We asked our readers to buy, not donate. Here’s what it taught us about the new math of news.

Most people in the news business agree on at least one thing right now. As search and AI reshape how people find information, the old model of waiting for audiences to wander in is finished, and we have to build direct relationships with readers instead. The numbers are stark. When Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing habits of 900 Americans last year, it found that a Google search showing one of those AI summaries up top sent the reader on to a website just 8% of the time, versus 15% when no summary appeared. Half the clicks, gone. And that’s before you count the people skipping search entirely to ask a chatbot. We all can see that the referral traffic we leaned on for many years isn’t coming back.

That means organizations all over the spectrum — commercial papers and nonprofits alike — are quietly renegotiating their relationship with readers right now. Many of us are arriving at similar conclusions, often from very different starting points.

At LAist, a nonprofit newsroom that’s built on a membership model used by other public radio stations nationwide, we ran two experiments over the past six months that illustrate how we need to think about our audience relationships in fundamentally different ways. To a lot of the commercial news industry, our experiments might look like table stakes. In public media, where “payment” has always been voluntary, they got a few gasps.

These experiments were critical to answering a question that more and more leaders in news media are asking out loud: As habits and news ecosystems transform yet again, how, exactly, are we going to get people to pay for our work?

It started with a wall

Last November, we put up LAist’s first free registration wall. The concept wasn’t a first for a website that’s also home to a public radio station. Others, including WBEZ.org and Gothamist.com have done similar experiments, though primarily limited to their archival content only. At LAist, we applied our wall to all of our content.

The goal was modest. We wanted to find out whether gating content would torpedo our traffic, and to establish a conversion baseline. So we were conservative about it. Readers got a number of free articles before they hit a dismissible wall, and only later a hard one. The results were better than we’d expected. Traffic held, and within the first month we’d collected more than 12,000 emails, 80% of them from people who didn’t match existing donors or newsletter subscribers — so, people we’d never known before.

By March we were up to 90,000. That’s when we got more aggressive and swapped the registration wall for a login wall. To someone visiting LAist.com, the experience was essentially the same, but there was an important change on our end. The new version used magic links to ensure we received real emails and gave readers one free article before a full stop. Again, no meaningful drop in traffic. And the people who logged in actually engaged more, with longer sessions and more pages per visit than the site overall.

That foundation was ultimately the perfect set up for a more ambitious experiment.

A premium product public media doesn’t usually try

Our Voter Game Plan, LAist’s nonpartisan election guide, reliably pulls in well over a million users each election cycle. Digital audience research we had done in early 2025 surfaced a pattern I couldn’t stop thinking about: Most of our digital readers already pay for news. They have subscriptions to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or similar publications both national and local. That research also found that, unlike our local listeners on LAist 89.3, these readers do not have a history of donating to nonprofits like us. They may have never heard our on-air pledge drives where listeners hear directly from LAist staff on why our work matters and why they should donate. Readers were used to hitting a paywall and subscribing. I knew we needed to test a question public media rarely asks out loud: if we offered these readers something to buy, rather than something to support, would they?

We launched Voter Game Plan+ about a month before California’s June 2 primary. The guides themselves stayed free to use, behind the login wall. What we put a price on was a set of convenience tools layered on top. Readers could save their picks across California’s maze of races, which matters when there are runoffs and it’s genuinely hard to remember in November who you backed in June. They could also take interactive quizzes to line up their views against the candidates in the LA Mayor and Governor races. One $7 fee covered the tools through both elections.

Our original plan was to charge everyone, members included, partly because we wanted to know whether even members would pay for something extra. Our membership and development colleagues made a strong case that that was too much too soon, and they were right. Getting members comfortable paying on top of their voluntary donations is a culture change, and it takes time. So we compromised. Members got a code that unlocked VGP+ for free.

All of this ran on Allegro, the open source customer data platform we’ve been building with Chicago Public Media and our development partner Alley. What started in November as a simple wall for collecting emails had grown into a full CDP and decision engine. By the time we launched VGP+, it was connected to our Salesforce CRM, could match a reader’s email against their membership record, and had a new entitlements layer that let us attach VGP+ access to an individual profile.

We set a modest stretch goal of 1,000 purchases. Against a product that draws more than a million users, that wasn’t shooting for the moon. It was simply a proof of concept.

Building it was the hard part

Getting this live was difficult. We had to make the paid pieces visually distinct from the free ones, strip the usual member and donation messaging out of the VGP package while leaving it everywhere else on the site, and stay transparent with members about why we were suddenly asking anyone to pay, after years of making the case that our core mission was providing high-quality news and information to all. None of this is new in commercial media or e-commerce where hard paywalls are an established craft. It is, however, very foreign to how public media talks to its audience. That meant we ended up flexing muscles we’d never used and making a few mistakes along the way.

To deliver the content behind the wall, we landed on a toolbar modal that showed up on every guide, whether a reader had access or not, plus bold callouts on the main Voter Game Plan landing pages where most people enter. Tapping any of it sent the reader to a marketing page that explained the program and the price, with a separate link for members to claim free access. Non-members paid the $7 through a simple Stripe form. Members entered a code that validated against our database and skipped checkout entirely.

What the numbers actually said

Four weeks in, the results were better than we’d hoped, and more interesting than we’d planned for.

We cleared the stretch goal easily, landing at 1,675 purchases. But the total was never the number that mattered to me. The one I’d put in front of another product leader is this: Of the readers who clicked through our VGP+ callouts to the marketing page, 8.4% bought, a rate I’d be happy with in commercial e-commerce, let alone public media.

It was who bought that told the real story. Two-thirds of buyers, 1,130 people, weren’t current members, and 889 had never given us a dollar or an email before. A further 34 signed up for full memberships after buying. Across the whole program, we processed exactly two refunds. More than 3,000 members also activated free access with their codes — a sign the tools had real pull on their own, not just a paywall to get past.

That is the cleanest evidence we’ve ever had for a thesis we’ve been chasing for years. A real share of our digital audience will pay LAist directly for a product they find valuable, separate from, and on top of, any membership relationship. These weren’t donations made out of goodwill. They were transactions. And the people most willing to transact were exactly the non-members we’d been trying to reach.

A small wrinkle

We did surface one unexpected but important result: About a third of buyers were current members, people who already had free access. When we looked closer, we found that some of them had simply misread the experience and assumed the whole guide was paywalled, so they paid. When we reached out to clear it up, the response was nearly unanimous and, frankly, a little touching. They didn’t mind. They were glad to chip in for work they valued.

While we’re not calling that a win — it’s a UX issue and something we’ll fix before November — it did teach us two things we wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Members will pay for added value on top of their membership when the value and the trust are there. And our messaging might not have been sharp enough to separate “the guides are free” from “the tools cost money,” which is also a solvable problem.

The bigger story wasn’t the money

The paid product wasn’t even our biggest audience result. Just by putting a free wall on the guides, we captured more than 58,000 new emails in under a month, and signed up over 48,000 people to our Make It Make Sense election newsletter. For comparison, after the 2024 presidential primary we added about 4,000 newsletter subscribers in a similar window. Every one of those 58,000 contacts is now someone we can message and warm up over time, from a return visit, to a loyal newsletter reader, to eventually a sustaining donor.

Put the two experiments side by side and you can see the rungs of a ladder we didn’t have before. An anonymous reader becomes a known email. A known email becomes a logged-in reader we can recognize and learn from. That reader becomes a one-time buyer or a newsletter subscriber. And over time, with the right messaging, that person becomes a recurring member. What used to be a traffic sieve, a million people pouring through our guides and vanishing as fast as they came, is finally starting to work like an acquisition machine. That matters more every year, as broadcast audiences age and people increasingly get their news from social platforms, aggregators, and chatbots instead of from us directly.

We’re not alone in this

The thing that makes me confident this isn’t a one-off is that you can see the same logic playing out across the industry, often from the opposite direction.

Look at The Salt Lake Tribune. They became a nonprofit back in 2019, and this past May they did something that sounds almost reckless: They tore down their paywall entirely and made everything free. They’re betting that donations will replace the roughly $2.6 million in subscription revenue, about a fifth of their total, that now drops to zero.

What convinced them was an experiment of their own. When they told a randomized group of subscribers they’d start getting the news for free, 87% chose to keep paying anyway, as donors. Their team described the old arrangement as confusing, asking people to pay for a subscription while also asking them for tax-deductible donations, a tension that got harder to defend the more they leaned into fundraising.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the mirror image of the confusion we ran into with our own members. The Salt Lake Tribune hit the dissonance of mixing a transactional ask with a donation ask going one way, and LAist hit it going the other. We’re both learning the same lesson, which is that the friction isn’t the price. It’s the muddle of asking for two different things at once.

Or look at The Minnesota Star Tribune, a for-profit paper considering moving to nonprofit, and their Strib Varsity product. They took 17 scattered high school sports sites and folded them into a single destination, kept the scores and stats and schedules free, and charged for the livestreams and the feature journalism. That effort is converting readers to subscribers at about three times the rate of the Star Tribune’s main paywall. Within the first few months, Strib Varsity accounted for roughly 10% of all new subscriptions to the paper.

That is the same shape as VGP+ (on a larger scale). Free utility, a paid layer of real value on top, aimed at a specific, high-intent audience. The motions are different. Theirs feeds a recurring subscription, ours was a one-time fee inside a donation-first organization, and the Tribune’s was subscribers choosing to become donors. But three different organizations are pointing at the same insight. People will pay for a relationship and for value they can feel. The mechanics driving the action, subscription or donation or one-time purchase, matters less than we’ve all assumed.

Why I’m not going to caveat this

I could tell you that LAist is a special case, that we’re public media and a little different. And there is a real wrinkle in our setup. Unlike many other public media stations, the vast majority of our LAist.com readers don’t overlap with our radio audience, the listeners who’ve traditionally provided most of our member revenue. That’s a result of the legacy of how we came together. LAist.com was a well-loved local site for years before we acquired it in 2018, and our web and broadcast audiences have stayed fairly separate, even as that gap slowly closes.

But I want to be clear about which way that cuts. It means the majority of the audience we converted had no prior relationship with us and had never given us a thing. They were about as cold as any commercial paper’s readers. And they paid anyway. So I don’t think of this as a public media story with an asterisk. If anything, we ran it on hard mode.

What this looks like for you

If you take one thing from this, take the ladder, because the specifics will look different depending on where you sit.

If you’re a small nonprofit newsroom, the registration wall is the cheapest, highest-leverage move on this list. You don’t need a premium product to start. You need a reason for an anonymous reader to give you an email. (Having a big news moment to do it around can only help, but it’s not essential.)

If you’re a commercial paper experimenting with donations or a nonprofit conversion, The Salt Lake Tribune’s 87% is the number to sit with. Most of your subscribers may already be paying you for civic reasons rather than transactional ones, which means the relationship is more durable than the paywall that’s been mediating it.

And if you have a high-intent vertical that draws a loyal, recurring audience, whether that’s elections, high school sports, food, or local politics, that’s your VGP+ or your Strib Varsity. Keep the utility free, charge for the value on top, and watch it convert at a rate that’s multiple of your general traffic.

For our part, we’re already pushing these insights into what’s next. We’ll use the behavioral data Allegro is collecting to build more personalized experiences across LAist.com and the LAist app and to make our membership asks more targeted and contextual. We’re expanding the ways people can support us, and building better paths from a one-time gift to a sustaining membership. And we’re starting to design new products and utilities, like a local government hub, that meet our audience’s needs and that they can pay for directly.

A start, but a real one

Through all of this we’ve pried open a few doors public radio has mostly kept shut, and broadened what it can mean to support public media and to put a real, human value on the work. Building these muscles isn’t optional anymore. If we want a business that lasts, and a newsroom that reaches people wherever and however they choose to show up, this is the work.

It’s just a start. But for an industry and an organization where change historically has tended to come slowly and unevenly, it has felt like a genuine leap forward.