Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr of tech news site Pando Daily write about what’s happened in the year since it became a subscription website.
Lacy and Carr write, “A year later, we have close to (but not quite) 5,000 subscribers and almost seventy Pando Patrons. We’ve also spun off (or helped spin off) three podcasts into stand alone subscription vehicles with all of the money going to the individual contributors. Readers and listeners are directly paying Pando writers and contributors tens of thousands of dollars every month to keep doing what we do.
“Meantime, unlocks have allowed us to still share our journalism to an audience several times larger than these subscribers, and sponsors like Braintree have allowed us to gift thousands of free memberships to groups that can’t afford them but value the reporting.
“It’s not a bad life for a content startup. We write everyday, our words have a sizable impact, and thousands of the most interesting, successful and influential people in global business pay us $10 a month each as a result. Ad sales are doing fine, but we don’t live or die on them. They simply allow us to do more. We don’t have to worry about raising money from investors ever again. And unless thousands of you cancel at the same time (please don’t do that) we won’t ever go under. We don’t have to play games with grabby headlines, volume, or Facebook hacks. We just try to do good work.
“We still have challenges. We’ve had to reduce headcount more than we’d like. And senior employees remaining at the company (that means us) have taken sizeable pay cuts, which isn’t easy in San Francisco. Growth and getting more distribution are a huge challenge and frustration for us, as they are for most media companies.”
Read more here.
