Laura Nelson gave a talk at WordCamp Europe in Porto and I’ve seen several people recommending it. The talk is “Creating a paid newsletter subscription in WordPress”. Laura shows how to create a clone of Substack using WooCommerce and the MailPoet plugin. The videos from this WordCamp are not cut up, so you’ll need to…
Over at LeakyPaywall, Peter Ericson has a great article on whether you should offer a subscription level that hides ads. His main example is Samsnytt, a WordPress-based publisher from Sweden. Samsnytt tries to upsell users to a special plan with an “ad-free experience”.
Block Club Chicago is a start-up with a very specific name and mission: they focus on block-level news in Chicago neighborhoods. They launched via a Kickstarter campaign and now get 70 percent of their annual revenue directly from readers through subscriptions and individual donations:
Poynter has a detailed article on revenue for Civil Beat, which is a WordPress-based news startup in Hawaii. The site had initially launched with a paywall but found that it was not successful for them:
Racket is a really interesting start-up publisher out of Minnesota. They call themselves “writer-owned, reader-funded” which sounds like a very good pathway for a lot of news start-ups. They use WordPress with Pico for payments:
Sarah Gooding from WPTavern published an awesome article on local newspapers in West Virginia. With all the talk of big money in WordPress and big tech in general, it’s great to see people like Tyler Channell focus on real problems and real solutions like this. Here’s the description of Tyler’s WordPress-powered PaywallProject:
Here’s another very useful WordPress publishing podcast: “Jeremy Green of Endo Creative and Leaky Paywall shares his thoughts on “why WordPress is a great choice for content publishers seeking to monetize with digital subscriptions, plus his favorite techniques for subscriptions.”
Quartz is a WordPress publisher that is taking down their paywall. They’ve been going 10 years now and have gone through a few different business models. It looks like they’re moving to selling ads and also premium newsletters. This post explains the thinking behind Quartz’s move.
We have the opportunity for you: The Cordova Times is 108 year old WordPress-based local newspaper and it is available for free. The small weekly in remote South-Central Alaska (only accessible by boat or plane) has won a lot of awards including “Alaska’s Best Weekly” for two years in a row. The newspaper is owned…
We often hear about old newspaper companies that are struggling. But there’s a good chance that 2020 was a turning point for successful new journalists. If you look carefully, we’re seeing many fresh, independent media projects. The business model for these new projects is different. They are ditching corporate ownership in favor of a model…