Pete Ericson presents Lenfest Institute research on paywalls: publishers with thriving digital businesses show paywalls to 4.2-6% of readers, while average publishers show them to just 1.8%. In a case study, tightening a leaky paywall from two free articles to one and adding free registration raised the stop rate from 30% to 60% and boosted email signups by 50%.
Questions this video answers
500 publishers.
1.8% of readership.
Between 4.2% and 6% of unique visitors.
About 30% of users.
It increased to almost 60% of visitors.
Chapters
All right, let's get to it. So how do you know what to set what to set the, the free meter to one article a week, five articles a month, 10 articles a month, etc. And so I came across a great article by the Lenfest Institute, which did some research on exactly this. And what they said is they surveyed 500 publishers that had paywalls in place. And what they found, first of all, which was interesting, is that the, the average publisher was way too generous with their content. Let's see here. They, that they needed to stop. And that's the, the lingo that, that we use. How many stops with the paywall did you get as a percentage of the users that have been on your site? And so what they found is 1.8% of their readership was being presented the NAG or the subscription prompt. Then they took a look at, well, what was working for publishers who, who considered having a thriving digital subscription business. And what they found out is that if the paywall stops were between 4.2% and 6% of your unique visitors, that was considered a good way to a good number to create a thriving digital business. Now these are news publishers, general news publishers. And, and your publication might be a little different, might be a magazine, might be something else, maybe less content, more long form as we're going to talk about next. But these are some general numbers to work with. So now having said that, how do you figure out how, what percentage of stops you're actually getting on your paywall? And that's where we come into something thing new. So I'm gonna going to talk about t journey here. This is the publication that we're pretty involved with and, and we use it as a kind of a testing ground for, for different things. It's got, it's been around for a few years now. We've rebooted it as of this year and it's new format and we're, we have leaky paywall running on it. We have issues running on it. We have everything, basically all our software, including apps running on it. And if you look in the back end of this site on the leaky paywall subscriber screen, there's a new stats board here called NAG Stats. And what this does is it flags anytime a visitor hits an article and the meter is used up. And then, and the nag, the subscription prompt triggers, it records this. And so you can bug Jeremy afterwards to get. I think you have this as a plugin now, right? Yeah, maybe close to it. Okay, well, we could get this on your site, I'm sure, so you can take a look at it. And so what do you do with it? Now this is raw data. It's just recording every single trigger. So here's today the IP address that that person came from and what actual piece of content that they were, they were reading. And so to get the percentage, all you got to do is let's say you go back 30 days, just, you can grab it and just quickly copy and go 30 days back and then pop it into a spreadsheet here and just drop it into the spreadsheet and. And then all you gotta do is it takes. Every record takes up four rows. So figure out, you know, how many rows you take up, divide by four and that's how many stops you got. So I looked at T Journey and I got. First time, the first time I looked at it was over 30 days ago. I looked at a 30 day window. I think we had something like 800 stops or something like that against the users that were on the site. So once you know how many stops you have, which is brought off of here divided by four, then go into your analytics and pull up the same period of time. Say it's 30 days. And then see how many users that you had on the site. And then divide the number of stops that you have, the nag stops by the number of users and you'll get a percentage of how, of how many times you know, per user that nag is showing. Now what was interesting is we found with T journey was that 30% of users, this was almost about a month and a half ago, about 30% of users were seeing our paywall, which blew my mind. I was like, okay, so the Lenfest is saying that, you know, you want around 6% maybe of the stops. We, we got 30%, but subscriptions weren't pouring in, so we're only getting really a few subscriptions, I don't know, a handful a week. And what, what were we doing wrong? Right? So Jeremy and I traveled out to the wordcamper publishers out in Columbus about a month ago or so, where we talked a lot about subscriptions. And the thing that was really, that was being repeated over and over and drew a lot of attention was the focus on a, you know, reducing the friction in the paid subscription path. So, you know, traditionally speaking, when you, when you go to subscribe, now I'm logged in here, so I'll just open this incognito when you go and subscribe. So if I pick an option, traditionally, you know, I got A lot to do here. So, okay, it's 25 bucks for the year. I gotta fill in my details. And I got payment information. So it's. I have to go through a fair amount of friction in order to capture that subscription, which is okay, and people do it. But how do you reduce, how do you reduce the friction in it? And so, and I'm not going to tell you exactly how to do this, but I'll tell you what we did. We created a new free level subscription for T Journey. And the idea being that if we can get people to register on the site first and get that over with, give them a few more free articles for registering and then get them on the email list, which if you've been here before or talked to us at all, you know that building that email list and automating it and all that is priority number one. So the free level does two things. One, we're trying to reduce the friction point so that when somebody comes in, they can simply register and not deliver any kind of credit card information. Get in the system, get on our email list, and then every week or so the emails roll out saying, hey, there's a new article, go read it. Now they've gotten a couple more free articles that month. But what we're finding out is, and then the big question is, okay, well, now we're getting people registering and this is working quite well. We're getting new registrations, free registrations, and now these free registrations are giving people more access. So what happened to our stop rate? And what blew my mind again is that our stop rate, well, one thing I forgot, we changed the meter was set to two free articles per month. That was the old meter. And as soon as you hit those two, you were done with the two articles. The third article you had to pay with the new free level, we have restricted the meter to one free article a month. The idea being that you get your free article and these are long form articles. And again, this came out of sort of a magazine type of approach. It's very long form content, not very frequent delivery of content, a couple articles a week. And so you get one long form article. And, and if you want more, then you subscribe. So we did tighten the meter up, we cut it in half essentially. And then we created this free offer that you're looking at right now. And so what happened? So our stop rate went from 30% to almost 60%. So now we have, now we have almost more than half of visitors that hit the site get stopped. And that it makes it makes total sense. And we're getting we're getting quite a lot of new registrants. And so looking at the data again, this is still a little fluid, but looking at the data, for about a month and a half, our email subscriptions have increased about 50% so far. And we'll continue to report on it as the time goes. But so far, that's pretty good. And then paid subscriptions, honestly, have stayed about the same. They haven't changed much. They didn't go away because we were giving away free articles. So part of the strategy is if we can build the list faster, and we know that anybody who's on an email list has a 10 times better chance of subscribing, then it's worth grabbing those, you know, those free registrants and getting them in the system. And, of course, once you get them into the system, you can.
