Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 25, 2013
4:43 pm
The Dish
After raising a few hundred thousand dollars immediately and about
$611,000 after a few weeks, subscriber growth is slowing for Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog.
Sullivan
wrote Monday that income is now at $653,000 out of the $900,000 he needs to break even. If you do the math, that's about $42,000 in new revenue over the past 30 days. "That’s 72 percent of our goal in almost three months," he said, "but almost all the likeliest subscribers have joined already. It gets tougher from here on out."
- A Daily Dish chart of subscription sales shows the decline after a strong launch.
As a result, Sullivan has
tightened the meter from seven free reads a month to five over two months, and on Monday announced a new
monthly subscription option for $1.99. (Annual is $19.99.)
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Feb. 25, 2013
3:02 pm
Since moving to a reader-funded blog, Andrew Sullivan has collected about $611,000, and he doesn’t want to nag, but…
[A]round 7,000 of you have already clicked on seven read-ons – your total free access every month – and not yet encountered a request to contribute. The next time you do, you will. …
Of course, nagging is an integral part to pay-meters’ success. They wear you down. If your experience online is anything like mine, I tend to ignore the pay-us boxes until they finally get too annoying. At some point, if what I’m reading is worth it, I say to myself: “Screw it. Just get this over with.”
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Andrew Sullivan, The Dish
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 22, 2013
10:30 am
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Andrew Beaujon
Jan. 3, 2013
10:53 am
BuzzFeed |
Reuters |
Time |
Foster Kamer |
GigaOM |
TechCrunch
Andrew Sullivan, who is
taking his venerable blog "The Daily Dish" independent, tells BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray that he's already gotten individual donations for up to $10,000. "We're well into six figures in revenue,"
he told her, adding that he "wasn't sure how many subscribers at a base rate of $19.99 a year he would need to make the enterprise work long-term."
Sullivan
would need about 50,000 subscribers a year to make enough to feed and clothe himself and his seven staffers, Reuters' Felix Salmon calculates. That million bucks is not a huge barrier; you could put together a good alt-weekly for that cost and with a similar staff, and you don't have to pay for print. Of course, alt-weekly readers are used to getting their content paid for by advertisers.
Few bloggers could make such an arrangement work, writes James Poniewozik: "As journalists go, Sullivan may be like Louis CK or Radiohead: established creators who have been able to monetize DIY efforts themselves after becoming famous in more conventional ways." There just aren't that many writers people will pony up for, Poniewozik argues:
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Jeff Sonderman
Jan. 2, 2013
1:03 pm
Daily Beast
After six years of affiliating his popular blog with major media companies Time, The Atlantic and most recently
the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan announced he's returning to independence.
As of Feb. 1, the blog will live at andrewsullivan.com without any ads, sponsors or investment backing. Just Sullivan and a couple of colleagues blogging -- and hopefully, readers paying. Sullivan is asking for $19.99 a year to subscribe ("around a nickel a day").
Sullivan calls it "the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews ... just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation."
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