Subscription Sticker Shock Should You Raise Your Prices

Your publication doing the same.

That's probably the secret hack right there. Keep an eye on what Netflix is doing price wise. And every time Netflix increases their price, just increase your price.

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Yeah.

Are you ready to talk about pricing?

Let's do it.

All right, let me share my screen here. I'm going to go with this guy and. All right, and then let's go. I was going. I was trying to find a title for this. How about subscriber retention versus revenue? Is it time to raise prices? Earning what you're worth. How to handle subscription price increases. Subscription sticker shock. Should you raise your prices?

Ah, that'll probably get more eyeballs.

Yeah, yeah.

Or ears.

Yep. Money talks. Tackling the anxiety of raising your subscription price.

Okay.

Price increased decision, overcoming the fear of losing subscribers.

That's a big one. They all panic.

The price increase decision overcoming the fear of losing subscribers or subscription sticker shock. Should you raise your prices?

That one will get more. Okay, let's go.

Let's go with that one. All right.

That'll get their attention.

All right, cool. So thinking about raising your prices is a terrifying thought for all of us. We've all been through it. We see our publishers go through it and what happens when they raise their prices, generally speaking, Actually, all speaking that we've seen that I've seen, nothing happens. So have you gone through any price increases with your publishers this past year?

Let's say, I would say probably close to 15 of them have gone up in pricing.

And did the world end?

No. And maybe that's because people are used to things being a bit more pricey than they were before with this general inflation across the globe.

Yeah.

What's an extra dollar or two or five on my. On my subscription? I think people just expect that's coming at some point. Yeah. It's also something we've seen across the board with other digital type services like Netflix and Hulu and all the others. What's the difference with your publication doing the same?

That's probably the secret hack right there. Keep an eye on what Netflix is doing price wise. And every time Netflix increases their price, just increase your price. Good hack.

Yeah.

Right? Really? They got it figured out. Yeah. Yeah.

And obviously the biggest Fear that publishers have is that they're going to lose a lot of people or there's going to be a mass exodus or there's going to be a Washington Post style 200,000 plus people are going to cancel their, their subscriptions. That doesn't tend to be the case with local publishers. Even with regional publishers, maybe you lose 10 or 15 at most. But if you're, if your messaging is clear prior to doing this and you're telling people why you're doing this, why you need their support, it's not a big deal. And most people are happy to support you with that increase. And I've even seen some publishers tell me that they've gotten messages from people that hey, we're happy to pay even more than what your price increase is like. We love what you're doing, we want to support you and.

Right, right.

Just, just know that.

Yeah, that's a great point. A couple things there. One is the Washington Post, that was politically, weirdly politically motivated. That was just super strange. But as far as paying you more, before I forget. So I, this week I was talking to a publisher. They were trying to keep the subscription levels really simple. So they only had two, two levels really, monthly and annual. But they realized that part of their crowd were happy to pay more to support their mission. And so we created a, they created a third level which is essentially pay what you want or a donation based subscription level. They were very keen on doing that because they had, they, they're coming from a donation model. Right. Where they weren't really running paid subscriptions, but they were taking donations and that was working well for them and they were getting, they were getting some higher tier donations. So adding a paywall with sort of that standard monthly annual pricing plus the, hey, you know, really become a super supporter. Right. I don't know what they're going to call it is a good combo to look at if that's the kind of publication you're running. Yeah.

And those two things certainly can live in tandem. Like I think we get questions quite often. Should we do donations? Should we do subscription? Should we do memberships? Should we do this or that? Do them all. Do them in tandem. And once someone becomes a paid subscriber, it doesn't mean that's it. And there's no other chance for you to continue a relationship and get even more from that supporter.

Yep.

Your paid people are worth your weight in gold and they're likely to give you even more money if you ask. Anyway, that's probably a separate podcast altogether.

That would be a good one. Yeah. Yeah. So it is terrifying, though. It's scary to raise prices.

We.

I've gone through it many times in my career and always, you know, with thought in terms of the value you provide and with thought terms of what your current pricing is, what your competitive landscape looks like. Usually price increases go super, super smoothly now just to. And what we're going to talk about on this podcast is setting prices, raising prices, the value and discounts, pricing discounts. Just want to get that out there. So we're listening to. And just to help make settle fears a little bit. And we've gone through a number of price increases this year as well. They've all gone extraordinarily, really very little pushback. But I'm going to just single out the business journal here that we're looking at. So this is a. This is a B2B subscriber in the Youngstown, Ohio area. And they actually were running annual subscriptions. I think it was $29 per year was their annual subscription price. And when I talked to them, they said, yeah, we want to quadruple our pricing. We're going to go to $99 a year. Which to me, okay, yeah, that seems reasonable for a B2B publisher, but for them and their current subscriber base, that's a big jump. And they were making it retroactive too. So all their subscribers that were currently on the 29 were going to 99. Which now if you're used to paying 29 and all of a sudden your month, your annual bill jumps to 99, it might make you pause. And they have, they have a decent sized subscriber base. How many subscribers did they, did they lose after they went through the whole retroactive repricing? You wanna take a, you wanna take a guess at the percentage?

Cool. Probably less than a percent.

Exactly. Bingo. Yeah, it was a handful. It was less than 10 fingers or that many. Yeah, if you're nervous about raising your prices and you feel in your gut that, yeah, it's probably time for a price increase, then it's definitely. Then you're overdue for a price increase. And that's. I've seen that over and over again. So I was talking to Rob at Daybreak here, who publishes the local news newsletter, and he hadn't raised his pricing in over two years for his newsletter sponsorship slot. And unsolicited, he was mentioning cheap. I was thinking about, I'm like, how sponsorship's going. He's, yeah, good. I'm all backed up. Got people waiting I'm like, okay. And he's like, yeah, thinking about raising pricing. And as soon as I heard that, I'm like, okay, so just do it. Because it's simple. It's not even retroactive. It's just going forward. And one of the things that, as far as, like, when and how to raise pricing, if you're.