Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers
Jun 16, 2026 · 1 hr 29 min · 13 segments
In this episode of The Paywall Podcast, Pete sits down with James Baldacino, fractional CMO of Leaky Paywall and AI SEO specialist at Ellipsis, to break down what publishers need to do as AI reshapes…
James BaldacchinoGuestPeteHostLet's do a teardown, shall we? Let's jump to a teardown.
But...
Okay.
What I like to do here, and I do this for a lot of our own customers, is not – this is not a customer.
They've gotten some traction.
They have – oh, my goodness.
What do they have? They have – I wrote down – I did write down how much traffic they have.
Oh, here we go.
So they have 243,000 visitors per month.
their average page their average pages per visit is 1.63 so articles per visit which is super average and normal we always quote 1.7 and they write about the business of Hollywood so that's their their more more in the b2b space and they're basically talking about like what's going on in Hollywood so What I'd like to do, I'd like to get your opinion on what you would do to improve this site really in any way possible.
Like whether it could be it could be I'm going to certainly lean in about their subscription setup.
But here's here's what we got.
I have my ad blocker off.
So there are some ads here.
And as far as a reader experience, I went here, I looked at an article, I was able to read the article, and then I went to a second article, and then I was told... hey, don't stop here, you know, unlock the full story.
I went back and I read a few other articles, some of which were open here.
This one, oh, this one is somewhat open.
And then again, I'm getting the don't stop here.
So I think the way this is set up is you get one article for free on the Anchler and then really you have to pay to get kind of the rest of the content.
So I go-
Let's do a teardown, shall we? Let's jump to a teardown.
But...
Okay.
What I like to do here, and I do this for a lot of our own customers, is not – this is not a customer.
They've gotten some traction.
They have – oh, my goodness.
What do they have? They have – I wrote down – I did write down how much traffic they have.
Oh, here we go.
So they have 243,000 visitors per month.
their average page their average pages per visit is 1.63 so articles per visit which is super average and normal we always quote 1.7 and they write about the business of Hollywood so that's their their more more in the b2b space and they're basically talking about like what's going on in Hollywood so What I'd like to do, I'd like to get your opinion on what you would do to improve this site really in any way possible.
Like whether it could be it could be I'm going to certainly lean in about their subscription setup.
But here's here's what we got.
I have my ad blocker off.
So there are some ads here.
And as far as a reader experience, I went here, I looked at an article, I was able to read the article, and then I went to a second article, and then I was told... hey, don't stop here, you know, unlock the full story.
I went back and I read a few other articles, some of which were open here.
This one, oh, this one is somewhat open.
And then again, I'm getting the don't stop here.
So I think the way this is set up is you get one article for free on the Anchler and then really you have to pay to get kind of the rest of the content.
So I go-
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