RocaNews

Our co-founder Billy Carney will be speaking at FIPP World Congress in Madrid this Fall -- check it out!

Gen-Z wouldn’t pay for news, they said. This past month, we’ve added over 1,000 new paid subscribers to our premium WeThe66 newsletter. Since starting daily circulation of the newsletter in February, we’ve delivered in-depth analysis on all of the most important news subjects: Why some in MAGA want a recession, the arguments around Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, Trump’s deportation of migrants to El Salvador, and where US aid to Ukraine is going, among them. For a while, we shared the sentiment that Gen-Z and Millennials would be reluctant to pay for news. It turns out that news just has to come from a brand they love and trust.

This weekend, we crossed 1.6 million followers on our flagship Instagram news page. A lot of this growth stems from a fundamental insight about today's media landscape: While most news organizations view social platforms as gateways to elsewhere, young people view social media as the destination. We saw our friends — and ourselves — using Instagram constantly. So, we decided to build our first native news product on the platform. Legacy news companies are falling behind, in part, because they fail to meet young people where they are. Today, our Instagram engagement is 5-10x that of virtually every major news outlet: Buzzfeed: 0.1% Wall Street Journal: 0.1% Fox News: 0.1% Huffington Post: 0.1% New York Times: 0.2% CNN: 0.2% NPR: 0.2% NowThis: 0.3% RocaNews: 1.2% Engagement calculated as [avg. likes from past 10 posts]/[followers] as of 10:00AM ET on March 3, 2025 We now use the platform to deliver daily news, engage with our readers, garner feedback, grow our brand, and more. Most legacy news outlets still don’t take Instagram seriously. For selfish reasons, we hope it stays that way. Thank you to all of you who’ve ridden the IG wave to 1.6M. The journey continues!

Unlike many news outlets, our relationship with our audience is a two-way street. The Roca community’s feedback is vital to our editorial decisions. With hot topics like DOGE, it’s hard to know whether we’re covering it too little or too much. So last week we polled our audience, asking if we should cover DOGE more, less, or the same; and if more, where we should focus. We left the poll up for ~18 hours and received approximately 54,000 votes. Here are the results: 49% say Roca should cover DOGE more and increase coverage on what the agency is cutting 25% say Roca should cover DOGE as we have been 16% say Roca should cover DOGE more and focus on the privacy stipulations of the agency's access to data 10% say Roca should cover DOGE less A semi-related interesting bit from six months ago: in September 2024, we ran a poll: Would you like Elon Musk to have a role in the government? The results were 50% Yes, and 50% No. By the way, there aren’t many news organizations that can get 50k responses from a representative population of Gen Z/Millennials overnight. News audiences have been spoken down to and ignored for too long. We view our audience as a tremendous asset. DOGE time, it is.

Roca's 2024: From cash-burning startup to profitable news company. From our founding in late 2020 to early 2024, we employed a "grow first, monetize later" strategy. This is the approach VCs wanted, and was what their funding allowed. After we raised capital in 2022, though, the winds changed. The media sector, already a pariah of the venture industry, faced its death knell when BuzzFeed News, Vice News, and — eight months after launching — The Messenger all went under in a 10-month window. At first, these developments seemed like more storm clouds hovering above our beleaguered sector. But soon we realized it was an opportunity to evolve our business model. At the start of 2024, we primarily earned revenue in two ways: advertising (on both Instagram and our free newsletter) and subscriptions on our gamified news app.?To start turning a profit quickly, we would need to not only increase the revenues from these streams, but also create new monetization channels — ones that were more durable and befitting our mission. Achieving higher revenue on these existing channels was straightforward: We grew our Instagram, free newsletter, and app audiences by hundreds of thousands to secure bigger deals and ensure better performance for our advertising partners. Establishing new revenue channels, however, required us to innovate. After a strategic reassessment, we launched three new products: 1) Long-Form Video, 2) A Subscription Newsletter, and 3) A Physical Product. Thankfully, these new ventures are off to excellent starts: 1) Roca's two YouTube channels — on-the-ground reporting and deep dives — have gained over 110,000 subscribers in just five months.? 2)?We've shattered our own view that Gen-Z won't directly pay for news, following the success of our new paid newsletter that combines hard news topics with a community-centric approach. 3)?We began selling physical products, loosening our reliance on ad placements and sponsored content. In 2024, we surpassed $1M in ARR and became profitable. In the process, we became sustainable and independent. For Roca, last year was the year of the business model.

2024 has been a spectacular year of growth for RocaNews — both in terms of audience and revenue — but what we're proudest of from the year has nothing to do with our business and everything to do with our community. Earlier this year, when Hurricane Helene ripped through the southeast and devastated western North Carolina, one of our readers, a nurse named Katie, sent us an email imploring us for help. She and friends had been running food and water to Appalachian towns that the storm had rendered unreachable by car. With the weather getting colder, she asked for our community to send blankets and coats for the mountain folk, especially the kids, who will soon be freezing. In the weeks that followed, the Roca community sent hundreds and hundreds of packages every day to her home. She told us her Amazon deliveryman asked her, "What was going on?" on the first day of the gift blitz. The boxes kept coming and coming (pictures of Katy and her fiancé receiving and organizing the boxes below). Then, more recently, we promoted an incredibly inspirational community-funded restaurant in Wellsville, OH, called The Gathering Place. Wellsville is a small town on the Ohio River that at first sight looks bleak. It's lost two-thirds of its population since its peak and been ravaged by the Opioid Crisis, but some of its residents are fighting back to save it. They started a gathering place (fittingly called "The Gathering Place") that serves free food, hosts movie nights, and convenes for church on Saturdays. They've rehabilitated numerous opioid addicts simply through their love and community. The Gathering Place is supported only by donations, and Wellsville is a poor town with a median household income of less than half of the national average. One of its founders, Brenda, told us, "$200 goes a LONG way." Given how deeply the Gathering Place moved us, we decided to share their story with our audience and start a GoFundMe with a goal of raising a couple thousand dollars. As of today, the Roca community has raised $29,000 for The Gathering Place. We are blown away. As cliche and cringe as it is to say "the [insert org name] community cares," the Roca community truly does care. It recognizes that there are decent people everywhere, especially in the places the media writes off as backwards and hopeless, and it wants to help them. We have never been prouder as founders. Thank you for an amazing year! -Max F, Max T, and Billy

Roca co-founder Billy Carney met with Andres Sanchez for the latest episode of his podcast, Beyond the Wealth. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dMnT6zGT

Roca co-founder Max Frost sat down with Alastair Lewis, Yulia Petrossian Boyle, and the River Group’s Nicki Murphy at FIPP - Connecting Global Media Insider New York

Roca co-founder Max Towey recently joined standup comedian Giulio Gallarotti?on his podcast “Oops the Podcast” to discuss the election results and how RocaNews correctly predicted the outcomes of each swing state. Giulio, who recently made his Netflix debut in the “Pete Davidson Presents: The Best Friends” special, became friends with Roca through his YouTube series called “Places You Can Go.” He’s visited Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries that people say you can’t go to. We both believe in holding a mirror to the world. And when we held a mirror to the country this year, we saw a decisive Trump victory. Tune in and find out why: https://lnkd.in/eEcAcYJS

Starting this week by reflecting on a very busy end to last week in NYC...first had the pleasure of hosting FIPP - Connecting Global Media Board Meeting at Hearst Tower, with many on Zoom but 8 of us 'in person'..followed by a great evening with 3 guys that are changing the way news is delivered and perceived for and by Gen Z and others .. do check out RocaNews - they are doing GREAT and important work. Finally, our last FIPP Insider of the year alongside our friends at The Media, Audience & Content Marketing Association - MACMA - a fantastic turnout of contacts new and old and so many excellent connections to follow up on. With many thanks to all who contributed to such an inspiring and insightful few days...