The Florida publisher earning nearly $100k/year from readers

Membership offers news businesses — both nonprofits and for-profits — an opportunity to turn the trust and goodwill gained from serving their communities into consistent, sustainable revenue. LION Publishers member Mainstreet Daily News, launched in early 2020 as an antidote to the declining legacy outlet in Gainesville, FL, is leveraging its growing prominence in the community to earn more than $8,000 in monthly revenue in the first year of its membership program. The outlet boasts nearly 10 full-time employees and covers almost half a million people in Alachua County and the surrounding area. The following Q&A from December 2024 with J.C. Derrick, publisher of Mainstreet Daily News, highlights the remarkable success of their membership program, with tips for other publishers.

LION: What sparked your interest in a membership program? Why did you think it might be a good fit for your news business?

J.C. Derrick: We knew a successful news business includes reader revenue, so we did extensive research to see if a subscription or member model made sense. All signs pointed to a voluntary membership program, including a helpful LION Sustainability Audit [in late 2023] from analyst Ariel Zirulnick. Her top recommendation was for us to launch a membership program, which we did a few months later.

How did you prepare to launch your membership program? How did you determine pricing and what benefits to offer?

Literally the day after we decided internally to go in the membership direction, we were invited to participate in the Google News Initiative’s Reader Revenue Lab. We used the lab to hone our value proposition, standardize language across our site, test certain features, and most of all, start making more asks. Initially those asks were for people to become supporters of our work (we had long had a “Support Us” button on the site), and the tests were largely designed to drive more people to the “Support Us” page on our site. Right after the lab ended, we launched our membership program with two pricing levels: $12/mo or $10/mo if you pay annually. 

We started with four benefits we knew we could deliver without huge extra effort from our small staff: 1) an exclusive monthly newsletter giving people a behind-the-scenes look at our work, 2) occasional member events, 3) ticket and gift card giveaways, and 4) (and most importantly!) the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping Mainstreet build a stronger community.

In the first 12 months of the program, you reached nearly 600 members and about $8,000 in monthly revenue — quite a success! How did you launch the program to see this initial growth? How did you promote membership to your audience?

We launched the program with an email to our subscriber list on December 14, 2023. We had more than 40 signups by the end of the month (we also converted about 50 monthly contributors to members). Surprisingly, we found 90 percent of our audience chose the annual option, meaning we get $120 at once. This created a larger revenue stream faster than we expected. Our promotion efforts included:

• Monthly unique email messages from a staffer making an ask to our email subscriber list
• Occasional publisher asks at the top of our daily email newsletter
• An evergreen ask in our email newsletters
• An in-copy box making an ask in stories 
• We switched our website pop-up from asking exclusively for newsletter signups to a combo ask that also included a membership ask

Has growth been steady or has it tapered off? Have you changed your marketing tactics or overall strategy at any point?

We were worried about a tapering effect, but it did not materialize. We’ve seen ebbs and flows on a monthly basis, but every month we’ve had at least 25, and as many as 75 [new members]. The higher months are usually tied to traffic spikes due to big stories (content matters!), but we also had a spike at the end of September when we asked people to help us get to 500 members by the end of the month. They really stepped up to help us get there — three months ahead of our original goal of 500 by December 31.

Are your members unique among your audience? Do you draw members from your whole audience, or are members distinct in terms of engagement, demographics, or other characteristics?

We expected virtually all of our members to come from our newsletter subscribers, because it’s free. If you like our content, why wouldn’t you start there? But we discovered one in four new members was not a newsletter subscriber. We also didn’t find a correlation between frequent commenters and members. The vast majority of members are people we’ve had no contact with in the past. Our takeaway: Every unique user on the site is a potential member.

What advice would you give another LION looking to launch a membership program?

First, don’t be afraid to jump out and get started — even if it’s just with one or two benefits. Second, don’t assume that because you’ve been asking for general support that you wouldn’t get much out of a membership program. The structure of a program, along with focused, precise language communicating your value, and a good squeeze page (don’t make your offers too complicated!) can be a magical combination. Also, we do not do discounting. Discounts make people easy to acquire but difficult to keep. We’re building our business for the long haul. 

A big thanks to J.C. for taking the time to share his insights!

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Based on 2022-2024 Audit data, about a quarter of LION Audit participants have some type of membership program, generating about $100,000 annually from an average of 645 members, for an average member contribution of $155 per year. And, as J.C. notes, there are many ways to convert audiences to paying members, but LIONs convert about 6.5 percent of newsletter subscribers into paying members. 

If you’re interested in creating or advancing your own membership program, we’ve highlighted resources recommended by LION Audit analysts below (leaning heavily on the excellent Membership Guide from the Membership Puzzle Project):

1. Identify your membership readiness gaps. Launching and maintaining a successful membership program is a complex, cross-functional effort that should not be undertaken without evaluating how heavy a lift it will be for your organization. 
   • Review “Are you ready for membership?” in the Membership Guide and identify your gaps in each of the nine readiness factors using this membership readiness worksheet.
     
2. Identify your value proposition. A value proposition connects your journalism to audience members’ needs and articulates how you create value for them through your work.
   • Read the Membership Guide on discovering your value proposition. Do the “First, Best, Only” exercise, then use the value proposition template to identify your value proposition. 
   • Read about how LION member Richland Source identified its value proposition.
     
3. Define your audience funnel(s) and evaluate the size of your loyal audience. The audience funnel describes the process and workflows by which your audience (and potential audience(s)) move from awareness of your organization and your news products, to loyal consumers of your products, to those who support and sustain your organization.
   • Indiegraf, What the heck is a marketing funnel and why should I care?: A primer on the audience funnel for digital news outlets.
   • Indiegraf, How to Put Your Audience Funnel to Work: Tactics and metrics to pay attention to for audience funnel efforts.
   • There are many ways to evaluate the size of your loyal audience in order to evaluate the size of your membership opportunity. This step-by-step process from the Membership Guide (beginning with “How should we calculate our universe of total members?”) is one option.
     
4. Identify staffing and technical needs and membership costs.
   • Review the Membership Guide’s “Staffing a membership program” section, especially the list of “must-have” capabilities, and identify what essential skills you have and which ones you need to obtain, either through training, resources, contractors, or hiring.
   • Do the same for your tech stack using the “Building your membership tech stack” section of the Membership Guide and the resources below.
   • The Membership Guide’s advice on what costs to plan walks you through startup costs, ongoing costs, programmatic costs, and staffing, technical, and overhead costs, which should give you a detailed enough rundown to build a membership budget.