How to grow digital subscriptions for your print publication: Two cases studies

Hi, I'm Pete and this segment is taken from the Media Audience and Content Marketing association webinar that I participated in this year. Its aim is to help you, the print publisher, understand the foundation of what it's required to succeed when adding a digital subscription offering. I'll discuss two veteran publishers that we have worked with and show you how they went from struggling with a digital approach and what they did to succeed in growing both digital and print subscriptions. So, let's go. So the first challenge might seem fundamental, but it's something to always think about, and that's your articles have to be friendly to Google so that they can be found in search and they have to be shareable in social media. And you've probably heard this before, but it's critical. And I can't tell you how many publishers I've run into that are still. And maybe you're one of them, not publishing, publishing your best premium content on the web. And of course, a paywall is the next step if you're going in that direction. If you look at these blue numbers, just want to show you how important it is. This is one of the publishers we work with and we take a look at where are their paid subscriptions coming from. And it varies some, but Google search is a big one. There are email marketing campaigns, a big one. We're going to talk about that direct. That's someone who goes directly to the website, social media, and then referrals from other websites. Now, these numbers can change. For some of our news publishers, we have Facebook as the number one source of paid digital subscriptions. But in any case, the point is that PDFs and flipbooks, they do serve a purpose for a certain segment of reader, but they don't serve the modern reader, especially when you get on mobile. All right, the second challenge is related to this. It's really the format. And I see a lot of PDFs and flipbooks that are. And I get what the benefits are. They're easy to produce, but they're applied in a way that's not going to generate new subscribers the way you really want them to. Essentially, when you put content in a PDF or in a flipbook, it's locked content from the modern reader. Google has a hard time indexing PDFs and flipbooks. They never do well in search. When's the last time you found a PDF? When you search for something, it doesn't happen very often. The other thing I see sometimes is where I'll go to a publisher's website and I'll click on the Flipbook and it'll take me off site to a third party vendor. And that's a problem in itself because you're literally sending people away from your website. You might lose them forever. It may come back. Maybe they'll subscribe to Flipbook access, but the numbers are very low. The other thing that drives me totally bananas is when I see Flipbooks that are free on a website, just free and open, and that publisher is trying to generate paid print and digital subscriptions. And it's like a big sieve. Why would I pay for a subscription when I can just take a look through the Flipbook if I really wanted to? And then the last thing is what I mentioned before is mobile. The numbers are a little different, but 70% is a pretty typical number of your traffic that is going to your website, looking at your content. So you really have to look at your. The articles that you produce, are they friendly? Do they look good on our phone? A PDF and a flipbook. It just doesn't work. No matter what you do, no matter how you try. There's too much work trying to pinch and zoom and flip and figure out how to manage the flipbooks. Okay. Hey Pete. Yeah, Real quick, do you want to launch that poll? Sure, yeah. Why not earlier? Oh, yeah, that's fine. Okay. Yeah, I don't know how Do I do that or do you do that? I'll do it. I'll hit the button. But we are going to launch a poll so everyone should get something popping up on their screen and we would appreciate you taking part. Cool. There we go. Okay. Okay, let's talk about Modern Driver magazine. So about five years ago, we worked with them to create a digital subscription plan for them. That was the original intent and purpose. And the situation that they were in was pretty typical of a lot of publishers at the time and still some publishers today, where their website traffic was driven by their news blogs. So they were publishing articles in news, they had a strong podcast going, they had a lot of educational how to articles, how in terms of how to drumming, but very little actual magazine content. So the articles that people really wanted to read were just not available on the site and that they had a pretty, pretty good amount of website traffic at the time, but they really were missing a giant opportunity. What they were currently trying to sell is print subscriptions, mostly PDF subscriptions, which were very few, just a handful a week. It was just, it just didn't, it really didn't work very well. They had an E store for back issues and such. Which makes sense. They were selling education and they were promoting lots of events, but the digital subscription funnel was almost non existent. In 2017, we helped them launch their new website and the purpose was to do two things. One is to drive more website traffic through Google search and social sharing to the site and to get all their magazine articles on the site in a web format. So basically like you go to any news site, you click on an article, if you're just reading an article, it's good on mobile. And so what they did, or what they did at the time is they actually copied and pasted the text and images from their PDFs into onto their website. And they went back a year and did that in a. And they used to, they used actually one of our free plugins called Issue M which lets publishers publish web based issues that are Google and social friendly. And it's free on the WordPress repository, you can grab it and, and then what they also did is as they were publishing releasing issues going forward is they would go back every single month and then what they would do is they would, they would copy and paste articles into back issues as well. So every new issue they released in a web format, they actually released an archive issue in a web format. And the reason that you do that is because every article that you publish in a proper web format is a magnet for a specific Google search and gets shared in social media. Okay. And then of course we helped them install Metered Paywall was our leaky paywall product at the time. And what is a metered paywall? Well, a metered paywall is essentially a paywall that's a little leaky that lets you choose to, let's say, give away 1, 2, 3 free articles per month before that visitor sees the prompt to subscribe. And the metered paywall lets Google continue to what we call indexing. It lets Google crawl all your articles and it lets all your articles rank in Google search and it also lets continues to let all your articles get shared on Facebook and LinkedIn on social media and, and be shared by thousands. And they can read the full article when they click the link, but it's only when the individual browser starts to browse where the meter kicks in and counts how many free articles are going to get before they're prompted to subscribe. So that's what happened there. Okay. Now that they have their website in a Google friendly, their articles essentially in a Google friendly social sharing format and the meter paywall up, what happened? The first 14 days they had 900 new subscribers come on board. It was, they were pretty happy with that. It didn't take them that long to get into a situation where every day they were in the double digits of subscriptions. And that was a mix of both digital and print subscriptions. If you look at this little chart over here, this is from archive.org, which is also known as the Wayback Machine. If you ever heard of the Wayback Machine, you need to go there and put in your web address and take a look as far back as you can to the first version of the website that you ever published and have a really good laugh. Because the archive.org basically preserves the history of the Internet. It's an amazing place. But if you look at, and this is public traffic data and if you look at the data you'll see that since they, they started putting their articles in a web based format and really piling those archives in a web based Google friendly format, their traffic grew through search and social media and it was pretty, pretty dramatic story. Their print subscriptions grew too now. So why did that happen? So when you set up your website as a what I would call like a proper digital engine, so you're pulling in all this traffic from, from Google search and social sharing and you have a metered paywall in place that is, that is capturing let's say free registrations which we're going to talk about in a little bit, and paid subscriptions. You, you create this relationship engine where you're presenting your paid message over and over again. And when you're presenting your paid message you're obviously giving the, the reader a choice. Do you want a digital only subscription? Do you want a print and digital subscription? And what they did, which worked for years, which was really interesting, is how they priced print versus digital. Their print and digital subscription was at the time was $29 per year. Their digital only subscription was 60 or $59 per year. So they price their digital subscription higher than their print subscription and they now for them ad revenue in print was really the goal. They wanted to motivate print and it worked. But what was really interesting is that 20% of people that subscribed chose the digital only product which kind of blew all our minds. But there are people out there that just don't want paper. But they're willing to pay for digital now. I wouldn't, they're no longer doing that. I'm not sure I would do that today because today there's a real focus on simplicity and not confusing the buyer. And I'll show you later, probably want to keep pricing the same for those choices. We'll get into that in a minute. Okay. All right, so here's another story, kind of a similar story. We work with track and field news, veteran news magazine publisher, news publisher, 50 plus years of archives. They, they wanted to generate digital subscriptions. That was their primary, primary push. And what was shocking was in the middle of the project that we were in, they announced to us we were helping at the time, we were helping them put together their new website and paywall. And it was a good sized project. They announced that they were going to quit printing. And that was a little bit of a shocker. It lasted for nine months and they went back to printing again. And so what we all found out was that 50% of their readership had absolutely no interest in logging into anything. They wanted the print product that was, they're willing to pay for it and that was that. And they were really good. They were very real emotional tugs in their postcard and print campaigns to get people to log into their new state of the art publication. And half, half their readership said no, not interested. So what they did when they went back to print is they went from the $30 a year product for print to if you look at their website now they're charging over $150 per year. So they just crank their prices up. They have a few different products that they're selling. Their highest level product includes access to all their archives. So they have a lot of archives and then they installed a timewall. And so what's a time wall? Well, timewall is, can be good for publishers that have a lot of ever old evergreen content that's, that has value and you can charge, it's a lot of work to preserve all this content. You can charge for that. So their highest paid product includes full automatic archive access. And they're so track and field news, they're, they're publishing a database of the recorded history of track and field events. And that's, and their fans, their readership, they want to get back to all the old record all the times and all the charts. They have tons of charts on their end from, from decades ago. So that, that works really well for them. And I, I, I take a look at their subscriptions once in a while and what's been happening is, and this has been several years now is digital print and these, type these archive timewall subscriptions, they're just rolling in. It's working really well for them. Now one thing that I want to mention, and this is A workflow thing that they're doing, which I think is brilliant and works really well for them, is, and I know one of the challenges for issue based publishers is you're producing a print issue. It's the print model first and then it goes on the website. And there's a, in the digital world that's actually problematic. You have to get your articles on the web right away. If something's ready to go, you're losing out in Google search in a fresh article, whether it's news or a magazine, a long form article, you're losing out in social sharing stuff that you can get right away that your audience is willing to pay for. If they can get something earlier that wins, great. But you still have this sort of workflow challenge because it's issue based. It's a print and issue based product. So what track and field does, if you look, this is actually their homepage and what they do is they, when something's ready to go, they publish it on their homepage and they actually make a copy of it and they put it into a draft web issue until that issue is ready to go. And then they launch the issue and it's almost. And it's. Some people say, hey, that's duplicate content. No it's not. Google doesn't care about duplicate content. Google only ranks the first article that's, that's published. That's a myth that's been around for decades. And so what they're doing is they're serving their print audience that really does like to read things in a issue based format, but they're also serving the audience that just wants the, want the, they want the articles. Now are you looking for more help in growing paid subscriptions? Why not grab our subscription accelerator guide over at leakypaywall.com/grow or join our podcast at paywallpodcast.com where we dive in deep on all things that generate subscription revenues.