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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, everyone. This is Steve from PublishPress. And on this episode of our podcast, we're talking with Tyler from Paywall Project. If you're around the WordPress community, you may have come across a video he made a couple years ago about West Virginia newspapers that were struggling to stay in business. And he's made it his business to try and make those newspapers financially sustainable.
Steve Burge:He has a WordPress platform that enables small publishers to set up a paywall, make money, and keep themselves going. And the business is going well, and it's expanded beyond West Virginia to other parts of The US and now internationally. I think you're gonna find this a really interesting conversation. Hey, Tyler. Welcome to the Publish Press podcast.
Steve Burge:Hey. Thanks for having me. So you run a project, payroll project, that's been around, what, five or six years now?
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Formerly five or six years, but, sort of in the background for probably almost ten years. It is. Wow. Yeah.
Tyler Channell:Yeah.
Steve Burge:And so you mainly focus on talking to your audience, which is publishers, and not so much to the WordPress community. So if you don't mind, could you introduce yourself, who you are, what you're doing? Could you let people know about the Paywall project and what you're working on? Yeah. So my name is Tyler Channel.
Steve Burge:My company is Paywall Project. And so we focus on providing a fully managed tech stack for
Tyler Channell:publishers, mostly local publishers. And, we utilize WordPress and a lot of the WordPress, you know, plug in community software options to provide that that
Steve Burge:software or that that service. You almost mentioned WordPress as a bit of an afterthought there, that the people who are coming to you are newspaper publishers. And most of them want a platform first and foremost and don't necessarily care
Tyler Channell:if it's WordPress or not. That that's right. The vast majority come to us just looking for a solution. And they don't really care what the solution is. But WordPress, you know, you're in the space, I'm in the space of WordPress.
Tyler Channell:WordPress is the best in terms of publishing and access to a broader community of functionality and easier to maintain and publish and all of those things. And so that's they come to us and that's what we offer. So you've been in this almost ten years now.
Steve Burge:How did you get started? What's the origin story?
Tyler Channell:Yeah. I went to grad school at West Virginia University for journalism. Spent a lot of time thinking about local news, like, local news revenue models, like, how can we keep these mom and pop, local newspapers alive? West Virginia is a very small state. There's a lot of small publishers.
Tyler Channell:There's 55 different counties and almost just as many newspapers in West Virginia, as there are counties. And so this was in 2016, I got approached by a startup publisher to build a website for them. And, that sort of snowballed into getting more publishers that wanted sites set up and more specifically sites that generate revenue. That was sort of my, like, I don't want to set up a site that you're just publishing content on, you know, aimlessly. The point is to generate some revenue, create some sustainability.
Tyler Channell:And so, after those two first initial clients came on board, I found myself driving around to these, like, really, really rural communities in West Virginia pitching, you know, basically pitching WordPress sites for them with paywalls and trying to get them to adopt that kind
Steve Burge:of system. Oh, so you did some old school sales.
Tyler Channell:Old school. Yeah. I made a, connection with the West Virginia Press Association and that was sort of my avenue into cultivating some trust in these teeny tiny communities. And my thought was if it would work in West Virginia in these small towns like a paywall or subscription system, and generate revenue, like sustainable revenue, then I thought, well, then this could work virtually anywhere.
Steve Burge:So I might be British originally, but, I've been to West Virginia a good few times now. Oh, nice. Including, during COVID, we took a particularly long trip. Yeah. In in and out through the mountains, basically it was lots of outdoor activities.
Steve Burge:So good for
Tyler Channell:For sure.
Steve Burge:For the COVID era. And
Tyler Channell:For sure.
Steve Burge:West Virginia strikes me as a place where it's not just one state. I mean, you go out west, there are states where it's completely flat. You have maybe Arizona, for example, two or three big cities fairly connected and fairly easy to get to most of these places. Whereas West Virginia strikes me more as, like, fifty, sixty separate little microstates Yes. Because of the way the mountains are and all the little towns are so isolated.
Steve Burge:That may be related to each each little town having its own newspaper, its own distinct little community, the newspapers being a core part of those communities? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And again, so West Virginia
Tyler Channell:is not exactly known for its broadband connectivity tech, you know, economy?
Steve Burge:Well, there's there's whole areas of West Virginia which are almost Internet blackouts, right, or Wi Fi blackouts.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. If you're not familiar with West Virginia, it's a very rugged landscape for sure. And not exactly a place where you would, you know, incubate a tech startup or any kind of tech operation. And so that's why, again, like, if it if I could get something to work in West Virginia and get publishers to adopt, you know, even on a small scale, get them to $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month on a very small, you know, 5,000 person town, then the idea was that, okay, then we could do this in other places and create some sustainability for other publishers too.
Steve Burge:So your first customers were all in West Virginia. Yeah. Was there a moment when you got an outside customer and thought, this could this could grow a little bit bigger?
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. The leads started to come after, you know, you get a few of these sites on board and they start to find you, from sites that are built, you know, using Paywall Project. And so, and then there's word-of-mouth and things start to grow in that way. Customers have come to Paywall Project because they see other publishers or there's word-of-mouth.
Tyler Channell:And so, you know, it's sort of grown in that way into a multi state. Even international, we have international based publishers at this point. So a lot of
Steve Burge:the publishers may know each other and go to the same meetings, the same associations, the same conferences?
Tyler Channell:Absolutely. What happens typically is a publisher comes on board and then there's like two or three more, four more, five more within that, like, 200 mile radius because they talk to each other and, you know, that's like the best trust, you know, building, that, you know, for them to trust Paywall Project to take on the project. So for them.
Steve Burge:So what do these newspapers look like? What's a typical one? From my experience here in Florida, these small newspapers are often a mom and pop organization. There's maybe a married couple in their 50s, for example. Is that what a lot of your customers look like?
Tyler Channell:I would say so. Yeah. In the beginning, for sure. They were certainly mom and pop couples in their 50s, 60s, some maybe even retired and doing this as sort of a retirement, you know, hobby, if you will. And then more recently we were getting more solopreneurs, we're getting more mid sized publishers that are coming on board that have, you know, bigger, bigger teams and are digital first, type publishers.
Tyler Channell:Whereas for a long time we were sort of getting the print first, you know, web is the secondary thing that we have to deal with, type clients.
Steve Burge:So you've added a whole different segment to your user base. You've got the startups as well now.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. People who come from SaaS based platforms, maybe they've started up a newsletter and now they're wanting a bit more control over their their setup because maybe they don't have a website or maybe they, you know, they they wanna generate more income, more sustainability, and so we help them sort of make that transition.
Steve Burge:So where does the name Paywall Project come from? Are you are you very focused on on getting these newspapers behind a paywall and generating revenue for them? Is that your main selling point?
Tyler Channell:I would say so. And oftentimes for if you're in the local news space, it can be a very off putting word for them. They see the word paywall and they're like, oh, no, we don't. We can't do that. Like, that's not that's not within our ethos to paywall our content.
Tyler Channell:But but it's not a hard paywall. We're not we certainly don't advise hard paywalls in almost any case. It's a soft, you know, metered approach that we that we sort of, you know, prescribe. Oh, so people may get one article, two articles free, then maybe they have to sign up for the newsletter to get the third or fourth article. Precisely, yeah.
Tyler Channell:So most of the structures are one article for free that allows for social, you know, sharing and SEO benefits and all of those things. And then we're asking them to sign up for free to get an additional article or two. And that's the point in which they're creating accounts and adding them into the newsletter. And then they get access to that article. And now that, now that they're on the newsletter, the most important part of the whole operation, getting your, your readers onto the newsletter, you can remarket to them every day, every week, whatever that that cadence is for your for your newsletter.
Tyler Channell:Hopefully it's often. And the idea would be to get them to upgrade at some point after being blitzed with your with your wonderful content. So
Steve Burge:does it work? I mean, obviously, it must work, but I guess my question should be, how well does it work? You you run a newspaper in a small West Virginia town. Are you looking at getting up to a revenue of $10, 15, 20, 50,000 dollars a year?
Tyler Channell:For sure. For sure. Yeah. We have publishers that have landed in that, in that, like, that number for the digital side of their operations. A lot of it will come down to how often they're sending their newsletters and how restrictive they are with their meter.
Tyler Channell:So if a publisher is giving away, like, five free articles before they ask you to sign up for free, they may never get to that point in the funnel of signing up for the newsletter and they may never get to the point where they're being asked to subscribe. So, you know, we we that's in the very beginning of the setup, we basically preach, you know, kind of a one and one strategy. One free on the public side, one free on the free sign up side. And then, you know, from there, that's where they grow the newsletter like crazy. Grow that newsletter list like crazy.
Steve Burge:Oh, so you have enough data now, you have enough sites to be able to make some fairly strong recommendations. Oh, absolutely. What works best?
Tyler Channell:Absolutely. Yeah. And that's something we we pitch in our when we do sales calls is, you know, we have a, you know, close to 70 some publishers at this point that we kind of can pull from and and see what has worked, what has not worked, and and kind of recommend a strategy for them. So a large part
Steve Burge:of this job sounds like it's almost consulting as well as the the tech side of things. That these companies come to you because they know they're not digital native. By and large, they they need some help, and they're looking for someone like you to to give them the tech stack and also give them some expert advice as well. For sure. Yeah.
Steve Burge:And that's the
Tyler Channell:thing, like publishers, I tell them all the time, you can go through and look at our tech stack. You could use every one of these plugins yourself. Feel free to do that. We don't put them in contracts. We're not that's not what we're what we're trying to do.
Tyler Channell:The goal is to get them to sustainability. That's goal number one. And so, you know, the open source community is the best way to sort of put those puzzle pieces together. And yeah, you're right, we do provide a lot of like marketing help for them as far as like sending their newsletters, helping them, you know, with that whole infrastructure. So you're not trying to get too much of
Steve Burge:a vendor lock in that these customers, if they wanted, could pick up and leave, but you're providing a high quality service and they they stick around.
Tyler Channell:That's the point. Yeah. The point is to give them service that they're not used to and not locking them into contracts, which is something they're also used to, to seeing with other other vendors, especially outside of the WordPress space. And yeah. And they stick around.
Tyler Channell:And, you know, we've we've got good good software partners and we've we've got, I would say, a wholesale based rates on a lot of plugins that we that we utilize. So it keeps our costs low, which also keeps it low for them to, you know, get started and to try it out.
Steve Burge:So And so you're about ten years into this now, I guess five or six officially Yeah. As Paywall Project. Are things picking up? Is business good at the moment? Are you getting new publishers through the door?
Tyler Channell:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I would say that something has happened in 2025 and, like, there's just been an abundance of leads recently. I'm not quite sure why, but, yeah.
Tyler Channell:Things are things are good. There's a lot of startup based publishers that are coming to us more so than before.
Steve Burge:Interesting.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. So people who are using existing SaaS platforms, maybe they tried it out, they're getting some traction, but they're, like, not sure what to do next. And so that's, that's something we're seeing quite a bit of. And then we're also getting these like large, like, multi chain news, like, organization leads that have, you know, ten, fifteen, 20 like, sites as part of their, you know, their operations. So it's it's kind of all over the place, but mostly, you know, publishers only.
Steve Burge:Oh, congrats. So the original small town West Virginia newspaper that you started with, And I think quite a lot of the WordPress community might know you for because you did it at least one or two videos about some Oh, yeah. Some West Virginia newspapers, several years ago. But that original constituency, that original audience is still there, but you've also added startups and you've also added larger newspaper chains as well to what you do? Absolutely.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Nice. Yeah. And that was the goal from the beginning was if if we could prove the concept in a very difficult place to prove it, then, you know, it would be easier. Nothing's easy in the publisher space, but long term it would be more attainable to, you know, attract, you know, bigger publishers to to maybe try out a model that they're not super familiar with.
Tyler Channell:So the pain points that they're coming to get solved by you, the paywall of course. Sure.
Steve Burge:And I think you use the Leaky Paywall software.
Tyler Channell:That's right. Yeah. We're heavily embedded with their operation as far as yeah.
Steve Burge:We've talked before because you, you work with Leaky Paywall, right?
Tyler Channell:On on a part time type basis. We do some product development together because we both have insights to, like, what publishers are asking about and what they're wanting and and things like that.
Steve Burge:So the problems that the newspapers or, the publishers need help with are the paywall and the newsletter as well?
Tyler Channell:Absolutely. Yeah. The newsletter and just general content distribution, like publishing, like general publishing is a is a struggle.
Steve Burge:Okay. Yeah.
Tyler Channell:Well,
Steve Burge:they need sort of basic WordPress help.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say that like half of our client base, maybe maybe a little bit more that come on board are are not WordPress like natives. They're coming in with all kinds of different CMS systems that have to be migrated into WordPress.
Tyler Channell:They know about WordPress. Maybe they know it from like the WordPress.com side of things, but they're not, you know, some of them have had terrible experiences with WordPress because of the WordPress.com, you know, Squarespace type approach on that side. So they're sometimes hesitant. But by and large, it's a training exercise for all of them to get them into WordPress and, you know, used to that ecosystem and publishing and sending their newsletters through WordPress and things like that.
Steve Burge:Oh, yeah. You use the newsletter glue plugin?
Tyler Channell:Yeah.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Newsletter Glue Newsletter Glue.
Tyler Channell:Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic. If you're, if you're, trying to, you know, wrangle your publication workflow, newsletter glue allows you to kind of do that inside of WordPress and just send out the HTML to your preferred ESP.
Steve Burge:It sounds like you got a migration challenge as well quite often. I know talking with some people at, Newspack, for example, which is the similar to what you do but owned by automatic.
Tyler Channell:Right.
Steve Burge:And they've had migrations from 101 different CMSs and
Tyler Channell:Yep.
Steve Burge:And set up. So a big portion of what you do is wrangling all those migrations onto WordPress?
Tyler Channell:That's right. Yep. Because you can't, you can't bring them onto WordPress without bringing on, you know, twenty years of legacy content. And, you know, keeping that SEO value that they've cultivated over the years. So, yeah, that's usually a pretty big challenge, but we've, we've got workflows for each, you know, different CMS.
Tyler Channell:We've seen you see a lot of stuff when you start getting into migrations into WordPress from different systems and so it's possible. If the data is there,
Steve Burge:it's possible. Are you we've listed all these things you do, all the things you're doing from the tech support to the sales to the migrations. Is it just one person now? Have you have you got a team with you now?
Tyler Channell:It's a small team at this point. There's there's not everyone's full time, but there's probably around six or seven players at this point, like, helping with the with all of this.
Steve Burge:I see you've grown to several hundred sites on the platform, several staff members.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. I'd say we're not quite to a hundred publishers yet, but we're we're we're almost there.
Steve Burge:So I saw that you've just launched a new events product, an AI powered events product?
Tyler Channell:Yep, yep. And Steve, you might be familiar with this. So being in like the publisher space, like kind of hearing what they have to talk about, the issues, the pain points that they come to you with, they're very acute. Typically, they're very nuanced issues that they find themselves in. And one of those, issues is putting together an events calendar for local communities.
Tyler Channell:It's time consuming. It's, it's, you know, sometimes costly for the publishers to put together. And so we put together a system using AI and scraping and a number of different tools to basically cultivate local community calendars for the publisher. So pulling events from let's say ten, fifteen, 20 sources and then importing them into a WordPress calendar plugin for, publishers. So they have all the events in the community.
Tyler Channell:They don't have to do anything. They don't have to like go surf around trying to figure things out. It's just dumping in every night with new content, updated content. And then all of the, you know, value that that brings as far as SEO and, you know, adding it into the newsletter if they want or exporting it to the print publication and things like that.
Steve Burge:That sounds awesome. So it goes to Facebook, it goes to all the local news sites, it goes to anywhere you can pick up events. That's right. Imports imports them maybe with images and the date and cost. Looks for any duplicates.
Tyler Channell:Absolutely. And then also updated event, like if the event time changes, the location changes, the, you know, maybe the the banner advertising thing that they're they're using for marketing changes, like we are tracking for all of those adjustments.
Steve Burge:And then imports them all into the events calendar or another WordPress plugin?
Tyler Channell:Absolutely. Yep.
Steve Burge:That sounds pretty awesome.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Kind of leaning on the tech that's there. Like WordPress has really great, robust calendar, community. There's many different options as far as plugins go. And then just sort of utilizing AI to do what it does very well.
Tyler Channell:And that is, you know, structuring data and putting it into a format that is repeatable. And, yeah. Our publishers are are liking it so far. It's only been live for about three months, four months. So And I can see some possible extra benefits as well.
Steve Burge:It might be possible once you have a popular events listing to maybe charge for some some event listings, or extra promotion. It could be something, like say, that could go out in the physical newspaper as well if they have a print version.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. And those are those are sort of roadmaps for, like, future, you know, functionality that we hope to implement and try out. So right now most of the benefit is the time savings. Some cost savings for them.
Tyler Channell:Some SEO benefit. There's a lot of, been a lot of side door traffic to these events. People search for, for example, one of our clients, Salem Reporter in Salem, Oregon, that's the capital city of Oregon. They've been pulling in events for the last three months or so and people are actually finding events when they type in like Salem City Council meetings. Salem is outranking the original sources of the data.
Tyler Channell:And people are finding their sites through a site door and, you know, boosting the overall traffic to the site.
Steve Burge:So you've ticked off a few of the problems that newspapers might have from, from the paywall, making some online revenue for them to getting a newsletter out to events. Are there are there other problems that you see that customers are telling you about things that pain points you'd like to solve?
Tyler Channell:I could probably be here all day, if I went through if I went through every, like, function request or thing that that they that they require. I would say that and this is something that we solved a couple of years ago, that was a big pain point for many publishers. So when you put up a paywall, one thing that you run into as a publisher is like admin issues around, I can't log in, or how do I reset my password, and you're dealing with a lot of stuff like that. And so something we put together last year was a way to sort of log people in automatically through the newsletter. And it's kind of a longer story.
Steve Burge:It recognizes their email address. That's right. There's like a custom, a custom token in the email.
Tyler Channell:That's right. Yeah. And so it logs them in and kind of keeps some of the admin headache down a bit. And because of the way that we're doing it, we had to had to basically have our own email newsletter sending operation, like our own ESP to do this, because it's, you know, our publishers will come to us with Mailchimp or MailerLite or whatever system that they're using. And so we sort of standardized everything into our own ecosystem so that we can have more control and, you know, create these more nuanced pieces of function for the publishers.
Steve Burge:Oh, okay. That makes a lot of sense. I think of, my father-in-law, for example, who he doesn't know the password for anything at all. For his Wi Fi, for his his sports app on TV that he watches all the time. For sure.
Steve Burge:And so I can imagine the challenges of getting a large customer base to remember their passwords and enter it whenever they get to the website. For sure. A a one click login is an excellent idea.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Yeah. And, that issue only gets more pronounced as the publisher grows. So, you know, some publishers we work with have, you know, let's say 100,000 free registration users, you know, and then a percentage of those are paid users. And so you can just imagine the snarl of requests that they'll get if people can't log in.
Tyler Channell:And you want them to log in easy, especially on, obviously you want your paid folks to be very happy and, you know, to like your product and not hassle, have a hassle with logging in. But also the free side. You want them to click the newsletter and, you know, see your content and hit that upgrade messaging over and over and over and over until you get them to, you know, see the value and and pay for for your your publications,
Steve Burge:you know, services. Oh, so someone most likely will hit the paywall the paywall screen five, ten, 15, 20 times before they finally think, okay, this is gonna deliver enough value for me.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. It could take six months, like, on on average for for a publisher to convert a free person into a page user. And a lot of that is through the newsletter. Like they're seeing bits, snips, and pieces of your content and they like what they're seeing.
Tyler Channell:Maybe they're not always clicking back to your site, but over time, if they are clicking back, they're getting they're seeing upgrade messaging. They're seeing, you know, please sign up and and support what we're doing. And eventually, they'll they'll do it if they if they stick around on that newsletter.
Steve Burge:And are you entirely locally focused? So far, the customers you've mentioned are all all geographically based. Is that your main focus still, or have you added some general purpose publishers as well?
Tyler Channell:Mostly local news and, like, medium sized news publishers, like regional publishers come to us. Like, you'll get you'll see leads that come from, you know, this one area or our statewide region of publishers. We've not kind of gone out and and tried to get other use cases for the there's, there's probably millions of different use cases for a paywall and but we're trying to stick to the publisher, universe.
Steve Burge:You've got a strong niche right now.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Yeah. And there's not a lot of, not a lot of people focused on the publisher space. I mean, you've got Newspack and they're doing a fantastic job on that, on that side too. But there's just not a lot of tech kind of fixated on helping a publisher, you know, grow revenue and put out all the fires that they're constantly having to put out with their text to text.
Tyler Channell:So, so we find that there's there's maybe not trillions of dollars a year in this particular vertical, but there's definitely enough to keep you busy for the rest of your life.
Steve Burge:There's only a strong niche that's above something like a substack or a beehive. It it has, more people involved quite often in actually writing the content, and it may have the physical component as well, the actual newspaper. Those are things that are probably not not easily dealt with on a newsletter platform. You're offering something that is more independent, can better integrate into their wider workflows. There's a there's a real niche that you found that probably can't be easily taken away by a SaaS service, particularly when it comes to the consulting and the expertise that you offer them to.
Tyler Channell:For sure. And I'll just mention that almost every publisher, they come to us with some kind of pre existing circulation type system that they're using. And they want that data also synced up in there, or they've got this other system that needs the data to flow here and there. So there's there's a lot of of these small, you know, integrations that have to be, I wouldn't call them small, some of them are quite difficult to master. But, they come in with a lot of specific needs around their data and where it needs to go.
Tyler Channell:So, yeah, it's, and it's something, you're right, it's something that SaaS platforms can't quite do at scale. And they wouldn't do it at scale because print publishers, you know, their circulation systems, it's a smaller batch of users that are in that universe. They're not in the digital space where there's millions of, if not billions of potential clients.
Steve Burge:Yeah. You have quite a defensible position there. Yeah. That it wouldn't make sense for any SaaS service to try and automate integrations with all these platforms.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. Why would you do that? You know, like, you've got there's all kinds of other things you could be focused on. So maybe you were crazy for focusing on that.
Tyler Channell:This has
Steve Burge:been your interest in at least ten years and going back before that to
Tyler Channell:For sure.
Steve Burge:University life. For sure. It's been a a lifelong interest so far.
Tyler Channell:For sure.
Steve Burge:To make sure these newspapers are healthy and sustainable.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Yeah. I remember distinctly remember in an undergrad course, a professor mentioned something around, like, if somebody can crack the nut on keeping local news sustainable, like, they're gonna, you know, she didn't say they're gonna be rich, but, yeah, they're gonna be successful at whatever they do. And so that's just something that stuck with me for a long time. And, and, I guess here I am trying to solve that problem.
Steve Burge:So you've got a fairly good overview of large parts of The US from West Virginia to to New England to out on the West Coast as well, and internationally, it sounds like as well.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Mhmm.
Steve Burge:How are you feeling about things at the moment? How are you feeling about the the lifespan of these newspapers, of these local regional publishers?
Tyler Channell:Yeah. You know, some, I've seen publishers come to us who have a print component. They add the digital component. They see us as sort of a thing they have to do. They have to have a website or whatever.
Tyler Channell:Some of them don't even have websites. I know some of your listeners are thinking, what? No website? And we've seen them actually kind of my print publishers are gonna freak out when I say this. They've kind of done away with their print more.
Tyler Channell:Like, it becomes less of this thing that they need to focus on, and I've seen some of them go entirely digital. Like, so, you know, printing maybe is not going to be here forever as far as distribution goes. And it shouldn't be because it's really expensive and people pay for delivery of a paper that actually is kind of a loss leader for most publishers. They're doing it just just for the advertising. This is a whole different discussion, but we're basically transitioning them to digital and then they're growing, you know, more and more and they're seeing higher returns on the digital subscribers.
Tyler Channell:So we're at
Steve Burge:the point where for most of the newspapers, the physical edition is a loss leader and the digital is perhaps where the actual revenue is?
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. The only reason most of our publishers, they're gonna they're gonna kill me for this, are publishing a print component is they've got print ads and some of them have public notices that run inside that print publication. And some of them are state mandated to run those public notices in the paper.
Steve Burge:And they get paid for that, right?
Tyler Channell:For sure. For sure. And so that's why they do it, right? There's revenue. And a lot of that's what I've quickly found out when I was going through all of these small communities.
Tyler Channell:I'm like, how are they staying in business? Like, there's there's 5,000 people in the town. How this doesn't quite add up. Like, what's what's making this function? And a large part of that revenue is coming from, like, state code that requires public notices to go out in the newspaper, which can generate significant revenue for a small mom and pop shop.
Steve Burge:Oh, these are things like there's a local construction project coming, here's advance notice, the construction is going
Tyler Channell:to happen. That's right. Yeah. And those kind of notices. Exactly.
Tyler Channell:And in West Virginia, especially where I where I grew up, it was like, you know, the coal mine is going to do some blasting or something. Like they have to notify the public, you know, required by state code. They have to publish that, in the paper of record, they would say, in the region. Oh, so literally without the digital component, these newspapers would be looking at going out of business probably because they'd be losing money on the print publication. Well, yeah.
Tyler Channell:So the risk is if a state decides to adjust that public notice requirement, maybe allow some digital publications to get in on the game of publishing, you know, those those public notices, it can put them at risk for going out of business. So, yeah, it just makes sense for them to build sort of a fortress around, you know, a subscriber funded type operation. And honestly, as you know, being in the software business, there's much less overhead for, you know, something like that where your your people can write from home and you can you can be more nimble than you can be with this, like, large print component looming over your head that's super expensive to not only produce but also to deliver.
Steve Burge:Oh, so these old school newspapers, they might no long they may no longer have the little office in downtown with oh, I remember driving from driving through West Virginia on trips that quite often in the downtown, you would see the newspaper building on the main street.
Tyler Channell:Yeah.
Steve Burge:So they may be moving away from their model that the journalists work from home. I mean, not all of
Tyler Channell:them, but I think that's where it's headed. They're headed to a a future where there's less overhead, there's less print, you know, there's less overhead from the print component that they're trying to to keep going. And, you know, more of a focus on on the digital subscriptions.
Steve Burge:So you sound reasonably positive on the the small local newspapers, but you're also seeing an influx of new startups companies who are trying to get into this space. Are these kind of ex journalists maybe laid off from the local newspaper or these young people fresh out of college full of energy? What kind of startups are you seeing coming into
Tyler Channell:the use payroll project? Yeah. It's actually kind of interesting because we're seeing kind of both. The Salem Reporter, for example, they're a digital first startup. I think they started up in 2018.
Tyler Channell:They came to us a few years into that operation. They've got a mix of, you know, a long time respected journalist, Les Zeitz. He's been in the Oregon political journalist scene for for decades. And then he's also got a younger staff around him that's reporting on, on the local daily news in, in Salem. And they're hyper focused on, you know, certain verticals of content.
Tyler Channell:They're, they're focused on the city news. They're focused on the schools. You know, they're not they're not branching out into all kinds of stuff. They're just, like, hyper focused on
Steve Burge:They're they're not trying to be perhaps an old school newspaper that had the the high school football game and the local fate. They're trying to narrow in on things they can do really well. That's right. Yeah.
Tyler Channell:They're they're they're focused on what the community, like, wants to read and what they care about. And so because of that, they they see a lot of paid subscribers. They see a lot of free subscribers. You know, they've got a lot of, a lot of newsletter subscribers that if they don't get their newsletter, if they miss their newsletter or it goes, you know, I don't know, they market a spam by accident, like, they they'll they'll panic. They'll email the Salem Reporter and be like, where's our newsletter?
Tyler Channell:And I'm like, that is like the best news that I've ever heard, you know. And they get that often if somebody, you know, marks it as spam and it goes away and they don't get their newsletter every every morning at six a. M. They're concerned. And that's what you want.
Tyler Channell:So.
Steve Burge:Oh, so they're using your platform to hit the inboxes every morning 06:00. That's right.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Multiple times per day. Yeah. They've got Oh,
Steve Burge:multiple times per day.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. They've got a free newsletter, which goes out in the morning, and then they have a paid newsletter which is very similar to their free but it gives a little bit more commentary, maybe some updates on like some stories they're working on, a little bit of behind the curtain of what's going on, that you get as a paid subscriber. Yep.
Steve Burge:So you're kind of seeing in real time the birth of a of a new business model that is working for some new publishers. They are providing a a different service, maybe more focused on on specific areas and specific needs, but there are publishers out there that are getting started, that are making money, that are really filling a a local need.
Tyler Channell:Absolutely. And they're doing it without having public notices sort of fund their operations up until, I mean, recently, I think Oregon passed some legislation that allows digital operations like Salem to accept public notices on their sites, which is great. It helps with the revenue side, but they're they're focused on the digital subscribers. Like, that is where that's where the revenue is coming from along with with some ads, but by and large the focus is on on digital subscribers.
Steve Burge:So a lot of these organizations are making money from the paywall. Maybe they sell some ads as well. Do a lot of them have other sources of revenue? Are they taking donations, from, from are they taking grants from organizations like the Knight Foundation, for example, or are they running events? Do they have other sources of income outside of the payroll?
Tyler Channell:Some of them do. I mean, some of the almost all of them are running ads to some degree. They're running local ads, not so much Google ads, but local ads. That's far more valuable to the publisher and to the readers. Some of them do events, but I would say by and large, like most of that revenue is coming from, like, their digital paid subscribers.
Tyler Channell:Like each month. Especially the digital first, like startups. Their ads are sort of secondary. You know, public notice stuff is secondary for them. They're they're hyper focused on on the digital paid people.
Steve Burge:So what do you do really is the core. It's the flywheel that drives their business. They may get money from elsewhere, but basically the core thing they do is publish content. They have a soft paywall with one free article, then one if you subscribe to the newsletter, then they send out the newsletter daily, weekly, maybe multiple times a day. And then once someone has read the newsletter, seen that paywall message often enough, they'll subscribe.
Tyler Channell:That's right.
Steve Burge:That mechanism is what is driving these new publishers. Absolutely. It's not
Tyler Channell:a newsletter widget sign up on the sidebar. It's using the content. I want to see more of this content. Okay, I'll give you my email address to unlock this content and that adds me to the newsletter and gives me access to the content. That that's the key to getting that newsletter to explode and and growth and then get you to a point where you can get them to pay for for access.
Steve Burge:Awesome. What it it sounds like you're finally achieving the goal you set out to, back in college when you were listening to that to that professor talk.
Tyler Channell:Yeah, for sure. That you found
Steve Burge:a way to make local news sustainable.
Tyler Channell:Yeah, I always tell publishers, you know, we wouldn't be in business if my, you know, if our publishers were not making money. So, like, that's the point. The point is not to set up the tech stack and then walk away from it. We want them to make money from it. It's not a service fee that they have to just pay every month.
Tyler Channell:It's something that actually provides, like, actual real value to them and their and their readers. Oh, feel free to
Steve Burge:refuse to answer this question if it's uncomfortable, but do you actually make a cut of the revenue the newspapers make?
Tyler Channell:No. No. We don't take any percentage fees, no transaction fees. The only thing they pay us is a monthly service fee. And so we scale up based on functionality and the number of, emails that they send out per month.
Tyler Channell:So if they've got high volume, then we we basically scale them up from there, but we don't we don't take a cut.
Steve Burge:So your incentive is to keep them on the platform, to keep them successful, to keep them doing well enough to be able to keep being a customer. But it's not as if if they make half a million, then you get a 3% cut of it. No. No. No.
Tyler Channell:No. And again our publishers are small to medium like publishers so that, like, if they could I mean it would be a miracle for some of them to get to a million just based on the on like the populations of their communities. So the point is is just to keep them like, sustainable. Obviously, they can, there's room for growth. But a lot of people don't get into small town journalism to become millionaires through what they do.
Tyler Channell:So, yes, they can make $50, 60, 70, 100, 2 hundred thousand a year probably. Yes. Like in most markets. But becoming a, you know, a millionaire or a trillionaire or billionaire or whatever is a lot less likely. So a lot of these will be three or four person operations probably forever.
Tyler Channell:That's the maximum scale or the maximum size they
Steve Burge:can be given their market.
Tyler Channell:Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever the market can can basically support is, you know, how big their teams teams will be.
Steve Burge:So where is Paywall Project going in 2025? Are you are you continuing to be hyper focused on your local news niche and continuing to build out the platform, say, with this AI events plug in and other services, or do you have other plans for the year?
Tyler Channell:Yeah. So we're we're still hyper focused on local news. And, there's a lot of local news publishers that need support, need help, and need help with growing their paid audiences. And so we're still focused on that. Focused on creating products that, you know, fit these really nuanced needs that they have to serve their audiences.
Tyler Channell:And so that's, we we we remain laser focused on on the publisher.
Steve Burge:And are you still driving around and shaking the hands of the local newspapers people and trying to get them on board or are you a little bit beyond that now? Are you moving on to to Zoom meetings and yeah.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. Yeah. I haven't done that in a in a while. But, yeah, it's mostly all Zoom calls at this point. Almost every day there's, some sales calls to go through demo calls.
Steve Burge:Well, that's probably the, the theme of this conversation so far is that things are moving digital now.
Tyler Channell:For sure.
Steve Burge:Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Final question for you. And we ask this of, of everyone that comes on the podcast.
Steve Burge:And I think as much as anyone, you will have a lot to choose from. Is there a good publisher, you can choose more if you want, that whose work you admire, whose newsletter drops in your inbox, and you say, okay. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Who's a publisher whose work you admire at the moment?
Tyler Channell:Well, there's two. The Salem Reporter is like our poster child of like doing everything to the highest level. They're sending their newsletter at a good cadence. They're They've got the free registration set up. They've got a lot of good hyper local focused content.
Tyler Channell:They're checking those metrics like seeing, you know, which kinds of content are converting people to free, which kinds of content are converting people to paid. Like they're really laser focused on growing that paid subscription audience. And, I'm not even from the area and I enjoy reading about the local community because it's that focus. It's that, you know, in touch with what's going on. As far as like news that I'm that I read, like a publisher that I read often, and they're I wouldn't say they're doing a particularly great job on the subscription side, but I do enjoy their content.
Tyler Channell:I read the, Bangkok post.
Steve Burge:Oh, okay. I was not expecting you to say that.
Tyler Channell:Nobody ever is. Yeah. So I really enjoy their content. My wife is Thai and so we travel to Thailand and so we've, you know, that I like to stay in kind of in touch with what's going on and and, Thai government and economy and things like that.
Steve Burge:They send out a regular newsletter that even though you're sitting in West Virginia, you can read and
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. They've got no
Steve Burge:use of describe to them.
Tyler Channell:Well, there's no need to because it's all free. And so that's there's a lot of room for improvement. Their content is fantastic. And and maybe I don't know enough about the Thai media market to know whether or not people would pay works in West Virginia. I don't know if it works in Thailand.
Tyler Channell:But but but yeah, they've got good content and they do have a sign up budget for the newsletter. It's just really hard to find. So
Steve Burge:You know, I suspect over there they might be looking at things like paid WhatsApp channels or Probably. Paid Telegram channels or something like that.
Tyler Channell:For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Line and WhatsApp are, like, you know, king of of, like, communication for most folks in in the region. So
Steve Burge:Yeah. Hey. Well, if, if Paywall project keeps on growing and you keep on getting more international customers, maybe you can try and pitch the Bangkok post one day.
Tyler Channell:Yeah. I'll have to open a branch in in
Steve Burge:Thailand. Yeah. There you go. Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Tyler.
Steve Burge:It's been great to hear about your work, and I I wish you continued success. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.