Pete Ericson recommends stopping readers after one free article, then offering a few more (2-3 for news) if they register for email. The New York Times tightened from 20 free articles to 1, and Small Boats Monthly saw 20% monthly growth in both email and paid subscriptions after restricting access.
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Hi, I'm Pete from Leaky Paywall, and today we're going to answer the question, what should I set my paywall meter to? In other words, how many free articles should I give away before prompting a visitor to subscribe? This is a question we get all the time from publishers, and we have an answer for you. The problem is that setting your restrictions too generously will make you miss the opportunity to not only build paying subscriptions, but also building your email list. Most publishers that we work with start too generous with their meter. Especially if you are new to paid subscriptions, you'll tend to want to give away a bunch more free articles than you need to. And that's a big problem because you won't scale up your paid subscriptions as fast as you would like. If you take this path, it'll take you a few months to organically see that you're not converting enough paid subscribers. And when you set this up properly, you'll end up with a free registration that lets you build your email list more quickly as well, which will actually create more traffic for you as your newsletter sends people back. Okay, so what's the solution here? What should I set my meter to now? Why don't we take a look at our old friend the New York Times here. Ten years ago, 11 years ago, when they started, they had a very generous meter set. You could go to their website and read about 20 articles before they asked you to subscribe. And it worked, and they started gaining subscribers. Sometime later, they went to 10 articles per month as the meter setting. That worked better, that converted more paid subscribers. Then they went to five free articles. Now they're at one free article sometimes, and sometimes you get to the site and there are no free articles available. But they will let you register for free to gain access to a few more free articles. And you, the publisher, should set up exactly the same thing. Whether you're B2C or B2B, whether you're a news publisher or magazine publisher, set up a free registration, stop your readers early, let's say one free article, and let them offer an email address and register on your site and trade for offering them a few more free articles. And when I say a few more free articles, I mean exactly that, and your language should reflect that on your signup form. So if you take a look at the New York Times here, I am actually logged in as a free registered subscriber. I have an account here, and what it's telling me is that I can read this article, but I'm almost out of free articles. They don't tell me exactly how many I'm going to get, just that I have a few. And that language works. Now here's another example. This is Small Boats Monthly, a magazine that we know and love. And they have a very restrictive metering setup on their site. They've been doing this for a few years and they have one free article set that you can read and then on the second article you get asked to register for free. And what do they offer for registering for free? They offer only one more article, period. Which means that if I fill out the registration information here, then I only get one more article ever. Now that's pretty restrictive. They produce long form content, but they've been doing this for a while. And what they found out is that even by just offering one additional article for free, they grew their email list at an additional 20% and their paid subscriptions at an additional 20% per month, month over month. So if somebody really wants your content and you're offering valuable pieces of content, they'll register to read it and then you have them on your newsletter. And your newsletter sends that person back to the website over and over again over time to see your paid subscription prompts and then that will trigger them to convert and pay for a subscription. Now one additional note here in the spirit of hardening your paywall. Small Boats uses one of our add ons called IP Blocker. And what this does is it stops people from from going incognito to get around their content. And that's a big hole in metered paywalls that is plugged by tracking IP addresses of your readers that come in. And when they go to a different browser or they switch to incognito, they still get prompted to subscribe, they get blocked. It still allows all the content on Small Boats to be indexed by Google and it still allows every article to be shared in social media. It's only when the individual browser starts to comb through content that the content is blocked and the offer is made to either register or pay, depending on your status. So what's the bottom line? Set your meter to one free article per month. Set, set up a free registration to offer access to a few free articles each month. Let's say maybe two or three if you're a news publisher. If you're a long form magazine style publisher, you may only offer just one additional article per month or do a small boat did and offer one article period. The best thing about this is it's super easy to test. Once your metered paywall is set up, you can change those numbers in the back end, let's say every 30 days and see what happens to your free registrations as they grow and your paid subscriptions as they grow. If you want to learn more about setting up a free registration growing your your mailing list growing paid subscriptions, make sure you download our Subscription Accelerator Guide or check out one of our other articles on setting up a free registration. See you next time.
