Offer a $2-a-month, 4-stories plan only to visitors unlikely to subscribe

David BarnardYeah. So what do you mean by unbundling? I'm still a little confused about that.

Michael RiberoEssentially, I think a lot of the pushback that we've got is from a media perspective is this concept of subscription fatigue. And I think paired with the fact that news and I'm overwhelmed with content, and so the thinking was can you essentially create a micro product or a mini product, maybe the Diet Coke to the Coke? And so when I was at The Post, we did something called starter pack and as opposed to getting an unlimited subscription, it was essentially read four stories every single month, and then you can decide. If you consume more, you're going to hit then another paywall or an upgrade wall and then go forward from that. That's the thinking.

David BarnardAnd that was two bucks a month, right?

David BarnardIt's like way undercut your main, but how did that turn out from an LTV perspective? Jury's still out?

Michael RiberoWell, so I think there's two things. One, the one thing I have appreciated about publishing, extremely difficult to be in, but you get a lot of visitors and you get a lot of data. I think we ultimately decided that this couldn't be a product that we were going to advertise to everyone. It was really in the cases where we saw low propensity, we would determine propensity really based on referral source or something like that. But if we could determine you were going to be really low propensity, this would be an offering and it would be, but really hidden behind the scenes, but just trying to, I would say lower the hurdle to get you into our payment ecosystem and then we could go from there.

David BarnardNo, that's so smart. And I mean there's so many ways to do that in an app. I mean, I was talking to Will from [inaudible 00:23:48] recently, and we were talking about they have some really clever things they're thinking about with being able to engage those people who, and it's pretty common in the industry now of people are closing out the paywall. Like, hey, they're there, so give them an offer, bring them in.