How Taegan Goddard built a thriving paid membership for Political Wire
He already had a robust advertising business, but he wanted to foster a deeper connection with his audience.
Most publishers that launch some kind of paid subscription product do so out of economic necessity. Subscription models are born out of a media company’s recognition that the online advertising market, as it currently stands, is not sufficient in its ability to fund quality journalism, thereby requiring the company to rely directly on its readers to close the revenue gap.
Taegan Goddard, however, contends that Political Wire, the aggregation and analysis site he founded and runs, was perfectly sustainable when he rolled out his paid membership program a half decade ago, and that he only did so to provide a way for his most loyal readers to bypass the site’s ads. “I found with programmatic ads that the incentives that exist between the publisher, the reader, and the advertiser are broken,” he told me. “The great thing about print newspapers was that the publisher would have to make sure that they were servicing both the advertiser as well as the reader in order to keep the business intact. And what happened with programmatic advertising was all of a sudden the advertisers had no idea that their ads were even being placed on your website.”
By launching a membership program, Goddard was able to forge a more direct connection with a readership that he’d spent the better part of two decades growing. I recently spoke to him about his early monetization strategies and how he expanded into paid memberships.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Establishing an initial business model
We take the ease of web publishing for granted today. If you want to post your writing to the internet, it takes only a few minutes to launch an account on Medium or Substack. If you require a certain level of design customization and your own domain, then you can turn to services like Squarespace or Wordpress and pay just a few bucks a month for the privilege.
In 1999, Goddard didn’t have that luxury. Even though that was the year Ev Williams launched the first iteration of Blogger, most writers who wanted to publish their words to the internet still used basic website-building tools that were distinctly Web 1.0 in their publishing functionality. “I was using Microsoft FrontPage to actually publish,” he said. Then in 2000 he discovered Greymatter, an early blogging software. “You had to install it on your server yourself, and essentially what it did was create reverse chronological posts. As soon as I saw Greymatter, I was like, boom, this is exactly what Political Wire should be.”
Blogging back then was still novel, and so was the concept of a website entirely focused on politics. “Most newspapers didn't even have a political section,” he said. “When they put their stuff online, they pretty much followed the way the paper was laid out.” This meant the political content was spread out all over the place, and Political Wire’s singular focus spurred politics junkies from all over the country to congregate at his site. During every two-year election season his web traffic would surge and then stabilize at a much higher level after the November election.
It was the 2006 midterm elections that finally brought Goddard the mainstream attention that would transform Political Wire into a real business. That was the year the Democrats recaptured the House and Senate, and three well-known political analysts -- Chuck Todd, Stuart Rothenberg, and Charlie Cook -- approached him and asked if he would publish their election forecasts. “That's when I kind of realized that I had broken through,” he said. Shortly after that, a DC media company approached him with an offer to sell advertising on his site, and he accepted.
This was prior to the modern era of programmatic advertising, back when ad buys were still website-specific. Goddard’s early advertisers consisted of companies trying to reach government decision makers. “I called it the Meet the Press model,” Goddard said. “The commercials on Meet the Press weren’t advertising to consumers, because Lockheed Martin doesn't sell anything a consumer could buy, but they were advertising to political influentials who were watching the show.”
Once Goddard outsourced his advertising sales, he started generating serious revenue. “When I signed that deal, I actually also quit my day job.”
Paywall incoming…
The rest of this case study is behind a paywall, but if you aren’t ready to subscribe, you can also download it as an ebook over here.