How should publishers handle AI and social media in 2024?

Welcome to the Paywall Podcast. I'm here with Tyler once again. Welcome, Tyler.

Hello.

We are going to nerd out about subscription success as we always do. If you're listening to this. Thanks for listening. Today we're going to talk about 2024. We're not going to talk about any kind of trends. Oh, yes, I lied. We're going to talk about trends. But what we're going to really talk about is what you should be doing in 2024. What are the key areas to focus on? With all the changes happening with AI and social media and everyone's scratching their head and thinking, what do I do next? How about that? Should we talk about that?

Let's do it.

I think that's. I think that would be a great.

One to look at.

Now, what I want to do is be clear that what you need to be focusing on are the things you can control this year or last year in the future. Social media being the big example of something totally out of your control that you're dependent on. And when you control things, you can guide them in the direction you want to guide them. They won't change on you suddenly in the future, and they will grow your business. And that's what we're. That's what we're here to do. Okay, so the word of the day is control. I mentioned social media. I just want to. I just want to reiterate that, yes, you might be generating traffic from social media, and that's fine. And you can keep doing it, but don't expect it to last. Facebook came out and they, they basically said, hey, we're going to turn off. We're not going to promote news feeds. Okay. Publishers are screaming, what do I do now? I'm going to go to TikTok. Okay. I'm going to go into Instagram. Okay, that's fine. And these are all fine. And these are supplementary to what you're doing, but they shouldn't be the core engine that drives your revenue. So what do you do instead? Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna jump a little bit. I. I know I, I said I wasn't gonna talk about trends, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna talk a little bit about trends. Cause Reuters, which is the article we're looking at, published a. A really neat piece with a lot of information in it. And I'm just gonna pick out the things that, that I read and thought, hey, this is what we're seeing. Not so much. Just a few things I want to note. One, they're noted that publishers, news, publishers specifically are generally pessimistic about the future. And at the same time they wrote that subscriptions were either stable or had a little bit of growth last year in general when they surveyed publishers, which I think that's a hint. If you're not capturing and being very committed to growing subscriptions. We're not seeing that here. We're dealing with subscriptions all day long. We're seeing a lot of success with not only increasing subscriptions, but building the audience, which is really the secret to building subscriptions. Social media, dropping traffic, that's another big one. Just talked about that. Another kind of a sad trend which it continues is stopping print. And Tyler, I know that you deal with this with your local publisher crowd sometimes, Right. Especially with small print runs, right? Yep, yep.

And it's not the end of the world transitioning from a print product to digital. I've got several publishers that have done it and they've done it successfully. I've got several publishers who have never been print publishers and have been digital first. There is certainly room for a digital only product without the hassle of print and mailing and printing and all of that.

So successfully stopping print and making a transition to digital actually sounds like a podcast. But is there any kind of a takeaway that you can, that you can share with the listeners about any particular nugget that might help that print publisher switch over to digital only?

Yeah, keep doing them in tandem, but push the digital only subscription plans as the primary option on your website. And then over time you will start to see that offering a print plan doesn't make a lot of sense. Even if you give it digital and print, it just doesn't make a lot of sense from a financial perspective. So at some point you'll start to notice that the vast majority, if you're only offering that digital offering, you're putting that forward. Most people will, will start to pick that only and then you'll, you'll be able to make that transition fairly simple.

It's almost like an old guard, new guard, customer.

Yeah, you don't have, you don't have to do them. You don't have to do them at the exact same. You don't have to end your break tomorrow. It's something that most publishers do over time.

So you're saying really lean in and throw a focus on the digital side and then that will, will organically take care of itself.

Yeah, I tell publishers, I tell them all the time, pretend like you don't have your print product. Sure. You can still add a link on your subscribe card page that says print plans or something. But don't make it prominent, make people go looking for it. Because again, those are like you're not usually you're losing money on those a lot of times. As far as delivery is concerned. I get why they still send out. There's advertising. There's a number of reasons why you would continue to send a print product.

Yeah.

But in the long run it makes more sense to offer digital. As we know it's a lot cheaper to do that. That's the primary. Yep.

All right, local news wisdom from Tyler. Awesome. Okay, another one. Let's back to the Reuters article. So another trend, bundling other content. Which makes sense if you think New York Times and their games. Washington Post launched a games product maybe a year ago or so. Podcasts, subscriber only podcasts. There's a good idea. People love podcasts. It's an efficient way and intimate way to consume content. I certainly love them. So consider having yes, you can have a podcast broadcast setup, but why not consider subscriber only podcasts. We have publishers that have been doing it for years and you have to be a logged in paying subscriber in order to pull it off. So bundling is another one. AI for back office work, definitely gotta mention probably the biggest buzzword of our time right now. We're gonna dive into that a little bit more. And then the final thing was to is what subscriptions and memberships, publishers looking more and more into turning that on or doing more with that to build the reader revenue stream. And of course that's what we talk about. Tyler, anything else that you think, you think is really a nonsense to look at for 24, anything you're talking to your publishers about and you're shaking your head thinking yeah, don't worry about that.

Yeah, I get a lot of questions around how do we stop AI from extracting our content and using it as part of their model? There's, there's already lawsuits. The New York Times has already filed a lawsuit I think around this topic. So I suspect in 2024 we're going to see a lot more of that, especially if they're successful in litigating that. But for the smaller publisher, the medium sized publisher, the rest of us who are not the New York Times, I don't think there's much to worry about. Most people don't consume their news through chat GPT and they're likely that's probably not something they're. They're going to do, at least anytime soon. And if you've got a gated paywall and you've got something that you always want to be behind the paywall, then just make it, make it. Always require a plan, a free plan at least, or a paid plan. I wouldn't get too caught up in all of that. And keep your focus on growing the newsletter and growing out your list, because that's as we've seen with Facebook and as we've seen with other social platforms, you can't rely on their traffic. But what you can rely on is the 25,000 subscribers in your free newsletter that you can market to whenever you like on your timeframe without the algorithms. And you've got an audience that you have ownership over as far as the platform is concerned. So that would be my focus. It's not much new. Like it's not a new thing that we haven't talked about before, but it's becoming more and more important because every single publisher just about that I work with, Facebook is basically last place on their referring traffic. Most of the publishers that I work with, it's direct traffic, which is from Google and from their newsletter, Facebook, Twitter and any of that stuff. It's a distant referring referral of traffic.

All right, a lot of things to unpack in that. Let me wind back to just the AI that started this whole kickoff. We. I did hear from a publisher who's dealing with a website that was essentially cloning his own website with content. And how do I deal with that? Yeah, you go after him and try to shut them down and all that good stuff. I think for the most part you're correct. AI is really. One crowd is super excited about it, another crowd is super scared about it. End of the world stuff. And the reality is it's a tool that you should absolutely be exploring and learning about and using today. We'll jump, jump into that for a second. But as far as AI content ending up. Yes, in chat, GPT or whatever, right now, that's really not the consumption. If somebody starts to copy your content, lock it down, take a period of time. And especially if you're in local news, where it's the most recent news is what's important. Just hard lock it. If you're using leaky paywall, just set that meter to zero. Take a, you can take a free registration or just lock it down for, for a month and guess what? That competitor will not have your content for a month.

Yeah. And one thing you can do, and anyway, one thing you can do is use the IP blocker. I think that would probably stop most of it. We haven't talked much about that, but basically it would prevent the IP from continuing to re scrape the data on your site. That's a whole nother technical conversation. But there are ways to continue to have a metered approach but also limit the access that bots and ChatGPT and others have to your site.

Yeah, you want to be careful. You don't want to blow up your site for the sake of the minority. People will always be getting, trying to get around your paywall, trying to steal your content. It's been happening for decades and you don't really care because it's the 90 plus percent of your readers who will pay you to support you, who like what you're doing, who aren't interested in doing spending any wasting any of their time trying to get around anything. They just want a convenient way to consume your content. All right, let's jump back into that. All right, so I have five things here that I want to go through in terms of 2024. What are the priorities? What would I focus on? You mentioned some of this in your.

In my lecture monologue.

You are a professor, so maybe I should just start calling you a professor.

Oh, please don't.

Professor channel.

Yeah, that's a good. It's the worst.

Yeah, buddy. A different life. Okay? And these are all very much within your control. And that's really the key is doing things you control. Tyler, you had mentioned the newsletter. I just want to reiterate that the newsletter is probably if you don't do anything but one thing this year and that's focus on your newsletter and make it awesome. It is the tool that will grow your email list. It is the tool that will promote your paid subscriptions. It is the tool that will treat your paid subscribers the way they want to be treated. It's lead acquisition. It's and its churn reduction all wrapped up into one. It is a direct marketing tool. I come from the old school of marketing, pre Internet and direct marketing, like postcards. We eventually figured out that you could send envelopes and packages and stuff. But postcards were the killer, was the killer app. Because it's direct mail, it's simple, it's clean, it shows up in your mailbox. Email is still that way. And so set up a free registration. As Tyler mentioned. Give away one article, require registration to to read the second article and then get that person on your mailing list. You're in total control over your email list. You want to grow that email List, you grow your email list, you grow paid subscriptions. We look at the data, the charts, and the more free registrations come in, the more paid subscriptions get converted. It's just, it's a percentage game. 5, 5 to 10% roughly of your free registered readers will convert to paid subscribers. It will happen. So really focus on that quick story. So this morning I was, my wife Colleen was talking about how she tries to get into the Wall Street Journal sometimes to read an article and they shut her down and she's really getting like frustrated at all this, like this. Oh, I can't. I just want to read one article. I just, I don't, I'm not going to be a subscriber. At least she doesn't think she's going to be a subscriber. Although she, maybe she'll consider it, but she's. I just want to read that one article. And, and they just bounced me away and I, I just get so mad. And I said to her, what if they let you read one article? That's, that's all I need. But sometimes you need a second article maybe. Would you give away your email address for that second article? No, I don't know. I really, there was this whole, then a story about how this, this Nike store person wanted to ask her six times for an email address on a purchase. And I said, what if you get the article you're looking for plus you get their newsletter every month. And she, then she went, she said, I'm quoting her. She went, maybe. And I'm just telling you this from somebody who's pretty private and very conservative as far as like giving away personal data. And this is the psychology of the free registration in a nutshell. Right? You're. And don't forget that. And this is a, just a key component. You don't have to give away much. And your newsletters, huge value. That's the free newsletter, massive value I get. You get free newsletters in your mailbox and they're triggers. They're like, oh, look at this new stuff. Sometimes you just delete, delete, delete, great. But sometimes you're like, ooh, that's a good article, I gotta read that one. Boom. And it drives you back where then you have a chance to capture that person and take em to the next level, paid level or whatever. Okay, have I said enough about the newsletter? I wanna say one more thing. Cause I'm not done yet. Cause it's that important is that newsletters are viral and we talk about social traffic. The thing I think we all, a lot of people forget, including myself, is that you can go and publish on TikTok, you can go on Instagram, you can go on YouTube, you can post all this content. That's great. But there's a difference between you, the publisher, putting an article out on TikTok or putting some content out on TikTok versus one of your fans, pre registered readers, casual visitors, or paid subscribers putting an article out on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, X, whatever. Because when one of your fans is promoting your content to their network, pays attention. When you, the publisher, promote your content to your network, eh, that's expected. Like I get you're getting all the news or all the articles from a publication. Okay, that's fine. But when I go and I share an article from a publication to my friends somewhere or my network, they pay attention because it's a fan sharing. So think about that. And the newsletter is viral. The email gets forwarded to someone else. The article gets. So you drive someone to an article, they copy the URL, they send it in a text message. Right. They throw it on Facebook. So this is the thing. If you control your list and grow your list, your virality will increase because your network will be doing the sharing. So I wouldn't get too excited, I wouldn't stop, I wouldn't worry so much about social. Let your fans take care of the social for you. Does that make sense?

It sure does.

Cool. All right, there's the newsletter. Let's talk newsletter. So redesign. Because every time you look at your design, if you haven't looked at your design in a month or in a year, you probably should look at it and make sure that you have the free newsletter. You have a paid newsletter. Free registration means you have a free list. Paid newsletter means you have a paid list. Treat those readers differently. The free newsletter is all about having language to upgrade to a paid subscription. So every day, every week, whatever your cadence is, upgrade. Maybe you have other products to sell. That's great. Upgrade and get a sponsor. Or don't forget the sponsor. Right. Paid cyber newsletter, no upgrade message. Maybe you have a special sponsorship just for paid subscribers. Maybe it's a. Maybe it's a. Maybe it's a promotion that someone gets to put into your paid newsletter just for paid subscribers that they'll pay extra for. Now what's a paid newsletter, Tyler? Oh, boy. That's the question.

That's.

Oh, wait, I have a newsletter, but I. Paid newsletter. That sounds like work. Is it extra work?

Not really, no. I. I've got several publishers that have two separate lists. Basically you've got the free people who sign up through the free registration and then at any point in the process they upgrade or someone comes on and just goes direct to paid. Those folks are put on the paid list. And so basically when you send out your newsletter, you can send to all the free users at any point and at the same time you can send out to your paid lists. And basically you're just changing the language a little bit around those two lists because clearly you want the free list to upgrade. That's the whole point is to give Colleen the extra article, get her, get her hooked on the newsletter. Because now instead of just wanting one article, she really wants 15 articles. And so to get her to upgrade is it requires language in the newsletter that entices her to pay. And that's exactly what you do. It's not that it's not that complicated from a technical perspective. It doesn't take much, that much more time to do and it's super effective.

And what about the subscriber only newsletter? What are some examples of that? Like how do I pull that off without creating a ton of work for my life? Do I have to write extra content to have a subscriber only newsletter?

Yeah, not typically. So I've got some publishers that they've got their, let's say their top five stories of the day that go out in their free list. But maybe there's two or three stories that didn't quite make the cut and didn't go in that free newsletter, but are still important. But they put that in the paid list and these folks get a little bit more commentary around these extra articles. It could also be news that's coming up tomorrow that's not yet public. Just any little extra thing that you can offer the paid list. It doesn't have to be extraordinary, it just needs to be a little bump above what you would get on the free list.

Yeah, I like that. I like having that like afternoon newsletter that instead of getting the newsletter sent the next morning, the paid subscribers get the newsletter in the afternoon. So you get it in front of everybody. Yeah, like that's, that's a good one. Yeah, I like that a lot. Could also do, depending on how much volume you have, you could do full text newsletters. Like if you're, you know, if you're put putting out maybe one or two articles a day, you could send full text to your subscriber list and you can completely automate that. Um, and that would be easy to do and that's A big benefit when you don't have to log in. You can just read something right in your email as a paid subscriber.

Yeah.

Cool. All right, so that was a lot about newsletters, paid newsletters. So the second that's. And so let's call that the first thing. Second thing is it's another distribution channel that's becoming popular and That's SMS or WhatsApp. Around outside the United States, it's WhatsApp. Inside the United States, it's SMS. So there are larger publishers that are working on this, doing this successfully right now that are essentially sending instant text messages or WhatsApp messages to their readership in exchange for payment. Right. So it's a premium part of their subscription. We have some relationships going in that end. If, if you're listening to this and you're interested in exploring SMS or WhatsApp, please get in touch. But it's another thing, another channel, like the email newsletter, but obviously it's like an app notification, but it's totally under your control. This is something that you can build. Yes. You'd have to ask for credential phone number or WhatsApp information on, let's say a registration, but once you get it, you got it. And it's part of teasing content and premium content as well. If you're a sports publisher, you're probably sending out 14 messages a day. That's how crazy sports fans are.

Yep.

If you're a news publisher, it might be a little less, but. But geez, I could. The New York Times on their app, they got me for. I. I'm sure I get at least 5, 6, 7 articles pushed at me every day. But yeah, channel you can control. Speaking of apps, number three, there's another channel you can control. Why not deliver the best reading experience to your, to your readers through an app? There are lots of app providers. We have integration with MobileLoud and another one coming. Plus we have our own unipress apps, easy to set up. And there's no extra work on the publishing end. Yeah, it costs a little money. Not everybody's ready for apps, but it's another area under your control. You get push notifications and it's a benefit to the subscriber. Just like the premium newsletter. It's like another subscriber benefit that increases the value of the paid subscription. And it's convenience. It's just open. Get the push notification, open the app up, read the article. Wonderful way to, to keep your readership running. Okay, so that's three podcasts. We, we mentioned Podcasts earlier. That's, that's another one. Some, I know some of you are exploring starting up a podcast. I hear it quite a lot when I talk to publishers. I'm thinking about starting a, a podcast. I think there are a lot of publishers in that mode. Some are doing it. And what I would do is consider, yes, the podcast is great, but you want to make it part of your value add. So I would either edit the podcast, you could maybe tease out the first part of it, and then for full access you have to be a paid subscriber and listen to it. You can do an integration with the, with the Apple Store now to be able to connect to that. And basically paid subscribers get access to paid podcasts. But that's something that I'd say most publishers are not quite ready for. But it is, it is coming. And if you're in a spot where you're considering it, it's a good spot. We actually worked with Street Photography magazine. They started a premium podcast years ago. And when I talked to Bob about it, he loved it. Subscribers absolutely loved it. They'd list, they, they'd go to the website, they'd log in and they'd listen to the, what they knew as the subscriber only podcast. And he was actually producing public podcast like free podcasts in the stores and then that, and then he would drive subscribers simply by promoting his content and the premium podcasts that were available to subscribers. That really worked well for him. And he was a, he's a one band, one man band and did it all, or most of it all anyway. So it works, has worked for a while. Okay, I have one more thought for 2024, which we already talked about. I'm gonna take a guess. Tyler, what it is. Talk about the newsletter. Talk about newsletter apps, WhatsApp and SMS podcast. One more. Okay, AI, let's jump into AI just.

A little bit because it is, it's the hot thing.

If you're not using AI, you need to be using it. And I would pending. If you're afraid of it, skeptical of it really, this is the point in time to jump in and start playing with it. Everybody's playing with it. We're all new at AI. This is nothing to be, be ashamed of because we're all new, right? We're all exploring what's what, what it's capable of. So things that are working for, for publishers and AI are like what, what Reuters mentioned. So that back office stuff, what can you do with it to superpower yourself as a publisher? It's not about writing content. And that's where I think a lot of people get weirded out about, oh, my God, AI is going to write all the content. No. And if you've actually played with AI, the content it produces is unless your inputs are fantastic. So the better your inputs, the better your outputs. Inputs take effort. And yes, it can accelerate things for you, but you have to put the effort in to make it work. So things that are. So the idea behind AI is go to OpenAI to create a free account. Chat GPT3.5 is what we're at, and you can just start playing with it. Things you can do with it, we use it for. We'll get a transcript from this podcast, we'll run it through Chat GPT and we'll build a summary. It'll build a summary of the podcast and we post that on our blog. I will edit that summary. And that's the thing is like when you get these summaries, you'll get something that's. Sometimes you'll get something that's, oh, that's terrible. So you got to edit it. And then that means you go back in and say, oh, wait, okay, do it this way, don't do it that way. You get something that's decent, you're going to go in, you're going to edit it anyway, then you post it. But I tell you what I think. I think I've saved myself at least an hour of time every time I use AI to create a transcript. This is original content. This is our content. This is drawing from our knowledge base from our publishers. But we're using AI to speed the. Take this long transcription that would take probably longer than an hour to get through and edit it, to do it in a few seconds and then spend a few minutes editing and then post it and you're done summarizing. Long documents. If you record. If you're in town hall and you're recording something, get a transcription, feed it into AI, produce the summary. Like this is just like an amazing way to leverage and make yourself, you know, superpowered. Proofreading is another one that's important. Send. Let the AI find spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and suggest. And by the way, you can train your own AIs to do it in your style, too. Like, there's you. But it takes a little time to figure out what you want it to do and how to communicate with it. And that's why the playing is important. You can create images for articles. That's another big one. Now I gotta be a little Careful with it. But yes, there's Dall E, which is the built in tool for ChatGPT. You tell it I need, I need a person reading a newspaper, drinking a cup of coffee in front of a window for this article and boom, you got it. Right now you can go down the rabbit hole and spend hours trying to perfect these images. But it's certainly something that, that you can put to work. And I see being put to work research, just gathering data on things. Just tell ChatGPT to go give me some information on this topic or that topic and you'll be. It'll save you hours of research time if you're doing a big project. And then another one which is actually working. There's a couple of Swedish publishers, Afton Blade in Sweden and one other one that were called out as this working well. And it's like doing a little summary on top of your articles. If you're publishing longer articles, news articles, you can essentially feed your article into ChatGPT and say, hey, write a two sentence or three sentence summary of this article and then you can post that as a block on top of that article. That is something that has proven really effective. And because what you're doing is you see a thousand words and you're like, maybe I'll read it, maybe I won't, maybe I'll read the first few sentences. But if you produce a two sentence summary of that thousand word article, I will, the reader will read the two sentence summary. Be like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, now I'll read the article. So it's been increasing reading rates on articles, just having those little summaries that can be AI generated in your flow. So those are the things that I've seen. I don't know, Tyler, if there's anything else that you either do use personally with AI or you find that your publishers are doing with AI.

Yeah, that's what you've listed is most of it. I've got one publisher that was, has been experimenting with using it to develop like background content, which again, publishers are a little hesitant to do that. But it was basically, here's the headline news in my local community. But give me some broader context at the bottom.

Oh, interesting. I see. Okay. So researching on the background content.

Yeah, like here's something that happened in the community, let's say a chemical in the water. Okay. Give me some background about like issues within the US that we see with drinking water or something in the last five years. I don't know, they're using it as a tool for background research to help them. I don't know if they're still using it, but whenever they do use AI, they're very like explicit about disclosing that on their site.

Yeah, that's fair for a piece for content like that. For sure. If they're going in and editing it. If you're going in, if you. If AI draft up something and you're going in and actually editing it as a human in order to make it better, which you should generally be doing, then that. That's not as important. But yeah, if you're pulling research and it's AI generated now, you're. Yeah. You're basically citing your source.

Yeah, and I think they were.

Yeah. And they.

And I believe they were manipulating what they got. Clearly. Usually you can't use what it spits out verbatim. No, quite that good.

Still probably saved them some time, right?

Oh, for sure, for sure. Stuff that you would spend hours trying to research and it can bundle that up for you in a couple of seconds. So.

Yep. Yep. All right. I think that's all we got for today. So just to summarize it, this is the year of control. Get things under your control. Stop worrying about social. Make your free newsletter and paid subscriber newsletter awesome. Think about apps. If you're ready for that. Think about SMS and WhatsApp. Collecting that information and blasting out notifications. Consider paid podcast and start playing with AI if you haven't already. It's will just make your world smarter and faster and supercharge you as a publisher. Thanks for listening. That's the podcast.