Should You Worry About Password Sharing?

A question I get from publishers pretty frequently is, should I worry about password sharing? Let's dive into that as I ran into this issue myself this morning while I was browsing LinkedIn, my favorite feed. I'm Pete from Leaky Paywall. I help publishers grow paid subscriptions and let's, let's dig in.

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So I was reading my, one of my favorite authors, Beau Sacks, who's a legend in the, in the magazine publishing world. And he posted an article here on LinkedIn about paywall violation, and I'm a sucker for Anything that's paywall article related, so I decided to hop in and take a look at it. And what happened to me was was interesting and and not surprising. I went in this article; there's a link to a New York Times lawsuit. So I clicked that, and what happened is is I got a login screen. That's fine. I'm a paid subscriber. Pay thirty bucks a month for the New York Times account, and my wife and I do share that. So I think we're probably pretty typical of the reader base where if a if somebody. subscribes, their partner usually shares that login. And I think that's probably expected today, but what I didn't expect was this confirmation that kind of stopped me a bit in my tracks. And what it asked me to do is say, hey, please confirm your account. We noticed multiple devices using this subscription. To continue, please request a verification code for my email address. Okay. So what the New York Times is doing is they're restricting my access because I'm in a different browser. So I'm in the LinkedIn browser. And so LinkedIn, Facebook, LinkedIn, social apps, they have their own web browsers built in. So a lot of times when you're going to log into an account, it's, you're using that browser. You're not using your Safari browser or your Chrome browser or something like that. You have to, you have to log in with their account. Now I have, I have LastPass installed. It was quick for me to log in, but the New York Times is still not letting me at this article. Now I went and talked to my wife this morning. said, hey, how many devices do you log in on for the New York Times? And she said, pretty much just the app. And I said, do you ever log into the website? And she said, not really. I mean, once in a blue moon, I'll log into the website maybe, but 99% of the time I'm in, in the app. Personally, I use the app. I do log into a web browser once in a while to log into the New York Times. So I'd say on average, and our kids do not, do not read the New York Times at this point. So I'd say on average, we probably have 3 logged in sessions. And then this is a 4th logged in session. I think, and the New York Times is flagging me. Now, all I have to do is click the button and say, email me a one-time code, and I'll get that code and I can type in the code and I'll get access to the article. But it did stop me in my tracks. I didn't— I felt a little frustrated as a paid subscriber. And I think this is something worth thinking about for you as a publisher. Should you employ a more restrictive what they call a concurrent login practice. So, and there are, like in WordPress, there are plugins, the concurrent login plugin, there are a bunch of them and we have several to recommend and they do work. And essentially they will look at one account and how many different browsers that account is coming in from. And you as a publisher can decide, okay, you know, I know there's a lot of password sharing out there. Let's install that. Let's restrict it. And if you do that, That's fine. That's not a bad decision, but I would recommend you keep it generous. So, you know, 4, maybe 4 or 5 different types of devices that you're going to let people log in on. It's going to be up to you. If you become more restrictive with that, what'll happen is you'll start getting some admin tickets, right? People will email you saying, hey, I can't log in. Login is a point of friction, and this is something that will will up the friction. Now it might be, this might be a good trade-off as far as the New York Times go. I'm not going to cancel the subscription because I got a little frustrated on a login. I'm happy that my wife and I can share this account pretty much trouble-free, but it is a little bit of a friction point. Now, if you're in the B2B space, you might decide, yeah, I need to really lock down my content because companies, there are a lot of people at a company. You don't want that password going out to 100 employees. Right. And if you're in a maybe in the financial space, we have financial publishers. You might want to lock down the content behind a hard paywall, period. So these are some thoughts. Now, one thing I will say is there's an opportunity here and that's selling a family plan. So let's say you're in the B2C space and you're selling, you're a local news publisher, you're, or maybe a niche publisher or magazine publisher. And you know that families would like access or multiple people would like access to your paid subscription plan. Set up a family plan. They do work. They do convert. People do pay for them. Sometimes in the subscription, someone will be subscribing and say, you know what? I think my wife would like that. So I'm going to get on the family plan. And it's just a little more money for maybe 3 or 4 seats, whatever you decide. So there's an opportunity here when you're thinking about restriction to think on the other side of getting folks to upgrade their subscriptions. Okay. I thought that hopefully that was helpful. This is something that we do get. And if you have any questions, just—

Respond. 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.