here. I, I'm going to pick on, on a, a magazine publish publisher here that I've, that I've looked at. This is somebody that we're working with now and we have an ad blocker notice because yes, I'm one of the 40% on the planet that have an ad blocker installed. And guess what? You know, it's 40%. You got to deal with it, right? This, this is enough to basically send me away. So you know what? I don't, I have to do work. I have to click this thing. I got to refresh it. I got, you know, it's like you're making me do work just to see content. And then on the, on the next page here I got a pop up which may or may not. Oh, here we go. So now I got another pop up. It's like, come on, guys, I just want to, I just want to like learn about you. But now it's like, I have this. This looks like an ad. It's so much. I don't even know what's happening here. All right, well, we're going to close that. Okay, great. So the other thing we see is, you know, browser notifications, like turn on browser notifications. You got to turn that off. Slide ins or like email newsletter graphs. Now that one I can almost support when there's a pop up to get on a newsletter. Like, that's if you're going to pop up anything. That's the pop up. Get the email address right. Or autoplay videos. Let me see what else. I made a, I made a list here. The other thing. So getting away from pop ups and such is this flipbook and E Edition business that continues to persist. And again, I get it. You have your publication that is now in a flip book or an E Edition or some sort of a form format. And what I see over and over again is magazine publishers giving this edition away for free on their website. It's just all, it's like all the content is just here. Now I gotta, I gotta decline. I gotta click another button. And now I can, Now I can, you know, go and read everything. Now I get it. You want your ads to be, to be present and that's the main motivation. But by having a flip book, I totally get it. But the reader doesn't like it, right? It's, it's kind of unreadable. No one's really reading this. No one's actually on their phone pinching and zooming and figuring out how to like manipulate these, these pages. It's silly. It really is. But at the same time, you're also hurting your ability to get people to convert because the content, what you're telling your reader is, it's actually free, but it's not, it's your best content. It's Your premium content. If you're take, if you're taking, if you're taking paid subscriptions for a print magazine, you need to be, there's no reason to not be taking print subscriptions to your digital magazine, which is not a flipbook by the way, or any addition. Okay. And let me end my rant on the content. And so it's like a big sieve, right? Like you're putting your content on the website in an old fashioned format. It's just a copy of print, but it doesn't do you any good as far as like attracting your audience. It doesn't have any SEO value. People don't share these additions in social media. So it's almost like not having your content on. You get no benefit of having free content on your site. Not even SEO, not even social sharing. It's, it's, it's the reverse of what you should be doing. Okay, now the other thing that I'll, I'll mention here is most of your visitors are casual visitors. They're not ready to pay you right away. And your, your goal is to build your audience. And yet you have casual visitors that are coming to your website. They're interested in your publication, but with all these, all these pop ups and all this, this, this closing of things and turning off ad blockers and whatever, you're driving those casual visitors away. Right? And, and there's a, there's a good percentage of these visitors that would likely engage with you, right? Give you their email address, pay for, for a digital subscription. There, there's a nice chunk there that you're just literally sending away. You're not building your audience with the right readership. Right. So, okay, so what's the solution? I'm going to give you a little bit of story. We worked with Modern Drummer magazine a few years ago and they were kind of in a similar situation where their magazine content was in, it was in PDFs, not flipbooks, which I would argue is actually a better format than a flipbook as far as readership goes on a digital device. They were selling individual PDFs, they were selling subscriptions to the PDFs, they were publishing a free news feed, which I know a lot of magazine publishers do. And that's fine. If you have free content you need to give away, great. But set up a registration to at least capture the email address. So what did, what did Modern Drummer do? Modern Drummer did the work of taking the content from their magazine and publishing it in, on, in web based articles. And what, like what's A web based article. Well here, let's look at, give you another example. And this is a beautiful online magazine. Iron and air.com so this is a web based article. It's just an article that's published on the website in a sort of standard web based format. So Google can index, you know, all, all this content and I can, if I'm like on Facebook or something, I can grab this URL and just share it on social media. Right. So that's what, what Modern Drummer did is they converted all their articles into web based articles. And we'll talk a little bit more about hiring here in a minute. So what happened in a year? The traffic to their website doubled in one year simply by converting. What they did is they went back a year and they converted their past year of articles that were locked in their PDFs essentially onto their website. And that what that did is it let Google index all this new content. And this is by the way, of course, this is, this is premium content. This is like the best content. And then readers found it and said wow, this is great. And then they shared it on social media. And of course they put, they put leaky paywall on as the gate metered paywall. It let Google in to index everything and let every article be, get shared in social media so that the receiver of the article could read it. But it limited the amount of free views and then ultimately encouraged people to subscribe. So this was a, this was a, a big change and they had, I think in the first, first few weeks it pulled in almost a thousand subscribe paid subscribers and then they were, they were really, and I don't know what they're doing now but, but for a very long time for, for, for years they're running you know, daily subscriptions in the double digits and simply by, you know, pulling away a lot of this nonsense off their website, getting their articles into a nice format, letting Google add everything, letting the articles get shared in social media and then gating the content with a proper paywall setup. Okay, so the next step here is in the ha. This is, we're sort of in the how category is. Okay, well you have this casual group of visitors and a lot of them are not quite ready to pay you right away. And this is another, another thing that if you look at the New York Times and other big publishers have figured out, a lot of the publishers we work with, we're really helping install now. And that's, that's a way to capture the casual reader and that's a free registration which if you've been listening to us, we, we talk about all the time because it works like crazy and you need to do it. And what does that mean? What's a free registration? That means, and here is that you set up, you set up the paywall. So you give away let's say one article a month or two articles per month, we recommend one. And then after, after you get that free article, you stop the reader and say hey, get more stuff free articles. Get our newsletter, whatever else you want to give away by simply giving us your email address by registering on the website. And so what you're doing with this is you're, you're adding this layer and it's a simple layered setup and that captures the email of the, what I call the super casual reader. So the reader that's actually interested in your content, it's not a zombie, you know, email that, that the pop up email newsletters tend to collect. This is an engaged reader. This is someone who's doing the work and as we're looking at here who's you know, they get, they get to their second article and they get stopped and it's like hey, you can't read this but you can read this article for free. If you sign up and they, and they, and you force them into a registration, it's simple just grabbing a few details, as many or as few as you like and they register. So you're introducing a piece of friction and saying hey, you can have more but we just want to put you on our newsletter. We want to give you the newsletter, give you, give you maybe a couple articles a month or just a couple articles period, as Small Boats does. And you have yourself now an engaged reader that's in your new, in your free newsletter. And they're enjoying a little more content and of course now you can track their behavior as well. And, and this is today is really the best tool to engage those casual readers. So bottom line is stop driving your readers away with the pop ups and the blockers and the, and the browser notifications and the autoplay videos and all the ads and slide ins and all the nonsense. Every click that your reader has to do to clear something away from getting them to enjoy your content. Is, is, is creating a risk factor for them just literally leaving your website. Every single click is like a, is like maybe I should just go away because this is bothersome and we're really tired of being bothered today on, with a lot of things not just on the web, but time is, time is valuable and think about it this way if you are causing your casual readers and or your paid subscribers to waste time on something, especially if it's annoying, that is not a good relationship. Okay, so we've talked about bringing your content into a web based format, your, your best premium content into an easy mobile friendly, readable format that Google can index, that I and everyone else can share on social media to grow your, your traffic. We talked about setting up a free registration to, to capture those casual visitors that are, that are interested, just not ready to pay, not ready to marry you on the first date. So free registration and then the meter paywall's job is to provide the targeting, the upgrade messaging to these free registered readers that are engaged and but in a nice way because they've already opted in through registration convince them to upgrade. And that works, that formula works like gangbusters. And they may not, they may have, they may decide to register and they may decide and I know Tyler, you talk about this. They might, may decide to just pay you right away after, after registering and thinking about it and saying oh this is great, I really want this but a lot of them are going to not pay you right away and that's okay. Now you have them on your newsletter. They're, they're engaged with you and they, they'll pay you down the road. Would be a nice percentage of these casual readers that will convert if you take care of them with your newsletter and not annoying them with. Yes. Hmm. Yep. Yep.

This, I, I like this model mainly because instead of blasting them with pop ups and you know, put your email address in here and they have no idea what they're getting into because maybe they don't know your brand yet and if they're looking at your articles and then they have a nice little box after maybe one article and they see that they need to sign up for free to get more access, you know that they're a qualified interested reader in, in your content. And not only is this good for you as the publisher for potentially being able to collect a subscription from them, but it's also more valuable to your advertisers because these are folks that are actually interested in your content. They're not, they're not just putting in an email address to close out a pop up box.

Yes. So let's get to that point. Exactly. They're more interesting to your advertisers. So this is, this is back to the conference. This is the thing I heard over and over, we gotta, we gotta please the advertisers. We got it, we got, we need more ad sales. We've got to make them happy. Which means we got to fill your fill the CRM. We got to get more, we got to get more readers. And I agree you got to get more readers. But more importantly you need to get a, you need to, you need to get more engaged readers.

Yeah, don't, don't fill it up with junk like and just say that you have a hundred thousand newsletter subscribers. If only a quarter of them are interested, then what do you really have?

Right. You know, so, yeah, and, and, and so I'm just looking at my notes here. So the, the wrap up on this is, you know what, what will actually happen if you do all this. If you set up a free registration to capture that casual reader and then you nurture them with targeting and you have your paywall provide those that, that upgrade messaging over time and your newsletter, your free newsletter is driving all those readers back to your content or you know, every time you release a newsletter they go, it's more traffic back to your website and more messaging to, you know, eventually to upgrade for full access paid subscription. All your, all your benefits. What actually will happen. And this is what we see happen with our publishers. Four things. One, your website traffic will spike. You may double your website traffic. If you're not publishing your premium content on the web because it's locked away in print or PDF or E Edition, you may very well double your traffic. Think about that. Right? And that's just that that's like yeah, you got to do the work of getting the content in the right format but Google will, will reward that and social sharing. It's your, it's your best content. It's your premium content. You, it will get shared more than your free content. If you're doing free content because it's the best content, that's what people want to share. So that's one. Two, your email list will grow. That free registration is the converter and it will grow with qualified engaged enthusiasts. Sorry, I'm getting a pop up from somewhere blowing out my, my topic list here. So now when you're growing, when you have these engaged readers now you can nurture them over time but the bottom line is your email list grows. Okay? And then here's the thing. You now you're, now you're actually growing digital subscriptions the right way, the way and it becomes, it'll become a major part of your revenue stream. If it isn't now and you're not doing it, it will happen. It will become a very important part of your your revenue stream. Remember listening to. To Wired magazine, did a presentation at one of the old conferences. And you know, the, if the, the data point is, you know, you need a visitor to click like on a thousand ads, like network ads to, to equal the. The amount of money you gain by one paid subscriber.

Oh my God.

Right? I mean, no one's going to click on a thousand ads. You know. You know, honestly don't know why anybody clicks on any analyst. It's by mistake, which happens to me sometimes. Okay, so we have. One is website traffic spike. Two, email list is growing. Three, you're, you have a new product that you're selling, digital subscriptions, right? A real nice stream of subscriptions. And then four, this is what started this whole thing is your advertisers will love this, right? You have email. You have email growth. You have website traffic growth. You have a better list, right, of, of readers. This cohort. You have a cohort of paid subscribers to Target. Paid digital subscribers. And you know, yeah, you might be selling print subscriptions, but there's a whole world of people like, like myself and maybe you too, Tyler, that we're not really big on print anymore. Used to be, but now it's digital. I have a slew of digital subscriptions, the publications because it's efficient and it's the way I want to consume news. And yes, you have digital print fans.