Does premium journalism require a subscription model?
PLUS: The rise of the zombie media brands
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Does premium journalism require a subscription model?
Semafor’s Ben Smith sat down for an interview with Pirate Wires and was asked about why his outlet doesn’t have a subscription model:
So our own view is we just didn’t want to overcomplicate things at the start. We wanted to try to build as big a brand as we could without the paywall getting in the way. So we didn’t launch with subscriptions. The advertising business has been really strong, and the events are very strong, and we probably will, at some point, start charging, but I don’t see it as a matter of principle.
If you can reach a very influential audience at the top of different beats, then the advertising is really valuable… that’s a corner of the advertising industry that has resisted being swallowed by Meta and Google.
It’s probably worth noting that while Semafor is technically profitable, it has also raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. That gives it the flexibility to operate at a loss while funding new expansions, at least in the short term. Not every media outlet has that kind of financial backstop.
That being said, I do think Semafor has been savvy in figuring out how to make ad-supported journalism work. When it launched, it avoided a massive hiring spree and instead focused on staffing a handful of key content verticals with experienced reporters. It largely eschewed open programmatic advertising, creating a better brand experience while also preserving ad scarcity. And while ads appear across its website and podcasts, the online content mostly serves as a loss leader that attracts influential audiences to its invite-only events — a format where sponsors are willing to pay a premium and Semafor doesn’t have to compete directly with the tech giants that dominate digital advertising.
It’s a great model, but one that would be difficult to apply to general interest news outlets or publishers that aren’t explicitly focused on attracting Fortune 500 CEOs as their core audience. Most of them will need subscription models to help fund their journalism, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn something from Semafor’s scarcity approach to advertising. By embracing open programmatic, many publishers devalue their advertising inventory while simultaneously creating a bad user experience, which hurts their subscription efforts.
ICYMI: How a yoga teacher turned bedtime stories into a media empire
Kathryn Nicolai built Nothing Much Happens into the most popular sleep podcast.
That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.
Quick hits
The rise of AI chatbots has made book metadata — all the keywords and descriptions you plug into the backend on Amazon and other online booksellers — increasingly important. Readers are no longer relying on broad genre recommendations; they’re instead typing in extremely specific queries about plot and character to narrow down their book selections. [James Blatch]
This is pretty cool: YouTube is working on a feature that will allow publishers to integrate their paywalls into its platform. Right now if you want to place videos behind a paywall on YouTube, you have to get users to sign up via its native subscription tool, which means publishers with already-existing subscription offerings basically need to double charge their subscribers. [A Media Operator]
This is a great interview with a bilingual creator who creates shortform videos explaining the news for Latino audiences. [Nieman Lab]
Conde Nast has basically turned the women’s magazine Glamour into a shopping blog monetized with affiliate links. [NYT] It joins a long line of zombie media brands that continue getting milked for revenue long after their editorial operations get wound down. (BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)
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It doesn’t matter if you’re a YouTuber, podcaster, newsletter writer, or traditional news publisher — you’re going to find strategies here that you can incorporate into your own business.
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How a newspaper distributed through Whatsapp amassed 37,000 subscribers
When Sipho Kings and his co-founder Simon Allison launched The Continent in 2020, they wanted to rethink how journalism is distributed online. Instead of chasing search traffic and social algorithms, they created a weekly PDF newspaper designed specifically for smartphones and distributed it through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and email. The idea was to bring back the simplicity of a curated newspaper while adapting it to how people actually consume information today. Six years later, The Continent reaches tens of thousands of readers across Africa and around the world.
In a recent interview, Kings explained how the publication grew entirely through word of mouth, why its unusual PDF format created a deeper relationship with readers, and how it’s building a sustainable media business outside the traditional web ecosystem.
You can watch the interview on YouTube.
If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]