Pete Ericson walks through how West Virginia Daily News can boost subscriptions by limiting free articles and redesigning their subscription plans. He breaks down specific changes to paywall strategy and pricing that could increase revenue.
Hi Scott, Nathan and Happy. December 22nd. In this video, I thought I would take a look at your West Virginia Daily News. I know you have a couple other sites, but I'd focus on this one and review your revenue blockers that I've gotten to know on this website. So I've taken some time to go through this. I am taking the perspective of a casual reader that's visited your site, which is your biggest opportunity. And what I see is the biggest issue for the current setup, subscription setup, is you're giving too many free articles away before and that gets in the way of converting free registered users. So let's just take a look at that. We're on the home page here and just, just as a quick FYI, I would recommend making that subscribe button at the top quite more obvious. So here's how I would do it. I would. Let's make this a little bit bigger and install it right here. Subscribe in the main menu. And then next to it would be a login so people can get in and out. That's a quick tip that will help call attention to your subscriptions. Your current subscribe link is really hard to see, especially with the advertising. Okay, back to the main mission here. So I've looked at five, six, seven articles. I don't know how many it took to trigger the, the first subscription message, but I did. And so here I'm just going to hop into the one that triggered the nag. Here we go. All right, so this is great. I get the subscription message. You could do a little brand work on it if you wanted it to match your logo. But essentially it's good, it's clean. It says, hey, get 10 free articles per month and off you go. But it took me so many articles to get here when we, most of the news publishers we work with are setting the meter to 1, 2 or 3 free articles per month and forcing a free registration to get the free articles, which really turns into the free trial, which is very powerful. So if you were to dial back your number of free articles to say three as a starting point, what you'll see is you'll see your conversions to these free registrations shoot up quite significantly. We just did this with a Irish news publisher and he, he, well, he had a huge increase in free registrations. It was actually 10x for him, but it won't, that won't happen for you, but it'll, it'll. I think you might see a, a good bump. So anyway, let's, let's continue on. So that's really the biggest one. I think 10 free articles per month sounds pretty nice as a casual reader, so I probably just leave that one alone. But just make that restriction tighter. Just do that one thing. You'll see your free registrations convert. Let's get into the second thing I wanted to talk about and that's the, your. The number of subscription plans you offer. So I'm going to click this tiny little subscribe button up in the top right corner and I have three, six, nine options. Most publishers today are running one option. If it's digital only and if like you print and digital, three options is ideal. And the choice of threes is just something that's been proven to work for as long as there have been humans. It's a good number and it keeps things clean enough so you're not overwhelming and confusing your reader. So I'm going to jump into your page here and let's do a little. Just do a little whoops. Share this. Okay, there we go. And do a little cleanup. So the first thing you don't need is free access because you're going to stop your readers pretty aggressively in on their casual journey reading content. And that's where they'll, they'll funnel through. This page is all about selling paid subscriptions and you'll definitely want to have some benefits. What I would recommend is actually a two column layout where you have the whole registration form on the left over here and then you have your benefits column over here. But that's another, that's another story. All right. Premium print and digital. Well, the subscription decision is do I want print or do I want print? Digital. That's really the decision. So you should only have one card for a print and digital subscription. Now you can add, maybe, maybe you have three button choices that say, you know, annual and three months or something like that. Try to slim it down if you can. And then digital access. I would stick to just annual. Just these would be your, your essentially your two main cards here that sell all your plans. Right. And because you're generous on your free registration, that's really your free trial. When people are ready to subscribe, they will often most of the time. What I see, choose an annual subscription by a pretty strong margin. So that's how they try your publication. They sign up for the year. So that means you really don't need the rest of these. There's not one choice here. I mean you'll have the subscription levels, but you don't need to display them. You can in your print and Digital just have the buttons that link to each page and you can, you can build a custom with any page builder or price pricing card builder, which I think it exists for WordPress, just your, your own fancy subscription page and then just link to the registration pages for leaky paywall. Okay, so what goes in the third spot? We have an empty slot here. Well, one of the things I was going to suggest is you have a fair amount of ads on the site. We do have a publisher that's really doing incredibly well in Sweden, News publisher. And they, they hide ads on their site for a 40% more expensive subscription. And yes, you want to display as many ads as possible, but your paid subscriber percentage is actually super low and you can do special targeted ads to those guys. That'll be even better for you if somebody complains. So anyway, back to this. You could have a card that's premium and where you just hide the ads and they charge 40% more in the last year. So they've had 10% of their readership pay 40% more to simply hide ads. So it's almost like free revenue. Okay, so that's that option. And then a final thought is I don't think you have IP blocker installed. Absolutely. Install that. It keeps people from flipping to an incognito browser or going to a different browser. And what it does is it just shows the subscription messaging when they try to get into a new browser and that will bump your subscription conversions by a percentage as well. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I'd love to carry this conversation forward. If you found this interesting and want to dive in, just let me know and we'll meet and figure it out.
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