The 240-year-old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is closing in May. I went through their website to see what went wrong. Spoiler: a lot.
Pittsburgh has 2.4 million residents. The Post-Gazette was the leading news source. At just 5% market penetration and $10/month, that’s $14 million a year in subscription revenue. Get to 10% (which publishers in Baton Rouge are doing) and you’re at $28 million.
So what happened? I subscribed to their site and went through the experience as a paying customer. Here’s what I found.
The Ad Blocker Fight
First thing I see? “Please disable your ad blocker.”
40% of people use ad blockers. Fighting them about it doesn’t work. It just annoys potential subscribers before they’ve read a single word.
Let them through. One subscriber at $120/year is worth more than ad impressions from 100 visitors anyway.
The 99-Cent Disaster
Click any article, hit an immediate paywall: “8 weeks for 99 cents.”
This is wrong in every way:
- You’re asking for payment before I’ve read anything
- After Stripe fees, you’re making 66 cents
- You’re literally saying “our content is worth less than a candy bar”
- You’re missing the chance to capture my email
What should they do? Free registration. Let me read 1-2 articles, then ask for my email (not money) to continue. Build the newsletter list. Send me great content. Convert me when I’m ready.
And never charge 99 cents. Ever. If you want a promo, do “3 months for the price of 1.” Give away time, not money.
The Newsletter Login Requirement
I tried to sign up for their newsletter. Clicked the newsletter button. Got a login screen.
To subscribe to the newsletter, I had to create an account first.
This is insane. Newsletter signup should be the easiest thing on your site—one email field, one button, done. They’re making it impossible.
For a 2.4 million person market, they should have 300,000-400,000 email subscribers. That’s a massive advertising asset. But they’re gating the top of the funnel.
Three Different Subscription Systems
This one blew my mind. They’re running three completely separate subscription platforms:
System 1: Digital subscriptions through one platform
System 2: Print + digital through FormStack (a completely different third-party site)
System 3: Archives through Newspapers.com (yet another third party)
So as a subscriber, I’m confused: Which subscription do I need? Why am I being redirected to FormStack? Has the site been hacked?
And operationally, this is a nightmare. Three logins. Three customer support systems. Three sets of credentials. Print subscribers can’t access digital because they’re in different systems.
This should be one subscription, one login, access to everything. The technology to integrate this stuff has existed for a decade.
Selling Their Archives for Pennies
They have 240 years of archived content. That’s gold—historical articles, photos, community memory.
What did they do with it? Gave it to Newspapers.com, which puts it behind another paywall on another platform and gives them pennies.
This is crazy. Bring your archives in-house, make them part of your subscription value, let people share them, use them for SEO, create “on this day in history” content. Your archives are a competitive moat that new publishers can’t replicate.
Ad Overload
The site is drowning in ads. Random national brands from Google’s ad network. Ads overlapping subscription buttons. Ads everywhere.
Here’s the thing: even publishers with millions of page views might make $10,000-30,000 a month from Google ads. A modest subscription program? $100,000-500,000 monthly.
You’re optimizing for the wrong revenue stream.
Clean up the site. Focus on local advertisers who’ll pay premium rates to reach engaged Pittsburgh readers. Build that email list to 300,000+ and sell newsletter sponsorships for $5,000-15,000 each. That’s real money.
No Event Calendar
Pittsburgh has 2.4 million people. Tons of events—concerts, festivals, sports, community stuff.
I challenge you to find their event calendar. Seriously, try.
Events are SEO gold. “Things to do in Pittsburgh this weekend” should drive thousands of visitors monthly. Plus events build habit—people check weekly, which creates more opportunities to convert them.
Modern AI can automatically aggregate events from Eventbrite, Facebook, venues, everywhere. Make it prominent, monetize it with premium listings and sponsorships, integrate it with your newsletter.
What This All Adds Up To
They treated visitors like enemies instead of potential customers.
Every decision—the ad blocker wall, the instant paywall, the gated newsletter signup, the ad overload—pushed people away instead of welcoming them in.
Meanwhile, the fragmented systems made everything harder for the people who did subscribe.
With better execution, they could have been generating:
- $14-28 million annually from subscriptions
- $1+ million from newsletter advertising
- $500K-1M from direct local advertising
- $100K-300K from event calendar monetization
All without the massive overhead of a multi-story building and daily print operations.
What You Should Do
Open an incognito browser. Visit your own site. Try to read an article.
Count the pop-ups and interruptions. If it’s more than one, you have work to do.
Try to subscribe to your newsletter. How many clicks? Do you need an account first?
Look at your subscription setup. How many different platforms or systems? Can readers access everything with one login?
Check your ad blocker experience. Are you blocking 40% of potential subscribers?
Calculate your revenue: How much from ads versus subscriptions? Which are you optimizing for?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had every advantage—240-year brand, market leadership, 2.4 million potential customers. They still failed because of fixable mistakes.
Don’t become the next cautionary tale.
This teardown is based on the Paywall Podcast episode analyzing the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette closure. For help fixing these issues on your site, visit paywallproject.com.
