In a field driven by headline events and not at all lacking for opinions, World Politics Review (WPR) has built a rapidly growing business selling in-depth analysis of world events, marrying quality content with a hard paywall–a unicorn for international news. In this in-depth Case Study, Publisher Hampton Stephens tells Insider how the site lets new visitors bypass the paywall by white-listing domain names instead of installing a meter, sells group subscriptions to academic institutions through an affiliate partnership with EBSCO Host, and retains subscribers through a unique content aggregation method. Plus, lots of vendor recommendations and reviews!
Company Profile
Founded: 2006 as free site, subscriptions launched 2009 and more and more content placed behind paywall until 2011, when current ratio of free:paid was met.
No. of publications: 1
Employees: 5 full-time, hundreds of freelancers
Business Model: Mainly subscription
Paying Subscribers: Between 1,000 and 5,000 individual subscribers; between 100 and 500 group subscribers.
Location: Tampa, FL, with editors in New York and Paris
Website: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/
Target Market
World Politics Review (WPR) was created for foreign policy professionals who have a world of online (and largely free) breaking news at their fingertips, but who need analysis that provides context for the key trends and events in international affairs.
“We’re not trying to be breaking news,” Publisher Hampton Stephens says. “We can’t compete in that game. [Instead] we’re trying to provide higher level, more insightful content and more analysis to put things in context.”
Content
WPR consists mainly of articles covering international news and politics. Every article is paid and behind a paywall.
The vast majority of articles are in the 750-1000-word range (briefings, columns, trend lines sections on site). WPR publishes six to ten articles per month which are in the 3,000 to 5,000 word range (in-depth section on site), and about 75 articles total on a monthly basis.
World Politics Review also publishes geostrategic analysis in a variety of formats:
- Every day WPR publishes multiple five-minute reads, including our Briefings and Columns. Briefings are written by our global network of expert contributors, while five columnists provide a different authoritative take on international affairs.
- WPR’s in-depth, full-length reports provide comprehensive examinations of single subjects. These include our Features, Special Reports, and Strategic Posture Reviews.
- In the Trend Lines section, subscribers find quick-hitting expert perspectives on events and issues, including analysis written or reported by WPR editors, as well as the “Global Insider” interview series.
In addition, the site issues two daily, subscriber-only email newsletters (See samples of these emails in our Marketing Samples Library):
- A daily Media Roundup every morning to help readers track the stories that let them stay informed. There are 20-40 links from third-party English-language sites. WPR content is featured up top with a blurb, while third-party content is headlines-only.
- A daily Leading Indicators service at exactly 4pm EST that’s full of third-part links to breaking news so that readers are informed.
“We have a small subset of subscribers who subscribe because of the Media Roundup and don’t even realize there’s original content until three or four months later, but they’re willing to pay for the Media Roundup,” says Stephens.
The third-party links also feed into the site’s curation and aggregation service to subscribers (see Retention Tactics).
WPR also has two rather creative on-site features only available to paying subscribers:
- WPR’s site-wide search tool allows subscribers to refine their searches so that they can find Daily and In-Depth analyses as well as the News Wire items highlighted by editors.
- The Media Roundup search tool, which lets subscribers search for individual topics across dozens of international news sources. The function serves as a rudimentary Lexis Nexis or “vertical search” for foreign policy experts looking for background research on more information on any international policy issue. It’s extremely popular with subscribers.
More on this features in Conversion Tactics and Retention Tactics.
The site has a roster of about 600 freelancers, about 100 of whom have worked in the last year and are paid by the article. Most of them are college professors, or individuals who work at think tanks or research organizations, i.e., they have day jobs, but writing is part of their professional life.
Stephens also says that the site’s in-house editorial department, led by editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein and staffed by three additional full-time editors, shapes WPR’s content and edits all articles that come from our outside contributors. “If I had to name one competitive advantage we have, it is our editorial team. We have dedicated a lot of time and energy to editorial our hiring process, and to getting the right talent in place, and as a result we have an editorial team that punches well above its weight” — especially given the small staff size in comparison to other news agencies covering international affairs.
Revenues
WPR generates six-figure revenues. The company is transitioning from start-up to high growth phase, and grew more than 230% in the last 12 months compared to the previous 12 months. The site is on track to be profitable in 2014.
Subscriptions (both individual and group) account for 95% of revenues; advertising and one-off sales account for the other 5%.
Individual Subscription Plans:
- $9 monthly
- $59 a year
- $99 every two years
The most popular plan is the monthly plan with 55% of sign-ups, followed by the 1-year plan (34%) and then the bi-annual plan (11%).
The site has conducted some interesting price testing. Early on, WPR slashed its prices in half. They’ve steadily been raising them (grandfathering anyone in who paid a lower price). Stephens reported that neither slashing the price nor raising affected sales much, either positively or negatively. The last round of price increases has been focused on monthly prices. Stephens said this was actually precipitated by something he read in SSI about how much higher monthly prices should be relative to annual prices.
Group Subscription Plan:
WPR has an affiliate/marketing partnership with EBSCO to sell group subscriptions to institutions (universities, government agencies, corporations, research organizations, etc.). While Stephens could not reveal the exact revenue share, he did say that institutional subscribers pay an average price of about $2,000 annually.
Marketing Tactics
WPR gets about 100,000 UVs a month and 200,000 page views. About 80% of that traffic is new, with 40% come from search, and another 40% direct. The site’s email newsletters are the main source for return traffic.
SEO, Paid Discovery and White Listing
Google is the #1 source of traffic for WPR every month, and the site is optimized for its headlines.
The site also uses Outbrain, a paid discovery platform. Stephens mentioned WPR had tried StumbleUpon, but it didn’t work very well, whereas Outbrain has driven sign-ups. Stephens manually loads stories less than 1,000 words to Outbrain so that he can “whitelist” the specific URL re-directed by Outbrain and let traffic from those paid discovery channels in for free. Stephens said he can’t choose which sites WPR articles appear on, but he can filter out sites he doesn’t want them to appear on at all. (Check out our How-To on Paid Discovery for more on how to use this technology to drive traffic to your site.)
WPR also “white lists” Google.com, social media sites, and other search engine domains. Once on the site, if a visitor clicks another article, they’re presented with a paywall. This is not Google’s First Click Free, nor does this method use cookies, like metered sites do; rather, WPR custom codes this function.
Social Media
“Twitter is our bread and butter,” says Stephens.
WPR tailors all social media posts for Twitter and then cross-posts to Facebook and Google+ using HootSuite. Stephens says there’s a vibrant community of foreign policy experts on Twitter that interact with one another because of a shared interest (as opposed to Facebook and other social media sites that are more friend- and community-oriented), illustrating how one social network can be more advantageous for reaching your target market than another.
WPR also has an advertising account on Twitter, and at least one a week it does some campaign to promote some piece of content on Twitter and get followers. Stephens says Twitter advertising has been more beneficial than Facebook advertising.
PR
Even though WPR has a roster of about 600 freelancers, many of whom with professional expertise or considered to be thought leaders in their field, they have not been able to leverage that for PR opportunities. That’s because when a freelancer gets a media appearance or mention, media outlets cite their university, company or research organizations, not WPR.
Affiliate Marketing + Group Sales
WPR has an unusual relationship with EBSCO Host, which basically acts as an affiliate marketer for the site’s group subscription sales. Many university libraries subscribe to EBSCO, which allows an a la carte selection of journal and paid publications. WPR makes all of their content available to subscribers via EBSCO, thereby not having to deal with IP address verification, etc. Since academic institutions are already invested in EBSCO for a variety of other publications, it’s easy for EBSCO to pitch the institutions a group subscription to WPR.
WPR also collects leads for group subscriptions through its own website (see screenshot below) and then passes those leads on to EBSCO to close.
(Worst Practice Alert: the dreaded grey Submit button. Almost any other choice would be better on this form.)
Conversion Tactics
WPR does not require registration to view previews (or articles made free to view when directed through discovery platforms). However, visitors can sign up for a free weekly email newsletter, delivered every Friday with links to the site’s premium content. WPR sometimes offers a free download of a report via social media in order to get email newsletter opt-ins.
As for original content, visitors can preview the first few paragraph of any blocked article. At the end of the preview, they are presented with an option to sign up for a trial for a monthly, annual or bi-annual subscription plan:
WPR converts 0.2% of every unique visitor to the site into a trial taker, and about 3.5% of every returning visitor.
Visitors can also sign-up for a subscription through the homepage navigation bar, which leads to the option to take a trial or pay immediately. (Best Practice Alert! Always leave an option to sign-up through the homepage. See our Case Study on Foreign Affairs for why.)
The two week trial requires a credit card at sign up (Best Practice Alert!) but trial-takers are not provided with a notice before being charged. Stephens told us that they changed to automatic conversion for trial to paying subscriptions a little more than a year ago, and while trial sign-ups per month decreased by 80%, conversions went from 5% to 70%.
Stephens also told us WPR has run extensive tests on its landing page and also experiment with the calls to action when users hit the paywall. The one area they haven’t been able to test or alter too significantly, however, is their cart pages, mainly because their vendor, Chargify, does not afford them much flexibility beyond matching the site’s basic CSS style. “We are investigating using Chargify’s API with hosting our own page, which could be more easily changed,” Stephens said.
The site has experimented with limited time offers, but found they do not work as well as free trials.
Retention Tactics
It’s difficult to give an accurate retention number for WPR because they changed their payment processor in April of last year and added a monthly subscription plan. Before the switch, the site only had annual and bi-annual plans, was sending about six emails before renewal and had a renewal rate below 50% (which is why they switched). The site decided not to send a reminder email, but rather an email notice every time a card was charged, whether it was on a monthly or annual basis. Stephens says this looks like it’s improving the renewal rate.
The site has also employed a number of retention tactics that increase member engagement. By far the most popular of these is the search box halfway down the middle column of the homepage which lets visitors search the site’s Media Roundup department.
About Hampton Stephens
Hampton Stephens started World Politics Review as a hobby when he was graduate student in international relations. He had previously worked on both the business and editorial side of publishing, most notably for the National Journal and Inside Washington Publisher. His past experience with paid newsletter and niche publications influenced his decision to make WPR a paid online publication.
His biggest lesson learned has been how to approach the business. “Our approach is to try something on a small scale, see if it works, and then implement it on a larger scale, and continually do that — that’s what has led us to where we are.”
His advice to other online publishers follows that line of thinking:
“Don’t be afraid to try things. Experiment on a small scale in such a way that you have low risk. If it doesn’t work, try something different. Every publication, every content type is different. There’s no template that’s going to work equally well for The Motley Fool and World Politics Review [for example].”
Vendors & Technology
Hosting — Amazon Web Services
http://aws.amazon.com/
“We had previously used Rackspace, but found that Amazon’s cloud servers give us more flexibility when things go wrong and also more redundancy, at a better price.”
Payment processing — Chargify for managing the complexities of subscription payments, free trials and the like, and Paypal Website Payments for the actual credit card processing
http://www.chargify.com
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-standard
Email management — MailChimp
http://mailchimp.com/
“We switched to MailChimp from Constant Contact about a year ago, and like it much better. We use their API to integrate the lists with subscriber self-serve preferences on our site, and we use their autoresponders for lead nurturing emails during trials.”
Web design — The current site was designed by Two Giraffes
http://twogiraffes.com/
Web development — U2i Worldwide
http://www.u2i.com
“They do such a good job that we have never seriously considered bringing our web development in house. Although their home office is in New York, we now work directly with their developers in Krakow, Poland.”
Content management — custom CMS based on the ASP.NET MVC framework
http://www.asp.net/mvc
“If I had it to do all over again, I might have started with an off-the-shelf CMS like Word Press to save some money and which would have allowed us to draw on plugins that take care of functionality we have had to create ourselves. However, at this point, our CMS works really well for us because it has been customized to our specific needs.”
Marketing Consultant–Clever Zebo
http://www.cleverzebo.com/
Analytics –Google Analytics for measuring traffic; AddThis to enable and track social media sharing
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.addthis.com/
Social media management — HootSuite
https://hootsuite.com/
A/B Testing –Optimizely
https://www.optimizely.com/
Accounting — Quickbooks
http://quickbooks.intuit.com/
Contributor Database — Quickbase
http://quickbase.intuit.com/
Editorial workflow management — TeamBox
http://teambox.com/
File sharing and file storage — Dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/
AdServer–AdJuggler
http://www.adjuggler.com/
Notification bar for free trial on site–HelloBar
http://www.hellobar.com/
Landing page creation and testing — Unbounce
http://unbounce.com/
Insider Analysis
World Politics Review is an admirable start-up, not only because of their impressive 230% growth with such a lean staff, but also their ability to focus on a target audience for international news that’s willing to pay. We like that they’ve been able to avoid a meter and made a hard paywall work for them by whitelisting certain domains that promote discovery and sharing. And while most publishers wouldn’t think of including third-party links in daily emails, WPR has turned this into a low-cost marketing strategy, as well as a retention tactic by preserving all links and headlines in their Media Roundup section. Love it!
For the most part, their landing pages and conversion funnel observe best practices. We would recommend testing whether highlighting the annual or bi-annual subscription plan over the monthly would yield more subscriptions and longer retention rates. The site may also want to test changing emphasizing the Buy Now button over the trial button. We also recommend they begin sending reminders for annual and bi-annual renewals. And given WPR’s popularity on Twitter, it might be able to leverage some PR out of its impressive roster of freelancers by asking them to tweet a link to one of their articles on WPR before or after a major media appearance.
