The pros and cons of media co-ops

The media world is currently obsessing over individual authors striking out on their own, as platforms from Substack to Facebook dangle cash in front of writers looking to build their own subscriber bases.

But with the independent author era still in its dawning moments — the market-leading platform Substack says it only supports 500,000 subscriptions; for comparison, Medium has close to three quarters of a million — the way that those individual writers come back together might be more interesting.

The key hits:

• The past week has seen a flurry of headlines showing how individual authors are trying to work together, either in the form of co-ops, collectives or bundles.
• These groupings provide several benefits, including access to incremental audiences, ways to improve subscriber retention and shared access to resources including editing and design.
• They also require a very different kind of working, one that raises the stakes even higher than they are for any entrepreneur.
• Even with those risks, interest in more collaborative models is spiking.

“Every other week there’s some group of people to speak to about this, who want to hear more about what we did,” said Jasper Wang, the co-owner and vp of revenue and operations at Defector Media, which was formed last fall by a group of former Deadspin writers who jointly own the company.

Writers are interested in collaboration for different reasons. For some, a co-op might be a way to solidify commitment among people who are only contributing to a project part-time. For others, a co-op or a bundle might offer a kind of audience development solution, helping individual writers find incremental audiences for their work, as well as possible collaborators.

Approaches differ when it comes to sharing the spoils too. At Defector, which has 37,000 subscribers, every staffer has the same base salary, as well as a separate, role-specific target salary that depends on the company bringing in a set amount of money. Any revenue that Defector brings in above and beyond the target salary thresholds is shared equally by everybody on staff.

At Every, a business-focused bundle of newsletters that has 2,400 subscribers paying $200 per year, new subscribers are asked which newsletter most compelled them to subscribe to Every’s bundle. That newsletter gets a cut, usually 50%, of that subscriber’s payment until they churn. Every’s cofounders, Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipping, said they are hoping to eventually develop a system that allows for a more nuanced allocation of subscriber revenue. “How to measure that turns out to be the most complicated aspect of the bundle,” Baschez said.

Co-ops differ from traditional publishers in another key way. …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron