The Truth About Paywall Evasion, AI, Google, and Passwords

Today we're going to talk about the classic question that we get all the time, which is, how easy is it to defeat your paywall? This is a question that actually came in last week or a couple weeks ago from a publisher. And every, you know, I'd say every month someone's asking the question, how easy is it to defeat your paywall? Or a paywall, should I worry about it? And they want to know what they can do to stop Google from indexing everything from subscribers, from sharing passwords, and now, of course, AI from basically scraping all their content. So the title for this is the Truth About Paywall Evasion. AI, Google and Passwords.

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. And now for today's episode.

Hey, Tyler, how are you? Good, good.

Good to see you.

Yes. Happy Monday. And so I thought we would do. I went back, looked at the recordings we've had before. We haven't really nailed this one, so I thought it would be good. And we did one on all the little friction points. Not too long ago, one of those was disabling right click and worrying about ad blockers and all that. And the answer is, don't do any of that, of course, but go back and listen to that episode if you need to. This one is going to be really focused on content, you know, protection and sharing passwords. And so do you need to do it? That's the question we're going to answer in this podcast. All right, let's talk a little bit about what Google does to your site, what AI is now doing to your site. And it is true, right? Like Google, you know, especially with Gemini AI there, it's. It's now ingesting all your content. If you have a metered paywall, a soft paywall, or no paywall, then, yeah, all your content is being pulled into AI. Google Search is indexing everything, but as a benefit, everything is being shared socially. And that's the advantage of not having a paywall or having a soft paywall. So generally speaking, you have two options when it comes to setting up your paywall. One is metered or soft or leaky, whatever you want to call it. And the other is hard paywall, like the Wall Street Journal where you just lock down everything. And I want to talk about the pros and cons of both setups. And then there are a couple of options in there that we can. That you can also do. Okay, so just to continue on the metered side, the metered paywall is essentially, you're allowing one or more free articles before you're asking the reader to subscribe. That's how it works. And that lets you know the big benefit is you get social sharing. So as long as you're leaking one free article, then everyone that comes to your site can grab whatever article they want, put it in Facebook, put it in LinkedIn, put it wherever they want. Right. That's a huge plus. If you lock down your content, that stops the hard paywall, the meter paywall. Also. I don't know what you think about this, but I think the meter paywall just gives the reader, generally speaking, a better experience on your site. Your. You have the opportunity for a free registration on the site, which would let the reader drop off their email and get more content. And you're not. You're not annoying right away. And it's great for publishers that are kind of early in their subscription, their paywall journey. If you need to build your list, if you need to build your brand, then the metered setup is really the winner for you. Okay, I want to compare that and so I want to compare that to the hard paywall setup, which is the draconian way to manage your content, where you're basically saying, nope, you don't get access unless you pay. Right. And then there's a little bit of a hybrid system with the free registration, which I want to talk about now, the hard paywall. Let's just take a. I want to share my screen here and let's take a view at. See if I can do this here. Let's take a view at a little bit of data here. What I did was, is this. I don't remember what podcast this was in, but the spreadsheet you're looking at, if you're. We're looking at here, is all about some local news publishers across the country, the US and how many paid subscribers they have, percentage of population. So this is something I extrapolated from some data from Statista. It's really cool data and it shows you what the possibilities are. So if I look at and really the meter paywall, the hard paywall, the hybrid paywall, they all work depending on where you are in your. In your journey. And I want to look at like the metered paywall first. So this is one of the subscribers on, or publishers on this list is nola.com they serve the Baton Rouge area, right? And they have. Their. Their market penetration is over 9%. And this is, as of a year or two ago, 9% of their population says here, here's my money. Whether it's print or digital, they're absolutely turning into subscribers. So I pulled up their site and I said, well, what kind of site do we have here? So I'm on lenola.com and this is an article that I clicked into, and lo and behold, we have ourselves a metered paywall. We have one article here that I'm getting without having to do anything. Now, if I go past this article, yeah, I gotta pay. Basically, I got to subscribe. But I just want to show that the, the metered paywall does. The soft paywall does work. Yes, AI is ingesting and Google is ingesting, and you might be freaking out about that. But on the balance, the benefit of getting the content into search, the benefit of getting your content into sort of the social sharing groove, which is social sharing, but it's also email sharing. Don't forget about email. It is actually viral. It's a very good viral part of. Doesn't matter to them. It's working. So, so that's the, that's the metered approach. So if you're the publisher who's. Who's still building your audience, you're building your brand, I'd say just based on this data, I would say don't worry about the sharing. What do you think, Tyler?

Yeah, for sure. And I see publishers almost weekly that ask about, how do I block AI, how do I lock this down? And, you know, ultimately you sort of are playing a game of whack a mole that ends up hurting. That can end up hurting your. Your paid subscriber totals. So is it a problem? Is it great that AI is scraping our data? No, not. Not really. It's not exactly exciting for a publisher to know that. But if you, if you don't allow people to test your content, you know, get a taste of what you offer, it can be extremely hard for you to convert them to a paid subscriber.

Yeah, it's the freemium model, right? Give someone something and they'll like it, and then they want more. And as far as metering goes, let's just kind of talk a little bit about the free registration. Because, yes, I mean, AI is a threat. I'm not saying it's not. It certainly is. And something you got to be considering at this point in time, the priority really is Growing your email list. So if you're gonna, if you're still at that in that mode where you're, you're growing your audience, growing your brand, you're not the Wall Street Journal, then absolutely you have to put in a registration wall. So the meter set to one free article, that's. Don't give away any more content. On that second article, pop the free registration. Let people drop in their email, choose a password, and then give them one or two more free articles, depending on your volume. And that will build your list faster than anything you're doing right now. And your email list is your, is the way you control your future. Because if your email list is growing, this is your data. This is first party data. You're not, you can, and this is again, previous podcasts. You, you absolutely can stop worrying about social and search and AI at this point in time because you're, you're, you're in charge with your list. You'll find that it will grow your traffic, grow your ad revenue, grow your convert more paying subscribers will do everything you want to do as a publisher. Okay, we did our free registration soapbox thing. Okay. Anything to add on that? I think that's, I'd say if there's one takeaway here is the free registration component for the metered setup.

For sure, for sure. And this might be skipping ahead, but if you are completely panicked about AI and the scraping of that, one alternative to that would be to just blanket the site with a free registration sign up. So regardless of any piece of content that you land on, you're going to require people to sign up for free. So that's, yes, it's, it's still a gate and yes, it would stop AI from, from scraping and it does add some friction. But yeah, at least you're collecting an email address and you can target these readers into, you know, nudging them into that, that paid funnel journey.

So, Tyler, that was the perfect segue. Thank you. Right, so now we're really stepping into hard paywall. So you're at the point where you just need to lock down your content. And the metered approach and the hard approach are both valid approaches, depending on your situation. But if you look at what the New York Times is doing, they're doing exactly what Tyler just said. So it's a hard wall. In other words, they're essentially locking out AI and, and social sharing, but they're letting you register here for free and you'll get a limited number of free articles so you'll get more content that Is a, that is a really good approach when you're sort of ending, you're, you know, you're feeling confident, you're kind of, you're building your list, but you know, you need to lock down your content. So it depends on the type of publishing you're doing too. Like, we have financial publishers, a number of them, and they're, they've been locking their content early in the game. Like they, they know that their content is super valuable and when they publish an article, it's like seconds to make a decision on, on a stock purchase. And so, boom, you know, they need to lock, lock this stuff stuff down. For paid subscribers, local news. Kind of depends on where you are. You're starting up. Yeah, Free registration metered. Perfect way to do it. You built a lot of confidence, built big audience. Like a brief site. Just lock it down. Right? Just, just if you, if you have a big list, you get the newsletter going, you can still ask for, you can still do the newsletter, pop up on the hard wall and continue to, to trickle in that list. Great. But you know, your content's valuable and, and you're striking the right chord and it's time to lock it down. So that's valid. Okay, so one thing I will note is there is a service called removepaywall.com and there are other services that do this. And the idea is that you can drop a URL into remove paywall and get around the paywall. And it works some of the time, maybe most of the time, not all the time. Should you worry about remove paywall? That is the question. Tyler, you want to take a stab at that?

Mike, my answer would be very similar to AI and that the readers who are going to those kinds of sites to try to bypass your paywall, that slim percentage will never, ever, ever, ever pay for a subscription on your website. So no matter what you do, they're just not going to sign up for a paid subscription. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. And I would also say that if you're running leaky paywall, there is a function called IP blocker which will effectively stop these remove paywall systems from dropping your wall on your content. So there are ways around it, but again, it's not something that I would, I would worry about too much.

Yeah, totally agree. That's not your customer. And I'll also say that if, if people are spending time to get around technology, they, they haven't sort of hit that point in their, maybe in their life or career where their time is, you Know, more valuable than money. Right. You know, we're, most of us are, are really valuing time. And so the hassle and frustration and time you have to take to get around something. I mean, I remember back in, you know, when I was really young, like, you know, you, you and, and Napster was around, and now I'm dating myself and you'd spend time downloading music and, and it took a lot of time, but you know, as you start like working and making money and all sudden you don't have the time to, to do these things. And so you're, you're prioritizing convenience. So all you have to do is make it convenient to pay for content. And most of your audience will do it. Yeah, these, these people, these. And let me just finish one thing before I forget. And then the, even the folks that have the time to get around your content, they might actually also be sharing your content. They're spending a lot of time in your content. They might very well like, hey, here's a great article, right? And send it to a friend or post the full article on social or whatever they do that you might think is nonsense. Doesn't matter. You're getting exposure from them to their audience.

Yeah, you reminded me of something. Years ago I read that publishers tend to panic about younger readers not signing up to their sites and paying for news or whatever. Like Gen Z's not paying or Millennials aren't paying or what? And I'm like, well, of course, because they're, they're not quite to a point in their journey of life where they've got a stake in the community and they've, you know, they're paying taxes and things like that. So typically as people age, they tend to get more likely to subscribe to your publication. So just something I wanted to point out.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, don't worry about it. One last thing is if you are. And just a note of how things work. This is kind of a leaky paywall thing, but with remove paywall you need to put in order to actually block these services from ingesting your content, including AI is you need, when you publish your article, you need to lock that article down right away so you can't keep it open for a day and then lock it down and expect it to be locked out of AI and remove paywall and others. So because they're just too quick to pull, pull your feed in and ingest that. So if you have a category of content that you're locking down, just make sure it's always locked down when you publish it. If you're thinking about locking, if you're sort of metering now and you're thinking, geez, I might have to lock things down, are you ready to pull the trigger? That's great. Do the free registration, zero articles. You have to register in order to get more. That will keep all these services and AI out. Kind of like what the New York Times is doing. And then the last sort of part of the subscription life cycle is kind of what the Wall Street Journal is doing is essentially there is no access unless you pay. They have a strong brand, the financial following, their readers tend to be wealthier and they can afford to pay what they charge. And they essentially made the decision, hey, our content has high value and you just have to pay for it and it works. So those are the two and a half ways to meter your content.

Yeah, financial publishers have it a little easier, I would say, than most for the other publishers in terms of getting people to pay for access since it's a lot of their content is directly related to the wallet and people are willing to pay a little money to figure out how to grow that.

Yeah, exactly. Last thing I want to wrap up on is password sharing. That's another big one. I don't want people to just share one password to a thousand people or ten people or whatnot. And once you get into, especially if you're, you know, if you're selling content essentially that targets like B2B, where organizations start getting interested in your content. You know, you'll get. And I actually heard this on threads the other day, somebody I sort of been tracking and chatting with a little bit. And he was saying that B2B customers are starting to pick up his product, that he's essentially metering and he's thinking, geez, I got one organization that just subscribed. I know it's a big. It's like a Fortune 1000 organization. It's like, okay, there are a thousand people now that are logged into my site. So what do you do now? In that kind of an extreme situation, you might want to consider locking down concurrent logins, which is what it's called. So how many people are logged into your site simultaneously? Yeah, if you're doing local news, if you're a magazine publisher, you probably should not worry about that too much again. Now the solution is there. You can go to. I forget what the name of. There's several WordPress plugins. There's. I think it's limit. Active logins is the name of the One we recommend you can install that. You can decide how many. You know, you could have like five concurrent logins running on your site. But what's going to happen is you're going to get some administrative friction back at you with people who are like, hey, I can't log in, or the experience isn't as smooth as just logging in every single time and not being bothered. So you have sort of this little bit of downside. But yeah, Netflix is doing it. You know, there a lot of streaming services are now like getting us used to, hey, you know, you gotta log out a device to log in the next device. So they're creating a little bit of friction. We're getting used to it. If you're looking to do it, it's not a terrible idea. But you may get some pushback on or just some emails. You have to deal with people having trouble logging in. One thing I might suggest if you're in the family plan, potential arena is do that, sell a family plan. Right. Like if you're, if you're doing local news or magazine or something and you have a, let's say your subscript, your subscription is nine bucks a month just to pick a number, do a 13amonth and you get five seats. Right. For family members or enthusiasts or whatever content arena you're in. You don't even need to set up any kind of a limit on logins. Just sell it up front and you'll find that people will opt in for their family. You're giving essentially people a chance to support you in a bigger way. Okay, Tyler, I think we covered. Anything else. Any final thoughts?

Yeah. The takeaway is not to panic too much and to focus on growing the email list, per usual, Right?

Bingo. That's right. Yep. If you're metering, go with and you're thinking about it. Yeah. If you go hard wall, put in the registration wall so at least you can get people past the wall with an article or two. Make sure you use IP blockers. So it's just not super easy to right click and go incognito. That blocks that and. Yep. And that'll. That'll lock out AI and search and it'll do a number on. On sharing. But if that's where you are, that's the way to do it. So. All right, till next time. See ya.

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