02 Sep Toward a Membership Economy
Major transformations and debates around business models for media usually play out over many years, but their essence can sometimes be
captured or crystallised in specific moments. This is how we like to think of the membership business model — once a fairly niche proposition pioneered by public radio and public broadcasters that gradually found its way into other news brands — as gaining a particular significance from about early 2021.
Allow us a quick recap to explain – for all the other troubles faced by the media industry after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, 2020 turned out to be a golden year for reader revenue. More people around the world started turning to trusted news brands for information and displayed a willingness to pay for subscriptions. Other global events like the U.S. presidential election also played a significant part. Established players saw significant spikes in subscriber numbers while newer outlets successfully launched paywalls during this period. As the year closed out though, a significant question started to loom – 2020 demonstrated that readers were willing to engage with a trusted news brand and even pay for news, but how could the value proposition be sustained as the big news stories started to fade into the rear view?
The discussion on subscriber retention that followed after the initial heady days (from reader revenue terms) of the pandemic now has many dimensions. Will people stop subscriptions to news organisations during a costof- living crisis? Do subscriptions and advertising revenue need to be combined effectively, without thinking that the former might replace the latter?
Do subscriptions to news have to be bundled with other products, as outlets like The New York Times have so effectively done? And finally, do news organisations need to fundamentally rethink the way in which they frame the idea of reader payments? Paywalls can be blunt force instruments that are not always the best fit for every news organisations. It is this context that membership models become important to consider. Yet, effectively framing the membership proposition is easier said than done.
Even now, it is not uncommon to hear memberships being referred to, or dismissed even, as “subscriptions by another name”. So how do you do it tight and could a membership model work for your news organisations as one if its revenue streams? We’ll try to answer those questions in this chapter by covering some fundamental definitions around membership and also looking in detail at some of the pioneering membership models in news organisations as well as some newer ones that have expanded on those concepts.
THE PUZZLE
There is no better place to start than The Membership Puzzle Project, a public research project founded by NYU professor Jay Rosen with Dutch news site De Correspondent back in 2017. The MPP worked over four years to collect and share knowledge and operational advice on how membership could help sustain independent media. At the time, according to Rosen, it had become increasingly evident that “that readers who value[d] a public service press [were] going to have to sustain it themselves — by contributing money, sharing knowledge and spreading the word.” According to the project’s practical and tactical guide to launching a membership program and establishing memberful routines, membership is the solution to journalism’s trust crisis and the collapse of outmoded business models.
The MPP created a database of news organisations employing different forms of membership and collected more than 160 names from around the world by 2020. Each media outlet in this list has a ‘mission statement’ that was essentially an offer behind the membership pitch, with a range of areas of commitment – from investigative journalism to helping to find fun on the Internet. The list included many well-recognized names, such as Charlotte Agenda, BuzzFeed News,
Columbia Journalism Review, Huff- Post, Intercept, the Guardian, Texas Tribune, and The Atlantic. Some news brands are known for their specific journalist services, such as PolitiFact, which focuses on political fact checking; Russian dissident Novaya Gazeta; and the German ‘constructive journalism’ Perspective Daily, which focuses on solutions. In late August 2021, the project hung up its boots. “The distinction between membership and subscription is now clearly understood,” Rosen said. “We now have strong member-driven newsrooms around the globe. They are doing it in many different ways — too many for one project to track.
There can’t be one center of gravity any longer.” Importantly, there is now a consensus that a member-centric approach can work at any news organisation, regardless of tax status, paywall, or location. The major takeaway from MPP’s extensive research, interviews and case studies over three years was that membership is not a silver bullet. Rosen said the group found that the model employed by De Correspondent — a “pure play,” in MPP parlance, in which operating costs are covered entirely by membership-generated revenue — didn’t emerge as a popular or particularly effective choice. Most sustainable news organisations instead have several sources of revenue, with memberships serving as just one stream alongside grants, large donors, advertising, and more.
With its global reach, the MPP also uncovered differences across geographies. Members-only benefits mattered less in the U.S. and Western Europe than other parts of the world, and in the U.S., sentiments like “I pay to keep news free for everyone” were more powerful motivators for members than exclusive perks or discounts. Some outlets wanted to serve people and communities who couldn’t necessarily afford to buy memberships or support their organisation financially. The MPP eventually began to distinguish between a membership program and “memberful routines” in which news organisation do similar engagement work with all audience members — not just those
willing to pay.
Most important, however, was the takeaway about the importance of empathetic, open listening. “Instead of just assuming what members want, successful membership organisations have developed ways of listening, fresh thinking about what their members actually want, and strong feedback loops to get it right,” the report concluded. “They frequently adopt more agile approaches than they may have used to in the past.”
SO WHAT IS MEMBERSHIP?
According to the MPP, membership is a “social contract between a news organisation and its members in which members give their time, money, energy, expertise, and connections to support a cause that they believe in.” In exchange, members are promised transparency and avenues to meaningfully contribute to both the sustainability and impact of the news organisation. Membership is not just a model, but an editorial orientation. Users are not merely sources of monetary support, but play an active role, allowing for a two-way knowledge exchange. The MPP sees the model as a tool to “identify […] strongest supporters and enlist them” in the organisation’s quest for impact. The key part of the puzzle, then, is the implied contract between the site and its members. “What do the members give? What do they get? What do journalists give? And what do journalists get? Refining that contract [and] discovering the contract that works is the real work of membership,” Rosen is quoted as saying in a Nieman Lab piece.
In other cases, membership is an agreement to keep access to journalism free for all. Many members don’t want a gate around the journalism they’re supporting. They are advocates for that journalism, and advocates have an interest in exposing as many people as possible to their cause. Most significantly, however, membership is far more than a mere financial transaction, offering individuals the opportunity to be a part of a cause in alignment with their personal values, and be a part of a “community.”
SUBSCRIPTIONS vs MEMBERSHIPS
In a Medium piece, Styli Charalambous, CEO of Daily Maverick, a South African news outlet that runs a flagship membership program, implores
an imagination of membership as occupying the centre on a reader revenue scale, with “donations hugging the hippie left and subscriptions the capitalist right.” While donations do not come with the expectation of anything in return for their contributions, paywalls offer value with access to particular content. Membership, on the other hand, “implies an exchange of value beyond a transactional gateway to content”, carrying with it the potential to be the most rewarding of all models. Importantly, members expect to be able to engage with the organisation.
In a subscription model, the MPP outlines, audience members pay for access to a product or service. A transactional relationship in which access to the content is monetized, this model typically requires a paywall of some kind. Importantly, subscription can scale much more quickly than membership because it doesn’t require engagement or a deeper relationship with readers. What it does require is exceptionally consistent, high-quality, highly differentiated journalism – and a good user experience. As Stratechery founder Ben Thompson so succinctly put it, a subscriber wasn’t paying for any one article, but “for the regular delivery of well-defined value.”Subscription works well for publications with strong institutional audiences in specific industries or that offer content that provides a strong professional benefit, as can be seen from the success stories of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Ken, and The Information. Additionally, the model may work in cases of highly specialised, niche journalism, like The Ken. The Indian startup chose the model because they expected that their future readers would be people who could afford a subscription and would see their journalism as professionally useful, and did not feel the need to offer additional benefits for users to find value or participate in.
MEMBERSHIP vs DONATIONS
The line between donations and membership is fuzzier than the line between subscription and membership. Donations and membership are both cause-driven, and many of these newsrooms use the language of member and donor interchangeably. The MPP makes the distinction between membership and donation clear.
In a donation model, audience members give their time or money in support of a common cause or common values in a charitable relationship. For publications with a coverage focus that can be strongly framed as a public good, a donation model works well. If a coverage area is hard to build habit or community around – such as an organization devoted exclusively to investigative journalism that publishes irregularly or one that publishes primarily through partners – a donation model can also work well.
What is different in a membership model as opposed to a donation model is the expectation of what a supporter gets in exchange. When trying to decide between the two, the MPP recommends that media outlets consider what level of editorial autonomy they would need from the audience in order to fulfil their mission and what level of participation they are willing to offer. Members expect to be able to engage with the organisation (but not interfere – a critical distinction). Publications such as ProPublica and Mother Jones are strong examples of a donations model.
LOOKING FURTHER BACK
It must be noted however, that the MPP was not the first entity to discuss the potential of memberships as a business model. Digiday reported back in 2014 of how publishers were experimenting with “something more akin to the public radio model: more inclusive membership experiences for its mostavid readers.” This was inevitable in a time of shrinking ad revenues and pressures to diversify revenue streams. The article also reported that followers of the model –from the National Journal, The Guardian and tech blog Pando — claimed that memberships were more than mere subscriptions; they could both have monetary advantages and help grow more engaged audiences.
“Memberships are a fundamentally better way for us to serve our audience. We can start a dialogue with our audience and ask them what’s keeping
them awake at night and give them solutions,” the article quoted Poppy MacDonald, publisher and co-president of National Journal as saying.
However, the piece also brought to readers’ notice the fact that the membership model wouldn’t necessarily work equally successfully in every organisation. The most effective memberships, they believed, were those based off niche coverage areas like tech or politics, which not every publisher could cater to, explaining why it work less for general interest publications. It all boiled down to identifying the audience. “I think there are many organisations trying to slap on memberships, but if you’re trying to help people do their jobs, it’s hard to pull that off if you don’t know who the audience is that you’re serving,” MacDonald was quoted as saying. Most importantly, the only way publishers could create loyal and lasting relationships, then Guardian deputy chief executive David Pemsel said, was “by having a brand people trust and respect.”
BLURRED BOUNDARIES…
As researcher Eduardo Suárez reports in a 2020 Reuters Institute paper, “How to build a successful subscription news business: lessons from Britain and Spain”, the difference between membership and subscription models is more blurred than ever before. He writes, “some news organisations with a membership model run very hard paywalls while newspapers with subscriptions allow sampling opportunities through free trials, social and search.” What emerges from this is that the most successful news outlets are not married to a single model. “The tweak them according to the behaviour of their audience and experiment with bundles and revenue streams,” he adds. Additionally, the three main audience revenue and engagement models – membership, subscription, and donations – are not mutually exclusive. Blended models are increasingly common:
The Guardian is a membershipbased news organisation, but also accepts donations, and offers several product-specific subscriptions; Seattle Times is both subscription-based and donations-supported; and Pro- Publica operates as a donations-based model with a high level of audience engagement that make donors feel more like members.
Although membership and subscriptions are distinct propositions with subscriptions tending to be purely transactional, for some newsrooms the distinction is less clear cut. U.S.- based business publisher Quartz told Press Gazette that it does not “think of a sharp binary distinction between subscription and membership”. For the publisher, it’s instead “more like a spectrum”, with both propositions putting readers at the centre of the business model. Size is a factor too; larger operations such as The Guardian rely less on personal interactions with members to shape reporting (with membership offering a shared purpose or identity instead) when compared with smaller outlets such as The Bristol Cable which is run as a members’ cooperative.
PIONEERING MEMBERSHIP MODELS
THE GUARDIAN
In 2016, The Guardian was losing tens of millions of pounds annually and its future looked uncertain, with its main benefactor projected to run out of money within the decade. While the 200-year-old newspaper had made substantial audience gains and even won a Pulitzer in 2014, that success wasn’t translating into more revenue. That year, the Guardian put out a call to its readers for voluntary contributions. At a time in which publishers were putting up expensive paywalls, its decision to make payment voluntary was controversial, even bold.
But it worked. But by the end of 2017, The Guardian had grown from 12,000 paying members the previous year to over 300,000. By 2019, it broke even, and in 2021 it announced it had reached 1 million members. In 2021, the newspaper reported that it “has recorded its strongest financial results since 2008” and that “annual revenues at Guardian Media Group grew by 13% to £255.8m.” The publisher announced it had a record 961,00 digital supporters including 560,000 contributors, a 24% increase year-on-year (the other 401,000 are digital subscribers).
This remarkable turnaround was driven by the creation of a large community and cause around its reporting. “There was a belief that people would never pay for what they could get for free but in a world filled with political demagogues and algorithmically enhanced junk news, Guardian readers understood the value of keeping trusted, reliable information and progressive perspectives freely available around the world,” said Mark Rice-Oxley, executive editor of reader revenues at the Guardian in a Press Gazette article. “The move chimed with our general approach of wanting readers to be part of our community: we are constantly inviting them to contribute to our stories, to comment on them, to share them and to write to us if they find them lacking,” he said. Importantly, the membership value proposition was about a sense of identity.
While contributors (the Guardian is no longer actively promoting what it terms “membership”) bring in a considerable part of the Guardian’s income, the publisher also raises money through digital subscriptions, advertising and philanthropic funding. Reader revenues however account for more than half of the Guardian’s incomings.
What factors drove its success? Tech and media journalist Simon Owens broke them down for a piece in his newsletter, which we reproduce here in our own words.
A running “articles read” metre
In its call to action to donate, The Guardian informs the reader of how many articles he or she has consumed. The article metre serves as a gentle, prodding reminder that the reader actually is receiving value from the outlet. Owens believes that the higher the metre gets, the more obligated the person feels to finally take out their wallet and donate
Mission-driven guilt messaging
How do readers feel inspired to pay in the absence of a paywall? The Guardian does it by convincing them of their importance in continuing to let journalism be available for all through its messaging. It also completely jettisons any claims to balanced and “neutral” reporting, taking stances instead and reflecting its progressive leanings. The strategy, coupled with its decision to invest heavily in its American newsroom, has resulted in what Owens believes has been strong donor growth outside the UK. The U.S., for instance,
accounted for over half its donations in response to the publisher’s editorial stance on climate change, environmental issues, and other subjects it believed were undercovered.
Its soft registration wall Several outlets have launched registration walls that require users to create an account before they can access free content, making it more difficult for
readers to avoid paywalls, and forcing casual readers to turn over their email address, allowing the publisher to better track their interests. This allows them to collect first party data that can be leveraged in ad targeting. The process makes for a poor user experience, especially time consuming for those who may want access to a single
article alone, probably leading them to abandon the attempt altogether. The Guardian, however, has an “I’ll do it later” button, which closes the registration
window and allows the reader to consume the article unhindered, likely driving down the number of people who close the browser when prompted
for details.
Its quasi non-profit status
Audiences aren’t particularly keen to give money to VC-funded entities. The Guardian’s quasi non-profit status, then, comes in handy, making it easier for readers to be comfortable with the idea of turning over their credit card information despite a lack of paywalled content. Owen writes of how one can see this framing in the publisher’s calls
to action messaging at the bottom of its articles: “Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence.”
Unhindered advertising inventory
The Guardian’s lack of paywall has allowed it to have its cake and eat it too. It was able to benefit from the postpandemic boost in advertising revenue while simultaneously continuing to grow its paid membership.
Allowing for both subscriptions and single donations
The Guardian’s lack of a paywall allows it flexibility in how it solicits donations. Users can choose to make a single, annual, monthly or fixed amount donation.
Not only do one-off donations drive a significant portion of The Guardian’s reader revenue, but these donations also place the reader in its newsletter funnel, allowing the publisher to focus on converting one-off donors into recurring members.
Fostering transparency and a sense of belonging
The above factors are in alignment with what Mark Rice-Oxley believes has been key to The Guardian’s membership model’s success. For him, the publication’s transparency is crucial. “It’s become clear to us over the years that our independence, our openness and the fact that we have no billionaire owner are key motivations for our readers, so these elements are now at the heart of our offer,” he says.
But also of note is how the publisher listens to readers, crucial to making them contribute. The outlet writes to supporters every week and fields their replies, thoughts, suggestions and complaints, and they receive annual updates detailing the journalistic high points that their money has funded.
Finally, members must feel like they are a part of the community, that they belong. Oxley details the strategies to ensure they feel this sense of identity to the publisher. “ … have put on special supporter events to give them an inside track of what’s going on in the newsroom – many supporters love to understand a bit more about how an investigation is executed, or what happened the day after Boris Johnson announced the UK lockdown,” he says.
In short, The Guardian created a better user experience, offered more options to its readers, and sharpened its editorial mission. It put its readers first and then found great ways to generate revenue by engendering goodwill from those readers.
EL DIARIO
In 2012, Ignacio Escolar launched El Diario (The Daily), an online-only newspaper with nine staffers featuring a fee-based model that allowed readers to pay whatever they want to access the digital content — even if that meant paying nothing.
The key element of El Diaro’s business model is a membership programme centred around the notion of community, bringing together citizens sharing values like equality, democratisation, social justice and the need for free independent journalism. They refer to users as their “partners in crime,” together making independent journalism
possible.
El Diario especially prides itself on being a pioneer of high-quality content and “a major reference in current affairs for a new generation of Spanish readers.” Launched in the middle of the financial crisis with no big investors or corporates backing it, the publication quickly attracted mainstream audiences despite its scarce resources. Members
could pay €8 monthly (around $8.5) or €80 annually (around $85) or set a higher fee voluntarily. The site uses metered paywall technology to help nudge loyal audiences to become a supporter, for example, by sending a membership pop-up once a reader has consumed more than ten articles for free in a month. The message, which has undergone A/B testing, says: “You like our journalism and it needs you.”
From that point, a reader has to become a member to access more articles. In December 2020, editor Escolar announced a new feature: “[W]e will leave the door open for all those who cannot pay (…) We’re not going to control readers who say they can’t afford to spend $8 a month. We are not going to check if they are really unemployed (…) We trust our community[.]”
Despite offering a free option, paid-for memberships have continued to grow, again thanks to a “more emotional than transactional” relationship with audiences. “I think our loyal readers and those who become members are sympathetic to our model. They know this is not about sales and that we need the full amount, if possible,” said Esther Alonso, marketing and development director a elDiario.es in a Reuters Institute piece. “With membership rather than subscriptions you can have a different conversation with your audience.”
Also, testing a more inclusive membership option for loyal readers is both a statement of intent from elDiario. es and gives its reader-funded model future flexibility: the site can use these options to retain existing members who might need to leave in the future because of a change in economic circumstances. Overall, the model has proved profitable. The publisher recorded revenues of €9.7 million in 2020. The next year, readers spent about €6 ($7) a month in 2021 for total sales of €4.5 million ($5.15 million) — more than
double its revenue in 2019. More than half (53%) of Eldiario’s revenue came from ad sales. That year, El Diario proved to be not only economically independent but also sustainable.
The company’s revenue, which came equally from advertising and membership fees, witnessed a steady rise since it was launched. More than five million unique users per month read eldiario.es as of 2021, representing more than 30% of the publisher’s annual income.
The brand’s audience has also consistently climbed since 2012; according to the Reuters Institute, El Diario is the most read native digital newspaper in Spain. As of July 2021, El Diario had 11.5 million unique users, and more than 61,000 members. El Diario aims to be fully open with their members about their contributions. It biannually publishes financial accounts, a good practice that helped with audience perception of the publisher as a trusted, reliable, and transparent organisation.
Zero-fee option
The key business innovation is the membership program, in which more than 20.000 people (“socios”) provide financial support to eldiario.es in order to strengthen its editorial and economic independence. The “socios” of eldiario.es do not “pay us to read the news; they pay us to support our journalism to build a better and more democratic society,” said Esther Alonso,
El Diario’s Marketing and Membership Programme Director. El Diario’s membership model guarantees its employees economic and editorial independence, all the while
keeping the reader at its centre and prioritising those who cannot afford to pay. El Diario’s membership plan allows ten free monthly articles after which readers must register with either of the two plans on offer. The annual plan is priced at €80 and the monthly one at €8. Both plans offer a host of advantages such as access to all content, ad-free browsing, newsletters, a community building experience, meetings, and discounts and promotions.
68% of readers opt in for the annual plan, which proves beneficial for the company from a financial standpoint, but also in formulating retention and loyalty strategies.
A new addition to the company’s membership offering was launched in December 2020, to cater to those who could not afford to pay. Readers simply need to fill a form where they can choose the membership amount as zero and support their request with a reason.
Covid-led strategy
When COVID hit in March 2020, the company, for the first time in nine years, hiked its membership fee by 33%. This move was well received by the audience and 99% of the existing members accepted the increase. The company also managed to gather 20,000 new members, taking the total count to 61,000 paying members and 212,000 registered users.
Retention and churn
As a part of its retention strategy, the publisher focuses on three core areas – technology, strategising reader loyalty, and having a strong email marketing plan in place. In addition to membership plans detailed previously, readers can also choose to be “Ambassadors” and pay a higher amount as an extended show of support. Among ambassadors, some even pay an added amount to support a local edition of their choice in a bid to boost hyperlocal and regional expansion.
“We are proud of being transparent with our readers and share an emotional relationship with them, rather than a transactional one,” Alonso said at the Digital Media conference.
As of September 2021, the company had 3,000 members who opted for a reduced fee and 15,700 members who chose not to pay. El Diario also boasted a loyal member base with a low churn rate that oscillated between 0.8 % and 2%.
Building your Own Tools:
El Diario’s BrainHub
In 2017, the publication realised it needed new technology, and decided to build its own system, Brainhub, to connect users across its website, its payment systems, and its email service provider using funding from Google News Initiatives.
The system is a database of all El Diario’s members, and it gives it realtime information on membership data, including daily new sign-ups, cancellations and the reasons why members cancel. It also tracks renewal failures and a stat the site calls “change of mind,” which is people who have previously asked to cancel their membership but changed their mind. Pop-up banners and membership marketing campaigns are also run through the system.
DE CORRESPONDENT
In third place is Netherlands’ De Correspondent. The outlet, which unusually is completely membersupported, currently has 71,000 members. The title has been memberdriven
from the outset having launched through a €1 million crowdfunding campaign in 2013 which brought in 18,000 members.
De Correspondent built a memberfinanced newsroom from the ground up. Starting with an idea similar to membership in 2013, even before it was called so in relation to the Guardian, the ad-shunning publisher managed to raise $1.7 million before its site had even published its first article. The success factors included the well-known names of its co-founders, prominent Dutch journalists, a well-managed campaign and a well-received journalism manifesto:
“We cover stories that tend to escape the mainstream media radar because they don’t fit neatly into the drama of the 24-hour news cycle. De Correspondent provides an antidote to the daily news grind – shifting the focus from the sensational to the foundational and from the attentiongrabbing headline to the constructive insight. We refuse to speculate about the latest scare or breaking story, but work instead to uncover the underlying forces that shape our world.”
Founder and co-editor Ron Wijnberg wrote of how a sustainable future for journalism was rooted in membership, and explained the key pillars of the model: “We adhere to a different definition of news. Instead of telling you what happened today, we cover what happens every day, shifting the focus from the sensational to the foundational “We reject the misleading ideal of “objectivity.” Instead of pretending to be “neutral” or “unbiased,” we level with you about where we’re coming from, in the belief that transparency about point-of-view is better than claiming to have none.
“We don’t just cover what’s wrong with the world. Instead of merely reporting on the problems we face, we try to find out what can be done about them as well, telling stories in a way that might get things moving in a different direction.
“We don’t see our readers as a “target audience.” Instead of regarding readers as passive consumers of information, we see readers as potential sources of expertise, who can enrich our journalism by actively sharing their knowledge and experiences.
“We’re built on a different business model. Instead of selling subscriptions or ads, we’re an ad-free platform funded by members, who don’t pay us to gain “access” to a “product,” but who become paying members because they believe in our cause.”
In short, articles needed to reflect correspondents’ unique vantage points and offer members new ways of understanding contemporary problems, often including their expertise. Strategically, this combination helped De Correspondent focus on member retention (as opposed to acquiring new members). In 2019, 95% of De Correspondent’s revenue came from readers. The remainder came from book sales and donations.
Membership costs
So how much was the price of a membership? It depended on the member. The publisher bid goodbye to the traditional subscription model with its fixed price, believing members to be in a better position to decide what journalism should cost them. The publisher chose a “Choose What You Pay” model, anchored by the principles of trust, inclusivity, and solidarity: they trusted members to pay a fair price in accordance with their capabilities; they believed journalism was a public good that had to be inclusive
and affordable; and they believed that those who could afford a little more would help keep their journalism accessible to those on a tighter budget.
Based on insights from surveys and interviews, the publisher discovered that many members would be open to and feel validated in paying more for De Correspondent’s journalism. The publisher made it actionable by setting up a new foundation to make it easy for individuals and institutions to donate beyond the annual membership fee. When staff shared the idea of creating this new Correspondent Foundation with members, they did so by inviting members to “think along” with staff about the shape such an organisation might take and even encouraged members to consider applying for a volunteer position at the nascent foundation.
Members front and centre
De Correspondent Managing Editor Maaike Goslinga and Conversation Editor Gwen Martèl told the research team at MPP: “The most important lesson throughout the years to build a membership- focused newsroom is: don’t consider members as an afterthought, but include them in your daily thinking.”
Editorially, this entails taking the suggestions of members seriously and increasingly responding to member requests for specific information. Initiatives that kept De Correspondent member-centred were highly grounded in listening to members and reporting insights to colleagues. The organisation spoke directly to individual members whenever possible, and members were the first to know when there was important organizational news, including new features and correspondents via daily newsletters.
Members were also regularly thanked in that newsletter for their support and contribution to De Correspondent’s journalism, and were encouraged to respond with their feedback. The publisher also sent out digital surveys to members regularly about their experiences (with questions requesting reactions to editorial style and what changes they would want to see on the platform).
Efforts to build a member-focused culture from inside the newsroom included transforming lessons learned about member participation into new features for a “member rolodex” and the wider platform, and helping correspondents enrich their reporting by harvesting members’ knowledge and experiences.
The publisher also sought to improve conversations with members, and their experiences by bringing more diverse voices to the on-platform comments section, inviting members to take part in discussions they’re knowledgeable about, and organising dissent. De Correspondent even added a full time conversation editor whose job it is to enrich the site’s journalism with the knowledge and experience of members (including ensuring that the online comments section was an open and safe space).
MODERN MEMBERSHIP MODELS
HOW COVID-19 KICKSTARTED BUSINESS: TORTOISE MEDIA
The ‘slow news’ outfit Tortoise Media, which had launched in 2019 with crowdfunding of £710,000, grew its paid-for members by about 50% in 2020. In 2021, the outlet had more than 80,000 people signed up – of whom about a third were under 30. Over 60% were paid-for members (nearly 50,000), and the rest had registered for the free daily Sensemaker email or taken on a free trial.
Membership ranges from £80 (full price) to £50 for a team member with other packages for businesses and free subscriptions for students. A number of its members joined through special offers as part of its early fundraiser, including a five-year digital membership for anyone under 30 who pledged at least £50. In the summer of 2019, the outfit even launched an inclusive scheme through which businesses could fund memberships to be distributed by charitable organisations and groups to fill Tortoise’s demographic gaps, such as those outside London, teenagers, the elderly, and the working class. Covid-19, however, changed the way the publisher did things. Prior to 2020, Tortoise did not make any of its content available for free, but since then it has decided to open up slightly, for example with the email newsletter, similarly to the Financial Times and New York Times.
Tortoise relied heavily on in-person events, especially its Thinkins, live, unscripted conversations with members, editors and guests on particular topics, which were often sponsored by business partners and attended by close to 500 people. Katie Vanneck-Smith, cofounder and publisher of London-based Tortoise told MPP that the events were akin to “part lecture, part dinner party and part Alcoholics Anonymous meetings”, but built around an organised system of listening. She called it a “reimagining [of] the structural processes” of journalism, adding that these events were hosted “to go deeper into subjects that we’re interested in investigating and reporting out.” From 2018 until the onset of the pandemic, Tortoise hosted 334 ThinkIns in-person. When Covid struck, however, the business lost all its non-subscriptions revenue in the absence of physical congregations. Like most other businesses affected by the pandemic, things quickly moved to the virtual realm. Tortoise pivoted to running a full schedule of live Thinkins online, allowing the brand to reach a much wider range of people across the UK and internationally, allowing many newer, diverse voices to be heard. A whopping 10,000 people attended the online events in total.
Speaking at a webinar for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2021, then Co-founder and Editor-in- Chief James Harding believed it a boon, in fact kickstarting their business model and journalistic work. “We are able to do things that have frankly a better calibre and range of people, gaining more diversity of people joining – geographical as well as everything else,” he said. So actually we found that the year just took off.”
Attracting younger members
Tortoise’s impressive figures with respect to its consuming demographic with 30% below the age of 30) are a result of a strategic move towards audio.
The outfit launched a daily podcast The Sensemaker with one story billed as helping listeners make sense of the world. It sits alongside the daily Sensemaker email newsletter. As of 2021, the podcast was seeing 120,000 downloads a week.
Story selection, however, has also been key to attracting and retaining users. Acknowledging the fact that a big audience is hungry for a “a different kind of news”, Harding described Tortoise’s choice to focus on its “big five” topics – technology, natural resources, identity, finance and longevity as having “made a massive difference” to the way people view the organisation.
ILL POST ITALY
The membership model, based on the donation program of the Guardian in the UK and the membership model of elDiario.es in Spain, came to the rescue of Italian publication Il Post, which cost €500,000 in 2018 when digital advertising plummeted. Membership was an immediate hit and totalled 15,000 by the end of 2020, with members contributing significantly to revenue at about $95 a year or $9.50 a month. By the end of 2020, the publication had 50,000 members, had doubled its journalist staff, and was no longer in danger of bankruptcy. Over 2021, revenue grew 76%, and the publication ended the year with a surplus of €659,000.
Like in the case of Tortoise Media, Covid-19 was a key contributor to growth. Il Post’s free daily newsletter on the pandemic, which adopted a balanced, data-driven approach solved for the needs of Italian consumers craving reliable information about the pandemic at a time in which traditional organisations, keen to keep up traffic and increase ad revenue, provided conflicting and sensationalist information. The goal of Il Post has been, and was during the pandemic, to provide a clear explanation of happenings, with articles published without bylines so readers would focus only on the facts.
In yet another similarity with Tortoise, audio helped drive membership growth. Il Post’s popular daily podcast, Morning, was made available only to
paying members. Paying members joined to listen mainly to the deputy editor Francesco Costa, who is renowned for his incisive commentary
on politics and culture.
Il Post’s value proposition is clear: it aims to provide readers with trustworthy, relevant information, especially valuable in a media landscape inundated with misleading and often trivial news. This is what it has in common with publications like Mediapart in France, which offers investigative journalism behind a paywall, and elDiario.es in Spain, which as we previously described, is committed to providing independent
news with a freemium model of membership.
At the very core of all operations, however, is a relationship with readers. Founder Luca Sofri reiterated its significance in an interview with Press
Gazette, telling media organisations to work towards “making your readers understand that they’re important and they’re collaborating with what
you’re doing.” A respect for readers’ knowledge is also fundamental. “Sometimes with Italian media, you have the impression that the journalists are writing… for someone who doesn’t understand the themes very well,” he said. “They wouldn’t say the same thing if they were with their friends.”
EDITORIAL PARTICIPATION: WYBORCZA CLUB
Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland’s leading daily newspapers, boasted 280,000 digital subscribers as of early 2022, propelling the publisher into the rarified ‘100K Club’, ahead of Canada’s Globe and Mail (200k) and Boston Globe (225k). The Polish outlet’s uptick in subscribers is in no small part due to
its membership model, part of which was the Wyborcza.pl Club launched in The Club, premium-priced at PLN 49.90/USD $12.50 month, allows direct
contact with the newspaper’s editorial team including participation in online meetings.
The underlying principle was that of community, and value that exceeded mere published articles. Bartosz Wieliński, deputy editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza told WNIP that the model provided “a strong bond and a sense of belonging to a community of like-minded people who believe in democracy, human rights, tolerance and the European Union.” It also brought together people interested in and curious about various other more general things – books, movies, and other parts of the world. Readers discussed topics of common interest on the newspaper’s forum, wrote letters, and even came to meetings. The club’s live meetings have attracted anywhere between 300 and 1,500 people, with many more watching retrospectively ‘on demand’. This is augmented by special video chats with Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza as well as a special newsletter, from which readers can find out, among other things, what has been argued recently in the editorial office and what is planned for the following week.
Another feature of the Club package is the opportunity to pass on two additional subscriptions to friends or relatives. It is Club’s most used feature, taken up by nearly 70% of Club members. While direct communication with members does mean additional responsibilities for the editorial team, staffers have found it a gratifying exercise. The idea itself came out of detailed research across their entire readership, which showed that loyal subscribers felt the need to share opinions and influence the activities of the newspaper. It also exemplifies what Leon Fryszer, publisher at Krautreporter, was quoted as saying in a report for the MPP. “If people are paying for your journalism, you have
to basically make them feel like you’re doing it for them – and you have to really listen closely or [you won’t be able to retain them] and then you don’t have a business.”
Direct engagement with both the editorial team and the brand is critical, according to Dorota Adamczyk, Chief Digital Revenue officer. “Being a Wyborcza Club member should be a distinctive experience from being a part of the subscriber community, especially if our business offers both possibilities,” she said. The value proposition offered by the club to the team should be exclusive, while remaining affordable.
“No comparative advantage”: Challenges of the membership model
Leon Fryszer, chief executive of the German site Krautreporter, modelled after De Correspondent, admits to having taken a hit in the recent past. Speaking at the International
Journalism Festival in Perugia in April 2023, he indicated that membership was challenged by a range of factors, some mimicking those faced by traditional subscription models. A widespread sense of fatigue with news, the rising cost of living, and a questioning of the value of news and memberships are all factors likely to affect membership. Additionally, a larger push towards subscriptions and forms of membership from more traditional publishers are bound to have implications on the revenue model.
Lea Korsgaard, editor-in-chief of the Danish site Zetland, which also relies on members for revenue, believes in investing more in journalism to reinforce its role and importance in the world. “You have to constantly retell the story, why are you here, what is the problem in the world that you are trying to fix,” journalism so far had failed at it.
Importantly, membership as a model had lost its comparative advantage, according to the panellists. While it initially catered to – and attracted – readers tired of sensationalist news and clickbait-y headlines and seeking credible sources of information, it was now having to compete with other publishers offering the same advantages, leading to everyone chasing after new and potential consumers.
So, what is a possible solution? Krautreporter plans to consider additional revenue streams and methods to reach audiences, hopeful to convert them to loyal members, especially as a general rather than local or specialist publication. It has had success in the past with retention after losing a significant percentage of their members. MPP documents how it improved retention after their second year: it refined its value proposition so there was less of a chance of new members cancelling because of misplaced expectations; it introduced a paywall and a benefit that allowed members to share their membership with others; it studied the link between survey participation and retention; and it made annual payments the default membership option and implemented small nudges to incentivise people to renew annually.
These final thoughts on the membership model often coming up against the same pressures as the subscription model are important to keep in mind when considering the question of whether your news organisation can introduce memberships. It is not a silver bullet solution, as the MPP points out, and there will likely be many tweaks involved to get the value proposition just right. But as we contemplate the future of reader revenue we are confident in saying that experimentation with various types of membership models will be a big part of the story.
The Innovation in News Media World Report is published every year by INNOVATION Media Consulting in association with WAN-IFRA, The report is co-edited by INNOVATION President, Juan Señor, and Senior Consultant Jayant Sriram