What did Drift do when it ungated its content?
It removed the lead forms in front of its content and made all of it free to read. Dave Gerhardt, who led marketing at Drift, announced the change in a Drift blog post titled Why We're Throwing Out All Of Our Lead Forms And Making Content Free, first captured by the Internet Archive on 8 May 2016. The post gives no publication date. Drift's blog posts at drift.com now redirect to Salesloft's site, so this post and the Drift posts below are cited from archived copies.
Gerhardt describes a phone call from Drift's CEO, David Cancel, proposing to get rid of all the company's forms. What changed, in the post's own terms:
- No more gated content: no content upgrades and no downloadable guides.
- A recent eBook was opened up. A 36-page eBook that had required an email address became a PDF embedded in a blog post.
- Two forms stayed. One to join the email list, with a pop-up on the blog, and one to start using Drift. A later version of the post, archived in November 2016, adds that sign-up asked only for an email address.
The post was frank about the cost: "Maybe we're going to lose out on hundreds and thousands of email addresses and possible leads." Gerhardt called it a bet that building the brand, telling the story and making products people want would pay off in the long run.
Scott Brinker, who has written the marketing technology publication chiefmartec since 2008, covered the move there on 27 May 2016. Brinker noted that Drift still invited newsletter subscriptions and freemium sign-ups, that freemium only works for some businesses, and that the results remained to be seen. For companies without a free product, Brinker suggested a different measure of marketing: the number of prospects who ask for a conversation with sales.
What did Drift report after a year without forms?
Drift said it still generated leads, through chat instead of forms. Drift's recap, A Year Without Lead Forms: 5 Things We Learned Ungating Our Content by Erik Devaney (3 May 2017), listed what changed:
- Less content, treated as brand. Drift published one to two blog posts a week and treated content mainly as a branding tool rather than a lead tool.
- A free book. It self-published a book on Amazon and gave it away free in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats.
- Chat in place of forms. Its first LeadBot campaign, on the pricing page, asks visitors what brought them to check out Drift, and Drift said 63% of the people who click that message start a conversation with a sales rep.
- The newsletter form stayed. Drift said its newsletter sign-up form converted at 2.2%.
A second Drift post, Forms vs. Conversations by Ilya Mirman (12 September 2017), reported that chat conversations added 15% more leads to the top of the funnel and drove 50% of qualified demos and 50% of the opportunities from them. It put the average time from conversation to demo at 3 days.
Two cautions apply. These are company-reported numbers from a company that sold chat software, and they measure the chat that replaced the forms rather than the content on its own. Gerhardt later told Renegade founder and CEO Drew Neisser in May 2019 about panicking when the CEO first proposed it: "you hired me to generate leads and now you're going to take this away from me." In the same interview, Gerhardt said Drift used bots to capture leads instead of forms.
How does Exit Five use free content today?
Exit Five gives away its newsletter and podcast and charges for its community. Gerhardt, who had led marketing at Drift and been CMO at Privy, founded Exit Five as a community for B2B marketers. Circle, the community platform Exit Five moved to in 2022, tells the history in a customer story published 21 November 2025:
- Exit Five began as a Patreon page with behind-the-scenes content, private Q&As and job discussions, and later added a private Facebook group.
- By 2021 it had passed 2,000 members. In 2022 it moved to Circle, and more than half of the Patreon members did not migrate.
- Circle reports 6,000+ members and 43% year-over-year revenue growth. These are figures from a vendor's customer story, with no year given for the growth.
Exit Five's own site, checked on 20 October 2026, shows where the gates are now:
| Exit Five offer | Access | What the site says |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletter | Free, with every past issue open | Free and open to anyone; every past issue is archived and free to read; more than 40,000 subscribers |
| Podcast | Free on public platforms | Listed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and others |
| Live sessions | Registration to attend | Some sessions name a partner company, such as AirOps; replays are listed on the Live page |
| Exit Five Pro membership | $49 a month, or $37 a month billed annually ($444 a year) | Community, local chapters, 75+ templates, a swipe file and monthly training |
| Preview of the community | Not offered | The FAQ points to the newsletter, podcast and live sessions instead |
In our reading, the lesson for a small B2B team is the structure: the open newsletter archive and the podcast do the job a gated ebook used to do, a registration form remains for live events, and the paid community sits behind the last gate.
What do you give up when you remove a lead form?
Mostly contact details and an easy metric. Gerhardt's 2016 post accepted that Drift might lose email addresses, and Brinker pointed out that lead forms and nurture emails sit at the heart of many marketing operations and feed many of marketing's KPIs. Remove the form and you need another way to show the content works.
Drift and Exit Five both kept something in place of the gate:
- Drift kept an email list sign-up and a product sign-up, and moved lead capture to chat.
- Exit Five keeps a free newsletter sign-up and sells membership to the community.
A small B2B team may have neither chat nor a free product. That leaves Brinker's 2016 suggestion: count the prospects who ask to talk to sales. We would add one step: find out what they read first. In our view, a demo request that names your templates is a stronger signal than a download, because the buyer chose to ask.
Our own template pages are ungated. Each siela.in template page, such as the 18 cold email templates and the 30 LinkedIn connection request templates, can be read in full without a form. We have no results from that to report; the test below is how any team, ours included, can measure it.
How to run a 30-day ungated content test
Ungate one asset, keep everything else the same, and count how many demo requests mention it. A team of one to five can run this with the tools it already has. The steps are our suggestion.
Pick one asset and record a baseline
Choose one template set or guide that answers a question buyers ask before they buy. Before you change anything, write down the last 30 days: page visits, form fills, demo requests and how many of those requests mentioned any content.
Remove the form, keep an optional sign-up
Publish the full asset on the page. Put an optional newsletter sign-up at the end so readers who want more can still leave an email. Drift kept one after it dropped its forms, and Exit Five has one today.
Add one clear next step
End the page with one line and one link to your demo or booking page. Don't add pop-ups during the test; they change two things at once.
Ask what they read
Add an optional free-text question to your demo form or booking page: "Did you use any of our templates or guides before booking? Which one?" Ask the same question on the first call, and note the answer even if the form was blank.
Log every request
Fill in the request log below the same day each request arrives, and update the weekly summary every Friday.
Decide on day 30
Compare the 30 days with your baseline and pick one of the outcomes in the next section.
The tracking table for an ungated content test
Use two tables: a log with one row per demo request, and a weekly summary. The example row is made up to show the format.
| Date | Company | Answer to "what did you use?" (raw) | Mentions the asset? | Which part | Where the visit came from | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Example | Company A | Used two of your follow-up templates | Yes | Follow-up templates | Organic search | Demo booked |
| Week | Asset page visits | Visits from asset page to demo page | Demo requests | Requests that mention the asset | Newsletter sign-ups from the page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline (30 days before) | |||||
| Week 1 | |||||
| Week 2 | |||||
| Week 3 | |||||
| Week 4 |
On day 30, read the result with these rules of thumb (our advice, not a benchmark):
- Requests mention the asset: keep it ungated and ungate the next asset buyers ask about.
- Visits rose but nobody mentions it: the page is read but doesn't lead anywhere. Rewrite the next step before deciding.
- Visits and mentions are both flat: the gate wasn't the problem. Improve the asset or pick a different one.
- You miss the old contact list: keep the optional sign-up and judge it by what those subscribers do later.
A month with a handful of demo requests is only a weak signal, so run a second month before you change the rest of the site. For more ways to turn readers into meetings, see our guide on how to book more sales meetings.
Frequently asked questions
What is ungated content?
Ungated content is material anyone can read or download without filling in a form or giving an email address. Gated content sits behind a lead form, so the reader trades contact details for access. Drift ungated its content in 2016 and kept only an email list sign-up and a product sign-up form.
Did Drift remove every form from its website?
No. Drift's 2016 post dropped gated content and content upgrades but kept two forms: one to join its email list and one to start using Drift. A later version of the post added that sign-up asked only for an email address. A year later, Drift's recap said the newsletter form converted at 2.2%.
What replaced lead forms at Drift?
Chat and bots. Drift's 2017 posts said a bot on its pricing page asked visitors what brought them there, and that chat conversations added 15% more leads and drove half of its qualified demos. These are company-reported figures from a company that sold chat software, so treat them as Drift's own account.
Is Exit Five's content free?
Mostly. Exit Five's newsletter is free and open to anyone, every past issue can be read on its site, and the podcast is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Live sessions ask you to register. The community is paid: as of 20 October 2026, Exit Five Pro costs $49 a month or $37 a month billed annually, includes its 75+ templates, and has no free previews.
How do you measure ungated content without form fills?
Count the demo requests that mention it. Scott Brinker suggested in 2016 that companies without a free product could measure marketing by the number of prospects who ask for a conversation with sales. Add a free-text question about what buyers read before booking, ask again on the first call, and compare the count with the 30 days before.
Sources
- Drift blog (Dave Gerhardt): Why We're Throwing Out All Of Our Lead Forms And Making Content Free (Internet Archive) (archived 8 May 2016)
- chiefmartec (Scott Brinker): The radical NoMQL movement in content marketing (published 27 May 2016)
- Drift blog (Dave Gerhardt): later version of the same post (Internet Archive) (archived 24 Nov 2016)
- Drift blog (Erik Devaney): A Year Without Lead Forms (Internet Archive) (published 3 May 2017)
- Drift blog (Ilya Mirman): Forms vs. Conversations (Internet Archive) (published 12 Sep 2017)
- Communicate Online (Drew Neisser): Say Goodbye To Gated Content And Hello To Conversation (published 11 May 2019)
- Circle: How Exit Five built a thriving global marketing community on Circle (published 21 Nov 2025)
- Exit Five homepage (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Exit Five membership pricing (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Exit Five newsletter (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Exit Five podcast (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Exit Five Live (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Siela: B2B cold email templates (checked 20 Oct 2026)
- Siela: LinkedIn connection request templates (checked 20 Oct 2026)