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We discuss paywall strategies for content publishers. With over 800 news, magazine, and content publishers running our Leaky Paywall platform we have learned quite a bit about what works (and doesn't) in digital publishing. Join Pete and Tyler for a deep dive that will help you grow your paid audience.
Pete (00:01)
On today's podcast, I interview Wally Wallace from 50 fish, a design agency based in Maine. He has been working with many of our publishers, magazine publishers, mostly for a bunch of years. I've never had him on the podcast. We talk all the time. He spends a lot of time with our publishers doing agency work. So, you know, how to, how to build email lists and design work and how to convert paid subscriptions. And he meets.
every month with his publisher clients to move them forward. And he's had incredible success. So I'm really thrilled to bring him on this podcast. If you are a long form content producer or magazine publisher, this podcast is for you. Enjoy.
Pete (01:17)
Hey Wally, welcome to the Paywall Podcast. Nice to have you here.
Wally (01:22)
Yeah, thanks Pete. Glad to be here.
Pete (01:24)
All right.
Yeah, awesome. This has been a long time coming. I think we've known each other for almost a decade, worked ⁓ quite a lot together with shared publisher customers. And the purpose of this ⁓ podcast, as we talked about, is to talk about what magazine publishers specifically can do to succeed ⁓ in today's digital landscape. I mean, we have...
We have social, we have ⁓ Google, we have AI now, we have a lot. I know you work with a lot of print legacy customers and I wanted to drill down with you how these ⁓ publishers are succeeding today.
Wally (02:00)
you
Yeah, it's a crazy time, huh? Between AI and the cost of paper and print and shipping and everything else, we're seeing some big transitions in the publishing world, for sure.
Pete (02:18)
you
Yeah. All right. Before we jump in, and I thought what we'd do is we'd maybe take a look at a couple of magazine publishers that you're working with and sort of break down how they are succeeding in the digital space. But before we do that, I just want to talk a little bit about your background so the listeners know kind of where you're coming from. The short story that I have is, you, you're an agency, you're based in Maine, great state of Maine, and you've been working in e-commerce for quite a long time.
Wally (02:39)
Sure. Yeah.
Pete (02:52)
have ⁓ then jumped into working with e-commerce and publishers, which would be paid subscriptions. But I know you also work on social media marketing ⁓ and ⁓ SEO and other things. So does that sound about right?
Wally (03:11)
Yeah, it's all part of the puzzle. So we, you know, we don't ignore any of it. Yep. So I've been doing digital marketing for my gosh, what year is it? 2025. So 26 years, um, built my first e-commerce site in 1999 and didn't sell a whole lot, but, um, got the bug for it. So it's, uh, it's been a fun ride. It's, it's quite the time to be doing marketing. know.
Pete (03:25)
Hmm.
Wally (03:38)
I was just telling somebody my first college, my classes in college when I graduated, we were learning about billboards and newspapers and print ads. And here we are being able to directly attribute sales to ⁓ a specific campaign that went out. So ⁓ it's a fun time, but yeah, e-commerce has been the backbone of what I've done and it's bleeding into publishing. I think it's really time to...
Pete (03:55)
All
Wally (04:06)
to kind of leverage that for publishers.
Pete (04:09)
Yeah, no, it's been great to see these publications that you work with grow, ⁓ really in all departments. Now, I'm just going to mention a few for the listeners ⁓ that you work with. I know you work with Wooden Boat Magazine and their Small Boats sub-publication. ⁓ Let's see, Track and Field Magazine, Brew Your Own, Wine Maker, Warfare History Network, and others.
Wally (04:36)
Yeah.
Yep.
Pete (04:39)
some good sized publications there. So, all right.
Wally (04:43)
Yeah,
and each with unique challenges and puzzles to kind of figure out. So it's, makes it interesting.
Pete (04:47)
Okay, so
yeah, let's speaking of challenges. Can we pick one to kind of talk about? there kind of a favorite ⁓ publisher that you've worked with and maybe it's just some interesting thing that happened recently or maybe it's been kind of a longer term project? Any favorites you want to talk about?
Wally (05:10)
sure. I mean, we could talk about small boats. That was our original, our original publisher that we began helping. Gosh, maybe it was probably about 10 years ago that we sort of took over and started leveraging our e-commerce strategies for, for them.
Pete (05:29)
So you have a lot of history with, I'm going to bring up their publication here. if you're watching on YouTube, can see what we're looking at. All right. Yeah. So who is Small Boats? Tell me a little bit about this publication.
Wally (05:39)
⁓ there you go. get the... You get the OptinMonster pop-up too. So,
yeah, Small Boats was started by Wooden Boat ⁓ magazine. And it really was their...
Pete (05:57)
Mm-hmm.
Wally (06:02)
They're testing of the digital landscape. So they wanted a product to test digital with ⁓ without having to push a wooden boat. This iconic, you know, now 50 year old ⁓ publication through the paces of a full digital work over.
So Small Boats became their kind of testing platform. And we today still use it for testing and trying new things and trying techniques for marketing or user experience on the site or this little pop-up that you're seeing here, know, always testing things, which I think is hugely important.
Pete (06:39)
Mmm.
Okay. ⁓ Is there a print component here or is it just digital?
Wally (06:49)
No, there was. ⁓ And we do have print replicas on the site, which are great. If you close out of that pop-up, Yep, if you navigate to specials up on the top bar right next to classifieds, you can see some of the... So we've broken out some of their... There's some video series here, but there's also the print magazines that...
Pete (06:57)
There's a newsletter pop-up, by the way.
Okay.
Wally (07:17)
involved and they would do an annual, if you slide down, an annual print magazine that basically covered everything that was online that year. And if you subscribe to read, which I guess you're not a subscriber, Pete, but if you subscribe, you would be able to read the flip book publication as it was in print.
Pete (07:26)
Mmm, gotcha. ⁓ Got it.
Yeah, I gotcha.
Wally (07:41)
And I think that's interesting because we also have publishers who are now embracing only digital while still trying to give something back to the people that are used to reading print. And the flip books are a way to do that just as a nice ⁓ token.
Pete (07:52)
Mmm.
Does that work? I I talked to lot of publishers about flip books and how they're dealing with them. I mean, what's your take on the flip book? Yeah.
Wally (08:15)
you got an offer. ⁓
It works as a mechanism for people to retain that feel of print. So our publishers who are ⁓ really kind of in that transition or, you know, who are...
want to keep advertising, we're able to sell advertising with the flipbooks as well, ⁓ which is good. So it still retains the layout. Now it doesn't, it's not searchable. Google can't find it. So the SEO portion of that is negligible.
Pete (08:46)
Mm.
Wally (08:57)
So for that reason, your metered paywall is really the magic that drives it. So here you can see we show the issue, but underneath it, all the articles that are in the issue are HTML articles. So a publisher simply putting up a PDF flip book is not really going to push the needle at all.
Pete (09:13)
⁓ yes.
Wally (09:24)
we need this content gating so that we can get people into the flow, into the next step. And here's our quick register nag where you can read this article free now. ⁓
Pete (09:35)
Mm-hmm.
Okay, so before we jump into
this flow here, I think this special section that you have up here is new. Since I've looked at it, it's been a little while since I've looked at the publications. And so you have video series just for listeners. You have video series, you have special editions, you have small boats annuals. These are also editions. And then the annual section is pretty big. It looks like you have a bunch of content on here.
Wally (09:48)
Yep, it's fairly new.
Pete (10:06)
So was this the purpose of this sort of ⁓ flip book and video ⁓ section to offer it like one other ⁓ perk for a paid subscription?
Wally (10:18)
Absolutely, absolutely. That's what we're trying to do is, you know, if you're a paid subscriber, we have a video, a whole series, like, know, each of these things here that Pete is showing ⁓ are series of videos that we were releasing once every other week or a week and, you know, 15 episodes in a series. And that's a perk for a subscriber. We're also doing things like
Pete (10:29)
Yeah.
Hmm.
you
Wally (10:46)
On small boats, we're running contests for subscribers. So if you're a subscriber, you can enter to win things, which is just another one of those little perks. Trying lots of different things to see what we can get to entice people to really feel like they have a membership and a lot of content to digest.
Pete (10:51)
Hmm.
Okay, interesting. So there's a lot of video content here, much more than I saw. Can you tell if people are clicking in here? Is this a high engagement area?
Wally (11:20)
Yep,
yep, no, can track all of that, is great.
Pete (11:25)
Okay, that's awesome. Yeah, so tell me about the con... Yeah. No, finish that thought.
Wally (11:28)
And that's, sorry, go ahead. Well, that's the big thing about
it is the tracking, right? So data is everything. So we know what sections people are looking at, ⁓ how much time they're spending in these sections, what sections are driving both paid and free subs. And that's really helping our content strategy as well. So we look at that with the publisher.
Pete (11:50)
Mm-hmm.
Wally (11:56)
on a weekly basis and it helps them kind of build out that next month of publishing and content, which is great. This traditionally was a small boats is a wooden boat product. So you see a lot of wooden boat items in here. But now under the boat profiles, if you go up to the top, Pete, you know, we have started to add in
Pete (12:03)
Interesting.
Mmm.
Wally (12:26)
Yeah, we have started to add in some some really fun small boats that are not wooden and one of them you'll see in here is a Boston Whaler and that has been huge ⁓ because what what that has done for us is given us a search term of 13 foot Boston Whaler which is a classic boat and it's put us on the map for that which is driving traffic.
Pete (12:36)
Interesting.
Right.
Wally (12:53)
So it's really finding things that we can kind of broaden ourselves into, still a really cool small boat, but give us things that are search terms as well. And I think that's one thing that publishers, they get tied up into their nice clean title and they forget about the search terms that need to be there.
Pete (12:53)
Hmm
Mm-hmm.
Interesting. So that, I remember the Boston Whaler as a kid driving around, know, buzzing around and the unsinkable boat, they cut it in half and it still floats. ⁓ So, so, so how did you land on, on, on this? Would you, were you doing some keyword analysis and looking for, okay.
Wally (13:18)
yeah. Yep. Totally. Cut it in half. Yep. ⁓ Super neat.
We were
doing some research and looking at trends and looking at smaller boats. This is one of the ones that kept coming up. And they, you know, it goes a little bit beyond, it goes beyond the wooden boat DNA, but since this is small boats, it really works. There it is, the unsinkable power boat. So.
Pete (13:41)
Okay, gotcha.
Right, right, right. Gotcha. The unsinkable.
All right, so if I land, yeah.
Wally (13:57)
And I think that's, yeah,
that's the key for publishers is to really think about, you know, SEO is huge, but you need to know the right, the right sequence and tactics to take advantage of it. And thinking about, you know, Google is really, it's a search engine, but it's all, it's really an answer engine. So if somebody is looking for something, you need to be able to answer their question for them. And that's becoming even more important.
As we talk about AI and AI providing answers, we want to be part of that answer if that's going to be in the topic. So lots going on and always changing.
Pete (14:34)
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, a Google's AI overviews is, is it getting everybody in a panic now? And, ⁓ yeah, I mean, and, know, at this point they're, they're relying on their SEO data. So if you, if you're doing well in SEO, you tend to do well with AI overviews. But from what I've, I've been learning, ⁓ lately is that AI overviews is actually looking, starting to look at different signals than Google search does. And.
Wally (14:44)
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pete (15:08)
I'm no expert in that, but definitely paying attention to it as everyone is. Yeah.
Wally (15:12)
But it's changing the landscape for sure. And
the cool part about it is when we think about search and small boats in particular, we can layer these things into everything that we do.
⁓ One of the biggest drivers of traffic for small boats is Pinterest. And that is really search based. Pinterest is basically a search engine. So we add our content to Pinterest. We have the great keywords. People look at the image, they click through and they end up on our site. And then we can track the number of subscriptions from Pinterest.
Pete (15:33)
Hmm
Mm-hmm.
Wally (15:52)
So it's, you know, search really ties into everything. If you get that keyword strategy right at the top and you can layer it into everything else you do, it's a big win.
Pete (15:57)
Mm.
That's super interesting. mean, Small Boats is a visual magazine. I guess maybe most magazines are visual. ⁓ But Pinterest is something that I don't think publishers generally think about at all when it comes to driving traffic. ⁓ Is that something you just picked up like down a while ago that, hey, wait, what's all this traffic doing?
Wally (16:07)
correct.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we've always used it for some of our e-commerce brands have used it in the past and small boats had a presence there when we started, but. ⁓
You know, we used our best practices and reorganized it and it really has been a big traffic driver and it's not paid. It's organic and it really is ⁓ search. It's just another search engine that we're taking the time to play the game on and it's paid off.
Pete (16:44)
Mm-mm.
Yeah, that's super cool. That's amazing. So.
Wally (17:00)
Yeah, so much to so
that, you know, our topic, our top traffic drivers for Smoglos are Google, organic ⁓ MailChimp email direct, and then Pinterest and Pinterest recorded 21 subscriptions in the last month. pretty interesting. 21 21 subscriptions came from Pinterest.
Pete (17:11)
Mm-hmm.
So.
Mmm, really? Say that number again? Say that again?
That's crazy. Last month. Wow. All right. So let's talk a little bit about this funnel that you're seemingly building here. ⁓ You've done SEO work. You have this Boston Whaler piece as an example. People are like, sounds like that's your number one driver. Then you have social, you have direct, you have email ⁓ drivers as well.
Let's say, let's forget about email for a second. Let's say I'm coming in from Pinterest, coming in from Google, AI, whatever, and I land on this article. What I'm hitting here is what we call the free registration nag, because we're nagging people. I can't, if you're listening to this, I can't read the article. I get a prompt that says, hey, read this article now for free. Ready for a second free article, create a free account by entering your email address and a password below.
Wally (18:05)
Mm-hmm. Correct.
Pete (18:23)
So I put in my email, I put in my password, I hit submit, and tell me what happens after I hit submit.
Wally (18:32)
Yeah, so after you hit submit, the article is going to open up for you and you can read the Whaler article. ⁓ I would say, we're thinking about the user process all the way through this. So if you actually back up one page, knowing that people are coming from Pinterest, here you go. So you're going to get in. This is great. So we're going to unlock the content. It's going to ask you a quick little thing about how you found us.
Pete (18:55)
Yep.
Yep, little pie getting a ⁓ survey. Where did you, thanks for being a subscriber. We love just five seconds of your time. How did you discover small boats? Search social, ⁓ direct by a friend, email newsletter or other, and I'm going to just choose recommended by a friend. And then this is a leaky paywall pop-up that you can use to capture. ⁓
Wally (19:04)
There you go. Yeah.
Pete (19:28)
⁓ source data. it effective for your publishers?
Wally (19:32)
Yeah,
we review it probably once a month. I feel like a lot of people just pick the top thing and go on to a certain degree. But ⁓ we do look at it, and it is something that we think about when we decide how much effort we're going to put into some different things. So if you back up one page here, Pete, this is one thing.
Pete (19:40)
Yeah.
Right. Yep.
Wally (20:00)
to the collection page. right, so here we know that Pinterest is really a visual engine. And what we've done is on the image itself, we've told people how many images of this boat are in this article. So that's an interesting piece too that is, even little things like this are just helping to tick things up and make the site more usable ⁓ and hopefully drive subscriptions.
Pete (20:06)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
That's interesting. So
if you're listening, there's a little white camera icon in the top right hand corner of the thumbnail, and it's got the number seven next to it. So there are seven images of this ⁓ boat in the article.
Wally (20:38)
Yeah, correct.
Yeah, and this is really for the non-subscriber. We want to show them value. And if they're into looking at these cool boats and wanting to see them, we're going to tell you there's seven more images in here. You're only going to see one at the top, or you saw one on Pinterest, but there's a bunch of them, which is really neat.
Pete (20:47)
you
Mmm.
Right. Right. That's a really
nice detail. Do people pick up on that? Is that the training people?
Wally (21:05)
They do.
mean, since we've since we've put that in, I think, you know, and it's all little things, but we do have markers on the timeline for when we put things in and we can see a little uptick.
Pete (21:17)
awesome. all the and it also it says quality, it says premium. I like any sort of subtle marker that says hey there's value here.
Wally (21:24)
Absolutely.
you're asking somebody to part with $30. So for this, totally worth it. But we just want to show that value in premium content as we go through.
Pete (21:37)
Yeah.
That's awesome. Okay, so back to the funnel, back to the process here. So I've gone to this Boston Whaler article. I registered, I dropped in my email, I chose a password, I hit ⁓ submit. It unlocked the article. Anything else happen?
Wally (21:58)
No, I mean, we did add a save to my favorites. So now you can actually bookmark some articles at the top here, ⁓ which is neat. ⁓ You know, that's a neat little thing that was seen some people actually really taking advantage of. ⁓ Otherwise, it's really we're trying to present content in a premium way that is also
Pete (22:05)
Interesting. Okay.
Save to my favorites.
Wally (22:28)
from a usability standpoint, very easy to read. So you'll see that the images are larger, the content is a little smaller on the inside. It just feels like a premium piece of content. And that's all part of the selling process.
Pete (22:40)
Yeah,
yeah, design, good white space. ⁓ I like it. And then when I register, the email goes to get sent to MailChimp, is that right? No, yes. Okay.
Wally (22:53)
Correct, yeah, so we have a welcome series. So now you will
now be in our welcome series, ⁓ which we have triggers and we could talk through this ⁓ in more depth, but.
Pete (23:00)
Okay.
Wally (23:10)
Basically, you're signed up as a new member in MailChimp and you're put through the Welcome Series. If you subscribe fully, there's a trigger that checks for that and it takes you out of the Welcome Series so you get into the general population. But the Welcome Series is really designed to show you what we're about, show you some of our benefits, features, benefits and selling.
Pete (23:20)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Wally (23:33)
And then we do have an offer on the final third email of the welcome series for people who haven't actually pulled the trigger. ⁓ And that happens, I think, in this case, eight days after the initial email is sent. So that's been very effective as well as, know, just it's an automated thing that goes out every time somebody is in, they automatically get in at that time stamp and we send out emails.
Pete (23:38)
Okay.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
So three emails over eight days, that's the cadence.
Wally (24:05)
That's what we have running up. So you'll get one pretty quickly here if you don't fully subscribe. And then after three days, you'll get another. And then I think it's a five day wait for the last one.
Pete (24:06)
Okay.
Yep.
Okay, cool. And then do you segment that email? Do they go to like the free registration list or something like that?
Wally (24:28)
⁓ It is it's basically we're using tags to segment it so the tags are updated as they go through the funnel But they are they are technically free registrants at this point
Pete (24:32)
Yep. Okay.
Okay.
Okay. And you mentioned that a big chunk of your traffic comes from email. So ⁓ how do you, how do you handle this new free registered reader?
Wally (24:49)
Yeah.
Yeah.
We are going to, so email, you know.
Email was an eye-opener for us. This publisher, when we started with them, sent one email a month to announce their issue. And they were afraid that sending more would just cause people to unsubscribe and leave. ⁓ What we found, right now we're up to two emails a week for this publisher. And they have a, well, let me check.
Pete (25:08)
Mm, right.
Right.
Wally (25:29)
Their open rate for the last 30 days is 51.48%. So, and that's two emails a week with 20,000 emails on the list and 51 % of them are opening. email really becomes your product in a lot of ways. And that's how people digest your content.
Pete (25:36)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Wally (25:55)
When you send out a nice email, that's what they look at. That's how they dive in. They may dive in and explore from time to time, but really email becomes your product. And it also becomes our biggest selling tool. So we're using it. We do segment. In this case, we have a little bit more segmentation going on with small boats and some others for testing, but generally we'll segment subscriber, non-subscriber.
Pete (26:19)
Mm-hmm.
Wally (26:24)
as a general base and subscribers just get the content and they can read everything. Non-subscribers get the content, but they also get a few different subscription ⁓ banners or asks within the email. So we have some call to action to subscribe. And I think that's the big thing for them.
Pete (26:42)
Got it.
Got it. Do you get, ⁓
yep.
Wally (26:51)
And you know the game, it's the more times people can hit that paywall the better and that really, you know, we eventually did one email a week for them almost right out of the gate and we're doing, you know, at least two a week for this publisher.
Pete (26:55)
For sure.
Yeah, it's interesting. I still talk to publishers, magazine style publishers that are coming in and they're doing one or two emails per month and that's it. And they really haven't, they really just haven't taken the time to think about what's the marketing strategy here. They're just matching their publishing cadence at this point.
Wally (27:18)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and
you know, we found that that, you know, that second email a month ⁓ could really be digging into a topic area. You know, it could be something totally different. So if it's, you know, one of our other clients, like warfare history, it could be just digging into, ⁓ you know, a particular battle.
Pete (27:43)
Hmm.
Wally (27:55)
in World War II or it doesn't always have to be new content. These clients are definitely very content heavy, ⁓ which is great. So dig up some old content and serve it up and get some new eyes on it, which is only going to help everyone.
Pete (27:57)
Right.
Yeah, so that second weekly email is sort of a, you have a little experimentation ability to pull archives in. Yeah. I heard.
Wally (28:19)
Absolutely. Yeah. we... Go ahead.
Pete (28:26)
Sorry, I heard a statistic not too long ago. I don't know if you could weigh in on this. I don't remember where this came from, but somebody was seeing higher open rates ⁓ from the archives email than they were on their fresh content. Does that make any sense?
Wally (28:46)
Yeah, I believe
it. It totally does. Because with that, you can really curate something, right? So we could curate an email for small boats about small power boats or small, you know, ⁓ or canoes or whatever it might be and really just curate a group of content and push it out, which I think is, you know.
Pete (29:07)
Hmm.
Wally (29:13)
It's huge and I think publishers oftentimes lose sight of the fact that the old content, yeah, it's older. Maybe it's three, four, 10 years old. ⁓ But if it's evergreen content, a big part of your subscriber base hasn't seen it yet and they might not dig in and find it. So it's really important. We do have some publishers that are news based and digging up an old article from
Pete (29:33)
Yeah.
you
Wally (29:42)
know, 2023 about some whatever it might be newsworthy thing may not make sense, but these niche publishers with evergreen content, I that's the game.
Pete (29:56)
Yeah, that's amazing. ⁓ So yeah, moral of the story, get your archives up and at them. I mean, we get so many newsletters, yeah, we get so many newsletters in our mailbox that there's no way we can see all the articles from a single publisher. Even publishers that do really super long form journalism that I pay for ⁓ in the publishing space, I'll miss their articles.
Wally (30:04)
Lever jump.
Pete (30:24)
even though it's just one article in an email. It's crazy.
Wally (30:25)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's, it really is how people digest the product and you just got to get your product out in front of them, which is, is, you know, publishers are, are so interesting because they're, you know, with e-commerce getting somebody to write a blog about their product is like pulling teeth. Like they just, they don't want to do content.
Pete (30:37)
Mmm, I like that.
Yeah.
Hmm. Hmm.
Wally (30:54)
But publishers have a ton of content, they just don't know how to leverage it and how to push it out in front of people, which is, you know, really how you can move the needle towards subscriptions on the digital side in a way from just simple advertising.
Pete (30:58)
Right.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the publisher superpower ⁓ audience and content. And that corporate doesn't really have that, the publishers do. And so, you know, with this free registration that we just looked at, it's basically a line in the sand that says, hey, this is premium content. And if you want in, your first step is to cough up an email address. And then your second step is to pay for full access. ⁓
being confident with that is a really important part of the process. ⁓ don't know what you see on your end, but I talk to publishers every day. And a trend is, especially the ones from print, but even the digital only is the confidence is not there. It should be there because their content is great.
Wally (31:47)
Absolutely.
Pete (32:07)
and they have traffic, they have an audience, maybe they have a big email list, but their confidence isn't quite matching what I see. ⁓ And I think maybe part of it is that publishers have been in the sort of ad revenue model for a very long time and they're focused a little more on volume than they are on quality. And now when you're getting into the subscription game, you absolutely have to focus on quality. ⁓
of course, some decent volume. And I mean, had a publisher tell me just a week ago, it's like, well, I'm not sure we're quite ready there with the quality, which kind of blew my mind. My brain just sort of blew up and I was like, what? I mean.
Wally (32:51)
Yeah, so I
see quality in a couple of different ways. I think, is it quality of content or is it quality of presentation and what they feel their site is reflecting? Because I think they're all creating amazing content. But one of the first things that we did with Small Boats and several of the other sites that we work with is we redesigned them.
Pete (33:01)
Mm. Right. Right.
Wally (33:16)
because we said, you know what, if this is gonna be a premium product that we're gonna drive a ton of people to, we need to make sure when they get there, they understand the value and they can see it because people are more sophisticated now with their digital, even.
Pete (33:20)
Right.
Wally (33:37)
even if it's, you this is an older audience that Small Boats is going after by and large. So even that audience is really demanding. Things look right and feel right and it's easy to access. And having that premium feel made a big difference in the sales pitch.
Pete (33:44)
Hmm.
Yep, Yeah, no, for sure. ⁓ I wish publishers would try to keep things simple. I I look at small boats and I think, wow, it's a beautiful design because simplicity kind of is at its core. It's kind like an Apple product, right? It's just simple, but it's simple in a beautiful way. Yep, yep, yep. All right, so ⁓ where were we? We were talking about email and...
Wally (34:10)
Absolutely.
easy to read, easy to navigate. And that's really the idea.
Pete (34:25)
You were talking about upgrade messages and the free emails that go out. Are you tracking those? Do know people are clicking on those messages? Okay.
Wally (34:32)
We do. Yeah. Yep. we, we
change them up from time to time as well. So, ⁓ you know, we have, we, we have some offers that we put out, ⁓ this publisher has behind them the leverage of Wooden Boat, which is great. So Wooden Boat has a massive following and email list and we do present offers to that list separate from the small boat side, which
Pete (34:37)
Okay.
Right. Right.
Mmm.
Wally (35:01)
we can learn a lot from. we, you know, by having that in our back pocket to leverage on a quarterly basis, we can test some things and see what works and then bring them back to small boats. yeah, it's, it's really, it's really, you know, offer creative.
Pete (35:03)
Mm.
If you were
to give one tip for your free newsletter, that's, in my opinion, designed to present upgrade messaging. ⁓ And I say this because plenty of publishers will just send out the free newsletter, but there's no upgrade messaging at all on it. That happens more than you would think it would happen. ⁓
Wally (35:34)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Pete (35:48)
So if you were to, publishers will ask, okay, great, I need upgrade messaging. Where do I put it? What do I say? Do you have any sort of philosophy on how to present upgrade messaging in a free email that's going to somebody who had registered on the site?
Wally (36:08)
Yeah, I mean, we've tested a bunch of different things. ⁓ We have found that a little message from the publisher or the editor or whoever it might be at the top with their little digital signature on it helps to say, hey, here's a sample of the great content that we put out each month and week. We'd love to have you join us.
Pete (36:22)
Mmm... Mmm...
Wally (36:34)
click the button to subscribe. And then down below somewhere in the middle of the message, we'll have more of a traditional banner offer where we're asking, you know, read the content. ⁓ The email does double duty as you know, Pete, it's really, I think you probably even told me this at the beginning, it's really about wearing them down to a certain degree, right? So we want people to get this content.
Pete (36:36)
you
Mmm.
Yeah.
Wally (37:03)
to open it, to click on it, to end up at the site and get frustrated that they can't read it because that's how they're going to eventually subscribe. So email is by far one of it. It's by far our biggest tool in the tool shed for, for subscription. And it really is, you know, more emails mean more subscriptions, ⁓ and well-crafted emails and having a site that backs it up is important.
Pete (37:26)
Hmm.
I love that. I support that. 1000%. Uh, I mean, we look at the data too on our side and clearly publishers that have a higher cadence, uh, in their, you know, uh, frequency of sending emails, like they, they're converting more paid subscribers and we, unfortunately, like we as humans, we're, we're pain motivated. Like that's, that's how we do things. I mean, yeah, some of us, minority of us,
are success motivated. We go striving for new things and betterment and all that, but really all of us react to pain. So when you can't read something and it says you have to pay, you get a little spike of pain. You might not subscribe, right? But then 20 times of that pain later, you mean like, wow, I really want to read this stuff and they seem like a good group of publishers. ⁓
Great publisher, here's my money. I'll support this.
Wally (38:33)
Yeah. And the other,
the other piece of it is just be in front of them everywhere. So this was probably a separate podcast, but it's, know, so they read the email, they click on it. They're frustrated. They've been to the site. So they get our social marketing. They see it. There's another great article they want to read. They click on it. It's like, ⁓ you know, we're, we're, we're going to be in front of them everywhere they go. And we're to present them with value.
Pete (38:38)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Right.
Wally (38:57)
It's not like we're selling a trinket that they just don't need. This is great content. And ⁓ I think that's where publishers can just learn to put it out there and it's all trackable. So we know if a social campaign, we know how much we spent, we know how much we made. ⁓ With email, it's the same thing. There's a cost for sending emails from the email provider, be it.
Pete (39:04)
Right. Quality.
Hmm
Wally (39:24)
you know, MailChimp or whoever it is, you know, the gain is going to outweigh that cost.
Pete (39:25)
Right.
So you're remarketing on social after a visit? Is that what you're doing? Okay, can you unpack that a little bit for our listeners?
Wally (39:39)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure. Yeah, mean, social media, mostly with Meta and Facebook and Facebook and Instagram is we'll we'll offer remarketing ads after you visit the site. And then we also have prospecting ads that go out and publishers. You know, we really found a very interesting ⁓
because they're willing to pay up to the value of that subscription, generally, to get that account. So say we have an offer for small boats going out and it's a dollar a month, which we do periodically. Small boats would pay $12 or we try to get it in the 10 range or below, ⁓ but they'll pay that money.
Pete (40:19)
Mmm. Mmm. ⁓
Okay. Yeah.
Wally (40:38)
in order to acquire that customer. So the cost per acquisition is very high based on the sale price, but they know that they're going to renew that customer, you know, 4.3 times or whatever their rate is, and they're going to make out on the backend. So it's a really fun model because coming from e-commerce, you know, we're working a return on ad spend of being, you know, we're trying to hit
Pete (40:43)
Hmm.
Wally (41:08)
you 500 to 1000 % return on ad spend, which, you know, you pay a dollar, I want 10 back. But these guys will pay 12 for their 12 and then renew them with Stripe, you know, for four years. So.
Pete (41:11)
Right, right.
Right. Right.
So that's the difference though, because it's a recurring subscription, right? So you're counting on a percentage of folks that sign up to just stay on. So if you're doing the $12 for 12 months campaign for small boats, let's say, ⁓ what percentage are sticking around after that? And do you keep the price the same or do you go to the retail price?
Wally (41:27)
Correct. Yeah.
Yeah.
No,
we charge them the full price after they come through. So first year is 12 and you see this everywhere, right? So you go to Wirecutter or any place and they're going to offer you a great deal on the first year to get you in the funnel.
Pete (41:49)
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Yeah.
Wally (42:03)
because they know that that second year you're going to let it renew. And the third year you might think about it, but you're to let it renew. And they're going to make their money from you at that point. So yeah, they have a great, I'd have to dig up the exact percentages, but ⁓ their renewal rate is very high.
Pete (42:14)
Yep.
Over 50 % would you say or so? Okay, all right. Nice.
Wally (42:26)
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
In between the 80 and 90%.
Pete (42:32)
Hmm. Yeah, the the that social campaign sounds super super interesting and if you can if you if you have an 80 % whatever 70 80 % renewal rate then might take you 12 months to make the money back Well, you're probably charging it all one one shot. I take it 12 bucks, right? Yeah. Yeah, so it's paying for itself. Yeah
Wally (42:54)
Well, we're breaking even on the first year anyway, right? So we're really not losing that money. So
sure. Yeah. We're just, we're just paying for subscribers at a, at a renewal.
Pete (43:01)
and then you get the root.
Right.
That's awesome. All right. I'm going to, I want to switch gears with you just a little bit. I want to be cognizant of your time as well, since we're getting on the 40 minute mark. You know, covering, covering how important email is one of my favorite topics. And so I think we got that one locked down. This sort of last one is a little more, I don't know if it's philosophical or what, but
Wally (43:15)
Sure.
Pete (43:33)
This has to do with magazine publishers in specific and how they have really, they're coming from an advertising heavy world where their revenue pre-internet was 100 % print ⁓ and then with paper subscriptions, ad revenue is just a huge, huge component. It's still a huge component, it's from everyone I've talked to.
it's decreasing over time as Google and Facebook, et cetera, are competing for those ad dollars. And I remember going to the Niche Conference down in New Orleans, ⁓ standing in a room, this was a couple of years ago, it's standing in a room full of magazine publishers and doing a presentation on subscriptions and asking the room, who's running paid subscriptions or who's planning to run paid subscriptions? And the number I got was about,
hands that went up were about 10 to 15 percent of the audience. So super, super low number. And what we, one of the, it was crazy. And one of the learning, sort of the takeaways from that conference was that, and I say this and I get confirmation back is that these magazine publishers, a lot of them want to build their email list to please their advertisers.
Wally (44:38)
That's incredible.
Pete (44:59)
instead of building their email list to grow paid subscriptions, which is what we just talked about with small boats. Now, Yeah, so a lot of the times I'll be talking to a publisher, could be a news publisher, magazine publisher, and they'll have ⁓ super aggressive advertising on their site, right?
Wally (45:06)
Yeah, and that's a dangerous line to walk.
Pete (45:26)
They got the slide ins, slide in sideways, they got the overlays, they all sorts of stuff going on which just drives you bananas. ⁓ So the question that I'm sort of getting at is how do you walk that fine line of advertising and paid ⁓ reader subscriptions? So we just talked about design and the quality of design.
Wally (45:32)
page.
Pete (45:56)
quality of content and really building up this beautiful ⁓ platform product that people say, hey, take my money, I want this. And Small Boats is a great example of this beautiful product. But a lot of these magazine advertisers are super aggressive on their sites. And they, they, I think they know internally that they need to walk back their advertising a bit in order to not totally piss off their
paid subscribers. know that people, 40 % or so, are using ad blockers. But how do you, I do you have any experience in walking the balance between advertising and paid subscriptions?
Wally (46:40)
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's a really interesting world. And the paid side is obviously, like you alluded to, is where the growth is. There is some, we put in, I don't want to call it native advertising, but advertising that doesn't really feel like it. It's a soft push. So even if you go to small boats and if you go to, up at the top, if you go to their adventure category.
Pete (47:01)
Hmm.
Yep.
Wally (47:10)
You know, each of the sections on the site is sponsored by a client. You can see right under the word adventures, it's sponsored by Sean Tenney. And then if you scroll up, you'll see the hero image on this category is a pair of Sean Tenney paddles. So we're selling space on the site in a very aesthetically pleasing way.
Pete (47:27)
Yeah, yeah. Got it.
Hmm.
Wally (47:38)
and then giving a link and a call out to a company that's paying for it. But it's not going to get hit by an ad blocker. It's going to be visible and it's going to put their product front and center in front of everybody. So that's one little way. is a, you know, I, people who are really building a list to sell sponsored emails,
Pete (47:47)
Mm-hmm.
Right, right.
Got it.
Wally (48:07)
really better have, they better have great methods of building new email accounts in place because what happens is, you you start sending out too many sponsored emails and people just feel like it's, it's spam. Small Boat doesn't at this point send out sponsored emails.
Pete (48:15)
Mm. Mm.
you
Wally (48:28)
because we
value the clients and our customers. So we do at the bottom of every single email send, have, you know, thanks to our sponsors and we have their logos that are clickable. So our sponsors are in every email and sponsors can pay for an ad block in an email, but we're not going to send out a whole email for them, which is really just protecting our audience.
Pete (48:31)
All right. Right.
Hmm.
Right. Okay.
Wally (48:57)
So, you know, there's a lot of different ways. think that's probably, again, another whole podcast, but, you know, we have a publisher now that just trans just transferred from print and digital to just digital. So that was an interesting thing where, you know, we had to be cognizant of the advertisers and give them something to stay with them through that transition because print.
Pete (49:02)
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Wally (49:26)
You're in the magazine, you can see it. It's a touchy-feely, you know, I've got a full page or whatever it might be. So we're building out some mechanisms now on their new site in production that I can show you in a month or so that will kind of tie all that together. So the advertisers feel like they still have that presence, still have that value of a full page ad, but it's tied into the digital portion as well.
Pete (49:51)
Right.
All right, that's a podcast we're gonna do. That sounds good. We'll wait a couple of months and get some experience. But this is great. So what I'm hearing is lean into sponsorships, make it match the brand, work it in so it's part of the content structure. And then on the email side, which is sponsors wanna be in those direct emails that go out, what you're suggesting is be careful about placement.
Wally (49:57)
Yeah, it'll be fun.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Pete (50:24)
kill the newsletter with it. Don't send out individual newsletters, which will create unsubscribes, but bake it into the bottom or a less high content area.
Wally (50:35)
Yeah, or a banner
in the content of the email, but we really just don't want to send out a fully sponsored email. So what I like to tell the publishers is every email should make you money. Every send that goes out should make you money. It'd be great if it was tied to some advertising value. So if you have a sales rep, tell them to go out there and sell emails ⁓ because we can get you in front of, you know,
Pete (50:39)
Mm-hmm.
Right, right.
Mm-hmm. Mm.
Hmm.
Wally (51:05)
couple hundred thousand people a month or whatever size your list is. And then the other portion is it's gonna drive subscriptions. we use email as an advertising mechanism, but it's just gonna be curated and your content is still the most valuable piece.
Pete (51:26)
Yes, it sure is. That's a great note to end on Wally. Thanks so much for joining and talking subscription revenue and advertising revenue and social marketing and all that good stuff. Really appreciate it. Let's not wait 10 years to do this next time.
Wally (51:31)
Cool.
Yeah.
No,
no, anytime. It's as you can see, I can talk forever on this topic. So it's a lot of fun. All right. Thanks Pete. All right.
Pete (51:54)
Yep. All right. Cool. Well, thanks again. Catch you next time.