Why political news sites are adopting paid membership models
In an era when breaking news emanates from the White House seemingly every day, one would be forgiven for assuming that political news and commentary sites are flush with traffic and advertising, or at least more so than they’d be in any other midterm election year. But the reality is much more of a mixed bag.
For one, programmatic keyword filtering is allowing brands to avoid political content. As Digiday reported, ad buyers are increasingly “using keywords and sentiment analysis to create custom categories of content to avoid, with a focus on reducing their exposure to Trump.” Ad sales intelligence firm MediaRadar found that “the 10 largest buy-side platforms are placing ads on 11 percent fewer sites this year compared to last year.” This means that even if a Trump-related article experiences a traffic surge, the publisher ends up pulling in less lucrative ads that pay much lower rates than what that same publisher would see on a non-Trump story.
Secondly, while some publishers saw a surge in traffic in the first few months following Trump’s election, website visits have mostly leveled off. Data provided in October by Comscore showed that traffic, on average, was flat or even lower compared to a year earlier. It seems that Trump fatigue has set in, and it probably hasn’t helped much that Facebook is now placing less emphasis on pages in its Newsfeed algorithm.
Given this adverse climate for political news, many publishers that specialize in this niche are turning to paid membership models to supplement and diversify their revenue.
This shouldn’t be too surprising given the recent success mainstream publishers have had growing their subscription businesses. The New York Times recently announced it had hit 3.5 million subscribers, with 300,000 added in just the first quarter of 2017 alone. Publishers from The Washington Post to Vanity Fair to The New Yorker have all reported strong surges to their subscription numbers after Trump was elected.
But while most of these mainstream publishers have embraced some sort of paywall model, metered or otherwise, websites that focus almost exclusively on political news have mostly eschewed paywalls in favor of membership models. This means that the vast majority of their articles appear for free, while paying members get access to extra content and other benefits.
Taegan Goddard has recently seen success with a paid model. Goddard is the editor of Political Wire, a political news aggregation and commentary site that he founded in 1999, and prior to launching his membership platform he had grown increasingly disillusioned with the advertising model that had thus far supported his site. “Watching what programmatic advertising was doing to the web, it was creating bad incentives for good digital properties,” he told me. “Publishers no longer had a relationship with advertisers.” He was increasingly embarrassed by the types of ads that kept showing up on Political Wire. “I remember all of these advertisements that would go up for these Obama birther conspiracy theory ads. And because I ran a political site these ads got fed programmatically to Political Wire, but it’s the last advertiser I’d ever want on my site. And yet through programmatic ad networks they could get to my site and I had very little ability to block them.”
Goddard initially tried to launch a membership platform four years ago but pulled it after only a few months because it wasn’t well-designed. But after better membership management software came on the market a few years later, he relaunched the program, this time with much more success. He’d been on a long road trip when he began thinking about it, and later that night, while staying in a hotel, he decided to pull the trigger. “I put everything together overnight and sometime around 11 o’clock I had the membership model up and running, and when I woke up the next morning I had dozens and dozens of members who had already signed up. The feedback was so instantaneous that I knew it’d be successful.”
For $5 a month or $50 annually, Political Wire members get a number of benefits. For one, they don’t see any ads as long as they’re logged in when they visit the site. Prior to launching the platform, Goddard was writing longer analysis pieces for magazines like The Daily Beast and The Week; now, he publishes these articles directly to Political Wire as a membership benefit, and members get access to a library of political ebooks. “I cannot discount the fact that what readers also get is the knowledge that they’re supporting a site that they come to and have come to for years, multiple times a day, and they want to support the site because they rely on it as part of their life,” said Goddard.
Not only is Goddard making more money now than he did under a purely advertising driven model, the move has also realigned his incentives so they cater more to his longtime readers. “If I get linked from Drudge or something like that, those visitors are not going to sign up for a membership, and honestly that’s the type of reader that might have been attractive when my revenue model was advertising, because I could all of a sudden get a few hundred thousand pageviews which would serve up a few hundred thousand more ads, but now I could care less about that type of traffic because I’m more interested in loyal readers who want to come to the site on a regular basis and who want to help improve the site.”
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Though every publisher I spoke to for this article said the membership model forces them to adhere to their longtime readers’ needs, most have had to constantly experiment with different membership offerings to figure out what their readers actually want. “Over the last year we have tried to significantly up what you get if you are a member,” said Josh Marshall, editor and founder of Talking Points Memo. “And we have seen increasingly what drives it is literally people seeing things they can’t access. Simple as that. They see there are new things we’re doing that you can only access if you’re a subscriber. In that sense, it’s seeing what they can’t have.”
TPM launched its membership model in 2012, but Marshall didn’t get serious about growing it until 2014 or 2015. By 2016, membership had grown to 11,000 subscribers. Just a year later it was up to 21,500 subscribers, with a goal of reaching 30,000 by the end of the year. Visiting the site today, it’s fairly common to across headlines with a dark red “P” symbol next to them, signifying that they’re part of TPM Prime. Click on the headline and you’re shown an interstitial pop-up that explains what Prime is and how you can sign up to gain access to the content.
Ben Cohen went through several iterations of his subscription program before he found a model that worked for his liberal commentary site The Daily Banter. “We tried everything,” he told me. “We tried metering content. We tried paywall content. We’d turn it on, turn it off again. We’d try everything to see what the sweet spot was for us. And over time we moved away from a meter to more of a premium content strategy, both through trial and error and also because we’re limited when it comes to technology. We’re on the small side, we can’t afford to invest heavily into a very sophisticated paywall platform.”
While The Daily Banter’s free content continued to be published at its main site, Cohen uploaded membership content to a Squarespace website called BanterM. “We produce about four paid content pieces a week, and that is probably about 20% of our total output,” said Cohen. While most of the free content at The Daily Banter is mostly focused on politics, BanterM content can be on a range of topics and is often more personal. Cohen recently wrote a five-part series about a trip he took to the jungle of Peru. “We’ve built up a brand, it’s a site with personality. And people want to know what we do in our personal lives.”
In the wake of Trump’s election, many publishers reported what’s often called a “Trump bump” in subscriptions. Millions of Americans were horrified by such an autocratic candidate getting elected with the aid of fake news sites and Twitter bot armies, and so they opened up their wallets to actually help pay for journalism. On November 14, 2016, Cohen published an article titled “A Message to Our Readers: What We Plan to Do About President Trump.” In it, he detailed his dismay at taking a White House tour with the knowledge that Trump would soon be occupying it, and he pledged that The Daily Banter would be “directing all of our energy into covering Donald Trump and holding him to account.” He ended it with a plea for financial help in running the site, and the piece was met with a rush of new subscriptions. Today, The Daily Banter has about a thousand subscribers who pay $39.99 a year. “It’s been very successful in terms of providing us enough revenue per month to see us through bad months when we don’t’ have a good amount of traffic and the ad revenue is cut down,” said Cohen.
Marshall said that TPM saw its own Trump bump, though its effect was limited. “I would say that for the next six weeks, there were lots of people signing up. It was a jolt of new signups that were clearly tied to Trump’s election, but I would say that the Trump bump may account now for only between 5 and 10 percent of our subscribers.” Subscription growth, he said, is difficult to predict and is rarely steady. Cohen also echoed this point, saying there’s little to no correlation between web traffic and subscription signups. “When there’s high volume traffic, subscription rarely does as well, for whatever reason,” he said. “That’s mostly been because of the viral nature of what we’ve produced; stuff going viral on Facebook is not indicative of how deeply people are reading the site. [The membership] is really for those hundred thousand odd people who come to the site every day. Those are the ones that convert.”
It seems clear that more and more news consumers are expressing a willingness to pay for news, but will this trend hold up, especially as nearly every publisher announces it’s going to launch some sort of subscription product? A recent poll found that only 13 percent of Millennials “choose paid access over free access with advertising.” There may be a ceiling that publishers will soon find themselves hitting. But with the digital advertising market in a free fall and platform traffic harder and harder to come by, publishers may have no choice but the pursue a membership strategy in order to survive. “Facebook changes its algorithm every month and we can lose 50 percent of our revenue like that,” said Cohen. “If you’re relying on one avenue, that’s a bad idea. So you want to have multiple revenue streams, multiple ways to make money.”
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?Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at [email protected]. For a full bio, go here.