How a B2B outlet that covers the corporate travel industry built up a loyal subscriber base

The Company Dime mostly eschewed sponsorship revenue and focused instead on delivering high-quality journalism.

Image licensed from Getty Images

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For most B2B media outlets, advertising plays a central role in how they generate revenue. Because corporate vendors have long sales cycles and charge high prices for their products, they’re often willing to pay top dollar to reach highly niche audiences within their industries. That’s why it’s not uncommon for B2B publishers to charge tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor a webinar that’s only attended by a few hundred people. 

But when David Jonas and Jay Campbell launched The Company Dime — a B2B media outlet that covers the corporate travel industry — in 2014, they decided to mostly eschew any business model that relied on sponsorships. “We’re trying to avoid getting into advertising and the other marketing models that typically generate media revenue,” they wrote early on. “We hope we won’t ever do ‘custom’ publishing. The biggest driver of revenue in the B2B media industry is events, but we don’t want to start a conference that requires sponsors in order to be economically feasible. We want to keep saying ‘No, thanks’ to industry players offering to invest in us.”

Given the size of the corporate travel industry — some estimates put it at $711 billion — that’s a lot of potential money left on the table. So how did they plan to generate revenue? Their thesis laid out on their “about” page is fairly straightforward: “What you see here is a simple, reader-funded service. We don’t have investors and are not looking to sell the company when it grows. It’s risky, but we’re betting the professionals we serve will reward us with continued self-employment.”

As Campbell explained to me, they launched The Company Dime without grand ambitions to sell it at a high price, partly because both had already succeeded at selling another B2B outlet they jointly owned. Instead, their only goal was to generate a full-time income while putting out high-quality journalism. 

For the most part, they’ve succeeded at reaching this goal. Though they take on the occasional research project or brand partner, The Company Dime reached the point in 2018 when it was generating enough subscription revenue to cover expenses and pay their salaries. “It was at that point when we said, you know what, we can do this with subscriptions alone,” Campbell told me. 

In a recent interview, he walked me through how he learned the corporate travel beat, why they stuck to a subscription model, and what lessons he carried over from his first stint as a media entrepreneur.

Let’s jump into my findings…

Learning the corporate travel beat

Campbell has been covering the corporate travel industry for about as long as he’s had a career.

It actually started when he was a college student at Boston University; he got a part-time job at Air Travel Journal, a newspaper that focused specifically on covering Logan International Airport. “It was started by an entrepreneur who was kind of a legend in Boston,” he recalled. “He created a couple of different trade publications around the travel industry in New England, including that airport paper.” It was distributed via newspaper stands around the airport and read by both the travelers and the people who worked there. “He would sell ads for both of those crowds.”

Learning that beat required Campbell to read lots of national trade publications, and after college he mailed out his resume to several of them. He ended up getting a job as an airlines reporter at Business Travel News, which was the leading publication at the time focused on the corporate travel industry. 

Who reads such a publication? Not the business travelers themselves. “Our core readers were the purchasing and HR managers who are in charge of those travel policies, budgets, and contracts. They're really administrative type folks rather than the end user travelers.” Collectively, this group controls a massive amount of spending. Campbell estimated that, on airlines alone, business travelers represent between 30 and 50% of customers, and they also tend to spend more per customer because their trips are often booked at the last minute. Or at least that was the reality prior to the pandemic. “Nowadays, that number is probably down to something like 25%, and that's something that the industry's really grappling with.”

After four years at Business Travel News, Campbell left to cover the same beat for a news wire service called Bridge News. While there, he started an email newsletter he sent out to his industry contacts. It eventually dawned on him that internet distribution would change the way that users consumed news. “There was something happening in business travel where a lot of the manual, telephone-based work was moving to the internet with sites like Travelocity and Expedia on the consumer side,” he explained. “Similar things were happening on the business side, and I just felt that so much change was underway. People needed information more quickly.” A print publication that was physically mailed out once every two weeks wouldn’t cut it, even if there was a website version as well. While this doesn’t seem very revelatory today, it was in the early 2000s, especially for reporters who’d adhered to print deadlines for their entire careers. “It was a fairly new idea to email the news as it happened rather than, say, daily or weekly.”

Launching his first media venture

Campbell eventually went back to work at Business Travel News, this time as its executive editor, but in 2004 he quit his job to launch The Beat, a five-times-weekly email newsletter focused on business travel technology. This was, of course, long before the rise of the modern Creator Economy; back then, most people didn’t have much experience buying stuff on the internet.

In fact, there weren’t many options for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs to collect online payments. I asked Campbell what made him think that a newsletter business was even viable given that they weren’t exactly common back then, but he pushed back on my question. “There was a long history of subscription newsletters. I remember receiving fax newsletters back in the nineties. Email was interesting in terms of the new delivery mechanism, but other than that, it wasn't that different from things that had been out there before.” As for how Campbell collected payments, he basically utilized a traditional invoicing system, one that involved him manually billing his clients. He doesn’t really remember which products he used, just that it was a gigantic headache that distracted from his reporting. 

Given that The Beat didn’t produce much in the way of free content, I asked Campbell how he built an audience. From what he remembers, it was mostly through word of mouth. Because most of his competitors were still operating on a print schedule, it was relatively easy for him to beat them to breaking news. “When there is a hot story, people tend to send it to each other, and so I really didn't focus that much on marketing,” he said. “There was a lot going on in the industry at the time, and I felt really on top of it because I was able to quickly produce scoops, and so there was always fresh news. So it really kind of took off.”

That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of headaches. He hated most of the administrative stuff, for instance, including everything that had to do with billing. And while email was a great content delivery mechanism, he grew frustrated by the freeloaders who were just sharing his newsletter with their entire office. Many of them even automated the process so that as soon as the newsletter hit their inbox it was immediately forwarded to their coworkers. 

So after only 18 months he decided to sell an equity stake in the company. In essence, he became one of five co-founders of a larger media brand that eventually spanned over four newsletters, a monthly print magazine, and an industry conference. 

At that point, Campbell removed himself from much of the day-to-day business operations so he could just focus on the journalism. “Things that I thought of as headaches were off my plate now,” he explained. Today, he recognizes that this was probably a mistake. “I was able to get rid of some of the more boring administrative stuff, but looking back, I kind of underappreciated the value of it. Getting paid is kind of an important aspect of all this.”

Nevertheless, the company continued humming along, gradually acquiring new titles and diversifying its revenue models into areas like sponsored webinars and custom research. But then the Great Recession hit and the business travel industry cratered. It was at that point that Campbell’s partners decided it was time to sell their company to Northstar Travel Group, a much larger corporation that offers information services, data, events, and marketing solutions to the travel industry.

They weren’t exactly selling at the top of the market, but Campbell was happy to accept the payout, especially because he was already plotting his next media venture. He submitted his resignation and began waiting out his one-year non-compete.

Avoiding past mistakes

That next media venture, of course, was The Company Dime, Launched in 2014, it covered most of the same topics as his previous employer, but Campbell made deliberate changes in the operations. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could have done better and the mistakes I made.”

For one, he wanted The Company Dime to remain extremely lean; in fact, his business partner David Jonas is still the only other full-time employee. I asked Campbell why Jonas appealed to him as a business partner. “David is more pragmatic than me, which is good because I tend to take risks. I want to be creative and start new things, and he provides a good balance.”

Secondly, Campbell wanted to stay hyper focused on monetizing The Company Dime through reader revenue. This partly had to do with maintaining the integrity of the site’s journalism, but it also played into his strengths as a journalist. “I don't know anything about selling sponsorships, and so we would need a salesperson in order to make that happen.” A subscription model, on the other hand, mostly required Campbell and Jonas to put out high-quality journalism every week – a task that both were confident they could accomplish.

With The Beat, Campbell had distributed his content mostly via newsletter, but he’d been frustrated by how often his subscribers simply forwarded the content to their non-paying coworkers. So with The Company Dime, they decided to stick with a more traditional paywall that would be accessed through the website. “Rather than emailing the entire story, our newsletter includes a headline, a blurb, and a link, and to read the full story they need to log in.” Instead of utilizing a metered paywall or freemium model, they simply just lock most of the content down for paying subscribers. “There are some exceptions to this,” said Campbell. “If we publish like an op-ed [from an outside contributor], we don't feel it's right to put that behind a paywall. It's better for the author to get as wide exposure as possible.” They’ll also occasionally place an article in front of the paywall if it doesn’t contain any exclusive reporting.

The Company Dime debuted in November 2014, and from there forward Campbell and Jonas kept their heads down and stayed focused on delivering value to their subscribers. Campbell couldn’t point to any specific marketing trick that drove subscriptions; instead, they just slowly grew their personal network and relied on traditional word-of-mouth to draw in subscribers. By 2018, they were generating enough revenue to declare their business model a success.

Navigating a post-pandemic world

At his previous company, Campbell witnessed firsthand how the Great Recession had pummeled the corporate travel industry, but that was nothing compared to the downturn triggered by the pandemic shutdowns.

Virtually overnight, nearly all kinds of long-distance travel plummeted, especially once countries began locking down their borders. I asked Campbell whether The Company Dime faced similar headwinds. “In 2020, we actually did better than ever with subscriptions,” he said. With the industry in freefall, many who worked within it wanted a reliable information source that could guide them through the catastrophe. “There was also a major controversy at our industry's largest professional association where our reporting exposed a leadership crisis, so that scandal boosted our subscriptions.”

It wasn’t until the next year that they felt the pandemic’s effect. “It turned out that actually the impact on our subscriptions was kind of a lagging indicator,” Campbell said. “In 2021, our growth slowed down to basically nothing.” While they were still gaining new subscribers, there weren’t enough to overcome the churn. It was only recently that net growth resumed.

Today, The Company Dime’s subscriber base consists of a mixture of both enterprise and individual accounts at about a 60/40 split. For its first decade, it charged $100 for an annual subscription, and in August they announced that they’re essentially doubling their prices. “I've run a bunch of models on retention, and it'll be interesting to see what happens.”

And as for what’s next?

Campbell didn’t rule out a potential exit in the future, which would likely involve selling The Company Dime to a larger media company. But for the most part, he’s content with simply staying the course. “David and I just really like practicing the craft of journalism in this sandbox that we built. It doesn't really get boring. And that's what's nice about being a small business owner is you have that control to take it where you want.”