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📮 This week, we get back to business with the fourth installment of the Revenue Roadmap series, delving into how you can make use of the Earned-Income Roadmap.

The Challenge: taking your media from product to profit

When you have a product that meets demand and is starting to get some traction for your organization, the next step is to turn your attention to the business. How will your product influence your bottom line or your profit margin? This could be revenue, but it could also be audience engagement, increased visibility, or anything else that you believe will positively influence your business.

From content-based strategies to service offerings, media organizations should experiment with new revenue ideas to address their needs, monetize their expertise and create sustainable growth. Here we can start by demystifying some classical business subjects like strategy or technology.

The Solution: ask the right questions

Think first of your market conditions and your organization’s capabilities when pursuing new revenue streams. If you lack the necessary infrastructure, launching a new initiative might be challenging at that moment. However, building on existing successes, like expanding paid newsletters, can be a smart move.

The Revenue Roadmap guide offers 5 income-generating buckets of products and services to get you started:

  • Ad-based strategies: Leverage your audience reach for ad revenue.
  • Content-based: Capitalize on your unique content offerings.
  • Service-based: Offer services that harness your organization’s strengths.
  • Donation-based: Transform donations into profitable products.
  • Financial/legal restructure: Optimize your company’s structure for increased cash flow.

Take the content-based approach by offering membership programmes. Membership programmes are typically where the audience helps to financially support a news organization and represent a way in which media organizations can receive regular and predictable donations from readers and users. The key here is that paying for a membership is typically considered by the person as less transactional and more emotional and personal than paying for a subscription.

Musikilu Mojeed, the editor-in-chief of Nigeria’s Premium Times, an investigative, multiple award-winning newspaper, pointed out how exploring membership and experimenting with revenue diversification was what ultimately helped the organization keep their journalism accessible to the wider public (IPI 2024 MIF panel).

“We believe that the economic status should not limit people from accessing good journalistic products and content, so we decided that we are not going to put our content behind a paywall”.

The organization has been experimenting with book publishing, ads, publishing of special publications, training and reader revenue models, like membership. In 2019 their team had just started developing a reader-revenue model and “failed spectacularly”.

“For it to be successful you need to understand our audience… make them part of the operation and bring them in to provide feedback.”

In the second attempt at reader-revenue, Premium Times went back to audience listening and mapping, conducting a pre-membership survey to shape their offering. The solution came through approaching the Nigerian diaspora living abroad. Through surveys, Premium Times saw that the diaspora possessed higher economic power and remained very passionate about supporting media in Nigeria. This audience showed the potential to become the first patrons of the media through their “PT” Membership Club.

Explore all 5 buckets with 25 ways to earn income in Phase 5 of Revenue Roadmap. Remember that this list is not the limit! This guidebook is an evolving tool to get your team to ideate. Don’t stop here.

Next Step Forward

🧩 Unlock the future of media with the Revenue Roadmap Series!

🗺️ Follow our new vertical series as we explore innovative strategies to transform your editorial, technology, and business models.

The series is based on the Revenue Roadmap guidebook by IPI and Report for the World, bringing together new research, new case studies and new insights from newsrooms around the globe.

 

>> Get the full Roadmap

Innovation Deck

Join IPI as the Africa Programme Manager

📍Remote in sub-Saharan Africa, applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

📌 International Press Institute is seeking a talented, dedicated, and ambitious programme manager to oversee the implementation of our growing donor-funded work in Africa.
📌 The Africa Programme Manager will work together with and support IPI’s Africa- and Vienna-based teams to ensure high-level, impactful implementation of our programmes and strategies to protect and promote press freedom and journalist safety in Africa as essential pillars of resilient democratic societies.

Other opportunities:

IJ4EU Investigation Support Scheme

IJ4EU Freelancer Support Scheme

JournalismAI Innovation Challenge, supported by the Google News Initiative

 
📍Europe

Apply by October 28, 2024

 📍Europe

Apply by October 28, 2024

📍Worldwide

Apply by: October 10, 2024, at 23:59 GMT.

Share your thoughts, reach out to the Media Innovation team and help us shape our media support programmes! Say hi – [email protected].