 All right. Well, thanks Eric. Appreciate that. We are here, as you know, talking about these paywalls. It's been kind of a love-hate relationship for many years as publishers are trying to decide what to do in an environment that is increasingly more harsh towards sustainability. And I come at this as an outsider. I'm not a journalist. I'm a software developer. And we had a media company come to us back in 2008 as we were doing web development e-commerce. And they were wanting to put up a paywall, and we were like, well, that's interesting. And so as we began to learn more about, I don't know if we got a little bit of feedback there, as we're beginning to learn more about what their business was, we looked and we saw a number of newspapers and print organizations out there really struggling to make the transition to the digital market. And so that's where it began for us. We began to have more conversations with different publishers around the country as we began to build out the platform. And I began to really sense the emotion and the pain that was coming from the publishers and the new executives as they said, we've been in this for decades, and we don't know what to do. We don't know really what to do. And I've seen all the experiments, Eric mentioned a number of experiments that have been made. And so what I'm sharing with you today is I'm going to share with you a few success stories, but I also want to talk a little bit about how paywalls fit within the context of the open web and how they can work together and balance. Because an extreme to one side or the other is not good. We want to have balance. So let's start with what the open web is. The year of the open web began back in 2017. Obviously, there have been many years that came before that that kind of started to build a foundation for the year of the open web. And it continues on into this year, and I imagine that it's going to continue on for years to come. You can learn more about this at yearofopen.org. They work collaboratively to define various initiatives. But Mark Sermon said this. He's the executive of the Mozilla Foundation, rather. He said, the open web is a sweeping term. It encompasses technical concepts like open source code, open standards. It also encompasses democratic concepts like free expression and digital inclusion. But there's a single underlying principle connecting all these ideas. And open web is a web by and for all its users. Not select gatekeepers or governments. And I could really, I can connect with that. The language there reminds me a little, it kind of like a small statement coming out of the Gettysburg Address. The government, by the people, other people, for the people. So we see that concept there, and it's a good concept. Now, some will argue that change are charging, rather, for access to news content. In other words, subscription models and being gatekeepers goes against the idea of the open web. Now, Jonah Peretti last year in October did an interview, and he said that the subscription model does not support informing a broad audience. While not providing necessarily a strong solution for a media industry struggling to make it on the back of ad revenues, he did say this. He said that Google and Facebook are going to have to fix this problem. It's not tenable that only people getting quality news will be only two or five, or even 20% of the public. Now, what's he really saying, as you dig down a little bit further, is Google and Facebook need to do better at sharing their ad revenues back with the media organizations that they're making their money off of, right? And when I talked to publishers, they said, yeah, it would be nice if we can get a little bit more. But the problem that the dilemma that we have here is that it's still on the back, it's still advertising, which is an indirect monetization model of your core business. So fundamentally, the problem in advertising, it doesn't, it's not meeting the needs, it's not filling the financial revenue gaps that are being created because ad dollars just aren't what they used to be. Now, these platforms like Google and Facebook and various others are trying to move into the news markets and provide solutions, especially local and hyper-local, but they're not doing a quality or an effective job with their solutions. They just don't have the boots on the ground like people in the community. They don't have the relationships. They don't have the connections. They don't have the people who are on the ground doing the work and making the connections. Well, Google has recognized this. It's interesting, Google, in the wake of the fake news and a quality deficit in the content, has actually began reversing its original policies that penalized paid content versus free content. You all know that if you had a paywall or some sort of, maybe some of you know, but as you have a paywall or some sort of paid model, there were certain penalties, certain things that you didn't, you know, didn't rank as well in that sort of thing in certain areas. But notice what the vice president of Google News, Richard Gingra, said. And this was just this year. So this is kind of encouraging and it's interesting. Advertising alone can no longer pay for high quality journalism. So it's a pretty powerful figure making that statement. And it's true. Even this year, just a couple of months ago, there was an interview that Jonah Peretti made, and he said this. He kind of changed his tone a little bit and he says a partial paywall for BuzzFeed could make sense. So it's interesting, you know, just a few months, just last year, you know, he was pretty strong, made some strong statements against it, but he's kind of seeing maybe there's a balance that we could find in setting up direct monetization models for content. Now I respect the fact that Google, you know, recognizes the quality deficit, but it's naive for them to think that they can swoop in and be an effective solution for these news organizations. And you'll notice I constantly refer to local and hyperlocal. I know there are probably some bigger organizations here, but we have seen, you know, the paid content models, the paywalls and things work really well for the local markets because they really have something unique and there's not as much competition. There's still competition, but there's not as much competition and there's that uniqueness in their content that they have. So the open web sets up a framework, a framework for openness that we can all agree is a good thing. But it doesn't yet address the needs that legitimate content generators of the world have. There needs to be a balance. So what are the pain points that print publishers have, newspapers and magazines and so on? What are the pain points? Now these pain points are many, and sadly over the years, especially during 2008-2009 recession, we saw many newspapers had to shut down or they had to cut back quite a bit on their staff. So that was a tough time for the news industry. But let's take a look at a few. So decades ago, we had new mediums like radio and TV coming onto the scene, which challenged the print medium, yet the print medium was still able to hold its own. The internet was a mixed bag. It could hurt our help depending on how quickly these print organizations adopted the digital medium. Then we have Craigslist and Facebook, which virtually have dried up classified revenues, and then digital ad revenues just aren't making up for the print avenue losses. So the first two bullet points here really are just mediums, medium changes, consumption medium changes. And I think the second one, newspapers could and should really dominate in because you guys have the backbone, and I say dominate in the best sense of the term, but you guys have the journalism backbone, you have the reporter, you have the connections, and this is a medium right up your alley. And there have been many who have done an excellent job in making the jump to digital, but there are many who are still struggling. But I'd say arguably the biggest pain point for media organizations today is in the realm of ad revenues and advertising. They just have plummeted. They are not what they used to be. I remember someone telling me that if you drink too much carrot juice, you're going to turn orange. And I laughed it off. I thought it was comical, but then I met a woman who was juicing, and that woman was Oompa Loompa Orange. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. And so I got curious. I looked it up. I found out that vitamin A in large quantities can actually damage your liver. Of course, vitamin A beta-carotene comes from the carrot juice. So I don't think this lady was overdoing it, but she certainly was orange. But what I'm trying to get at is too much of even a good thing is bad. So we have to have balance, and we have to find that balance. And there is science. There are numbers that you're going to see me put up a little bit. You've seen some numbers from Eric here. And there is definitely science, and I also believe that some of it is a little bit of an art. And there's a little bit of experimentation and playing around and knowing your audience, knowing your community, and finding out what is it that they value about you, what is it that your market can bear, and so on. So case in point, advertising. Too much of a good thing? Too much of a bad thing? Is it good? Is it bad? In the context of purchasing, I don't mind ads so much. Most of the store, and I'm shopping, and I see an ad or something like that. Honestly, I don't do a lot of shopping. My wife does most of the shopping. But when I do go, you know, it's the Apple store. It's Home Depot. That's where I go. But I like seeing the ads. I like seeing the deals. And I want to find out what's going on. So advertising in the context of purchasing is welcomed in most cases. Even shopping online. Amazon.com, eBay, those kinds of things. Usually it's not, you know, not something that is frowned upon. But when people are not in the context of purchasing, when they're in the context of consuming news or information and that sort of thing, advertising is a little bit more annoying. It's a little bit out of context. And so this is that dilemma that publishers have is presenting ads in a way that is relevant and important, but not invasive. All right? So the two complaints I hear the most from readers, from our clients' readers, is that either the ads are just too distracting or they're way too many. They're just way too many. I'm not in the right mindset when I'm reading a long-form article to have a full-page ad blow up in my face and I have to sit there and wait to close the ad. It's an invasive ad. It's improper design, ad design, I believe. What's more, this ad, when it blows up and fills the entire screen, often changes the scroll of the screen, and so once I click it, I have to then scroll back down and try to find where I was reading. And this is invasive. This frustrates me, and I know it frustrates many other users, and it's a problem. And so there needs to be better ad design, more relevant ads, and not so invasive. So when the timing is right, when the context makes sense, ads are normally welcome. And in the context of reading, it needs to be balanced and not so much. Now, a YouGov report commissioned by Upstream shows that in 1997, back in the early days, that everybody was clicking on everything. User engagement was at 7% for online advertising. Well, that's not too bad. But when you get down to 2012, this had fallen to 0.1%. And I ventured, I guess, that if a recent study was done, it would be somewhere around that or worse. People are simply learning to overlook online ads. That's it. We have gotten good at overlooking them. And to add insult to injury, we have the era of ad blockers, which are just, you know, people don't even see the ad, so it's not even a problem anymore. Anyways, so this only compounds the dilemma for ad revenues for publishers. So think about it. If I were to give you guys $1 on the condition that you guys would give me $7 back, would you do it? Well, maybe somebody's generous out there. If you like me really, and you really are altruistic, sure I'll do it. But no, most cases, it doesn't make sense, OK? So check this out. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism did a study on digital revenues across 38 different newspaper publishers. Now, for every dollar gained in digital advertising for these publishers, they lost $7 in digital, or in print advertising. So that is a big hit. If you're used to having $700,000 in ad revenue, depending on your side, maybe it's $70,000, whatever it may be, if you're used to that and it drops to $100,000, what would that do to your business? That would hurt. That would hurt really, really, really bad. So we have seen that advertising is good when carefully done. But overdone, it only drives your readers and your core business, who you are and what you do, it turns them off because of the advertising. You have to be careful with that. And this kind of report is altruistic familiar for publishers and newspaper executives. They're looking at the financial statements coming across their desk. In short, the early dot com boom days, online advertising seemed like the holy grail, OK? It was the financial holy grail. There was no limit to space. We could throw up as many ads as possible. We can take pages and break them down into clicks. Take one article and get 10 clicks out of it. So we could throw more ads for every pagination that is done on that article. And so we saw that was kind of the trend and we'll just put it up for free. We won't charge anything to our customers. We will put it all in the back of advertising. It didn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And I'm not putting down, I don't want to put down advertising. Again, my goal here is to bring balance and perspective. Advertising is good, but the way it has been done in the past and even is being done today is too much or it's just not working. So the digital ad revenues just aren't growing as fast as the loss in print ad revenues. We've seen that advertising revenues have dropped. They are dropping. And the, you know, typically most organizations, print organizations will use advertising as the horse that pulls the cart, but it's just not strong enough to pull the cart anymore in many cases. And so what I suggest to organizations is start switching things around. Start allowing your customers, your core business, journalism to be the horse that pulls the cart. Let advertising take a backseat, not completely get rid of it, but let's kind of shift the paradigm a little bit and bring some balance to this and let your community who you serve bear the weight a little bit of your business. So check this out. The subscription economy is here. Now, like I kind of underscored at the beginning, there are different types of experiments going on for paywalls and micropayments and different ways for purchasing access to your content. And I don't know. I just know that there's a trend. I can look at the trends and see what's kind of working for most organizations. And until we find, you know, the perfect formula, we're going to have to continue experimenting. But the fact is, folks, people are getting more and more used to subscribing to stuff. It's just become a part of our society thanks to the likes of, you know, Netflix and Spotify, Pandora, and whatever subscription service that is out there, people are getting used to it. Reuters reported in 2017 that there was a year over year increase in customers paying directly for online news, not just in the young age demographic, but in all age demographics. Even the older folks are getting on the bandwagon and pulling out the card, using Apple Pay, Google Pay, whatever it is to get access to the news or the digital magazines, e-editions and that sort of thing. I'm not a big e-edition person, but I have some older relatives who just have to have that e-edition experience. It's that print to e-edition. But, you know, those are offerings that are available. So the subscription economy is here. Consumers are realizing that they do get what they pay for and so they're pulling out the cards. But how can publishers charge for access and not feel guilty that they're breaking some sort of unspoken or developing open web rule? You know, how can they feel that their charging for access isn't going against this open web ideology? Well, let's take a look at media organizations and the open web. Are media organizations bad because they want to charge for content directly? Let's look at this logically. The roles of media organizations can be summed up in two different ways. You have content creators and then you have content reporters. So let's look at it this way. It's entirely up to the content creators, you know, people like musicians and writers and software developers to determine how they want to distribute their original creation. That's up to them. It's their idea, it's their original creation and many of them are perfectly happy to put it out there for free, for the community to contribute back to, to offer as kind of an incentive or something else. But it's important to note that these creators must have some commercial aspect or some monetization model in their life in order for them to continue to create. It's just a fact of life. There has to be a monetization factor. And so how do we address this when it comes to the publishers and media organizations of the world? Think about this, even Mr. Mullenweg has WordPress.com it's his commercial hosting platform. Yes, it uses the open-source WordPress software but does that hinder the open-source community because he has this commercial business in the back of something that he developed? No, I think it contributes, it puts back into it he's able to actually add value to the open-source project because of his commercial aspect. Now he didn't just put everything behind a wall but he gave some and yet he does have a business on the back of it and notice it's a service business as well. And if the content is too expensive or if it's no good, if it's poor quality you know the market will let you know they'll stop subscribing, they'll stop paying and they won't come back. And that's where you have to do some heart-searching is what we have really bringing value. Now the second role in content is content or news reporting, a.k.a. journalism. This is an entirely different aspect of media organizations and should stay far, far, far away from content creation or news creation I should say. Imagine your regional newspaper having a news creation department with roles like vehicle crash coordinator or game thrower or worse yet, the obituary team. Now these kind of departments could get people into some serious trouble. I kid you not, we had a client, a publisher of a regional daily who told me that there was a lady who called in and she said, I really like the obituaries but I was wondering, is there any way you can add more? Sure, we'll get right on that. You can imagine the obituary news creation team. Hey Donny, we need moral bits. The content generated from news reporting is already an open source. This paradigm shift seems really simple but it's amazing how many times I have to explain this and point this out in conversations with people anyone can gather the news information. Anybody can go to the corner and see what happened. Anybody can now, granted I know there's a thing with the press passes and things like that. There's certain access that press does have but for the most part news is an open source and anybody can go and gather the news but who wouldn't you rather want to pay for a professional journalist to go and gather the news, photography pictures to vet the story, to edit the story publishers to publish it and make sure it's all delivered in a nice simple package to read. I'd much rather do that in the same way that I would venture to guess that many people would rather pay a web development company to download WordPress as an open source project and set it up for their media organization rather than do it themselves. You can see the comparison. WordPress, open source project, wonderful project but in most cases you guys are paying a development company to set it up and maintain it and help you support it. We need to shift the value proposition off of the content into the service. When we do that then this all begins to make more sense. So it's perfectly within the context of open web standards for news reporting agencies to charge for their service. When we look at it that way we're not putting up paywall for our content we're putting up a paywall for our service because you've got to pay for reporters, you've got to pay for photographers, you've got to pay for editors, you've got to pay for all these things. So news reporting organizations don't have to feel guilty for charging for access to their content because what's being paid for is really the service and that's where the value is. Just the same way that web development organizations don't have to feel bad for making a buck for setting up a WordPress media site. So quality and value should be the focus and when you focus on the quality and the value the clicks will come, the views will come and subsequently the revenues will come from your community. But if you're not asking for revenue, if you don't have a monetization model directly on your core business, your journalism or your site, if you're not asking for it you're not going to receive it. People aren't altruistic enough to call up and say hey we just want to support local news, can we send you some money? You have to have something in place. And in most cases we've come across some different organizations. We've set up some who follow the donation based model and I've seen it kind of work but most of the time when people are coming to the site they read the article, they see the little prompt to donate and it's like an ad. But if there is a hard stop along the way, and I'm not saying a hard paywall but a hard stop doing some sort of metered or kind of type of scenario, people are going to say well I do value this, I'm going to have to go ahead and pull out the card and pay. And we've seen that happen. So the news is 100% free. We've talked about that. So paywalls and the open web. How do paywalls fit in the context of open web? An online only news organization came to us about a year ago. They were in business for about six or seven years roughly and they said they had built a great following. They had a really engaged list, e-mail list. They were doing like a newsletter two or three times a week. Strong engagement in social. But they said we just can't survive on the back of advertising. It's just not happening. And basically we have about nine months left of runway. If we don't see any change, we can't keep going on. On top of that, we would really love to add a reporter for some sports and do a couple of other things but we just don't, it's not there. We can't pull the number of advertisers we need. So we set up a paywall for them. And when the paywall went up, it was interesting some of the feedback they got. There's always complainers. You're going to get somebody, you're always going to get somebody, oh, you know, why are you charging for access now? But they had a number of people who replied and says, it's about time. We were wondering when were you going to start charging for your content? The people valued their service so much. And so they did really well. As a matter of fact, for a hyper-local market that they were in, kind of a small media organization, they now have six figures of annual revenue that they didn't have before they set up a paywall. And so today they're in business because they decided to allow their community to support them. Did they give up on advertising? No, no they didn't. As a matter of fact, they did see a 10% drop in traffic. But here's what the publisher said. I asked them, I said, so how has your ad strategy changed post-paywall? And they've been in this going on about a year now. He said, the paywall's major impact on our ad strategy is that it allowed us to get rid of a lot of the most annoying ad slots on the site so that user experience was better. Even if the paywall only does that, that's worth it. You know, allowing your community to support you enough to where you can get rid of the annoying, the stuff that makes some money, but it's just annoying and really you want to hate it. He also said, continuing on, the paywall gives us the leeway not to pursue bad ad options. That is advertisers that aren't local or ads that are obnoxious to readers. So and they're doing great and they continue to grow their subscription business on a daily basis. So should content creating, content creating or reporting agencies implement a paywall across the board? Should everybody do it? In my opinion, it makes sense that businesses should have some direct form of monetization on the core business. Even in part, if it's just a little bit. Some sort of method that people can actually contribute to your business for the direct service they're paying for. And there may be some markets where advertising is sufficient enough to sustain and grow your business on the back of ad dollars. But the trends in reality just don't sustain that idea, that thought. We just see the ad models aren't there to sustain the majority of media outlets out there today. It's another interesting note. A paywall brings a certain level of accountability in journalism. When you have people actually paying, kind of with just an advertising model, you're having to do all you can to really pump those clicks and those views up so you can go back to your advertisers and say, look at these numbers. These are the kind of engagements that you can have in that sort of thing. But when you have a paywall and people are paying, now you stop thinking about so much your advertising, where you start to shift. It's a subtle psychology change, but there's a shift in your focus that now we're going to see what kind of, how we can improve our journalism to support our paying subscriber base. So there's something, there's a shift that happens there in value to your business. Will people pay? Well, I've seen it. I've seen a number of business, like I said the one I mentioned a moment ago. They're in business today because they decided to ask. They decided to ask. We've already seen that more and more people are willing to pay the subscription economies here. The percentage of people subscribing to content is going up. And let me give you a little case study here. A client did a poll to see before they set up the paywall, what would you be willing to pay? And so what they did, they asked this question in the context of three different prices. Would you be willing to pay this dollar amount, this dollar amount, and this dollar amount? And then they left up each price amount. Now each one, they didn't see the people taking the poll, didn't see all three prices at once. They just saw one of the prices. So once the margin of error got to 1%, then they stopped the poll. And so here's what they found. The percentage of those willing to pay, you got $2.95, $5.95, and $9.95. They said if they couldn't get enough to agree to pay the $3, that it wasn't sustainable. And they were amazed to see that there was, the percentage of those who said yes, they would pay for the $6, or the $5.95, which was double, was sustainable for them. And so what really shocked them, good thing I'm almost done, if I have to plug in, what really shocked them is that, is how close that $9.95 was. Look at that, less than 2% difference in those who would be willing to pay $10 for their service. They ultimately decided to go for the mid-range, and they actually launched here recently, and the subscriptions are just going daily. Daily, daily, daily. So they're doing really well with that research. And let's not forget we have the soft paywall, we have the metered paywall, we have that long sales funnel, you could do interval paywalls where, you know, get a name and email, you get two pages, or three pages, name and email, you get five more pages. There's a longer sales funnel that you can have in those kind of paywall models. Don't be afraid to push out the big things, public service announcements, make sure those get out in front of the paywall. And they'll come back. And when those are out in front of the paywall, they will click around and they'll say, hey, you know, I'm just going to subscribe to this. You know, different ways you can do that. The fact is that we need you to exist. We need journalism to exist. A study came out this year in 2018 by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago, right here, hometown of Chicago. And the report connected greater government abuses to areas without local news reporting services. The report indicated that the chain of awareness begins with the local news, reporting agencies, state services pick it up. And what happens is change happens for the good, for the good, because you exist. And I won't go into all the study. It was Bloomberg, actually, I believe it was, who reported on. I should have put the source up there. But the interesting thing was these organizations without, or these places, without local news in their community, the tax rates were higher. They noticed that there was a definite comparison that governments were charging more and there was a correlations made. Very interesting study, well done. So we need you guys to be communicating these things to your audience, saying, listen, this is what it would be like. These are the communities without local news. This is what it would be like if we didn't exist. There is a certain checks and balance that journalists and local news organizations bring to a society that's much, much needed. And we've seen that the rise of the Internet correlates directly with the loss of news jobs. The U.S. Department of Labor cites that 2001 to 2016, there was, the jobs went from 412,000 in 2001 down to 174,000 to 2016. So a significant drop in the jobs in the news industry. And as we've seen, much of the loss, much of the struggle is often tied to a failing ad revenue model. And it's just, it's a fact of life. And so we have to come up with experiments, so we have to try things that will fill the gap but more importantly, a psychological paradigm shift that allows for your community to get behind you. And yeah, donation-based, sometimes you have to give a little nudge. Not as hard of a nudge as we saw at the beginning of your presentation. If you don't do this or else, you know. But we've seen that the ad revenue models just are not sustainable. So it's time to embrace the subscription economy. It's here, it's growing. We don't see any trends otherwise. A paywall with a balanced and open, a balance of open and premium content will actually strengthen the open web. Allow for content that is quality to be put out there, to check some balances that need to be there because local journalism exists. They're not shutting their doors because they didn't ask for support. They didn't put up some sort of monetization model on their journalism. If you aren't here, if you aren't there, who's going to take your place? There's got to be some, there's got to be, we need the journalists of the world out there. You know, on some day, society may look back and say we should have supported local journalism, but they didn't ask. But they didn't ask. We're encouraging you guys to ask. And I'll leave you with this final thought from our American founding father here, Benjamin Franklin. A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district, all studied and appreciated as they merit, are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty. Thanks. So thank you to both Eric and Nick for those presentations. If you guys want to just come back up to the front here, we've got about 20 minutes for questions. So how we're going to run this is if you just raise your hand and y'all can call on somebody, we're going to try to run mics in the aisle so that everybody in the room can hear you and we can also hear you in the video. So yeah, questions for Eric and Nick. Or if you want to throw tomatoes at us. Tomatoes are good. I like tomatoes. Right here. I'm actually from the Boston Globe. Awesome. You mentioned a lot about, obviously, paywalls and we've done a lot of experimentation there in that world and learned a lot of lessons in different ways. I just wanted to add a comment about the mention of churn and there's churn. We've found that churn will always be there and it's not just about audience growth, it's also about audience retention and we have also found that churn in the digital realm is much lower than the churn we've had in the print realm and as a result we've obviously been pushing for more digital subscriptions but that is one of the reasons why as well. Just out of curiosity, do you allow people to cancel online? No. Sorry, I didn't mean to put you on this spot there. I've spoken with some people actually at my hyper-local newspaper and they have a readership of around 20,000. I don't know if you've seen anything if there's even room in the future for those really small publications but how was such a different model that has traditionally been on the hyper-local advertising that just doesn't have the revenue anymore? What that looks like with Paywall? Yeah, I guess I can answer to that. We've seen our most successful clients in hyper-local markets. The fact is the competition for the content is not usually there as much. There may be some competitors in the market but when you set up a Paywall, some sort of paid monetization for your content for access, you have what they don't have. If grandma wants to know what the score was for their grandson and they weren't there or maybe they're even out of town or they live elsewhere, you're the only source. They can't go to the Boston Globe to find out how their grandson scored at the ball game. Or even see the pictures. So there's a certain uniqueness that hyper-locals can bring that set up an environment which is much better for a Paywall. Just to add, there's also in the Lindfest Institute data, there's no correlation between the size of a publisher and the price that they charge. So you might think that New York Times could get away with charging a higher price than a hyper-local, but in fact, when you think about what is the value to me as a person living in that community, that hyper-local has a lot of value. I love the emphasis on charging for the service and not the content itself, just as a general principle. What I'm curious about, without talking about either of your companies specifically, one of the problems I see in the space in general, especially for hyper-local is accessing the tools and the resources to implement best practices like microtransactions a long time ago. It was very inaccessible for most folks. It was a high-level experiment that required large dev teams to be able to pull off. So I'm curious if you can speak to the state, when you look at the industry as a whole, regardless of your own companies, what's the state of the accessibility of these best practices and the ability for hyper-local to experiment with different models? I think that's been a blocker, that these are experiments that are accessible to only specialty teams and organizations with large resources. Is that changing? What are you noticing trend-wise? I would say that there is, first off, there are a lot of resources these days, including some of the organizations I mentioned, but there's also local online independent news. There's a number of organizations that are sort of banding together and trying to get, say, economies of scale of multiple publishers together to bargain for better licensing fees and things like that for certain products. But I would say there's a lot more, just more information these days than there was before. Yeah, I think the tools are definitely, of course, time has gone by and people are developing tools to make it more accessible for those kinds of objectives. So, again, I think it comes back around to... We've seen a... I'm not going to say it's a winner, but it's certainly a contender. The meter has kind of kind of solidified itself as a leading model in the market for companies who are wanting to set up some sort of paywall. And in the meantime, I know there are people, there are organizations that are looking at trying and experimenting with different things, but in the meantime, you have the meter, which is doing pretty well in certain markets. And the tools are there for companies to kind of ramp up pretty quick. Yeah, no, there's a number of organizations out there, including his and mine in that pool that can quickly ramp up these models for companies. So, yeah, I don't think access to tools is the issue. It's how much do you want to charge, what kind of model, how long of a lead-in in the soft paywall do you want to do? Are we doing micro payments on demand? You know, those are the questions that we're trying to answer, I think, right now. We got one in the back row there. I think the work that our competitors are doing, what I see is that they're sometimes monetizing events, and they're also monetizing research that they're selling frequently. And I wanted to hear your thoughts on how that might fit into this model. Events are definitely a strategy that we've seen a lot of publishers. I mean, I'm talking primarily from the sort of event in that world, which is fairly general interest. Events are a big area where there's a lot of activity, right? So, a lot of publishers are finding that within certain areas that they are acknowledged experts in, in their communities, they're able to use their convening power to get people together and make money, not just from sponsorships of events, but also from sort of direct sales to people who want to come. I can tell you a story. There is an organization in Australia who is in the pharmaceutical industry, and they do news in that industry, and they came to us and they said, well, you know, we've had this wall up for a while, and we've got a number of subscribers. We're thinking about doing an event, and they kind of told us what they want to do, and they said, well, let's presale, let's get a couple of speakers locked in, and so we kind of worked with them on a couple of things and set a time, and let's presale, see what happens. I remember the day that they launched the event. The owner called me and says, Nick, I just, I think, I feel like we're only going to get like two or three people that are going to jump onto this because it's, I just, I'm really nervous about this. I said, well, let's see what happens. Well, they made six figures within like two weeks because of the event, and it was just like, it totally blew their mind that they got so much community interest, but they had built a good platform for about two years of engaged users through their website, through their content, and the majority of them were paying users. But, yeah, so it was, I know in that particular scenario, they didn't do events before, they tried one. I know they're planning another one now, so it was really a good success for them. I'd like to ask about what you see the role of like ownership on the subscriber or reader in supporting journalism and publications because I agree that we're getting used to paying for subscriptions, but I think like one thing that's really different about supporting like a local paper, like here there's something like Block Club Chicago which just started off of Civil actually, which is really cool, but on Spotify, it's like, are you really supporting the artists? They're making pennies, they're not even making that much money really, but with something like a subscription, like for me of the New York Times or something, I feel like I identify a little bit. It's almost like donating to a nonprofit or supporting a cause or you're doing it out of your own values too, so I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about identity or ownership on the subscriber part. I would say that certainly the ownership of an organization makes a difference in what the stated goals of that ownership are, but we've seen at least in the newspaper world both for profit models and nonprofit models succeeding at asking people to pay for content and in a variety of different ways, both the guardian with the sort of the open model and my alma mater in Philadelphia, which is actually now owned by a nonprofit but uses a more traditional paywall model. And I would say yes, I'm sure there's a concern that if I were subscribing to Spotify, say that I would assume that not much of the money that I pay is actually going all the way to the content creator, but if I'm subscribing to most publishers, I can feel pretty good about knowing that a large part of the money that I'm spending is actually supporting the content creation. I think and to answer that in the publishing world, I think the challenge that one would have is subscribing to media content through somebody like Apple or Google where their percentage, their cut is really huge. So if there are companies that have direct paywalls on their content that don't have a platform, like a big platform in between them, usually a majority of those revenues are going towards that organization. Any last questions? So Eric, in your talk you called out how a lot of publishers to remove paywalls, you have to go through a phone call which has a discussion and there's a bit of a fun opportunity that happens to go back and forth about what it's like. So it's like canceling a gym membership where you have to hustle and you go through this whole process. So my question for you is, is there a way maybe as an industry, since we have a bunch of people in the room who might be able to brainstorm or think about this, to think about maybe a better way to be able to sign up and unsubscribe from different kinds of models? Because personally, I love so many great people who do great things. For example, I love the Boston Globe, right? I would love to be able to subscribe, but maybe for some reason I don't want to subscribe to them. Is there a simpler way for us as an industry to propose maybe a different model to be able to join or un-join these kinds of organizations? And I'd love to, since you guys both have, I think, different thoughts on this, I'd love to hear from both of you. Great question, and you just reminded me that I need to cancel my gym membership if I ever use it. No! But, you know, I think part of what is so interesting about this California thing that's happening is that that may be a result, right? The fact that California is going to make it a lot harder for publishers to make it hard for people to cancel. And so, we might end up in a place where there's this really sort of rapid, you know, sign up, cancel, sign up, cancel mentality among users for, you know, I'm going to sign up for a few weeks to get whatever, or maybe I'm traveling, I want to visit Boston and just take the paper for a few weeks, I don't know. But that, you know, this makes that possible, which I don't think really was a situation before. But I'd love to hear other thoughts. Yeah, I think the more transparent the organizations are with their customers about, hey, if you want it, pay for it, but we're going to make it easy if you don't want it. I think, really, that's kind of up to the tools and the organizations to say, yeah, if you don't want this, we don't want to hold you over a barrel, you know, make it possible for them to cancel. We found that, I'll tell a personal experience, I know back whenever, the day that I signed up for the seven-day trial to Netflix, I was like, I'm probably not going to keep this. I'm just going to try it out for my kids. I think it was like one of my kids, like, it was something that was running on Netflix. And I said, okay, we'll get a seven-day free trial. You can watch it for a few days. I forget how long ago that was, but I'm still a subscriber. We enjoyed the content. The content was, it worked. And if the content's good, we often find that people get in the door and they're using it and they're using it. And there's no problem with that paying on their account every month, you know, because they like it. But if they're not happy, you really don't want unhappy customers. What I would suggest is, you know, when you see those churn, we have a tool that, you know, lets people see the accounts that churned out and provide an opportunity for them to communicate with the customer. And we encourage our clients to communicate with those who churned out to see why, to help them understand. Of course, there are built-in ways that you can find this out at the point of canceling. You can ask the question, you know, what are your reasons in that thing. Some people just, you know, aren't interested anymore or maybe it's a financial reason or something, you know. So getting feedback is really critical to making, you know, your next decision or adjustment to the monetization model. And again, the important thing here, the underlying concept here is your connection with your audience. That is the real value here. You're not having, you know, it's no longer the advertiser you're trying to appease, but you're actually talking directly with your community. And that's who you are. That's the value that you can bring. I'm just curious if there are other thoughts on that point. Right, it makes the notion of retention so much more important than it maybe is today, where we have these sort of artificial things that retain customers. Yeah, I like that point. One of the barriers sometimes is the will I be able to cancel? Totally. That's a factor as well. Will I actually be able to, if you make it easy for me to know that I can cancel, I'm more likely to actually subscribe, at least for me personally, I suspect others as well. Yeah, that's a good point, real good point. This sounds like a pretty good un-conference topic if anybody hasn't put it on the board yet. Great. Oh, we got one more. It would just be incredible to be able to be a reader of content as someone who works in the content space and be able to go and at the same place where I could subscribe to the New York Times, unsubscribe to the LA Times, or unsubscribe to the Chronicle, or unsubscribe to the Tribune. I think about it this way. If we have the freedom and the agency to do things, like if you do things on Twitter or Facebook, with paywalls, people might actually be able to do it. But because we introduce friction, I think that's the big problem here. We as an industry have chosen to make friction our key mechanism. That's not a good thing, I think. I would suggest that maybe we haven't consciously chosen that as an industry, but that's the situation that maybe we've fallen into because we respect and we value that direct relationship with the customer too much. If we were willing to give away some of the control to some kind of thing that would, as you described, let a user subscribe and unsubscribe to all these different services from one sort of central thing, that might be a win for everybody. But I don't know what that thing looks like or who runs it. That's a really good... Yeah. Perhaps, yeah. So Brave is the web browser that is sort of looking at this notion of attention and actually putting a value in people's attention and then allowing people to use that value to pay. I don't know enough about Brave to know whether that is entirely the solution, but it definitely is an interesting approach to the problem.