“Killing print is the scariest decision in publishing.” That’s how Wally Wallace opened our conversation, and he’d know. His agency just helped a 30-year-old magazine turn off the presses and go fully digital-only, and live to tell about it.
If you run a print publication, the fear is familiar. Legacy subscribers churn, advertisers walk, and the whole thing feels like jumping without a net. So most publishers freeze. Meanwhile paper, ink, shipping, and fulfillment costs keep climbing and the math gets worse every year.
This episode is the operational story of a magazine that stopped freezing and made the jump. Here’s how they did it.
Listen to the full episode on the Paywall Podcast
In this episode we talk with Wally Wallace, partner at the digital agency 50 Fish in Yarmouth, Maine. The agency has been around since 2007, and for the last decade Wally’s team has focused on helping subscription publishers grow audience, subscriptions, and ad revenue. One of those publishers is Brew Your Own (BYO), a home brewing magazine that’s been in print since the 1990s.
The decision nobody wants to make
BYO had a deep library of evergreen content: recipes, brewing tips, troubleshooting guides. The kind of material that stays valuable for years. Print was still part of the mix when Wally’s team started working with them in 2023, and at first the plan was just to grow digital alongside it.
Then in January 2024, the publisher made the call. They were going digital-only. The last print issue shipped in early 2025, and from that point forward it was digital only.
“They came in with a plan, and it wasn’t a two month plan. We had a bullet point plan with an immense amount of bullets.” – Wally Wallace
That plan is the whole story. You can’t decide to drop print and execute it two months later.
A year-long plan, down to the renewal cards
BYO spent roughly a year working from a detailed plan that laid out every touchpoint with the reader. The bullet points covered things like when to stop blowing renewal cards into issues, when to update the outer wrappers to announce the final print run, and how to rework automated renewal email flows so they pointed people to the right digital subscription level.
Looking to grow your publication?
Sign up for expert advice straight to your inbox.That last one matters more than it sounds. If your renewal emails route a legacy print buyer to the wrong product tier, you lose them in the gap.
Then there’s the data puzzle. Some legacy subscribers signed up years ago by mailing a check, so you have no email address for them at all. BYO reached those readers with targeted postcards carrying custom QR codes that pointed them to the web portal. It’s not elegant, but it’s how you move people who never gave you a digital footprint.
Keep the advertisers: the digital print replica
Cut the print run and you risk losing a chunk of advertiser revenue along with it. BYO protected that line by continuing to produce a high-quality print replica inside a flipbook reader.
Around 20% of their readers still choose the flipbook over standard web articles. They like the magazine experience, and that’s reason enough to keep producing it. More to the point, it keeps print advertisers in the fold.
The flipbook still sells full-page and half-page placements, but now the ads carry live links. Wally’s team tracks flipbook opens and clicks, which means advertisers get real engagement data instead of a static paper guess.
“The advertisers, not all of them stayed, but a good portion did, and we’re giving them a good value for it.” – Wally Wallace
A click inside a flipbook is also high-intent. Someone opened the replica, started flipping, and tapped through to an advertiser. That’s worth more than a printed page nobody can measure.
Rebuild the site around topics, not departments
Print publishers tend to organize a website the way they build a magazine: by department, or by content type like “videos” or “photo galleries.” Readers don’t browse that way. A video about what? An article in which department?
Wally’s team ran a deep audit of BYO’s archive and re-architected the navigation around what people actually search for. They broke the content into buckets like styles and recipes, brewing tips and troubleshooting, ingredients, and equipment. Someone who wants to learn about kegging finds it under equipment, where they’d expect to look.
This was the biggest part of the project, and it earns its keep. Topical structure turns an evergreen library into a real resource, keeps readers on the site longer, and helps organic search. As Wally put it, if you’re taking print away, the website has to be good enough to carry the business.
Email is the real product now
Once you stop mailing physical magazines, your email list becomes the product. It’s how you reach your audience when a new article or video drops, and it’s a channel nobody can take from you. No algorithm change, no AI platform scraping your content, decides whether your readers hear from you.
That’s why BYO leans hard into free registration. The registration wall captures an email address before a reader can get into the premium archives. (On WineMaker, their sister title, the team has moved to Leaky Paywall’s List Builder, and they plan to bring BYO over soon.)
A free registration is a stronger signal than a newsletter pop-up. The reader gave you an email and created a password to keep reading. That’s a warm lead, not a cold address. Once they’re on your free tier, the goal is simple: let them hit the paywall over and over until they upgrade.
“We want to wear them down and have them hit that paywall as many times as possible. That is the game.” – Wally Wallace
It works. We’re pulling data across publishers for a study right now, and free registration walls are showing a 2x to 7x bump in list building depending on the niche. That’s an average with publishers on both the low and high end, so treat it as a range, not a promise. But the direction is clear, and it’s the same direction Wally is seeing on WineMaker.
The lead-in hack that doubles signups
If you run a standard metered paywall where casual visitors get a free article or two a month, your highest-traffic pages are leaking. A one-and-done reader lands on your best article from search or social, reads it, and bounces without giving you anything.
Wally flips that. Find three or four articles that pull the most organic and social traffic. Use the Leaky Paywall Lead-In block to show about half the article, and cut it off at an H3 that promises a solution or a tip. Then drop a quick registration block underneath: give us your email to finish reading.
The reader already has momentum. They’re hooked on a niche topic and they want the rest, so the odds of registering jump.
Promo alert: the Lead-In add-on lets you build these custom previews right in the WordPress editor, with as much or as little of the article as you want before the gate.
The honest part: it isn’t free
Going digital-only is not a clean win, and Wally didn’t pretend it was. You lose subscribers. Some legacy print-only readers simply don’t want a digital product, and others use the moment to cancel because they’d already drifted away from the hobby.
His framing is the right one. If dropping print means losing roughly a third of your subscribers, you have to decide whether that’s worth shedding the cost of paper, ink, shipping, and a fulfillment house. For BYO, the writing was on the wall: print costs were only going up, and the brand couldn’t keep the ship floating on print forever.
It also depends on what kind of publisher you are. We’ve seen this go the other way. Years ago a track and field magazine turned off print, sent stacks of postcards asking paid readers to log in, and still couldn’t get even half of them to create an account. After nine months they went back to print-on-demand at a much higher price point, and that’s working for the smaller crowd that stuck around.
The difference is the content. BYO is evergreen how-to material that stays useful for years, so the digital archive carries real value. A publication built on current events and results is a harder sell, because yesterday’s results don’t pull the same long-term search traffic. Know which one you are before you flip the switch.
What it comes down to
BYO made the jump because they planned for a year, built a digital product worth paying for, and gave their readers a reason to log in. The transition wasn’t perfect, and it cost them some subscribers. But the publisher now runs a business with lower costs, a growing email list, and advertisers who can finally see their results.
If you’re staring at the same decision, start the plan early. Shape up the digital product first. Then ask your audience to register, and keep building from there.
You can reach Wally and the 50 Fish team at [email protected] or 50fish.com.
Watch the full conversation:
