Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Local newsrooms are using AI to listen in on public meetings
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
May 10, 2013, 1:31 p.m.
LINK: www.politico.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Justin Ellis   |   May 10, 2013

Fresh off the announcement of their paywall experiment, Politico says it plans to expand its current subscription-based service, Politico Pro, to include trade, agriculture, and education. The company plans to launch even more Pro verticals in 2014. Dylan Byers has the memo, which offers some details into how Politico thinks about making its money:

We believe any successful media company in this age must have multiple revenue streams. In our early years, we were 100 percent reliant on issue advocacy advertising, mainly in print. That worked very well for us, and still does. But a growing newsroom must be supported by a growing business, so we have introduced events and subscriptions over the past 36 months. We still get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, with online ads growing the fastest. But we project subscriptions will account for 25 percent of our revenue this year and close to 50 percent by 2016, providing the company a nice, sustainable balance. The beauty of subscription revenue is that it’s predictable and not dependent on broader economic and market trends. Like clockwork, more than 95 percent of Pro subscribers renew each year and the few that drop are usually members of Congress who lost reelection or companies that went out of business or merged. In almost every case, Pro subscribers often add new verticals — or more users — to their package each year.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Local newsrooms are using AI to listen in on public meetings
Chalkbeat and Midcoast Villager have already published stories with sources and leads pulled from AI transcriptions.
You can learn a conference’s worth of data journalism through these NICAR tipsheets
From AI to OSINT, maps to the sports section, it’s a data journalism jubilee.
“More alarming by the day”: New York Times investigations editor on the legal threats faced by news publishers
“The rhetoric and actions that Trump and his allies take at a national level are being mimicked across the country at a much smaller level. Whether they’re Trump supporters or not, they’re taking cues from the President of the United States.”