On this week’s episode of Media Voices, we hear from The Knowledge’s founder Jon Connell. The Knowledge is a free-to-read newsletter aimed not at a particular demographic, but at a ‘mindset’.
Connell and team’s aim is to provide an antidote to the outrage engine, instant gratification-baiting nature of social publishing. At the same time they seek to speak to people who are curious and wish to hear from a variety of perspectives; the challenge lies in squaring that circle.
In the episode we also discuss the challenges of monetising newsletters, the growing popularity of the newsletter as a medium, and how legacy news brands are adapting to the rise of this new format.
Here are a few insights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
The ‘false start’ of assuming that audiences wanted to engage with The Knowledge on websites, rather than in their inboxes
I think we found very early on that although we tended to do quite a lot – we did quite a lot of content at weekends and long explainers and stuff – your readers do quite quickly give you feedback, and obviously, as you know, you talk to your friends and the people who you know are reading it. But the thing that they really liked was that daily email.
We did an experiment about a year ago in which we were thinking of launching something called Knowledge Premium, where our readers would go to a website at the weekend, rather like what we started with at the beginning. There they would get long explainers, they would get pieces about books, etc, but they would have to sign up and pay for that.
But what was interesting was how badly that experiment worked. It was a complete disaster. And not because people didn’t necessarily want the content, but because they didn’t want to be pushed off into websites.
Why Jon believes the audience for The Knowledge shares a mindset, rather than a demographic
I always say that The Knowledge is aimed at a mindset rather than at an age. This idea that we should aim it at the young, which everyone is always saying… actually, most newspapers, as you know, the average age of their readers is very old.
I think we don’t appeal to everyone, and those people who are completely obsessed with social media and live their lives on Twitter now… I’m not sure we’re for them. Very dedicated people on the strong right or the strong left… we’re probably not for them either. I think we’re for a particular market who’s perhaps less well served, which is people who have a genuine open mind, who believe in freedom and democracy… and they want and genuinely have an appetite to know about stuff. They want bits and pieces, things and ideas that they can pass on at dinner, when they’re chatting, or in the pub.
Monetisation beyond advertising
If we do get a paying readership, we will do events. I used to do Week Lunches, and I think we could do that kind of thing. I like the idea of extra paid-for newsletters on very specialist areas, such as green energy, because there you can, again, mine all the stuff out there for the best, most insightful [pieces]. And I suspect you could charge because there are enough people who need that information. It’s this difference between wanting and needing.
I mean, how many people want The Knowledge? Quite a lot. How many people actually need it, or can be made to need it? That’s the problem. So, we have to use all the tricks we can… eloquence and offers. And there has to be an element, I think, of altruism in it, in that you’re saying to people, ‘Look, we’ve got a little team here. This is hard work. We don’t do it for free.’
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