Strategies for Sustainable Growth: From YouTube Ads to Website Subscribers

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Welcome to the Paywall podcast. I'm here with Tyler Channel. Tyler, welcome.

Hello.

Hello. And we're going to talk exactly that. We're going to look at a publisher who got his start on YouTube. It's a musician, music instructor, and he was real, and correct me if I'm wrong, but he was realizing some ad revenue decline and wanted to start up reader revenue subscriptions in order to essentially capture more of his readers, control his data and turn on a whole new revenue stream. Have I done that right?

Yeah, I think that's more or less the idea. I think the initial impetus behind it was creating content on YouTube, building an audience and then trying to monetize that audience in a paid subscription or paper post or some sort of paid model outside of the pennies that YouTube will pay for or ad free roles.

Yeah. So this podcast is going to be about how to take control of your revenue and not have an algorithm essentially be the one that changes to that and that fluctuates your ad revenue. We have, I think the magazine publishing sector is really in a vulnerable state. We've been working with magazine publishers for almost 10 years now with subscriptions and that the early adopters that are really going after digital subscriptions are doing great. Those are the, those are the publishers we work with. But as far as YouTube goes, that's an interesting sector because YouTube has mushroomed up and provided this very lucrative ad revenue stream for creators that have generated a fair amount of eyeballs to YouTube. But, but as far as I can see, that is changing. And is that what happened with Intellamusica.com, which is the publisher we're talking about here?

Yeah. Again, I don't know his initial reasoning for wanting to do paid subscribers. We all know the benefits of that. Right. You again, like you said, you're controlling sort of the universe. I think there's a point that a lot of these content creators, they get to is they build this ginormous platform on YouTube and they're like, oh no, what have I done? Like I built my entire empire on this platform. That could change at any point, at any time, and it often does. Right. And I think the point for him was to leverage the eyeballs and, and the traffic and to get them onto his website, get him, get them onto his newsletter, get them to sign up for free and pay.

So, so we're going to jump into what is actually working for him. So if you're listening to this and you're a YouTube creator, this would be a good framework to copy. But before we get to that, his website, which we're looking at now, intellamusica.com it's pretty deep. It's got a lot of content on it. Free and paid. How long has this website been around with, with subscription revenue? And, and I know that we did this is actually a part two or part three of, of this story of this YouTuber and his quest to build reader revenue. So how long have you been involved and when did this, when this website first came up.

So he's been involved with Paywall Project for about a year and a half.

Ish. Maybe.

And I know that he was using a different platform before which was also a paid subscription system. So I'm not entirely sure how long it's been going on, but I know it's been a focus for a long time.

Okay, got it. All right, so he actually had paid subscriptions going before he joined Paywall Project. That's right. But he decided to go WordPress and then paywall subscription route. Yeah.

Basically bringing the third party system and bringing it native WordPress and letting leaky do all the subscription management.

Yeah. Okay, so how's it going now? Let's start with his results.

Yeah, so I think you have to look at the path of what we did early on. We started with a paid subscription system along with a pay per post option on his site. So basically people could buy in his case tutorials on specific tabs for $4 and $0.99 or whatever the price was, or they could subscribe to everything for basically the same price. And so he ran that for quite some time and I think there was some, there was, there, there was definitely some success in the pay per post and that you would often see people buying way more than they should be on the paper post when they should just subscribe and get access to everything. It would have been a lot cheaper to do that. Yeah, so there were certainly people who, who preferred that option. But as we know that the, the goal is, is to create some stability in your income. And paid per post doesn't do that. It's, it fluctuates a lot. And you want people to come to the site, subscribe for paid and pay you every month on a predictable basis. So that's what we transition to. And it's combined with a free registration model to help grow the newsletter. We talk about that all the time. And then nursing people into the premium content so they get just to back up a bit. So on his site he's got premium tabs, he's got free tabs. All of the free tabs you can access. You just have to sign up as a free registered member and then you get access to all of the free content.

Great.

You're all set up. You're on the site, you're on the newsletter, you're getting content on a weekly or daily basis. I don't know exactly how often he sends but then you meander over to premium content and then you're hit with this upgrade messaging. And so this model for him is working.

Right. So let me just back up a little bit. He when we looked at this and I went back and we posted about this about a year ago and we were looking at this paper article or paper tab in his case versus subscriptions that when the subscription prompt showed up there was a choice. There was basically subscribe for full Access or pay 4.99 for this particular article and tab. And I think at that point it was actually it was working. And like you said, people were coming back and buying multiple tabs.

Yeah.

Which you would say why are you spending 10, 15, $20 when you can just subscribe for five bucks a month?

Yeah.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but back then I think we were looking at subscriptions. Were they not impacted that much or not a lot.

But over time you start to see fluctuations in retention and things. I think there's certainly an audience that wants to be able to purchase it and always be able to look at this one thing. And so I think that sort of plateaued some of the of his subscribers and plateaued the growth a bit. So that's why we've transitioned into. And keep in mind there was no free registration at the time too. So it's possible that the free registration would have helped and you could have continued to run Paper Post, who knows. But I think long term it's a much better strategy to just offer one option which is to subscribe to pay for on a recurring monthly or yearly basis and leave it at that.

I love this experiment and I think it's great that he wanted to try some different things. And talking to two publishers today, I am finding that they are looking to try things trials and pre registration falls into that and gating their different Content differently. And then we have some publishers who went really complicated and have a lot of plans that are finally realizing, hey, this isn't really working. We need to simplify, maybe go to one or two plans. It's been a. It's been a really interesting year so far with I think, a lot of experimentation. So. So back at least a year ago, this, the setup was if I went to free tabs, they were just free. I would just grab the content again parallel with the magazine publisher, world's free blog, news blog, like all that. There's. They're publishing so much free content without any gate whatsoever. And then the premium tags were simply locked down. It was premium content. You had to either pay one time, 499 to get access to that article or you subscribe for full access. So that, that was the experiment really back. And from what I'm hearing is it actually worked. People were buying the articles, buying the tabs and subscribing. But over time the subscriptions have softened a bit.

That's right.

The tabs are taken. The individual article purchases have taken a chunk out of that potential subscription revenue. Does that sound right?

That's right.

Okay. All right, cool. So today. So fast forward to today, the. The learning process. And this is the beauty of this. It's so easy to make these changes and try different experiments. Today we have. This is a really big change. Two, there are two really big changes here. One is premium is now subscription only, I believe.

So if I go.

So let's load up the premium tabs and I go into a tab here and yeah, I have to pay essentially. So there's. It's 4 99amonth. That's really the only option which speaks towards simplicity, I think. Yeah, keep it. And then free registration was turned on for all the free tabs. Yeah.

Yeah. And you're. You're currently logged in as a free registered user at the moment.

Hey, you got a sharp eye. So how to do this? So let's go to free tabs. Right. And then I'm going to go in here. Yeah. And it's going to say, hey, this tab is free. And. And you have just a email address. Simple email address, password. And. And these two changes are pretty significant. So tell. So what's happened with the free registration? Let's talk about that first. How's that going?

Yeah, people are signing up, people are subscribing to this. They're getting on the newsletter. It's growing the list quite a bit. Yeah.

So it's changed the. It's changed the delta of the email list. List, for sure.

For sure. Yeah. And that's the goal with the YouTube like scenario. Right? It's. We need a way to contact our viewers and this is the way you do it. Get them on the site, get them off of YouTube, tease them with YouTube content, but then bring them to your website and get them to sign up for something, in this case more content that Maybe isn't on YouTube, and then get them on the newsletter. And they're also a free subscriber.

Yeah, I'll mirror that. Publishers that have good size audiences already can get bigger. Their audience size can get bigger with their description. Because you're. Let's say you have the most aggressive newsletter pop up in the world on your site. It pops up a hundred times, but you can close it. Right. And it definitely grabs email addresses, but it's still not as aggressive as drawing the line in the sand and having a free registration which requires your email address to view a piece of content. By definition, you're going to collect more email addresses with the free registration. And I think that's something for. We talked to publishers that have 60, 70, 80,000 email addresses on their list and they think they have a pretty good list. And then you turn on the free registration and that list all of a sudden jumps by another 10,000 and they shake their heads like, really makes sense, right? You finally. You have a lot of traffic. That's why your email list is big. Okay. But now you're drawing the line in the sand. You've got to give me your email. Yes, you'll get content, but this is the trade off and people are willing to do it as long as your content's good.

Yeah. It makes me think of when people used to do those newsletters and you get a free PDF or something, but you sign up. I'm like, that's not what they want. They want this content that they're looking at right here. That's what they want.

Yeah, that's old. That's like old Internet marketing. I actually looked at that yesterday. There was a. It was actually a food blogger website that I was looking at and they had down. Yeah, give us your email address and you can download the 1010 tips recipe or 10 tips on cooking or something like that, which I did. I went through and went through, but the reality is I didn't need to do it because it was just voluntary and what I really wanted were the recipes. So. That's right. So, yeah, yeah.

This. When, when you're implementing this stuff, just think about that. Think about that from the reader's perspective. If they want to see the content bad enough, then.

That's right.

They'll give you an email address. They will.

It's scary and I get it.

Yeah.

But, but it still works. It'll work. Okay, so we have this free registration here. Now tell me. So it's increasing the email list. How is it, how is this free registration impacting paid subscription conversions?

Yeah, they're going up, as you might imagine, with any free registration that you implement. Recording people with the newsletter that he sends out. And I believe he sends like premium content in that newsletter. So when those free people click that, ooh, what's this new tab or something I can learn? They click it and they're like, oh, I have to upgrade for that. So he's promoting. I believe that's, I haven't checked, but I believe that's how he's doing it. And, and people are, are converting.

Yeah. Yep.

It works. It works. Whether you're a YouTube content creator, if you're a publisher, you're a magazine publisher, a food blogger, like it's all the same concept here.

Right?

Grow the list and off you go.

Right. That's awesome. Does he have a premium, like a subscriber only newsletter or is he thinking about one?

I don't think so. I think right now it's just kind of everyone. Yeah, it's the stuff.

So it could be a value add down the road, but for sure. Okay, cool.

All right, so I'll just say really quick, the key is like that he's sending a newsletter. Right. Even, even someone who's producing YouTube tutorial content like this, like they need to send the newsletter too. It's not just the publishers that do this. Like you need to do it regardless of the content that you create. You've got to be doing a consistent daily, weekly something newsletter.

Yeah, that's very. I think it's really great that you reinforce that. It's easy to forget. Email is the one thing that hasn't changed since the beginning of the Internet as far as marketing goes. And it's your number one direct marketing tool. You have total control over. It's your list, it's your data. Whatever algorithm swings happen with YouTube or Google or social media, it doesn't matter when your list is growing. It's. You're growing, it's. You're in control completely. And that newsletter, I should be punched for. Forget almost forgetting to say this, but, but you said it, that email needs to go out to drive the, those free Registered readers back to your premium content to see the upgrade messaging.

Yeah, yeah. I have some publishers who don't send a newsletter, and they're growing the free registration, but there's not a correlation between the free registrations and the paid subscribers. So you have. You have to do all parts of this puzzle together. Otherwise you're just creating a ginormous list.

Yeah.

And you're getting really no benefit from it other than just having a large email list that you send promotions to or something, which is not what you want to do.

Yep. So one free. One free piece of. One free article. Piece of content.

Yeah.

No bother, no fuss. On the second click to the second article, you pop the free registration. You say you get access to it. Someone registers email goes to mailchimp or whatever service you're using.

Flow letter, perhaps Flow letter, maybe it.

Gets tagged as free. It gets segmented as these are all free. And then the key is obviously to send the newsletter to all your content, premium content, to this growing list of free registered readers. And then they will see upgrade messaging on your premium content, and they will convert over time. And that's the key. That's the. This whole flow is a nurturing flow. It absolutely works. It is. You're drawing a line in the sand with the free registration, but you're doing it in a nice way because you're controlling how much free content that person gets when they register, plus they get the newsletter. And that's a value add.

Okay.

All right. I got one more question for you. This is a. And by the way, if you're listening and not watching, the free registration is simply a box that pops up in the content that says, I'm looking at Intella Music. This guitar tab is free for you. If you're a general publisher, it could be this story is free for you or this article is free for you. And then just create a free account, get access to the free content, and get the newsletter delivered to your inbox. Okay, so the question I have is on the premium tab side. So if I go in, I'm not logged in. I'm going to get some messaging here that modern content for the practicing guitarist. Ooh, you switched the messaging. This is nice. Okay, so essentially you have your free tab and your premium tab. Now I'm on the premium tab. I'm in. In a. An article here, and I'm not logged in. And I'm getting promoted to. To pay. And the title says Modern content for the practicing guitarist. And there's a subscribe button. When I was logged in as a free registered reader, I got an up, I got upgrade messaging. So I believe they are using our targeted messaging extension to get that, to accomplish that.

They are indeed. They're showing different messaging based on the content type. And you don't want your free registration to pop up on the premium content because if they sign up for that, they won't get it and they'll be all. You'll create all kinds of problems. This messaging has to only show up for content in the premium category perhaps, or the premium tag or tag, not tab tag. So that's what's happening here. That's how we're able to differentiate between nice the mess to it.

So I'll say if you're, if you have a free registration going on your site, consider nuancing your messaging with our targeted messaging extension. Okay, so back to the question, and this is maybe carries the experiment a little bit further down the path. We talked about maybe a subscriber only newsletter. But what about letting the free registration unlock one premium piece of content? Has that concept been considered at all? Good idea.

I. Yeah, I like the idea. I think, I think since he gives away so much free content with his free registration, it's okay. But I see where you're going like giving them a little bit of a taste of the premium side.

Right.

Of things. But.

Okay.

Yeah, I guess.

Just a thought. Yeah. He's doing a good job with a lot of content.

Yeah.

And that's. It's probably good to lock for him to lock down. But if you have premium content, you want to give someone a taste, you can do, you can set that up. If you have a premium category where you unlock one premium article along with the free registration, that's just one of the levers you get with us is you're essentially if somebody registers for free, you can really choose how generous you want to be with the content. Now Tyler will tell you, and I agree, that really giving one more article for free is all you need to do. And that really speeds up the nurturing process and shows the upgrade messaging much quicker. But if you're new to subscriptions and you haven't gone through this before and you're feeling nervous about it, you can always be more generous with how many articles you unlock, including maybe a premium article or like 3 free articles. But then through our experience, we'll tell you that a few months down the road you'll be itching, but you'll be more comfortable to tighten the, the free registration restriction down to 2 or 3. Optimally, one extra article once they register. All right, Tyler, I think we've done. We're done here.

I think so.

Great. Yeah. Again, I think the lesson here is if you're. If you have free content, put a registration wall in front of it. If you're considering paper article, it may work in your very specific special use case. Absolutely. And we're always happy to talk about it. If you have an idea for how to grow subscriptions, just email.