Very few high-quality news publishers worldwide have managed to gain substantial financial support from members while at the same time keeping all of their content freely available.
Two of the few that do come to mind are The Guardian and South Africa’s Daily Maverick (DM). Both have diverse revenue sources, including advertising, but the voluntary support they receive from their readers has become a substantial portion of their business models.
For Daily Maverick, reader revenue represents their largest revenue source at 40 percent. The second largest is advertising / sponsorships at approximately 30 percent.
“All of our content is free to read, and we have a membership model instead of a paywall,” DM’s Julia Harris told WAN-IFRA webinar participants recently.
Launched in 2009 with a staff of five, Daily Maverick now has more than 100 employees, though not all of those positions are full time.
DM’s website averages 7.5 million unique visitors each month, but Harris noted that “can vary quite a bit with the news cycle”.
Arguably more important to Daily Maverick is their fleet of newsletters.
“That is a huge source of engagement for us,” Harris said.
DM has 24 of them, and sends a total of 18 million a month to approximately 650k subscribers.
Their long-time morning newsletter, First Thing, was our first-ever winner in the Newsletter category in our Digital Media Awards Worldwide in 2022.
While their main focus is largely digital, Daily Maverick does have a weekly print product, called DM168, which launched in 2020.
An initiative born of necessity
Membership has not always been part of Daily Maverick’s business plan. That started in 2019. And the Maverick Insider programme also won our global Digital Media Award for Best Reader Revenue Initiative in 2022.
“We had achieved a lot of editorial success, but meeting payroll each month was a challenge, and it was becoming more and more perilous: The business was in trouble, and the reason for that is we had a revenue problem,” Harris said.
“The digital advertising model was broken, and I think we can all probably agree it still is broken,” she added.
“After nine years, we had run out of family and friends to ask for money,” she said. “The first thought was: ‘Put up a paywall.’ But that was something we really didn’t want to do.”
The reasoning behind this was also based on South Africa’s economic situation, Harris noted.
WAN-IFRA Members can watch the full webinar with Julia Harris on our Knowledge Hub.
“Paywalls restrict access to information, and in a country like South Africa, where there is not this wealthy society to pay for news, you are really restricting who can access your content if you have a paywall. That was just something that we weren’t willing to compromise on. Our mission is to defend truth, and we can’t fully realise that mission if only a select few people have access to the truth.
Instead, DM came up with the membership plan.
“We had to really change how we were thinking,” Harris said.
A key part of this was to make sure that they were aligning editorial vision to meet the needs of their audiences, she said.
Noting that while the DM commercial team has done a lot of good work to build the Maverick Insider initiative, “our editorial content is our bread and butter. Without that we aren’t going to have a successful membership programme,” she added.
‘Retention for a membership programme is much better than for subscription’
Another crucial point for Daily Maverick was the basic differences between a membership model, which is more of an emotional endeavour, and having a paywall, which is basically just transactional.
“You’re not going to convince someone to become a member the first time that they read you. It’s going to take time to build that relationship with your reader, whereas paywalls are more transactional in nature,” Harris said.
While persuading people to become members takes time, Daily Maverick has found it to be well worth the effort.
“We believe retention for a membership programme is much better than for subscription,” she said.
Maverick Insider has also been very much an ongoing work-in-progress. At the time of launch, “it was definitely not a polished product. It was an opportunity for us to test our assumption, to get data from our early adopters,” Harris noted.
For example, in the early days, they tested one-off donations.
“We ran a donation campaign to our existing readers, and we had about 200 people who quite quickly were willing to donate. Now, 200 people are not going to sustain your business, but it gave us an idea that there were people who willing to donate,” she said.
In engaging with these donors through surveys, they found that people who were willing to donate were among their most frequent visitors, and those who had been reading Daily Maverick for some time before they donated.
Member benefits that actually matter, and those that don’t
When Daily Maverick launched the programme, they asked donors which benefits they would most value.
“People wanted to engage with Daily Maverick journalists,” Harris said. “They want to be part of the Daily Maverick story. And that’s something we’ve kept in mind over the years and have really valued.”
Conversely, she said, was what benefits people weren’t interested in: Special offers and discounts, prizes, etc.
“People wanted to support us because they believed in what we were doing, not because we were going to give them free stuff,” Harris said.
They continue to regularly ask people why they remain Maverick Insiders.
“People support us because they believe in that mission,” she said. “Our journalism has had an impact on South Africa. Some of our investigations have literally changed the course of the country, and that is what people believe in. That is what they are supporting.”
In addition, Daily Maverick constantly reviews and updates its membership messaging and the channels it uses.
“We’re now appealing to more people in more channels, more places. We, as marketers, can get carried away sometimes. It’s not about doing more, it’s about how you do it, and the things you focus on. If I was to pin-point one thing that has really been crucial in Daily Maverick’s membership success, it’s this mantra of ‘Test, track, improve and scale.’ ”
For example, DM tracks everything they do with their marketing, Harris said.
“We know everything that works. From the number of words, the time of day, and what day to send. We know what sentiment converts the highest. We know what cognitive biases we use in marketing, and what’s most successful,” she said.
Daily Maverick tracks all of these things, Harris said, and by doing so, they can see what converts members at the highest rate.
“Obviously this changes over time, and it’s not always successful, but understanding what appeals to your readers is going to be one of the most important aspects of a successful membership programme,” she added.
They’ve developed an ongoing culture of testing, which has paid dividends.
“We use colour psychology a lot, and we test different colours against each other to see what works. … we’re really trying wherever we can, to use psychology to improve the performance of our marketing,” Harris said.
AI-powered tool helps track their journalism’s impact
Today, they are also using AI in their efforts to increase acquisition.
For example, DM has created something called ImpactEngine, an AI powered tool that allows them to track the impact of Daily Maverick journalism by mentions in parliamentary meetings.
“If our journalism really makes it onto the national stage, in parliament, ImpactEngine will track this. And then through the tool, we create reports that we can use in our marketing messaging for new users and also to send impact reports to existing members, as a sign of ‘This is what your contribution is allowing us to do,’ ” Harris said.
“Again, it’s going back to reminding people of the cause, remembering why they signed up and constantly reinforcing that your journalism is living up to that.”
Having a robust onboarding journey when people become members is also vital to long-term success, Harris said.
“We have a nine-point engagement journey that introduces people to the team and key products that we know people will engage with,” she said, noting that these include newsletters, their app, as well as member-only webinars where people can engage with DM’s team.
They have also launched a platform called Daily Maverick Connect, which helps members interact with Daily Maverick’s journalists as well as each other.
While membership has been crucial for DM, Harris stressed that having diverse revenue sources has been important for DM’s overall financial success.
“You’ll have ups and downs in your membership growth. We also have philanthropy and more traditional commercial channels. Having those three different channels for revenue is actually what makes Daily Maverick sustainable,” she said.
This story was first published by WAN-IFRA.
