What happens when you lock down your paywall?

Hi, I'm Pete from Zine 101. And today we're going to talk about what happens when you lock down your paywall and stop giving away any kind of free content. Well, the Wall Street Journal just found out they ended their free article campaign and what happened was, is they saw an increase in conversion. Four times more readers turned into paying subscribers than before, but at a price. Their search engine visibility dropped 44%, and that's a huge drop in readership traffic. What happened was the Wall Street Journal went from giving away a few free articles to this. If I click into an article here, I immediately get blocked. I get the excerpt, it fades out, and then essentially, I have to subscribe. Now, what should you do if you're giving away free content now and you're thinking about a paywall? A hard paywall will drop your traffic tremendously, but it will also increase your conversions. If you go with a metered paywall, you'll be able to set how many free articles are given away for free? 1, 2, 3, 4 articles per week or per month. And that lets Google in and lets Google index all your articles, all the full text, and lets your articles rank in search. The second benefit is that social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the sharing that goes on in social media will kick in and it will let everyone in social media share your articles. That's a big benefit. So you say people can get around a metered paywall or a soft paywall by turning off cookies or turning off JavaScript. And yes, that is true, but it's a hassle. And today we're so busy and with a fair price, we really don't want to be hassled. And honestly, most people feel good about supporting an organization. The very few percent that want to get around your paywall, they're not going to pay you anyway. Go with a metered paywall. Modern Drummer did. We launched their site a couple of months ago, and in the first two weeks they received 900 new subscribers. What did they do? They set three articles for free, and then on the fourth article, the reader had to pay to subscribe. Maybe you can cycle your paywall. Start with a meter, get a few articles out there for free, let all the articles rank in search and be shareable on social media, and then perhaps turn it off like Genesee sun did. If we go to their site, you'll notice, and this is a regional local news site in upstate New York, and I click in on an article, you get the prompt to subscribe right away. They started with a metered paywall, and then they locked it down to zero free articles. And they also told me that they had a great jump in subscriptions, paying subscriptions, but they can cycle back at any time. They can jump back in and set that meter to 1, 2, 3, 4 for free articles. And that will open up the site and let Google back in and let the sharing back in. So it might be a game of cat and mouse where early on you let readers at your site, you let Google at your site, let social media at your site, and then you lock it down in order to create conversions. But there are other ways to do it too. I talked to a political publisher that's considering metering their general news articles, but creating end of the week issues that summarize the best of the week. And those issues would be locked behind a hard pay wall. So there's two reasons to subscribe. One is to get general access all the time, and two is to get access to these best of the end of the week issues. Bottom line is paywall can be a fluid tool for you to use, especially the metered paywall. It can be soft. You can lock it down. You can. And you can lock down specific items like issues to generate conversions.