How to drive paid memberships without a paywall
PLUS: How Sam Koslowski helped build The Daily Aus, a social first media outlet in Australia
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How to drive paid memberships without a paywall
Today’s question comes from Julie Rafferty:
Nonprofit hyperlocal news outlets are growing rapidly, particularly in well-to-do suburban locations. They are largely dependent on private philanthropy from individuals and volunteer labor. Ad revenue or sponsorships may be in the mix, but is a minor part of overall revenue. Because they are in relatively affluent communities, they aren’t attractive to foundations who want to concentrate on giving to efforts in less affluent locales. Nonprofit newsrooms are often digital and committed to at least keeping some/most of their content outside any paywall.
The challenge in this situation is convincing potential donors that the old, profitable, ad-based models are dead and that they need to view their local news outlet the way they view public radio/TV, museums, and even political organizations: as entities that exist for the “public and community good” that will always rely on charitable gifts to survive and thrive.
My questions are the following: how do we best message that to donors? How do we convince an organization like Press Forward to invest a sizable amount of their dollars in a national awareness campaign to educate the public to the need, value to democracy and financial realities of nonprofit news? And how do we convince donors that giving to their local nonprofit news outlet will help preserve democracy when everyone is so focused on national political news?
So I don’t think a lack of awareness of the local news crisis is the problem; the national media has actually done a pretty good job of documenting the decline of local news, and the average person on the street is probably at least vaguely cognizant that it’s a problem.
So, for me, I think the big challenge is to take this vague awareness that local news is in crisis and then tie that to the importance of supporting your local publication. As someone who’s interviewed a lot of local news entrepreneurs over the years, I have a few ideas for how you can do this:
Make direct references to “news deserts”
As I mentioned above, the neologism “news desert” has entered the popular lexicon, so it’s really just a matter of tying this threat to your own town or county. Wherever you are, you probably live in a location where the local legacy newspaper has either drastically shrunk or shuttered completely. In your membership calls-to-action, you should spell out, in detail, how much local news has diminished in your area. Make your readers understand what they’re in danger of losing.
Specify what their donations will fund
Too many media outlets use vague phrases like “fund our journalism.” That’s way too abstract. If you’re paying for a reporter to go to every single city council or school board meeting, then say that in your fundraising messaging. For example: “Your donation helps ensure we have a journalist in every government meeting where elected officials are making decisions that matter to you.”
Publish impact reports
If you’re doing your job as a journalistic institution, then you should be making some kind of impact on your community. Spell out that impact in your fundraising messages. The goal should always be to remind your audience what they will lose if the publication shuts down.
Hold pledge drives
So I think one of the biggest challenges for donor-funded outlets is that a large portion of the audience will learn to tune out the day-to-day calls to action that ask them to subscribe. That’s why I’m a big believer of the public-radio-style pledge drive. Basically, you pick one or two times a year where you try to annoy your audience into subscribing, even if it means temporarily creating a bad user experience. This causes procrastinators to come off the sidelines, and because it only takes place over a limited period of time, it doesn’t damage your brand or relationship with your readers.
So what does this mean in practice? Here are a few ideas:
Dedicated fundraising emails
Pop-up messages on the website
Messages at both the bottom and the top of your articles urging readers to subscribe
Lots of dedicated social media posts
Asking your audience to share your fundraising messages on their own social media channels
By the end of the pledge drive, every single one of your regular readers should have seen multiple pleas to join your membership program, and they should feel a bit of relief once the drive ends since they’ll no longer be inundated with so many messages.
***
Every year, the average person is hit with hundreds of requests to donate to various causes and nonprofits, and for the most part we learn to tune these messages out. Therefore, any successful membership program will rely on your ability to break through this noise and communicate the value you provide to your community. The thing to always remember is that people are extremely reluctant to pull out their credit cards and sign up for any recurring payment system; your job as a local news nonprofit is to overcome this reluctance and compel their support.
How Sam Koslowski helped build The Daily Aus, a social first media outlet in Australia
For most of Instagram’s existence, it wasn’t thought of as a platform for distributing news, but a growing number of media entrepreneurs have figured out ways to leverage its photo and video features to deliver engaging news digests.
One of those entrepreneurs is Sam Koslowski. Back in 2017, he and his co-founder launched The Daily Aus, a social first news outlet that’s grown its Instagram account to over 500,000 followers. As it ramped up its audience on the app, it began to diversify its content offerings across newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube.
In my interview with Sam, we discussed why Instagram was the ideal platform for launching the company, how it monetizes its content, and where he hopes to expand in the coming years.
Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:
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If you want to listen to an audio version of this interview, subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify] [Amazon Music]
I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast
One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.
In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:
Niche news sites
Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels
Podcasts
Newsletters
Affiliate/ecommerce
Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )
Quick hits
"Within the first 100 days of its launch, Sanity broke into Substack’s top-paid health-related newsletters — the only non-western name on their list ... 'Nobody in India, to my knowledge at that point, was running a newsletter that had paying subscribers that had attained any kind of scale.'" [Inbox Collective]
RIP TinyLetter. It's amazing that such a simple tool had such a large impact, paving the way for the newsletter resurgence. Tinyletter walked so Substack could run. [The Verge] Back in 2020, I wrote a piece titled “Tinyletter was one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.”
This is a fantastic profile of Janice Min, the CEO of The Ankler. It has some amazing quotes about what it was like to work at US Weekly in the height of the print era. [Creative Input] “At the time, we had to sell more than 550,000 newsstand copies to break even. After that, you’re making $1.89 per issue. So our biggest issues were selling like 1.3-1.4 million copies on the newsstand in addition to this massive subscriber base, I think of 14 million people."
A fascinating profile of the branding company that owns Sports Illustrated: "The licensing side of the SI business ... now accounts for more revenue than the media side and makes up around 5 percent of Authentic’s total business." [WashPo]
Yet another cable news castoff launches their own digital media company. I think it's telling that these folks are deciding to go independent rather than looking for new jobs in traditional media. [Zeteo]
More and more tech platforms keep figuring out that if you create monetary incentives for creators, they'll do everything in their power to help you grow. [Passionfruit]
I continue to be unimpressed with just about all news aggregation apps. People don't lack for news aggregation. These apps essentially try to solve a made-up problem, and they're competing with Apple News and Google News, which are embedded into the world's most popular mobile operating systems. [Techcrunch]
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Could you comment on the differences between the local North American press and the local European press (which has two differences: northern and southern Europe). It could be very interesting.
All of your advice on encouraging members for local news is good. But the best way to attract members is to seize on good reporting. Our breakthrough on Berkeleyside, a decade ago, was an email we sent after a weekend of amazing reporting during intense Black Lives Matter protests.
Here was how we opened that email: "Last night, Berkeleyside reporter Emilie Raguso spent ten hours straight on the ground reporting minute-to-minute on the riots that consumed downtown Berkeley. She didn't stop to eat or take a bathroom break. She was swatted at with a baton by a police officer, nearly hit by flying glass bottles, and was threatened by rioting activists."
Memberships flooded in. Since then, we've always grabbed the opportunity created by a great story to solicit memberships. That's what people want to support, much more than abstract notions of filling a news desert, in my experience. We also do three campaigns a year (spring, early fall, end of year) as well as monthly "timely topicals."
Between Berkeleyside and Oaklandside we have nearly 8,000 members now and last year that generated $960,000 (just the small-dollar donors).