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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, and welcome to the PublishPress Podcast. I'm Steve from PublishPress, and we help publishers succeed with WordPress. And I'm here with my cohost, Dan. Hey, Dan.
Dan Knauss:Hey, Steve. I'm Dan Knaus. I'm a solutions architect at Multidots, an enterprise WordPress agency that works often with large publishers and media organizations. We were talking with Pete today and full on into really interesting stuff about the point where publishers and search and AI and advertisers meet, and that is the the paywall.
Steve Burge:It's having a moment right now. I think a lot of people are discovering the value of putting a paywall on their content with AI hoovering up whatever it can, that some of these magazines and newspapers that are Pete's customers are discovering they're sitting on a gold mine full of content that they may have issues going back forty, fifty years. They may have decades of news stories that can turn their ordinary newspaper or magazine into a successful business in 2025, and Pete's helping them do that. So I think you're gonna find this conversation super useful.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. It was great. The intersection between Paywall product and a newer newsletter platform that Pete has integrated into a single WordPress solution that can be customized for smaller or larger niche publications, all kinds of organizations with content they wanna protect or define that relationship, how it leaks out. That's what we got into today, on the subject of leaky paywall and Pete Erickson.
Steve Burge:Hey, Pete. Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Pete Ericson:Hey, Steve. Thanks. Happy to be here.
Steve Burge:So, Pete, you are mister Leaky Paywall, but it's a slightly unusual name. I guess people who spend a lot of time in the publishing industry might understand the name and where it comes from, but what's the background there? What does leaky paywall mean? How did you get the name?
Pete Ericson:Well, honestly, it means leaking some content in order to, engage your audience and build your subscriptions. That's the elevator pitch. But it stems when we built Leaky Paywall about ten years ago, maybe even eleven. The British publications were calling the metered paywall a leaky paywall.
Steve Burge:Are you blaming the Brits for this?
Pete Ericson:Yeah, we're totally blaming them for it. When we decided we needed a name, we're like, oh, that that's that's catchy. So let's take it. And and honestly, some people hate it, and some people love it.
Steve Burge:Well, I guess it's kind of related to to dripping to some extent. You're dripping out the content Exactly. Article by article.
Dan Knauss:It's like Yeah. Porous autoclaved cement. That's what I always think of for some reason.
Steve Burge:So the whole the whole philosophy is having a paywall that is not hard. Right? The opposite of a leaky paywall is a hard paywall where people absolutely have to pay for almost all the content, but a leaky paywall is dripping content out. We we had Tyler who works for you on on the podcast a few episodes ago, and he was saying you guys have a philosophy of one and one. So you you leak or you drip one free piece of content for anyone, and then one piece of content when people register, and then you have to pay to join the site.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. That's that's our general operating philosophy if we had to spin a bottle in the dark. It really depends on the part of the journey that the publisher's in on how tight to make the paywall. So just to see if as as a a couple examples, if you're if you're a startup or a or a publisher that's starting up their your first paywall, maybe even your second paywall because your first one didn't work so well, you generally are in a state of fear. We're therapists in a way because publishers are really nervous about turning on the paywall and we deal with it over and over again.
Pete Ericson:In the beginning, we say, look, you have levers. Right? Like, you can and the Brooklyn Eagle, which just launched with leaky paywall, this is they're one of a lot of examples where they wanted to make sure everything's working. They wanna make sure that they don't tick off their audience too much. They wanna make sure that they can sleep at night.
Pete Ericson:So what they did is they decided to give away you go to their site, now they give away three articles on the meter, and then you register for two more and five a month. It's a generous setup. It's a purposeful setup because they're nervous, And then but then in two weeks and a month, they can sort of tighten tighten the valves the key payroll.
Steve Burge:Mhmm. And then they can Okay.
Pete Ericson:And they can they can they can boost their email registrations and their conversions as they tighten things up. But they need they need a lot of publishers need to start really generous because it's just an emotional you know, it's a big change in their in their business setup. Right? And then once they get comfortable with that, yes, then the one in one is generally or one in two depending on, like, if it's a bigger publisher, they they may go one on the article, you know, for free on the meter, and then you have to register to get, like, two more or three more if it's if it's a big news publisher. And so that's sort of the sweet spot where you get and I and and really, the the first number one, that's the key.
Pete Ericson:Right? Because your average session from a reader is one or two articles. So when that that reader hits the second article, that the registration wall needs to come up and say, hey. Give us your email. We'll give you more content, and you'll get the newsletter.
Pete Ericson:Right?
Steve Burge:That works
Pete Ericson:that works like magic.
Steve Burge:A lot of these publishers feel like putting up a paywall is really taking their relationship with the customer in their hands. And really, what else does a publisher have apart from the customer relationship? And so turning on a paywall is a moment of extreme nervousness of of risk almost for them.
Pete Ericson:Absolutely. Absolutely. And and yet, I would argue in the way we set it up is that you're actually gonna engage that reader better. You're gonna get their email address, first of all. You you have they have the control.
Pete Ericson:Once they have the email, they have the control of over how generous they wanna be with that reader and their content. We're all used to subscription systems. So if the publisher wants to give away 10 articles a month to to people that register, they can do it. No problem. Go for it.
Pete Ericson:You're not gonna convert much in the paid subscription department, but, you know, go for it. That's what the New York Times did five years ago, something like that. You know, they started with 20 articles a month, then they went to 10, then they went to five, and now they're at zero and with a with a registration.
Steve Burge:Yeah.
Dan Knauss:It kicks in pretty quick. That so has that nervousness gone away a bit in the industry? Because nowadays, you hear like it's become a standard tool almost and and having a a more gated membership experience that people can't just take for granted seems to have really become a standard now that
Pete Ericson:Yeah. I agree. Netflix helped pave the way for that. But, you know, we we tracked the New York Times when we were building Leaky Paywall. We saw that their their metered paywall was working.
Pete Ericson:We're like, yeah, let's just build that.
Steve Burge:I mean, they went from almost bankruptcy to really enormous revenues for a publisher. Right? Yeah. Paywall worked wonderfully for them.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. I I wish I had the the chart, but if you look at their revenues from when they launched their meter paywall to today, you actually see in the last five years or so that their subscriptions have actually they they've grown, and in the last five years, they've accelerated. Nice. And they passed they passed ad revenue and print ad revenue and all revenues years ago. I don't know if it was five, six, seven years ago.
Pete Ericson:They they their their digital subscription revenues all of a sudden became the priority. And and that's why they went into games and and Mhmm. Recipes and other content, essentially.
Steve Burge:So you you've seen a you've been in this about ten plus years now. So you've seen publishers' attitudes change over time. Are they warming up to paywalls? Certainly, there's a lot less reluctance to put a paywall on content than there was ten years ago.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. There's there's the need. I think the the need was there ten years ago, but I think the need is just is just more clear to publishers today. The nervousness remains, but the the clarity on, like, we and and, you know, publishers, you know, it's they're not Google. They're not Facebook.
Pete Ericson:They they they need the revenue. And the reader revenue, if they if they produce good original content and their audience likes it, they will pay. They will they will donate. They will do all the things that that the publisher needs for sure.
Steve Burge:Well, there's a a line coming now, I think, between publishers that want their content out there, ones who want their content ingested by AI, who benefit from having their content sucked up by the web, by Google, by AI bots. For example, we run a plug in company. It's absolutely to our benefit to have ChatGPT come to our site and suck up all our documentation. That's wonderful. But not for publishers.
Steve Burge:They need to run quickly in the opposite direction, right, away from having their content commoditized and sucked up.
Pete Ericson:That's a
Steve Burge:Paywall question. Even more centrally in the
Pete Ericson:edge of AI. That's really the answer. So back to the sort of the new startup publisher that's just getting onto subscriptions or trying to get it right, they need to build their audience first. The big priority with AI and just it's always been this way in Google and social anyway, is get that registration wall up. I mean, it it's the screaming burning number one priority for publishers to do, and it forces the email in order to get more content.
Pete Ericson:That's their superpower. Right? Their content. And so AI is coming in and, yeah, it's scooping up all this content and we're all using AI and it's great and I love it. But there's still this sort of intro period right now where you can build you still build your list really quickly with a reg wall and build your your audience and double your list, triple your list in the next year or so.
Pete Ericson:And then what happens is publishers will will will tighten up the the registration wall to say the one on one you talked about earlier. But then when there's confidence and it's right, you start nervous and start all of sudden you start building your email list, then you start you're building your paid subscriptions, and all of sudden you get to that point where it's like, Hey, okay, we have a solid email list. We know what content resonates with our readers. We know readers will pay for our content. We're chugging along nicely.
Pete Ericson:Boom. Now we turn that next valve and we make it a hard paywall. So that blocks AI, it blocks Google, it blocks social sharing, it blocks all these things, but that's okay because at that point in the journey, they built their email list. Their newsletter is huge, is driving tons of traffic back to their site, which is popping the upgrade messaging or whatever other messaging they need to pop, it's working. So we have plenty of publishers that are in that end game in their journey.
Pete Ericson:Still, they have the option of doing what the New York Times does where you can have zero articles. But if you register, you get one or two. That's a great way to set it up. Then boom, they still keep building their list because you've got to drop off your email in order to get more access. Then from there, it's pay.
Pete Ericson:And that's that's kind of the end sort of the end game. And that's where, like, the New York Times is right now. They've been doing it for thirteen, fourteen years. I can't remember.
Steve Burge:So for the publishers that you work with, the newsletter is almost on a par with the website, that they are two essential parts of the same strategy. That if you don't have a website, you're not in business. If you don't have a newsletter, you're not in business. Those two very tightly connected. Right?
Steve Burge:I mean, you you have you started with a WordPress plugin. Right? Mhmm. And now you've been adding newsletter services as well?
Pete Ericson:Yeah. So, yeah, we started with the Leaky Paywall plugin back eleven years ago, and we sold it and it went okay. But we realized we needed to be on the WordPress repository. So that was a that was a big game changer for us. We threw our core version.
Pete Ericson:It's a limited version. You can do you can you can get subscriptions going with it. That got us a lot of attention and downloads and people reaching out, and that was super helpful. Then we learned that we actually needed to talk to our publishers because they didn't know what the heck they were doing. Digital marketing is not in their wheelhouse.
Pete Ericson:In the past life, were an agency, digital agency. So we were building publications using our own software. We stopped doing that when we got enough volume on the software side. So now we do quite a lot of onboarding work to help the publisher get things right. So when they launch, yeah, they're building their email list.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. They're converting paid subscriptions. They're getting all the nonsense, all the pop ups, all the junk off their sites, making the and then the newsletter clearly became the engine, like the direct marketing engine. Right? That would that would as soon as you collected an email, you put it on your newsletter, The newsletter do do you know, set it up right, and it's pushing people back to your to your website, and it's targeting that person, producing them the upgrade messaging you need.
Pete Ericson:And that's where Flowletter kind of came. And Flowletter came now we have a great integration with Mailchimp and other platforms, but we were seeing pain points like, okay, you got to log in with subscriptions now. Well, that's a huge pain point. Right? You got to now oh.
Pete Ericson:And so publishers are getting some publishers not so much, some publishers are getting a lot of, depending on their audience, email requests or, Hey, how do I log in? I can't log in. Huge pain point, right? Then copying and pasting into Mailchimp or third party, that's for some publishers that proves a lot of newsletters. That is so much wasted time, right?
Pete Ericson:So publish in WordPress, right?
Steve Burge:Then Also Flowletter, you haven't quite defined it as this, but it's actually sitting inside WordPress, right?
Pete Ericson:Right.
Steve Burge:They don't have to go to Mailchimp or go to another platform.
Pete Ericson:Right. Well, okay.
Steve Burge:So they can copy and paste inside the platform.
Dan Knauss:It's an AWS based system that WordPress integrates with your basically, your user subscriptions and with how how does that work out? Are they are they very custom deployments per per client?
Pete Ericson:Yeah. So they they they can be. I mean, we use so news newsletter glue is the editor. So that's part of our platform. And what we usually do with it when we onboard a publisher is we'll take a look at their Mailchimp templates and be like, okay.
Pete Ericson:This is your template. We'll just we'll make a a copy of your of your Mailchimp template. Usually, there's input like, oh, we kinda wanna improve it a little bit. Okay. Great.
Pete Ericson:And then here's the template, and then publisher just kinda grabs the template, drops in the the post content into the template, schedules the pup schedules it to publish, boom, off it goes.
Steve Burge:He so you give them a some consulting. You give them a little playbook. I mean, how often how often are the successful publishers sending out their newsletter? Is this a are they hitting every day, every morning, every evening, once a week? How often do the successful publishers send out?
Pete Ericson:Dang. That's an awesome question. As much as possible. That's the answer. Okay.
Pete Ericson:So on the news if you're if you're like a news publisher or local news publisher, then the answer is probably daily. You're gonna have a morning newsletter. You may even have an afternoon newsletter if you're like in the local news space. People want the content. There are some opportunities with like premium newsletters just on like early delivery in the afternoon for paid subscribers.
Pete Ericson:But that cadence needs to be pretty aggressive. There's definitely a correlation between the frequency of your newsletter and your conversion of paid subscribers. If you're a magazine publisher, if I can keep going down this rabbit hole, you're kind of in a different space. Most larger magazine publishers are they are interested in building their email lists, but to please advertisers, not to please their readers. That's that's you know, we talk to a lot of them and that is that is their thing.
Pete Ericson:They got ad revenue. They wanna push the ad revenue. And so that their cadence has been like sponsored emails. Lots of them have pure sponsored emails that get kicked out, which is amazing to me because you feel like you'd have a wave of unsubscribes when they do that. Then the magazine publisher decides to get into paid subscriptions, which is smart.
Pete Ericson:And now but now now they have to really start balancing how aggressive is their advertising on their site, how aggressive is the advertising in the emails, and really focus on delivering content. Same thing though, if you have a if you're publishing a lot, some magazine publishers have, you know, their magazine content, they get their news content, and then it's it's a it's a daily or at least like three times a day occurrence. Then you get to the small like the small super nichey, digital onlys and their magazines, quote unquote, they serve a super niche audience, and they may only be publishing an article a day, really long form, high quality, super low volume articles. Well, what do you do then? Well, if you do an article a day, you got your daily or maybe three times a week.
Pete Ericson:If you're doing long form, you probably have evergreen. So now you start pulling archives into your newsletter stream. And I'd say that rough answer would be for really small low volume long form content publisher, try to shoot for at least twice a week, three times a week if you can. You know, pull those archives. Reader most readers haven't read everything.
Steve Burge:So you recommend quantity when it comes to sending out the newsletter, that whatever a publisher probably thinks is acceptable, you should probably go beyond that into what may make you feel uncomfortable at first. Like, should I be emailing twice a day? Should I be emailing once a week? Most publishers may be emailing once a month by default. You recommend just upping the quantity, contacting your audience more and more.
Pete Ericson:Generally speaking, I haven't I haven't seen a publisher ever oversaturate unless it's sponsored, like sponsored advertising content. On the on the most extreme side, sports publishers are crazy. I mean, if you
Steve Burge:Yeah. Them away.
Pete Ericson:Like, if you're if you're like, we work with the Pittsburgh sports teams publisher, and he had apps. And he was he was messaging he was sending out notifications through the apps on average, like, seven or eight times a day. Because if you're following you know, if it's your favorite team, you just like, and something happens, like, tell me now. Right? Like, that's that's crazy.
Pete Ericson:Like, we're just we're just nuts about sports. That that works for them, and and, then it kinda that that's the extreme, and then it scales down from there depending on your your audience.
Dan Knauss:Are you seeing any any greater sense of nuance from from different clients now, different publishers where they realize Google is now they probably always been reading everything that goes through Gmail. But because of gated systems and because of publishers going all in on newsletters, they seem to be reading that more closely. And now it sort of becomes a question of, well, what stuff do you want to tease out to the AI bots? What things do we want to expose? And does that help us?
Dan Knauss:Are there situations where the paywall kind of works for humans, but you're still trickling out things in a different way for the for search.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. I mean, you can always you can always tell the paywall, like, what to let in. So if you you could block everything, but if it's coming in from Google, let it in or chat, you know, OpenAI, let it in. You can you can do that. The the sort of the traditional approach publishers and I don't know if I don't know if this answers your question, but so and I'll just go back to Brooklyn Eagle.
Pete Ericson:They choose certain articles that are hard locked. Like these are premium only articles. And yeah, that will keep out AI, that will keep out Google, and it will keep away social sharing. Is that the right approach? I would argue no.
Pete Ericson:In the beginning of that journey, when the publisher is just launching and getting their email list built, you want social sharing. You want discoverability. You want Google. You want all that. Because when people come in and then they hit the reg wall real quick after one article, you get the email.
Pete Ericson:And the value of that email is everything. Right? So yeah, you're going to have AI in there. The thing I tell publishers is they think they know what their premium articles are, and they're wrong. They don't.
Pete Ericson:Because the reader know what's premium, because the reader decides through the meter what they want to read. They see something on Facebook or whatever, they click it, they come in, and they made the decision that this article is important to me. This may be an article that was written very quickly and is quote unquote lower value than the premium content, but it doesn't matter. That individual reader decides this is, for whatever reason, this is really important to me. So when you pick and choose, you're always getting it wrong as a publisher.
Pete Ericson:So let it in. But then when you're down towards the end of that journey, you just will start locking everything down because now you have a big list, now your subscriptions are growing, now you have momentum and confidence, that's how you approach it.
Dan Knauss:There's also kind of an interesting scenario where the ability for an LLM to basically like a docs bot, where you feed it a huge trove of information and then it becomes like the New York Times archivist. And that's really a much more effective way to assimilate a long term or specialized or database trench of knowledge. Is that coming up on in the radar of like some newspapers maybe that go way back in time? Search for that has always been really difficult. In The Times, Paywall is weird or you hit those sites where they've scanned things from like the 1800s.
Dan Knauss:But if that was all there available in search and then it makes you look like the expert because it's citing you and getting you back in. Is that something you're you're thinking about or seeing publishers consider as a as a new opportunity?
Pete Ericson:So when you when you say found in search, what do you mean? You mean that the your your archive is always available in search?
Dan Knauss:That the what now you're you're being greeted with your queries with really the, you know, the chatbot response and mileage varies on that. But I've noticed when when I'm targeting especially historical data that I know certain publications specialize in or something very targeted that way, suddenly, if you can tell that certain sources and then it's citing them, very industry publications or something of a local and historical nature, It's either there or it isn't. And if it's there, you get quite a lot of stuff right there in the summary. And then it tells you kind of cites the source and maybe that's the click that you want because now I'm kind of doing research on a refined level. I'm clearly in your market here.
Dan Knauss:And I'm seeing you now as long term source data experts I might want to pay and talk to. Is that kind of the the mind shift that's there for some? I don't know. And how does a paywall work in that?
Pete Ericson:That is that is awesome. What a what a what an awesome No. We don't really
Steve Burge:That sounds like a a hyper advanced strategy.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
Dan Knauss:Feeding feeding the AI very carefully with what
Pete Ericson:Yeah.
Dan Knauss:You know, maybe not this last year's data, but ten years with good data that no one else has.
Pete Ericson:So my my brain jumps to we worked with the Austin Monitor in Texas for a long time, and they they've changed their model, but they were basically archiving all, the, you know, the town hall, like, votes at town hall and all really deep dive. They were they were heavily into real estate and what was going on in the area. And they were basically building an archive of, like, how did something vote? And I have a friend who's a real estate developer, and he's his you know, part of his mission is to dig into, like, what were what were what were the rulings? What were, you know, what were the votes?
Pete Ericson:How did things go? And he's trying to, like, assess, can I buy this property and develop on it? Like, you know, there are just so many, like, details in terms of the and I'm not a real estate expert, but on all the sort of rules and regs on a on a controversial piece of property. And that kind of an archive could be, like you say, a total gold mine. So as a prob as a like, if I were that publisher, I'd be I'd be using AI to to create that database for me.
Pete Ericson:Right? And for my my my paid subscribers, I think that's how the paywall would would would interface with that. And then you get yeah. You become a paid subscriber, you get access to it. And what they the way they set it up is they they charge more for archives.
Pete Ericson:They were charging, like, a hundred bucks a month or something like that for archive access. And it and it worked. Like, it worked for them for years. So
Steve Burge:Do do many of the newspapers you work with actually have archives online? I know most of the papers have probably have an enormous batch of old printed copies sitting around somewhere, but very few of them seem to have digitized their old content. Their their online content may go back ten years max.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. They don't value the old news because it news is like, you know, the lifespan of news is what, twenty four hours or, forty eight hours maybe or something like that. So they're not really prioritizing that. But when you're dealing with magazine publishers that have or long form content publishers, yeah, they're really concerned about their archives. So they're they're digitizing you know, like, quick the quick solution is digitize your your print copies into PDFs, you know, maybe put them into the e edition flipbook thing, and then just lock them down with the paywall.
Pete Ericson:And then but the right the right the right solution is to actually copy and paste the text over time because it takes time, takes money, is get get each issue out in in a web based format so it can be shared on social because nobody shares a PDF or or a flipbook. And then you build build what I tell magazine publishers is, look. You launch an issue. Like, all your articles are web based. Great.
Pete Ericson:Now you got Google. You got social sharing. You got all now take an take the take an archive and copy and paste and do the same thing. So you're going one issue forward. You're going one issue back.
Pete Ericson:You know? Because each each p each article's like a like a magnet for search and now AI or whatever. So and, like, we did So when we launched Modern Drummer Magazine a while ago, they they had sort of the they they took their first their last twelve months of issues and copy and pasted the the images, the text, they formatted it, and put it on in a web based format. People started subscribing, and then every month, they went back one issue. In a year, they had doubled their traffic.
Pete Ericson:And it was like Uh-huh. It was ridiculous.
Steve Burge:They're sitting on a gold mine of content, but it's a a real pain to I mean, that's probably one of the very best uses of AI I've heard when it comes to WordPress in particular. There could easily be an AI tool that could extract your old your old content from PDFs and turning it into WordPress content.
Pete Ericson:Let's build it.
Steve Burge:That's I was just thinking the same thing right now. Yeah.
Pete Ericson:It would be a great that's a great use case because right now, there's no good way other than copying and pasting and bringing the images, and then you gotta format the text and make sure the links are active and all that. It's a lot of work manually. But it's but even manually, it's worth it. So, yeah, if if if we could get AI to figure that out, that's that'll be a hit.
Steve Burge:That's you think of modern drama magazine, I mean, it probably goes back
Pete Ericson:Yeah.
Steve Burge:Sixty, seventy years maybe. I don't know exactly how old it is. But some of these magazines may have I mean, you publish what once a month, 12 issues full of content going back fifty years. That's a treasure trove if it could be accurately turned into WordPress content.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. We had a we had a I have a publisher who rented a high resolution scanner for a week. It was, like, two grand or something, some super duper scanner. And he basically sliced up all his his archives back to the fifties and spending a higher week feeding print pages through the scanner in order to build up his archive. Great idea.
Steve Burge:Time well spent properly?
Pete Ericson:Yes. Absolutely.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. You're actually better off with an image in a lot of cases. I've chat GPT, others can I think they're using Python tools to basically scrape through documents? But I've seen some nightmares where people like used Word or something to create the PDF and some of the text is actually embedded and coded as text and other things are not. And layouts are random and it completely failed in one one project.
Dan Knauss:Was I was trying to do that. You're better off just you know, now they just read the image. You take a photo or something and, you know, your phone can already read that text. That makes makes a lot of sense to do it that way.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. I agree. PDFs are the next best thing essentially or images. So
Steve Burge:Yeah. We're in the era of notebook l l notebook l m l o m. The Google's product that does the that does the research. You can just drop in a 400 page book in PDF form, understands it like that, extracts the text. The more complicated magazine layouts, maybe the magazine publisher doesn't care too much to have a I mean, maybe the original design doesn't even translate too well to to the web if you extract, say, a two column layout in print and try and turn it into an article.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. They're they're you know, the magazine publishers, if they're still if they're printing, and some of them are are doing startup print runs, I mean, they're they're very concerned about the print product. Like, that's their main product. And they're a lot of them are like, well, well, you know, yeah, we'll take some digital subscriptions, and they do they do get a mix. I mean so track and field news, they're they've been around for a long time.
Pete Ericson:We've had them for a client for a decade or more. They they get a mix of print and digital subscriptions, real healthy mix of both. Right? Now they're more kind of in the their magazine, their print magazine, they've always been, but they're sort of in the news reporting world. When you deal with, like, coffee table style magazines that are, like, beautifully designed and all that, you know, they're gonna skew more towards, like, the print and digital subscriptions versus the digital only subscriptions.
Steve Burge:So some of those publishers would really value the the flipbook option where they put so much time and effort into their layouts that they'd want people to have a magazine style experience on their website.
Pete Ericson:They do. And the flipbook is under huge debate because it's it's just a terrible format. Right? And on an iPad, on a desktop, it's it's tolerable, but on a phone, it's almost unusable. A PDF, like what we just mentioned earlier, an image or a PDF would be even better because then you could just quickly pinch and zoom and and get into the content versus trying to click buttons to figure out how to zoom in on a on a flipbook manager.
Steve Burge:So are you seeing a lot of success with these hyper niche magazines converting to successful online publications? You've mentioned a a drumming magazine. You've mentioned a a track and field athletics magazine. You have quite a few more examples of just magazines, publishers in a really strong niche making it work online.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Like CalFly Fisher, California fly fishing magazine. That's a super niche. Like, it's all about fly fishing in California. And I believe that was purchased, and revamped, and now they have a beautiful site.
Pete Ericson:They have a print product, which is I don't know how many times per year. And they kinda have it all all going on now. So, yeah, very, very motivated to sell print, very motivated to sell digital subscriptions. They they kinda have the the nice nice combo going. So, yeah, they're they're the niches are I mean, when you have aquarium landscaping magazine, like, there are niches
Steve Burge:everywhere. Wait. Hey. Aquarium landscaping is having an aquarium inside your outside landscaping?
Pete Ericson:No. It's it's like the landscaping in the aquarium.
Steve Burge:Right? Oh, flipping it. Okay. Okay.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. It's like, yeah, fish tank. Okay. Well, we gotta put gotta keep the fish happy. So, you know, how do you do that?
Dan Knauss:What about academic institutions or places that you know, any institution that has, like, a long historical archive or intellectual property they're they're interested in monetizing or protecting. Have you taken on those kind of projects?
Pete Ericson:Yeah. We worked with Harvard for quite some time. Their law school has a magazine and it's like it's a professional development publication essentially. And, yeah, they did quite well with it. And they're still they're still running it.
Pete Ericson:I think they took I think they took their development in house recently, but, you know, they were selling last time I talked to them, their big sale was group subscriptions. Right? Like, corporate subscriptions. So they were selling to to law firms. Like, that was they would get you know, attorneys would would buy subscriptions, but essentially, they'd be selling, like, you know, a hundred seats or or or the whole firm gets access, they would just be taking taking, you know, a check and then giving access to the to the content.
Pete Ericson:I mean, if you if you're producing original content and it has value, you know, reader revenue is is a is a good path. Ad revenue is Digital ad revenue is a tough path today.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. I'm just really interested these days how there's these competing interests to what are we exposed to AI, but it also can create this value add for at some point maybe ten years ago or even more, it was noticeable where you have this kind of inch wide but mile deep trenches of like all these books came online or the Oxford English or National Biography was a big online project. And that's essentially mapping out like a social network for like a whole period of time if you wanna know who's related to who, who did business with who. They didn't set it up that way. But if you expose deep historical information to an AI, suddenly you have this major research tool and that's sort of been free.
Dan Knauss:I had things where there was like a light switched on the Internet and suddenly I had these old books and things for my family and I didn't know what they were. And there were actually references to old publications two hundred, three hundred years back. And that's got to have some some immense value. But I don't think anyone it's kind of like me. Is that like the next level of of paywalling where where you kind of partner with a research portal?
Dan Knauss:Is anyone looking down that? Why do you want this information or how can we help you find what you're looking for maybe those niches?
Pete Ericson:Yeah. That sounds almost like GPT is built specifically for a specific Right. Niche.
Steve Burge:Ancestry.com or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's at GPT for ancestry research.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Right. So I I've never gone through the process, but I imagine the difference would be you could just start you could sign up and just start asking it questions and then just have this con like, this dialogue where you're digging or then you're at the dinner table and somebody says, but but who is that person related? Oh, wait a second. Let me go, you know, go in and and yeah.
Pete Ericson:Which would be a game changer for sure.
Steve Burge:So, Pete, with with the advent of AI and with the death of advertising, it seems as if being a a paywall company helping people sell subscriptions online, you're in a very nice spot right now. You're you're working with these companies that are often sitting on a gold mine of information that can be repurposed to sell online subscriptions. It could be aquarium landscaping. It could be California fly fishing. If you have fifty years of issues, then those magazines that maybe a couple years ago looked like they were dying suddenly because of the intersection of where things are now.
Steve Burge:It turns out that an apparently dead magazine is sitting on top of a lot of valuable content and ways to monetize that online. A lot of these a lot of your customers maybe seeing a strong uptick in their business right now?
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Yeah. If they get the setup right, it's it's it's building their list and building subscriptions. Absolutely. And it's building their traffic.
Pete Ericson:And the thing that bringing all that archived content online, it's just every article just shows up and all a sudden gets search traffic, all of a sudden gets social traffic. Right? And all of sudden, if you're sending it through your email, you get the email traffic. So you have all this sort of viral virality of every single individual article that you bring back. And the content, know, content is a superpower for a publisher.
Pete Ericson:That that's that's its superpower. So, yeah, bring do whatever you can to bring all that old content back, and then and then people will pay for access to it. It is it's something that publishers still today, you know, ten years ago, yeah, good idea. Until still today, yeah, that's a really now it's a really good idea. Yeah, we're gonna start that.
Pete Ericson:And I I do see it more and more, but it's still a big lift and an AI tool to make it easy would be amazing. Yeah, that content is everything. And can I speak to your comment about advertising is dying?
Steve Burge:Oh, you're going to object to that?
Pete Ericson:I think it's dying, but digital advertising, way we think about it today, yes, it's sliding. You plop in an ad network like Google Ads or some of the other ad networks, and it's popping up and, you know, you're doing video slides in and pop ups and sidebars, rails and all that. Yeah, that revenue generally tends to be sliding. There's controversy over the the numbers, you know, like the bots that are out there clicking the links. Are you really getting you know, is the advertiser really getting the clicks and all that?
Pete Ericson:And yeah. So that that is, like, you know, what is it? 40 plus percent of of us use ad blockers. Like, there's literally a war against online advertising in the traditional digital advertising sense. But if you look at sponsorships, it's like sponsored content, that's a totally different game.
Pete Ericson:That's really what I see the ad industry heading towards. So that means direct sales. So now instead of just dropping an ad code and letting the algorithms do their job, you're reaching out and you probably have someone who's selling those ads. And the ads are now sponsorships and they're being baked into your content. You have full articles.
Pete Ericson:You have your email newsletters. You have yeah. Sure. You'll have some some display ads and things like that, but it's a it's a gentler, more powerful approach. You don't need as many sponsors.
Pete Ericson:The sponsors match your audience and your content. Like, there's that the good ones are perfectly matching that. I mean, just look at YouTube. Right? Like, you know, you get you get, you know, product placement or sponsorships.
Pete Ericson:Like, these things work. You know? As long as what your sponsor is is is providing actually helps your audience, boom. You know? That's this is this is the way.
Steve Burge:Oh, it's it's mutating. Advertising is changing from the way let's say, advertising as publishers used to run it is dead perhaps. It's getting more sophisticated.
Dan Knauss:One of one of leaky paywall's many add on extendable features is the ability to let corporate sponsors underwrite either their own maybe their own employees subscription or a set group of people. Is that something you see future in or people using where we actually have people who want to make sure we're reading these publications instead of advertising directly, kind of underwriting your professional subscription, something along those lines. There's so much stuff I skip, but I'd probably follow that substack more closely if they had a discounted or free one for people that are in their market niche.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Yeah. The corporate subscriptions, the group subscriptions are are big for some publishers. They, you know, if they have professional groups to go after it's or or it could be recreational groups. Like, I think the one of one of one of these extensions we built for soccer soccer coaches, groups of soccer coaches.
Pete Ericson:Right? So and they needed access to Soccer Coach Weekly in in The UK.
Steve Burge:There you go. That's that's a good very good niche product there.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. That works great. Another thing that's that's working well too is, like, physical location access by IP address.
Pete Ericson:And so, like, you're sitting at Panera Bread and you're, you know, and, you know, this this your access to the local newspaper, business news, or whatever is is is this was a business journal that did this. And you're sitting there and you get, you know, your business, you know, journal access sponsored by Panera, right, that shows up because you're sitting at that location. So that kind that kind of approach, it's yeah. It gets the word out about the sponsor, gets people in, groups of people in. It's sort of the next step.
Pete Ericson:Once you get your your your your registration subscription individual funnel going, that's sort of the next step. Okay. Who can I what schools can I get in? What libraries? What corporates?
Pete Ericson:You know? Clubs. Like, family plans for local news. Get five seats for your whole family. Like, that there are lots of variations.
Steve Burge:So we're seeing a a flowering almost of paywalls and paywall strategies. They're getting more sophisticated. They're getting more advanced, more custom, more targeted. What may have started as a simple sign up and pay system has evolved into a myriad of different approaches.
Pete Ericson:Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's part of the the need to talk to publishers and walk them through what's possible. You know? And it's like, okay.
Pete Ericson:You know, phase one, you know, get get get the foundation built. You know? There's a lot of things publishers wanna do. You know, you you talk to them. They have all sorts of ideas.
Pete Ericson:They're great at creating ideas. And okay. But phase one is phase one. You know? Get the get the reg wall up.
Pete Ericson:Get subscriptions going. Get launched. Okay. Phase two. You know?
Pete Ericson:And then whatever whatever you know, newsletter, usually, it's phase two. And then whatever else they need to talk about, the group subscriptions or promotions or, you know, pricing, trials, discount. I mean, there's it's a there's a never ending stream of conversation there.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Thank you so much, Pete. And we have one final question that we ask everyone on the podcast, and that's our blog roll question. Everyone that comes on the podcast works with publishers on a day to day basis. You see a lot of publishers.
Steve Burge:Is there one who whose work stands out, whose work that you really admire at the moment? Someone who's when their newsletter drops in your inbox, you always read it. Who is doing really good work in the publishing space at the moment?
Pete Ericson:Whose new newsletter do I read every time? I'll tell you which one it is. It's a newsletter called Daybreak.news. It's our it's our local one of our local news publishers. It's just right now, it's a it's a Mailchimp newsletter.
Pete Ericson:That's it. There's there's no and it's a donation model. But it's a curation. So where we have, like, the Valley News, which covers sort of is their traditional newspaper, And they do a good job. They don't really curate like day like Daybreak does.
Pete Ericson:So Daybreak, you know, they're tracking what's going on Reddit and YouTube and at Dartmouth College and and all these different and the newspapers and then writes a clickable title to the source, a short excerpt of what, you know, his take on you know, Rob's take on what this means. And it's like, it's probably 10 or 15, you know, short excerpts. And then and then below that is like 10 calendar event type of things that are happening in the area that are good to look at. So every day you get a super scannable email that you can look at in five minutes. You know exactly all the stuff that's going on in the Upper Valley.
Pete Ericson:And you might click, you might not. He's got some sponsors that are a couple sponsors in every single newsletter. Now he's looking at building a website finally, which is great, but that kind of cure, like super local news curated newsletter, It's great.
Steve Burge:Such a simple business model. One guy reading the web, curating it into a newsletter, hit publish.
Pete Ericson:Yep. Yep. Exactly.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Pete. I wish you all the best with with Leaky Paywall.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Been a pleasure knocking knocking things around with you guys.
Steve Burge:Yeah. And and if you wanna build that AI PDF tool, hit us up.
Pete Ericson:Yeah. Sure. That sounds great. Let's talk about it. Love it.
Pete Ericson:Alright. See you, guys.
Dan Knauss:See you. Thank you, Pete.