Scaling Local: A Publisher’s 104% Subscription Playbook

So, Tyler, we are going to talk about another successful local news publisher today, Is that correct?

We are. We are.

Awesome.

And oftentimes, at least for me, sometimes clients are just doing their thing and publishing their content, and then one day you take a look at some data and you're like, oh, wow. And. And that's what sort of prompted today's discussion. Welcome to the Paywall Podcast, where we discuss paywalls and paywall strategies for news and magazine publishers. This episode of the Paywall podcast is brought to you by Leaky Paywall. Leaky Paywall is the most flexible WordPress subscription platform. Find out more@leakypaywall.com and now for today's episode, foreign.

That's awesome. What's really cool is that I don't know anything about this publisher. And I just want to make a note. First of all, welcome to the Paywall podcast. Second of all, the. This publisher, just so you get a little idea of where we're coming from, is located, I guess, in the US they are focused on local news. I have. We haven't really talked much, if any, about them previously, and we will be keeping them sort of confidential. So this is. This is sort of an NDA podcast. We're going to share some data points to you guys who are listening and talk about why they are succeeding and. Or not succeeding in whatever areas. But we're going to kind of keep this. Their name quiet to protect the innocent. How's that sound?

Sounds great. Let's. Let's do it.

Okay. All right. So we can call this. We'll call them Publisher a. How's that? Just so we have something. Something to talk about. And why don't you Tell you what, before we jump into it, because we haven't really done this very often, but can you just talk a little bit about yourself and Paywall Project and what you do before we jump into these guys?

Yeah. So Paywall Project is a fully managed subscription management service for publishers, and we manage the entire tech stack for publishers. So that means your leaky paywall set up and ongoing maintenance, you know, your newsletter, sending through newsletter glue and all the other various technical things that are required in order for a publisher to succeed. We manage that for them so that they can just publish their content and publish their newsletters and not have to worry about all the hairy tech stuff.

Right. That's awesome. And so I know you deal with quite a lot of publishers, most of them focused on the local or regional news space, right?

Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of local news publishers that are in small towns, medium sized towns that are digital only, that are digital plus print. And yeah, we service, we service all of them.

That's great. All right, so let's dig into Publisher A. Can you give me a little backstory about like, when they might have joined and how are they set up? What's, what's the setup look like?

Yeah. So Publisher A came on board in 2022, summer of 2022, around this time. Okay. They were inside of WordPress, WordPress.com just, they had open source WordPress, but they were using PayPal to gate access to their Flipbook. Everything else on the website was for the most part flip free to access to their audience.

I hear Flipbook, I hear a print publisher.

You guessed right. So that's when they reached out. They were just looking for a better solution that would sort of more cohesively tie everything together and not make the print Flipbook thing be the only single product that they're, that they're selling. They wanted to have more of a paywall across the board.

So they were, they were, they were just restricting their Flipbooks. That was it. Were they also taking print subscriptions as well?

They were, yeah. And that was part of it. So you would, you would buy either a digital PDF access or you would buy a digital and a print access. And a lot of people had. It was a mixture of people.

And how did that work for them with the PayPal setup?

Not too great. They had issues with their provider with logins, and just the experience wasn't great given the way that the PayPal integration was set up. You had to go to PayPal, it took you off site, you had to fill out your information and then you came back. So the initial, you know, overall experience for the end user wasn't, wasn't great.

Okay. And what were they using for email newsletter service?

I believe they were using mailchimp just to fire out their weekly, you know, hey, our, our Flipbook is, is ready or, or whatever for this.

So it was once a week. Was that the case?

Once a week.

Okay. Yeah.

Cool.

And anything else that you think listeners should know about?

Yeah, I just, I think it's important to know that all the content on the site that they were publishing was open. So that's a key. I see a key thing to know in this discussion.

Yeah. Okay. So why subscribe? And, and they publish all their print content on the website.

Not all.

Okay.

But I feel good of it enough.

To be like, I think I know what's going on in the news realm. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Awesome. All right, so now let's talk about what happened three years ago. They came on board with you, and you got them configured differently, I imagine.

Yeah. So one thing about this particular publisher that was quite nice is that they were already used to sending newsletters on a weekly basis.

So they were.

They were used to doing that, which, if you've listened to this podcast, you know that a newsletter is the most foundational, fundamental thing that you should be doing to grow your audience and grow your paid subscribers. So they had that down. They were doing that.

Okay.

They just. They just needed to kind of readjust their overall strategy, their workflow for how they're bringing in readers and funnel. Funneling them to a paid subscription.

Okay.

So, yeah, so we set up leaky paywall for them. Yep. And we did our classic. We call it. Pete and I, we both refer it to. We. We call it our one in one strategy. Meaning, okay, readers get one free article, and they sign up after that and get added to the newsletter. I think we've talked about this a million times.

Well, let me unpack that just a little bit for anybody who's new. So what Tyler's referring to is the metering setup. So in other words, when somebody lands on your news site, they get to read one free article without any fuss. And then when they go to their second article, they get a free registration prompt that says, hey, you can read this article and it's free, and you'll get our newsletter, but you got to drop in your email and your password. Does that sound right?

That's right. That's right.

Okay.

And so, yeah, for the publisher, their. Their workflow didn't change much. They were continuing to publish their content in WordPress, but they just had this funnel that was now working for them automatically to grow their newsletter and grow free registrations on their site. So that was the biggest major change that occurred for them with their new workflow.

All right, before we jump into the results of that, did they stick with PayPal?

No. So because of that, disconnected payments, like, workflow that they were in, and given that they were. They were all non recurring subscriptions, meaning there was no need for us to migrate them into, like, into a different situation. It just made sense for them to go with Stripe, which is what we work with at Paywall Project. Virtually all of our customers use Stripe. It's the best payment gateway for. For subscriptions. And so, yeah, we set that up and, and set everything up on a recurring basis for the customer. So when they sign up, they're not signing up for a non recurring plan. Every plan is recurring out of the box and then they can cancel it if they don't.

Important. Yes. And is it easy to cancel for sure? Yeah.

Every, every customer can cancel on their own. They log in, they go to my account, boom, click cancel out of there.

Click cancel.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. All right, so now let's get into what happened when they started, when they installed a free registration. So after an article, you got to register, you get the next article for free. You get on the newsletter. I assume that the newsletter is sending the readers back to the site. I also assume that the publisher started publishing all their content from print into their site as well.

You bet. So go ahead.

Well, I was going to ask if they're. If the cadence change for their, like, did their strategy change for how they, how frequently they sent their newsletter?

It did not. Their frequency stayed weekly.

Okay.

But reliably on that day, whatever day it was Tuesday, Wednesday, they committed to at that date. And they always send on that date. The difference really is how their newsletter looks. It's not just a, hey, the E Edition is ready for you to check out. It's a bit more robust. Yeah, it does have, hey, the E Edition is ready to check out. Here's a button to go find it. But there's also a bunch of article data inside of that newsletter. You know, that shows a thumbnail and an excerpt and read more. And it's got multiple stories and they're choosing which stories that they want to promote in the newsletter. So it's not just this basic button that goes to the E. Edition.

Okay. All right. So really the newsletter strategy stayed pretty much the same then?

That's right.

And it's been like that for three years.

Yeah.

Okay. All right, so what changed was the on site experience.

That's right.

Okay, got it. All right, so instead of open content, now it's all the content. Now it's metered. It's behind a reg wall. And then after you, let's say you register, you read your second article and you go to your third article. Then, then what happens?

You go to your third article and you're hit with an upgrade to continue reading message prompt. So at that point, the, the reader has to make a decision on do I want to get a digital only plan or a digital print plan?

Okay, Was it, was it, is that the two choices? Digital only, print only.

Yeah, those are the only two. The two plans? Yeah.

Not like print plus digital. Just it's like print crowd, digital crowd.

So it was digital. It's digital only and digital plus print.

Okay, all right, got it, got it. And okay, so now we have. We have different choices for different. For new content. What about the uptake on the digital only versus the print and digital? How's the. How's this the revenue split, or I should say the transaction split?

Good question. I'm going to just pull that up so I can look at it.

Because first they're giving access to essentially their digital PDF version of their print product that comes out once a week. And now there's a choice where you can get like the actual digital content access and have all the content.

Yeah, yeah. And so for this particular publisher, I would say it's a 60, 40 split. 60% are in the print and E Edition center on a. On a combo plan, and then the 40% are on the digital only plan.

The print and digital E Edition also gives you access to the website content.

That's right.

Okay, got it. That's interesting. So 60% print and digital. 40% digital only.

Yeah. Nice.

Any trends on that? I mean, it's been three years. I don't know if you paid attention to it, but, um, in other words, has the digital uptake been pretty stable right out of the gate, or has it changed over time?

It's definitely more people have gravitated towards the E Edition or. Or the digital only.

The digital only, yeah.

It's certainly been growing.

Okay, interesting.

In the beginning, most of their customers, I mean, all of their customers were used to basically being, you know, funneled towards the print and digital. So that's just kind of what they expected. But I think as readers saw the transition in the UI and the experience, they were like, oh, I can just, you know, easily read all the articles in article form on the web or through the E Edition. So I get the best of both worlds. So.

Okay, interesting. So still a strong print uptake, growing digital uptake. How about pricing? Was that changed at all in your tenure?

They've had very, very small adjustments. I'm talking like less than 50 cents to a dollar, I believe, on some other plans. So.

Okay.

No meaningful price bumps.

Okay.

Over the course of, you know, the last few years. All right.

Stable as she goes. Okay. And had a thought. And it just literally disappeared. I'm sure we'll get back to it. Okay, so small adjustments in pricing and how does their. How does their monthly versus annual pricing breakdown?

Yeah, it's a good question. So let me take a look.

Are they getting more monthly takers or more annual takers? And I, I ask that with great interest because I do, I get into a lot of discussions with publishers about, about pricing strategy.

Yeah.

And I mean in general we have seen more annual plans.

Yeah.

Get picked versus monthly. Not by a big margin, but you know, from our, our data we're seeing the free registrations come in as a kind of the trial and then people are ready to pay and they get the newsletter. Of course. Then they're kind of going to try it for a year.

Yeah. So you'll, you'll, all the publishers out there listening to this will love this. They only have a yearly plan across the board. They don't even have a monthly plan. And I think that's because this is a print first publisher, meaning that's kind of, that's where they started, you know, however, whatever year they founded. Right. So that's just how they've always sold it. So that's how they also sell their digital only access. So.

Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, so now that we have, I think the profile built on how things are structured here, how are they doing?

Things are good. So oftentimes at paywall project customers will ask us how we're doing, what can we do better, things like that. And you know, we check in and sometimes we check in proactively for the customers too. We're always kind of looking at what's working across the board, across different states, different locations, different publishers. And you know, as I mentioned earlier, this publisher is publishing on a weekly basis with their newsletter and it is rock solid reliable. They're getting it at, you know, 6:00am in the morning. Like people expect it, they don't get it, they're upset about it. Like that's what you want, right? You want your audience to like come after you if you didn't publish your, publish your newsletter on time because they're expecting it and they're doing that and they're publishing the vast majority of all of their, their content online, including their obits, all of their obituaries are online. There's a lot of local sports, you know, local city councils and county commissions or whatever they call it there. And so all of that information that is local to their county and to their small town is being published online. Combine that with a better framework, in one year you get 104% growth in revenue. Oh yeah. Wow.

Okay. Can you say that one more time? You said 104%.

I said 104% growth.

And, and that's, and that's like last.

Year versus previous year, 20, 23 to 2024.

Okay, got it. Very nice. And how are things looking for this year?

Fantastic. They're certainly on track to do that again.

Wow. Doubling every year. That's probably something that local news publishers might be interested in for sure. Like that.

Yeah.

How, how about their newsletter? How has that been growing? Their, their email newsletter?

Yes. Yeah. So when they started, the newsletter wasn't. I mean, it was probably in the 700 people range, I would imagine.

Okay.

Not, not terrible for a small town. But since 2022, it's now up to around 2500 people on that list.

Okay, so in three years they've grown three. More than 3x.

Yeah. And again, the only way for people to get on that newsletter, no sidebar widget signups, no special forms, no pop ups. 100% of those new newsletter subscribers came through signing up for the free registration period.

I like what you just said there. No pop ups. So one of the things that we endure on the web is pop up after pop up after, pop up after, slide in after this nonsense. And we are, we are definitely exhausted from all these. We're exhausted trying to figure out how to close things. And the way that the, that I know the free registration and the paid subscription prompts show up in content is there's no, there's no pop up. It's just part of the content. Yeah. And the superpower of you as a publisher is you have your content, which your audience wants and you have, you have an audience and you have traffic to your content. Right. So that's your. So, yes, I get it. You want to, you want to get that email, you want to convert that paying subscriber, and it kind of works with newsletter pop ups. Like, that's been the de facto way to do it for many, many, many years, and it's still happening. But if you can bake your asks into the content itself. I mean, imagine being on your phone, you're standing in line at the checkout counter or whatnot, and you hit a pop up. Well, it's like a nightmare to figure out how to close a damn thing, right? Your, your blood pressure spikes. I mean, it's, it's a rough experience, but if you get a message that's literally in the article that you're reading that says, hey, just drop in your email address here and you'll get the article, your chances of conversion go up a ton.

Yeah, and, and I think that's largely because the intent of the reader is much stronger. Like they want to read the content. And like, okay, sure, like we'll give, we'll give you an email address. I'm fine with that. To get access to that. Whereas a pop up is like, if they do enter it, maybe it's like just, okay, whatever, just let me get to the next thing.

Right.

Because you know, oftentimes you're trying to get to something and you've been stopped. And so it's a, I don't know, for me, it feels a bit more punitive to do a pop up versus putting it inside the content, which is a bit, you know, a bit more delightful, let's say.

I like the way you said that. Yeah, you do a pop up, you're punishing the ui, the experience, you. Oh, no, I just got hit in the head with a pop up. But when you're putting the, the ask the message in the content and even though you're requiring it, what you think is more punitive than the pop up, it's actually less so because, because you're also giving away content. And I want to be clear here, this setup is one in one. You know, it's tight, right? It's one free article. I want to read a second article. Oh, I got to drop in my email and password to register. I get that second free article and then on the third article I have to pay for full access. Now, as a publisher, you might be listening to this, thinking about either I'm going to install subscriptions for the first time or I'm going to improve my non functioning or poorly performing subscriptions. I want to be careful about like setting up a really tight one in one paywall. Right. And what you have here is you have levers. So some publishers we work with will look at 1 and 1 and say, wow, that's really restrictive. I'm a little terrified of launching with that. Okay, great. So don't. Right, launch with two and five, which we just did for a publisher. So you get two articles, you register, you get five more, and you get five every month. So super generous or two and 10. Now, you're not going to convert nearly as much in terms of email and paid subscriptions, but you'll get the system running and you'll get some confidence to say, you know what, let's tighten the lever and change the 2 and 10 to 2 and 5 to 1 and 3 to 1 and 2 to 1 and 1. And then you're building your email list so fast and your paid subscription so quickly, you'll get to a point where you'll start shutting things down. You say, let's just go to 0 and maybe 1 for a free registration or 0 and 0 nothing. Total hard paywall. But it's a journey to get.

Yeah, I've worked with several publishers that are like that. They start with a, you know, they're scared of adding a one in one strategy and they start generous. And over time I've worked with publishers that go from generous to less, to less to less to hard paywall.

Yeah.

And that's the, and you have to do that for a lot of publishers, that's the best journey. Like they have to see that they're, they have grow confidence in their, in their content. Because as a publisher I don't think they're, they're not used to selling their content necessarily. They're used to just selling advertising around it. So the idea that somebody would be willing to pay for the content is a bit of a different world.

That's a very good point. Had a conversation with a publisher the other day who said exactly that. He said I'm not that confident to put up like a harder, you know, more, more robust metering paywall. Metered paywall. And I think that comes exactly from what you said, advertising. So publishers have been writing content in more in volume to get more ad views and clicks versus when you get into paid subscriptions, you're now you're not pleasing your advertisers anymore. You're pleasing your readers, which means higher quality content, maybe even lower volume content, but higher quality and the confidence. Unfortunately that's just where a lot of publishers are and they need to take a deep breath, focus on creating great content because they have an audience. I mean they have a brand, especially in local publishing. You may even have a monopoly in your area for local content and just tear into producing the best content you can, can and be fearless about asking for money and trade for it.

I love, you know, I do.

All right, so if you were to, if, if you know, based on the information you told me and by, by the way, I forgot to ask, how many articles go out every week do you know? So like 10, 10 articles a week or how, how many they produce?

Maybe even less than that.

Okay.

There's certainly more obits, but the obits don't always make it to the newsletter unless it's like somebody who's semi famous in the community. But I'd say their newsletter consists of four of the top stories and again they're using newsletter glue to drag and drop all that stuff in and make a decision on the content in that way. So yeah, it's not that even though they've got more content than that that goes out, they're not putting every single thing inside the newsletter.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, sounds like an opportunity. What do you think?

Yeah, it could be. I like that they only keep it short, you know, and sweet. And you can click on read more if you want to see more stories. And partly because there, if you're in the newsletter space like I am with newsletter glue, you do run into email clipping and all these other things that come about with long newsletters.

Right.

But true.

Yeah.

You know, you could make it longer or do something different for the paid audiences, which some publishers do so well.

What's interesting is they've been consistent. They simply changed the experience on the website itself and decided to take the take that breath at some point and set the restrictions to one and one and be like, look, either you know, you can get a little for free, you'll get our newsletter. You can pay and get everything. That's. Those are your choices. And the fact that it's an annual only subscription also shows confidence. I like that. And I think building confidence about, about your premium content and everything you produce that's original content in my book is premium content. I don't care if it took three minutes to write an article. If you wrote it and it's original, it's premium content. Can't find it somewhere else.

Definitely. Yeah. The local content has extraordinary value. No matter, no matter the length of that content.

Awesome. All right, Tyler, I think that covers it. So moral of the story is get your experience right, be confident, tighten down your, your paywall. So there's, there's the, you have a free registration in place that's tight and then paid subscriptions that quickly follow up after that. The free registration builds your newsletter. And this publisher went to three times the size of their newsletter list, which is a higher quality list than a pop up newsletter. And they went to over 100% revenue growth year over year. Pretty amazing.

Love it.

Well, Tyler, thanks for sharing that. Publisher A should be pretty happy, I hope. And maybe we'll go on and talk about publisher B sometime.

Let's do it and see Andy. All right, catch you later. See you. Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com see you next time.