Choosing the right revenue streams for you

Writers love coming up with reasons they can’t get paid.

Whether it’s comparing the cost of media subscriptions like they are commodities or being ad free at the expense of relying on free labor, we can always find an excuse that prevents that money from hitting the bank.

So, what happens when you’re the publisher?

You get to rethink how this is done. You define the business model. You choose who pays for your work.

In the first ever issue of this newsletter, I dug into the most common revenue streams for worker-owned newsrooms. You can see why I landed on reader subscriptions as my focus and why I talked your ear off about it all last year.

The reader subscription model was far and away the most lucrative, the most popular and the most value-aligned option for the outlets I looked into.

That said—there’s a few other revenue streams that are common contenders you should consider too like sponsorships, digital products and events. We’re digging into them this month as we kick off a Revenue Series, starting with this issue.

Ask not “should I get paid for this?” but instead “who should pay for this?”

P.S. We’ve got events coming up this month like Your Next Milestone and Help! I wanna leave Substack. Check ‘em out and register!

Choosing the right revenue streams for you

Journalism should be free, but journalism isn’t free, so who’s footing the bill?

Some publishers think they should never charge readers.
Some publishers think reader donations are better than philanthropist donations.
Some publishers think all journalism should be publicly funded by the government.

We don’t need to prove that any one of these is right because the world gains nothing from all businesses collapsing into the same business model.

We just need to find YOU a business model that works for YOU and YOUR AUDIENCE.

So, I invite you to experiment with different business models and look for something that balances your motivations, your funder’s motivations and your reader’s benefit and call it GOOD ENOUGH.

In this issue, we’re looking at 13 of the most common ways journalists fund their work, along with their tradeoffs and revenue potential.

I bucketed them into five types of funders:

• A brand pays

• Another publication pays

• The reader pays

• Participants pay

• Philanthropists pay

For revenue potential, I’m using a scale of $-$$$$ where $ is one reader paying you a small amount like $7 and $$$$ is one entity that could potentially fund your whole operation. Note that I’m comparing this PER BUYER and PER YEAR, not sum total revenue potential.

Let’s get into these funding streams!

A brand pays (Advertising and sponsorships)

I recently rewatched the episode of GIRLS where Hannah gets a job writing advertising content at GQ and she goes through all the stages of “I’m not a real writer” grief.

Ads get a bad wrap because they’ve impacted editorial decisions and reader experience of stories at some publications.

But, I’ve also heard some very helpful reframes of ad models from journalists like Andy Dehnart of Reality Blurred and Ted Williams of Tiny Money.

Andy works with Mediavine who manages ads on his publication covering reality TV and unscripted entertainment for over 20 years. Mediavine runs the ads so Andy can focus on writing and engaging with his readers. He’s tried other ad networks, including Google’s AdSense, but said what makes his relationship with Mediavine work is that they maintain a “high quality inventory by like setting those [ad rate] floors really high.”

You’re going to hear a lot more about Andy’s model and experience next week!

I also loved Ted’s approach to sponsors with the Charlotte Agenda (a publication he founded and later sold to Axios). Ted secured 25 five figure deals ($10-40k) with local brands and the Agenda worked with them all year. That fictional GQ situation gets a lot better when you’re deciding which brands you work with.

More on Ted’s approach soon when his interview with newsletter pro Matt McGarry is released on Matt’s podcast.

🧠 Funder motivations: Get their brand in front of your audience.
⚖️ Tradeoffs: Ad quality if you choose an ad network vs booking ads yourself which adds a sales job for you or your team. May require a larger audience.
💰️ Revenue potential per buyer: $$$$

Another publication pays (Freelancing and syndication)

Freelancing is a common default for indie journalists but it can also be an intentional operating model that supports your publication’s existence.

Ty Burr who I interviewed last month does this occasionally with his newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List.

Ty picked up a contract writing weekly movie reviews for the Washington Post while one of their critics is on leave, but it’s an opportunistic choice for him. As he told me, he could live on the income from his own reader subscriptions. It’s just a lot more comfortable when you add in the WaPo gig.

Not just that, but Ty also shared that his WaPo reviews drive a good bit of traffic and new readers to his newsletter.

Freelance work can also come from your blog or newsletter as editors spot your work so pairing freelancing with your own reader-funded or ad-supported publication can make sense either as a transition step or as a complete business model.

Another related option is syndication which 404 Media recently announced doing with Wired. If you find yourself freelancing for the same outlet a lot, you could always pitch them a set up like this.

🧠 Funder motivations: Publish quality work that engages readers.
⚖️ Tradeoffs: Potentially less choice in what you write and/or less time to work on your own publication.
💰️ Revenue potential per buyer: $$$

The reader pays (Pay per article, tip jar and subscriptions)

For every writer who thinks “paying $60 a year for a blog is insane,” there’s a reader who can’t imagine what they’d do without that blog.

Readers will pay for your work. Full stop. This is already well documented by loads of indie writers so if you like this model, it can work for you.

Subscriptions are ideal for journalists because it’s not a good use of your energy to have to chase down every reader for $5 every month. That will take too much time away from your research and writing.

But plenty of writers offer one time contribution options too.

Matt Kiser of What the Fuck Just Happened Today? has had great success with this model. When I interviewed Matt last year, he talked about a free sticker giveaway he runs with a suggested donation of $3 that always yields much more than that.

This is sometimes called a Tip Jar. 

Ryan Singel, who co-founded Outpost, told me when they built a tip jar feature at the request of The Lever, it was “way more successful” at getting contributions than he originally thought it’d be.

You can also implement pay-per-article which Rascal has done using a service called Acta. Acta is only available for Ghost publishers right now but they have plans to expand to other platforms in the future, according to founder Guillermo Olaizola.

(Want to know how this is working for Rascal alongside their subscriptions? Me too. It’s on my list to ask them for this month’s series. Stay tuned!)

🧠 Funder motivations: Access to the information or wanting the information flow to continue.
⚖️ Tradeoffs: Often more marketing work to sell to individuals than to organizations.
💰️ Revenue potential per buyer: $

Participants pay (Events, merch, products and services)

Beyond access to your stories, you can make specific offers to your audience like hosting events or selling merch.

Events are a major revenue driver for Eric Newcomer’s publication. It sounds like much of that revenue comes from event sponsors but Newcomer also charges attendees making this a dual income stream in itself. On top of the money you can make, you can use events to deepen audience engagement or grow your audience too, and you don’t have to run these in person. You can offer virtual events.

Merch seems to be less lucrative and more labor intensive than other revenue streams. Merch is fun and it can be a subscriber or donor perk too but I have yet to hear from a publisher that it’s a great standalone source of funding for them—see Defector’s annual reports where they talk about the “diminishing returns.” That said, lots of publishers still gravitate to merch. RANGE just launched a merch shop called Newsy Couture so maybe we’ll get to hear their findings soon.

Digital products are underutilized by journalists but keep your eyes open for an opportunity to package up your expertise and sell it for its utility to a professional or peer audience.

Matt Brown of Extra Points does this with the Extra Points Library which is aimed at college sports industry pros. The library is a searchable database of contracts and financials that were sourced through his public records queries, reusing work he’s already done for reporting to add another income source for the publication.

Services can be an option too for journalists that like working 1:1 with their audience.

Jenni Gritters recently shared that she made her paid newsletter free and instead offers paid coaching to readers. Nika Talbot of The Shift offers guest writing as a service.

🧠 Funder motivations: Get access to something special.
⚖️ Tradeoffs: Operational costs and additional labor on top of the rest of your work.
💰️ Revenue potential per buyer: $$

Philanthropists pay (Donations and grants)

Of course, you can always set up your publication as a nonprofit or get a fiscal sponsor and take donations.

Small dollar donations work similarly to reader subscriptions and one time contributions where you send lots of emails and social posts out to solicit donations.

Large dollar donations are either about relationship cultivation with big funders or grant applications.

The fiscal sponsor route has been really successful for RANGE which is a for profit publication. During a member drive last August, they had one reader come forward with a larger donation and they were able to offer them a tax-beneficial path through their fiscal sponsor. Hell Gate also used this model for faster cash flow as they were getting off the ground.

The two fiscal sponsors I hear about the most are the Tiny News Collective and Alternative Newsweekly Foundation though there’s plenty out there and most fiscal sponsors will also have connections to philanthropic funders.

I don’t cover much about nonprofit strategies as it’s not my wheelhouse but check out the Institute for Nonprofit News if you’re interested in this funding model.

🧠 Funder motivations: Feel good support of meaningful work or tax write offs.
⚖️ Tradeoffs: Large donors can be tenuous to rely on as their funding interests change annually. Small dollar donor drives can be labor intensive and have similar trade offs to reader funding.
💰️ Revenue potential per buyer: $$$$

So how will you make money this year?

I recommend choosing 3 revenue streams to try. Integrate them one at a time and see which ones suit you and your audience best. As for me, I’m going with subscriptions, sponsorships and speaking this year.

There’s pitfalls and tradeoffs with every model so no need to search for the golden egg. Whatever you decide to try doesn’t need to be your forever business model nor does it need to be the be-all-end-all solution the news industry is waiting for, it just needs to be “good enough” to fund your work right now.

Want more readers to become paying readers?