gal-dem, Defector, and Being Transparent With Your Audience
By: Chris Sutcliffe, co-founder, Media Voices.
When gal-dem launched its membership scheme, it did so with a clear-eyed idea of who it was pitching to. The news site, dedicated to coverage of issues that mattered to “people of color from marginalized genders,” wanted to speak to audience members who would buy into its mission of providing free-to-access news around those issues.
At the time of the membership’s launch five years into the site’s existence, its head of editorial, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, said: “I fundamentally believe journalism should remain accessible to anyone who needs it and might benefit from it. This was never going to be about us excluding people, it was always going to be about sharing the love.”
As such, the initial announcement was extremely transparent about the reasons why gal-dem was seeking to monetize its audience directly. The letter from its then-editor, Liv Little, was up-front about the financial strictures that digital news outlets find themselves in, which many larger news organizations obfuscate in their own marketing messages.
Gal-dem’s membership drive was also driven by the recognition that while its audience might want to support the mission en masse, its different cohorts had varying reasons for doing so and different financial situations of their own. To that end it launched with three membership tiers, each of which was tailored to one of those cohorts – ‘sugar’, ‘spice’, and ‘nice’.
All told, then, gal-dem’s membership launch demonstrated a keen understanding of not just its various audience demographics, but also how its mission could be leveraged in its membership marketing activities. And while, unfortunately, gal-dem eventually folded as a result of some of the strictures it was transparent about facing, its approach to memberships is still worth emulating.
Shrinking subscriptions
Over the past few months, many publishers that were previously pursuing a hard paywall-based strategy have begun diversifying their reader revenue strategies. Axios’ Sara Fischer cited the examples of both TechCrunch and The Washington Post—among many others—as outlets that are transitioning to strategies based around “flexible paywalls, membership programs and more ads”.
That is easier said than done. As the gal-dem example demonstrates, memberships are far more reciprocal than transactional. While subscription pitches tend to focus on the exclusive benefits that payment confers, memberships are based on audiences buying into a mission.
As such, media companies looking to launch memberships should look to outlets like gal-dem, which make their inclusive and free-to-access nature as much a selling point as the exclusive benefits conferred by a hard paywall.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) is the UK’s largest independent newsroom. It launched its ‘Insiders’ membership scheme last November and—like gal-dem—was extremely transparent about the reasons it did so. Its audience editor Jessica Best, told AMO: “We have to practice what we preach. These ideas around integrity and trustworthiness were really central in terms of what people connected with about our mission.” She went on to say that:
The other thing for me is that we want to be in a grown-up conversation with our readers, so that they understand why their support is important, and what the money is used for.
In order to land that message, the marketing communications the TBIJ employs for the Insiders program is heavy on transparency—about the difficulties of running a digital news outlet, what the money is being spent on, and even how it is used to fight legal battles. That feeds into what Best describes as a ‘David vs. Goliath’ mission that the TBIJ leverages to get audiences to buy into membership.
Best cites The Daily Maverick, a membership-based publication from South Africa, as another news organization that uses transparency particularly well in marketing materials. After it suffered a series of DDOS attacks last year, it used those outages in its call for support, stating that the attacks were a result of its investigation. It was effectively used as tangible proof that its mission was working.
Crucially for the news outlets broadening their strategy away from hard paywalls, that call for support has precedence for working for larger outlets, too. The Guardian is one major international news outlet that has made similar transparency part of its marketing materials for support: it was cited by Brinkhurst-Cuff at the time of gal-dem’s membership launch.
While The Guardian has recently reported a funding deficit from donations, for many years its call for support—which hit many of the same beats as gal-dem’s and TBIJ’s—was responsible for a turnaround in its fortunes.
Best says that transparency is vital for news memberships:
Being honest about the deficit, being clear about where our money comes from… We’ve also done things like [an article on] ‘how much does it cost to run an investigative newsroom?’ late last year, ‘85% of our money goes on staff costs, it costs £2.7 million’… we put some figures on it.
That’s the differentiator for me: how the transparency ties into the mission.
Membership and voice
While TBIJ’s strategy is similar to gal-dem’s focus on transparency, some subscription-based titles are emulating its tier-based approach to speaking to various cohorts.
Defector Media is a US-based sports title, formed by former members of the G/O Media property Deadspin when it closed. Its co-owner and vice president of revenue and operations, Jasper Wang, explains: “We spent a lot of time tinkering with the tiers, what benefits go in each, what language to use. We probably spent several hours debating the names of the tiers before settling on Reader/Pal/Accomplice.”
Like gal-dem, the Defector team leveraged its understanding of its audience cohorts to develop those tiers and married that to its mission. Wang explains that there are “so many marketing and product professionals out there trying to optimise checkout flow”.
He says that “infusing our marketing copy with our Defector-y voice is basically our most important lever to that effect, given we don’t control the tech platform product roadmap. For our ongoing marketing emails, we’re almost always voice-y, and in fact, our monthly subscription appeal email gets assigned to rotating staffers, who are meant to write the appeal with their own spin.”
And like gal-dem and TBIJ, Wang explains that, even as Defector has grown, the messaging has remained consistent: “The subscription product was not some separate announcement; we launched as a subscription-forward company. We’re still always reminding people of how their dollars directly support our work.”
It is a recognition that, even with exclusive content locked behind paywalls, subscription-based media can still take an approach to reader revenue that is closer to a reciprocal ‘membership’ mentality than a transactional ‘subscription’ one. It is why outlets like Tortoise explicitly call their supporter scheme a membership, despite it having more in common with traditional subscriptions.
As news outlets seek to transition from hard paywalls to a more nuanced mix of subscriptions, memberships, and other sources of direct reader revenue, they will have to acknowledge that ‘members’ and ‘subscribers’ are fundamentally different. As gal-dem’s team realized, members are less concerned about exclusivity of content than they are about feeling understood by the outlet and supporting its mission.
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As financial realities begin to bite, subscription-based publications are having to experiment with other reader revenue models. While the hard paywall isn’t going anywhere, some publishers are experimenting with complimentary membership models to buoy up that reader revenue. However, launching a membership is easier said than done.
As membership and Insider-based publications tell AMO, people who choose to join membership schemes have different priorities than simply getting exclusive access to content. Some, for example, prioritize transparency around how their support is used, which impacts how those publishers need to speak to them.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s audience editor, Jessica Best, says: “We want to be in a grown-up conversation with our readers so that they understand why their support is important and what the money is used for.”
And some subscription-based outlets have adopted that transparency-based approach to bring new audiences into the fold. Defector Media’s co-owner and vice president of revenue and operations Jasper Wang explains: “We’re still always reminding people of how their dollars directly support our work.”
