Happy February! Only 327 days until Christmas. Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
The latest episode in our ‘Futureproofing local news’ podcast series is all about finding resilient business models. Everyone appears to have accepted that advertising revenue alone will not save news publishing and this piece from INMA focuses on a neglected aspect of the revenue mix that might help make news sustainable. You guessed it, micropayments.
Dominic Young, founder of payment platform Axate, says at the top of this piece that ‘ad-dependent media are starving to death’. He has no argument with the idea that consumer cash can and will create scalable and broad-based revenue models, but, he says: “We have been doing it wrong.”
“Most readers have many interests, and few limit their media consumption to a single product. Subscriptions got us off the ground. Now, we need to gain altitude. The news industry has enormous untapped potential crowded right outside their paywalls.”
Young has been shouting about the value of micropayments for as long as we’ve been talking about micropayments (2017). It might be time to listen.
I don’t really do YouTube so it was interesting to read that supporter-funded Novara Media is closing in on 15,000 monthly donors thanks to a doubling in YouTube watch time last year. YouTube is ‘special’ for driving paying supporters, according to Craig Gent, Novara Media’s North of England editor. “You can speak with a voice directly to the audience… and say: ‘Look, this is possible because of your donations.’”
There’s a long list of DEI efforts included in FIPP’s January tracker. From the launch of Zikora Media and Arts to counteract the Western narrative of “negativity, disease and doom” that surrounds Africa, to a Mumbrella report on disability inclusivity in Australian advertising, this is a really useful global roundup of what publishers are doing to make media more representative.
I wrote this for Podpod and, genuinely, the interviews were a joy. Through its Podcast Pitch awards, The Whickers Foundation helps emerging audio documentary makers get beyond the cookie-cutter approach to commissioning that keeps the bean counters happy but leaves the rest of us wanting more. “A demonstrable flair for coaxing the human spirit into revealing itself” has to be the best awards’ judging critieria I have ever encountered.
Brian Morrissey has reported that one legacy publisher has seen traffic declines of nearly 80% from peak. But as one of our community members points out from their experience, traffic declines don’t always mean equivalent revenue declines. Is traffic down for you, and where are you looking to build audiences now? Join the discussion.
More from Media Voices
