Your First 100 Paid Subscribers (And What to Expect)

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 now for today's episode.

If you're just getting started with paid subscriptions, you're probably a little scared, nervous, and that's perfectly natural. And we're going to show you how to set things up. If you're just jumping into the subscription game, whether you're a veteran publisher or a brand new startup, it's really the same strategy. Now, before I jump in and, and look at this, I want to give you some, some something I want to get you excited because the potential that you have as a publisher with paid subscriptions is pretty amazing. And what I'm going to do is if you're, if you're watching this, I'll show you this spreadsheet here, but I'm going to show you what population of your, what percentage of your population of readers. And this is, this spreadsheet is more local news focused should you expect to convert to paid subscribers. This is a really interesting piece of data. And this was pulled from statista.com this is, this data is, it's over a year old, but kind of doesn't matter. What it's looking at is about 11 local news publishers, big ones LA Times, smaller ones, AR Democrat, there's a, let's see Newsday, which is a Long island regional newspaper. And what this, this data gives you, and what we ex, what I extrapolated is what's the metro population? How many subscribers did these publishers have on the print and the digital side? And then we come up with some totals. So what I did is I looked at all the subscribers that they have. I compared it to their trading area. This is what I did. I looked at basically kind of the metro trading area of the population and came to a percentage in terms of how many print and digital subscribers they have and what, what that totals to. And if you add up the totals and you do the average, what we're finding is, is that the newspapers here combined print and digital have, and most subscriptions here are digital. The print has a good chunk. The percentage comes to 5.76% of the population have decided to pay and become a paid subscriber. So I think that's a pretty interesting number. I almost, it's, it's a little low. Like in our experience, I Think maybe you would agree, Tyler, that that number can be improved upon.

For sure. For sure. Especially for the hyper local. If they've got 10,000 people in a community, your, your numbers are going to be much higher than that. I've seen upwards of, you know, 30% for the, for the small towns.

Yeah.

In a place like West Virginia, for example.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially as a, so as a, as a, as a local news publisher you have that connection with your community and they absolutely, you know, if you do a good job, they want to support you for like, like niche news publishers, magazine publishers, which we work a lot with. Those numbers are really do run around 5 to 10% like that as far as, like audience and let me back up on that, let me back up on that. The magazine and niche publishers are going to be a little lower than 5%. The local news publishers which have a really defined market are going to be higher than 5%. I mean I think you say 30. Yeah, I'd say probably 10% or more would be, would be good. And this, I just want to share this data because it's really, I mean look at your, look at your population in your town. You know, if you're in 100,000 area and you're going to get 5% of those of your, your local crowd to convert, figure out what you're going to price per month, per year and just do the math and you'll. And you're going to, that's your target, right. That's your minimum target. I would say there's a lot more potential than that. Calculate 10%, calculate 20%. So when you're here and you're ready to turn on paid subscriptions, these are the numbers to shoot for. All right now Tyler, back to you. You're onboarding, I think a few local publishers that are just starting up paid subscriptions.

That's right, yeah.

How are they doing? Are they a little nervous or they just ready to go?

Yeah, well they're both, I think all of the above. They're coming off of SaaS based systems and they're ready to accelerate their paid audience. They've got kind of a proof of concept that people are interested. They've got a newsletter that's 2000, 3000, 4000 people deep and now they want to see whether or not they can convert to two paid subscribers with that.

So what have they been doing? They just been like doing the standard here pop up like newsletter ask like here drop off your email and join our newsletter. Is that.

Yeah, yeah, basically. And a lot of Them don't even have websites. They're just leaning on newsletter platforms to market their content. So whether that's through social or tapping their own internal lists or you know, paying for exposure for, for, you know, for newsletter signups.

Right. And so they're ready for reader revenue now for subscriptions. So any idea what the trigger was for them? Just out of curiosity, I would imagine.

Just having a bit of control over the systems a bit. Newsletter platforms aren't exactly designed to run a full fledged digital subscription, you know, operation. They have them, a lot of them will have options to buy things, but it's not a comprehensive set of tools. And I think that's what they're all after in terms of we want to build this, we want some longevity, we want to grow this into a full fledged business, not just a side gig hustle, which is I think what most SaaS based newsletter platforms are designed for. And you'll reach a certain ceiling where it's like, oh, like I've, I've got this audience, they're on the SaaS platform. What do I do? Should I migrate over? I need more function, I need this and that. And so the earlier that you can do that as a publisher, the better. Right?

Yeah. Well, we're not biased at all with WordPress.

Yeah. I say that as someone completely in the weeds with the WordPress open source setup. Can it be done on SaaS? Absolutely. You probably will be just fine. But if you want more control, obviously you'll want to be into a system that's open source.

Yep. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, control is a big part of it. I didn't even really go down that path, but it's true, most SaaS systems are pretty structured. Don't really give you the flexibility that WordPress will give you.

Yeah. And I would say one other thing, and I forget this. Even as we talk to customers, potential customers through Paywall Project, you know, as, as both of us are sort of in selling software to some extent, a lot of them are hungry for service and expertise in, in the field of, of what we do. And so that oftentimes comes across, they probably don't care too much that we're using WordPress. It doesn't really matter. It's like, oh, you're, you support our, our type of customer.

So yeah, dang, that's a, that's a big one. Yeah, well, there's a lot of misinformation out there and who's paying attention to what actually works? You know, as far as software developers go, there are a lot of consultants out there that are good, that are really doing a nice job walking people down the right path. But yeah, most software solutions, it's like, here's the software, all right, here's how it works.

Okay. And I, I recall a person telling me that the advice that they were getting from X Platform, not, not Twitter, but X Platform, it wasn't specific to news publishers. And so it just like wasn't. Wasn't what she was after. And so it, and it wasn't likely going to help. It was maybe aimed at a, at a more of a YouTuber type.

Got it.

And so, you know, that's. There's a number of reasons, but I think all of those combine.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the, you know, having the high touch is really. Right, the word for it. You get on zoom and you figure out the needs and walk someone through the setup and how to do it and what's going to work based on their situation is really powerful. And that helps alleviate the scariness of the whole project. Right. So one of the things I'll just finish on sort of the fear is we've brought a lot of publishers on board that don't have any paywalls. And it's their first time and probably they are, you know, those publishers are the most challenging, generally speaking, because they don't really know anything about what works and what doesn't work. Whereas the publishers that have a paywall that's not working so well, they're just ready to make decisions and, and go for it. But, you know, if you have 0 subscribers and you have content and maybe you have. Your newsletter list is growing, that's great. But then you're ready to turn it on. It's a scary time. And what I will say is take a deep breath and just do it. I mean, we saw, we've seen a business journal, just a couple examples. We've seen a business journal go six months with a free registration, which was good. Better than nothing. But they were ready to launch their paywall. They got cold feet. It was month after month. It was like, oh, you know, we'll just turn on the free registration, we'll start. And their list exploded, which was great. Like, they, they more than doubled their list in six months. And they had a pretty decent list to start with. And then finally they turned on the paywall. And what happened? They started getting paid subscriptions. And were there complaints? Yeah, sure, a few here and there. But we're pretty used to paying for good content these days like that. Like the the fact that you have to pay for content. Yeah, there always going to be people that complain about that, but people, the, the readers that want to support you. If you're doing a good job with content, you're, you know, adding to their, to their knowledge base, to their, you know, making their life better because you're covering what they're really, really interested in. They'll pay, you know, a lot of, a big percentage of them will pay you. So just start. And it makes the value of your content higher when you put a price tag on it. It's really important. Okay, enough about scariness. So now let's talk about what actually works. Like how should you set up your paywall in order to start bringing on board your first subscriber, your fiftieth subscriber, your hundredth subscriber? Tyler, you wanna, you wanna tackle that one?

There's a little softball layup if anyone listens to the podcast. We talk about one thing on every single podcast and that is the free registration. So if you don't have that set up, you, you should set that up. And the way that you should set that up is giving away at least one free article. No questions asked, no sign up, no nothing. Just let folks read at least one article. This opens the door for social. People can share it without being gated. They can. The content can be scraped by Google and other other search platforms. And then after that free view, they're hit with a free registration prompt to sign up in order to see the second article. And during that signup process, they're creating, creating an account and then also being passed over to the newsletter. And once they're on that newsletter now, you're able to remarket to them on a daily basis, a weekly basis, whatever that cadence is for your publication, and bring them back to the site over and over and over again until you get them to a point where they, they've, they've seen the light, they've seen your content. They like what they're, what they're getting every morning. They see high value in it, and then they convert. I don't care if you're a magazine publisher, a News publisher, a YouTuber or whatever, this funnel works for all of them. Doesn't matter how big you are, how small you are. We've seen it convert across the board. And you know, that nurturing process of getting them into the free registration funnel will grow your newsletter like crazy, more than any sidebar widget will ever do. And you'll be able to convert these, these folks over to paid subscribers. Maybe in one day. I've seen that happen in five minutes. They sign up for free, and then five minutes later, they're like, ah, screw it. I'm ready. Let's do it. But sometimes it's six months, eight months, it really depends. And so that's, that's why it's so important to get that newsletter growth going so you can direct market back to your.

Your reader.

There you go. There's your master class.

Boom. Okay, everybody hit rewind and listen to Tyler again. Let's unpack that a little bit.

Yeah.

So if you take a look here, back to our friends at the Salem Reporter. After one article, you. They get. The reader gets something like this, hey, story's free for you. It's just an email and a password. Hit submit and it unlocks the next article. And then once, once the, the email is submitted, that goes to mailchimp or whatever newsletter service you're using. And it's building your list. And what you're doing here is you're drawing a line in the sand. You're saying, yeah, don't, don't, please join our newsletter. You have to join our newsletter. You know, you're playing hardball here. You're putting this up, and guess what happens? Conversion goes up. It's like 20%, like instantly could be, could be higher, but it. You'll find that those free registrations do start to pour in and your list will grow faster. Okay, and then what happens next? You give away one or more free articles after this registry, after the free article is unlocked, and let me just go back here, and you have control over exactly how many articles you're going to give away after that free registration. What do we recommend? Maybe one article. Depends on your. How much, how many articles you're producing. Maybe two articles somewhere in there is pretty good. We do work with some veteran publishers that come in pretty, pretty nervous, and they're saying, you know, they want to start at like, you know, two free articles. Then you register, and then you get three more or two more. So you're getting maybe four or five articles per month. That's okay. But, but, you know, they, they. That's like turning on the system and making sure everything works kind of mentality. Then once stuff. Stuff starts to work, then, then always what always happens, they start tightening up the restrictions. So getting to one is really the key. I'd say that if you have one, if there's one takeaway from this podcast is only give away one article before the free registration pops up. Because if you look at your Google Analytics, you'll see that the average reader session runs about one point, you know, five, six, seven page views per session. So they're looking at one to two articles per visit. That means you want to grab them after that first article to get. When they're trying to get to the second article. Yeah, they can get there, but they got to give you their email address and register. That's really the key to engaging those readers early, getting them on your newsletter. And then what Tyler said that newsletter pushes the readers back to your website, which actually swells your traffic to your site, which makes your advertisers happy.

Yeah.

Yep. Okay, so what we're looking at here is the upgrade message. So let's say you have one free article, you register, you get a second free article, maybe a third, but then you get the next nag subscription message that says, hey, time to pay. And what the newsletter is doing is the newsletter sending all those readers back to your site to see the upgrade message over and over again. Right. Like, we need to be seeing messages 10 times, 20 times. And it's like, oh, God, if someone sees a message 10 or 20 times, that means they want to read 10 or 20 articles. And if you're saying no and they really like your stuff, the chances of them actually paying you to become a subscriber go up over time. And it gets better over time. More likely to convert. Okay, now if you don't believe me, let's go look at this. So I pulled up the Arkansas Democrat here. I'm gonna go back to the, I'm gonna go back to our spreadsheet here. I was like, okay, who's doing a really good job converting digital subscribers? Oh, wait a second. Here's a.7% of the population in Little Rock, Arkansas, decided to pay for a subscription. Well, that's sort of an interesting number right now. So there's, there's some others here that have 4%, 5%, 4%, but 7%. Like, that's, that's a strong digital, you know, that's, that's kind of going in the right direction. So I'm like, okay, what are they doing? Right? And so their setup is they have, they have some lockdown content. No, you might not be ready for this. And not even sure we really recommend this at this ever. But this is what they're doing. This is kind of the choose, choose what's premium content. So they have some premium only content. If you click on it, you basically just have to pay and start a, start a trial okay, fine, they're a little further down the journey. But even their free content here, if I go to the latest, like all this stuff, which is free, and I get one article and then I get the free registration. So I've already read my article. It says, hey, become a reader. Email password. Look at that. Magic, right? So what they're doing is, is they've, they've kind of, you know, gone into sort of the mature news publisher realm where, you know, they're, they're picking and choosing some of their articles, but even their free content, quote unquote free, is still premium. And they have a, they have a registration wall in front of it. That's why they're doing so well, because they're engaging early. They're building their list with the, with the free registration. So there you have it, Tyler.

That's it.

Yep. Okay. I want to just touch on pricing just a little bit. It's a question. We get a lot. What do I charge for a subscription? And as far as, like, news magazine, whatever, say your floor these days, unless you have a very special situation, your floor, at least in US dollars, is $5 per month is a very typical subscription price. And that would translate to $49 per year. But the range is really like, for local News is like 5 to $15. I don't know what you see on your end. I know you tell you deal with a lot of local news publishers, but that's kind of the range I see. And one of the things I will say is that if you're kind of, if you're, if you're sort of debating, you know, like, oh, Jesus, thinking about 15. My stuff's so great. That's, that's awesome. But just keep in mind that it's easier to raise your price than lower your price. So if you, if you're just starting, I probably hedge towards a minimum of $5 per month. Could be a little bit higher, maybe 9. You can always raise your price down the road. Easy to do, but you can't lower it because if you're too high and people are like, nah, I don't really want to do that. It's just too much money. You just lost their attention forever. And you want to build momentum with paid subscriptions. And again in a year, you can raise price on new subscribers or you can raise price across the board. Take your pick.

Yeah, and we see that all the time. Publishers will start at $5 a month in the beginning. They'll cultivate, let's say, 500 paid subscribers at that and then a year and a half later though, maybe change their pricing from five to let's say $9 a month. And what they'll do oftentimes is they'll take the $5, you know, first clients that came on board, those first group of 500 or whatever, and they'll just raise them up to seven. Still giving them a great deal. They're not raising them all the way to 9. And then only the new customers will get that $9 rate. So that's the model that I would recommend. If you're not sure, start with five and raise to seven and then eventually raise to nine.

That is brilliant. I love that. Yeah. So you raise your price for new subscribers, but then your existing subscribers, they get a small price increase.

Yeah, they're still getting this. It still feels like this grandfathered in plan that we have to increase it a little bit. But don't worry, you're still getting a great deal compared to what our onboards are getting.

So yeah, the last thing I'll say is how do you know when you've gone, when you've hit the right price? That's when people start complaining. Like when, when you, when, when, when you're, when your subscribers are like, reach. Start to reach out to you like more than usual. And they're like, hey, wow, this is really getting up there. You know, you're kind of right at the right spot. Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. And one thing I got got to show off, the Salem Reporter price card. If you're listening to this, this is a brilliant tactic and I'll just read it. So it's one card. It's one button on this card. It says subscribe now. The title is first three months for the price of one act. Now for unlimited access to sound reporter journalism for just a dime a day. Get 24, 7 access to our website. Great. And it's $12 for three months. So they, they're, they're at 12amonth. $12 for three months and then it renews at $12 per month. So what are they doing here? Sell Reporter is giving away time, not money. It's not a dollar for three months. It's a full monthly price for three months. So they're giving away time, keeping, preserving the value of their content. The, the do not do the $1 per month deal because it cheapens it. You get a whole bunch of people coming in for limited amount of time. They're all going to churn out. And now you just, just discounted the value of your content. Please do not do that.

Yeah. Trials are certainly the way. Trials of time are the way to. To give some sort of promotion, which publishers like to do. And so if you're. If you. If you feel the need, this is the way to do it. $12 for three months of time access and then renews at $12 per month. And it's sort of psychologically for the. For the subscribers, seems like, oh, that's sort of the same rate, the same number. It's the same kind of charge on my credit card. You know, the only thing that's really changed is time frame, so.

Right. And what. What is this leaky paywall?

What.

What is this? How do you set this up?

This is just simply using the trial extension with leaky paywall. And there's a way to adjust the time frame with that trial delay. Yep, exactly. Cool.

One last point. Even though there's only one button on here, and it's really shouting the monthly. This monthly plan, which is, hey, I get three months. That's cool. For the price of one. Right below that is a text link that says, choose a yearly plan and save 17%. And what's nuts about this is most people choose the yearly plan.

Yeah, it's. You know, they're like, these days, it's like neck and neck. Like, I would say that yearly plan is maybe a little bit more than that promo. Despite that ginormous subscribe button. If you're watching on YouTube and this link at the bottom, you know, some people just know the value of your content and like, oh, okay, great, I'll lock in 17% for the year. And so they. Maybe they see this link is like this special offer that's a little bit hidden that they found and that gets around your traditional promo.

So, yeah, it's a double benefit if you. If you read it first three months for the price of one. Hey, that sounds great. And then you get down here and you see the 17 savings, you're like, oh, that sounds even better. So you've gotten like a double, you know, a double dopamine hit in this. In this card, right?

Yeah, yeah. And that monthly plan below it that you see in the link base, not too many people go for that. Again, there's no real benefit to doing that. And then at the bottom, occasionally people will sign up for a gift subscription, but that usually comes after they've already signed up and they become a paid member or a paid subscriber and they get a taste of your content. You see, quite a few people will do that during the holidays. They'll sign up and your most loyal paid subscribers will come back and get their family members gift subscriptions later on.

There's an underrated tip right there.

Yeah.

Go after your paid subscribers during the holidays for gift subscriptions. Yeah, yeah.

Make sure you're segmenting your list. Once they do come off of that, that free plan, free registration and they hop over to paid. Make sure you're keeping that up to date so you can target your your paid readers with additional upsells like that.

Yes, that's a good point. Yep. So every. So what we've learned is on subscription cards, people read every word on your card.

So scrutinize it.

Thanks, Tyler. That's it. That's the pod. Catch you next time. See ya.

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.