Quick Overview

After his newspaper folded in 2008, its editor Ira Stoll launched a blog to continue following and being an influential voice in the beat he’s most passionate about. But he had to make a living publishing it, and running a few Google AdSense ads wouldn’t do the trick. So he embarked on a paid content experiment, asking readers to subscribe at their choice of $49 -$250,000 annually to support the free blog, in exchange for private quarterly reports, branded coffee mugs, and even tote bags. Read on to discover what he’s learned in the first year of the experiment — including why offering premium five- and six-figure subscription tiers has paid off.

Target Audience

Primarily men living on the East Coast of the US who are interested in the intersection of politics and business, or have free-market leanings. Many readers are engaged in the financial markets as investors or fund managers.

Content Model

The site follows a fairly typical blogging model, publishing 4-10 items a day relevant to its topical focus on politics, finance, business and regulations. Typical articles include:

• Short commentaries on and links to articles from other media outlets and blogs
• 900-1,500 word book reviews
• Event write-ups, such as an account of a dinner with Ron Paul
• Original reporting

Stoll writes most content, but uses a handful of free guest contributors. He also often receives ideas, links, data, and other information for his posts from his readers and subscribers.

“One of the site’s goals is to influence the political/policy debate. To do that, you have to reach as many people as possible, and putting your stories behind a hard paywall will limit your influence a little bit,” says Stoll.

So, all website content is open to the public, and each day’s headlines are sent to more than 500 subscribers of a free, daily email newsletter.

However, only paying subscribers receive a quarterly report that provides “behind the scenes” information about the site. This report recounts site statistics, such as quarterly traffic, top stories, top referring domains, and visits from interesting domains (i.e., The SEC, Treasury Department, the Senate, etc.). The report also discusses plans for upcoming quarters.

Revenue Streams

Although the site receives a small amount of revenue from advertising, the majority of revenues come from subscriptions, which Stoll promotes each quarter in online drives similar to a public broadcasting pledge drive (See Marketing Tactics, below).

Those paid options are a hybrid of a traditional subscriptions and donations. All subscribers get access to the special report, but subscribers who pay higher fees receive additional benefits. Subscription premiums include Public Radio or college alumni fundraising classics — coffee mugs, tote bags, and umbrellas — and quirkier offerings like a FutureOfCapitalism.com bow tie.

Subscriptions start at $49 a year, but rise quickly with packages such as $1,000 annually for a “sustaining subscriber”; $15,000 to become a member of the “Editor’s Circle”; $75,000 for a “Platinum Membership”; and $250,000 for a “Sponsor.”

So far, the site has signed up almost 100 subscribers at the $49 level, a few at the $1,000 level, and one $75,000 platinum member, says Stoll.

Creating the five- and six-digit subscription tiers was in part an exercise in pricing psychology, says Stoll. Would extremely high rates make the lower-priced options seem more affordable by comparison?

But they’re also a test of a new content development and site management model: A $250,000 sponsorship lets the subscriber endow a reporter to cover a subject his or her choosing. Platinum Memberships give subscribers one-on-one access to the editor and opportunities to make suggestions about the site and its direction, like an advisory board.

As with all experiments, Stoll is learning quickly. For example, he says he’s had a few calls about the $250,000 sponsorship package, but that most individuals with the wherewithal to afford it want to know if they can do it in a tax-efficient way — such as donating to a non-profit.

Marketing Tactics

Natural-search and inbound links are the primary sources of traffic to the site, thanks to a few well-established SEO/blogging techniques.

Three SEO tactics

#1. Linking and keywords

Each article features links to external sources and keywords in headlines and article copy.

For example, Stoll frequently includes names of well-known government officials, pundits, and politicians in article headlines, such as Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, George Soros, Paul Krugman, and Charles Krauthammer. His headlines also references simple, topical phrases, such as “taxes,” “tax cut,” “tax plan,” etc.

The site also maintains ongoing coverage of certain topics, building several relevant pages for specific, niche keywords. For example, when investment banker and former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman was first rumored to be a replacement for Lawrence Summers as Chairman of President Obama’s National Economic Council, FutureOfCapitalism critiqued of one of his New York Times Op-Ed pieces. The post scored links from The Weekly Standard and John Stossel’s blog. A follow-up article on Altman contained a link to that first article, and combined, the two posts helped the site achieve the sixth-highest Google ranking for the term “Roger Altman.”

“It’s not like being on the first page of results for ‘Justin Beiber,’ but in my little world — the intersection of politics and business — that’s pretty good,” says Stoll.

#2. Link-sharing with other sites

As the former editor of the New York Sun, Stoll has several former employees who now work at relevant sites like Politico. He will email certain articles to his former colleagues and suggest they link to his site.

He also contributes to other sites, such as Instapundit, which link back to FutureOfCapitalism.com

#3. Publishing scoops

“The best thing, always, is a scoop,” he says. “Items where I’ve had information that other people haven’t or an idea that’s original, those are the items that got a lot of traffic.”

For example, when he wrote about a change in Citibank’s checking account terms and conditions that warned customers that seven days notice may be required to withdraw money from their accounts, the post was picked up other financial news sites and blogs, says Stoll.

How the quarterly subscription drives work

Roughly once per quarter, the site aims to convert its free traffic into paying subscribers through week-long “subscription drives.”

The campaigns feature a series of daily posts, interspersed with regular coverage, that ask readers to support the site through a subscription. They include links to the subscription package page, which is headlined “How to Help.”

Stoll also has written a “10 reasons to become a paying subscriber” post that offers a mix of the serious (“You’re curious about what’s going on behind the scenes and would like to get a copy of that quarterly report issued only to paying subscribers”) and the fun (“A FutureOfCapitalism.com bow tie?”).

Stoll estimates that 90%-95% of current subscribers came through one of the subscription drives, as opposed to visitors who came to the site and found the “How to Help” page on their own.

Technology and Vendors Used

Stoll works with a partner in Israel who uses custom platforms to publish the site and manage the email newsletter. However, they also use a few third-party tools to help run the business:

PayPal: Payment system the site uses to process subscriptions
https://www.paypal.com/

Stoll says he chose PayPal for subscription processing to avoid the “nightmare” of disentangling the site from merchant accounts should his voluntary subscription experiment fail. As one of the people responsible for liquidating the assets of the New York Sun after bankruptcy, he says he experienced weeks of delays and difficulties in shutting down the publication’s merchant accounts. He has no desire to repeat the experience.

Google Analytics: The site’s web analytics platform
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Reader: An editorial research tool to aggregate news feeds from blogs/media
http://www.google.com/reader

Google AdSense: One of the ad networks the site uses to place ads on its pages
http://www.google.com/adsense

ContextWeb: Another ad platform the site uses to host ads
http://www.contextweb.com/

About Ira Stoll

Stoll is a longtime journalist and author of Samuel Adams: A Life. He worked for the Wall Street Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Smartertimes.com, and the Los Angeles Times before co-founding and editing the New York Sun from 2002-2008.

When the Sun shut down in 2008, he decided to start his own site to focus on what he saw as one of the hottest stories then in the news — the intersection of finance and government. It was around the time of the government takeover of Fannie Mae, bailouts, bank failures, the subprime mortgage meltdown, and the like, and he believed there would be an audience for a dedicated news, analysis and commentary site that tracked the trend. “I knew I was going to try to get some people to pay, or else I couldn’t afford to do it.”

Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis

We love a good paid content experiment, and FutureOfCapitalism.com’s approach shows that — as with public radio and television — loyal audience members can be convinced to support the content they love if you ask them to. Stoll was smart to focus on a niche with a passionate audience — free-market thinkers who are concerned about the future of capitalism — and to position his subscription requests as an opportunity to support a shared mission.

That said, the hybrid subscription/donation model is unlikely to be stable enough to support a large content operation unless the blog succeeds in selling more of the five- and six-figure subscription packages. But as the initial feedback has suggested, moving to a non-profit model may be one change that actually opens the doors to more of those premium subscribers.

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com