A walkthrough of Leaky Paywall, a metered paywall that gives readers two free articles before asking them to subscribe. It covers the nag screen variants, subscription tiers (free email-capture and $5/month paid), Stripe payments, and how Unipress links WordPress subscriptions to iOS and Android apps.
Questions this video answers
2 free articles.
January 5, 2016.
Stripe.
Chapters
In this video, we're going to show what the reader experience is like with Leaky Paywall. In this case, we are allowing 2 free articles to be shared before the reader is prompted to subscribe. And this, of course, does a couple of really great things for your publication. One, it allows Google to crawl and index all your posts and articles, which will send a lot more traffic to your site. And, and also each article will be shareable in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera. And that's really powerful because that means any one article can be shared by thousands of readers, sending you a lot more traffic to the site. So let's take a look at how this works. This is just a demo site, and in this case, we have the Article Countdown Nag Setup. That's a plugin that goes with Leaky Paywall. And if I click into the post, it's going to trigger the first warning that, hey, you know, I have one free post remaining here. I'm going to go back and read a second post. So let's go pull up this other demo post, and the NAG is going to tell me that I have zero posts remaining. So let's go back and find a third article. So I've now consumed two free articles and look at a third article. And there's the requirement to subscribe. So I don't have any posts remaining. I've gotten two free articles in this case, and I can either login or I can subscribe. And just as a little FYI, there are a couple of other options for the nag. This is the Slim Nag here. So if you're looking for something that's a little more subtle, you can select the Slim Nag. The default nag for subscription is this nag box here. You can edit the content that's in this box, right in Leaky Paywall, this does not give you the sliding countdown. This just shows up when your meter runs out. And this is what the default article Countdown nag looks like on an iPhone. And this is what the Slim Countdown nag looks like on an iPhone. Now let's subscribe. Subscriptions work through levels. So we have two cards here for two levels, and you can set as many levels as you like. In this case, we have one free level. So if I drop off my email address, I'll get a few more articles. And this is great for list building. If you want to give away some more free articles and build your mailchimp list or your A1 Weber list, this is the way to go. And then there's the paid version. And in this case there's a monthly fee of $5 and the reader gets unlimited articles for their $5. You can set one time subscriptions, you can set recurring subscriptions, you can set a day pass if you like. It's very flexible and you can have as many levels as you like. In this case, Stripe is configured. Stripe has a very simple and tested interface to encourage people to sign up. Okay, once I've subscribed, I get taken to my account page. This is a new page for Leaky Paywall and it gives the subscriber lots of information. It tells them who they are and lets them log out from here, gives them subscription information. So they have an active subscription, it's a monthly subscription. They paid with Stripe and the expiration date is displayed. If you are using Unipress, which allows you to connect your WordPress publication to the Google and Apple app stores, the subscriber can simply connect their subscription here with their mobile device. So what they do is they download your free app in the App Store and simply put their token in. So they are logged in and they are given a token that gives them access to your publication on either Apple or their Google device. And you manage your entire app infrastructure through WordPress. It's very simple, very slick. And by the way, this, if you are not using Unipress, this won't display at all. The subscriber can edit their profile. Now, the username is not editable, but their display name, say for comments, is editable. They can change that. They can change their email address, they can change their password, and they can also change their payment information right here. If they're using Stripe, there's the ability to cancel a subscription. And here comes the credit card information. If you're using PayPal or if the subscriber paid through PayPal, then they'll simply get the link to PayPal to make their updates. And that's it. That's the Reader point of view for Leaky Paywall.
