Our Collaborators: The News Revenue Hub
This post was co-authored by the News Revenue Hub and the Single Subject News Project team. Please see the News Revenue Hub’s blog for its announcement.
Hi there,
As we prepare to leave for #ONA18 to meet with our colleagues and friends — we wanted to make an announcement about a collaboration we are really excited about.
The Single Subject News Project at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is collaborating with the News Revenue Hub.
The News Revenue Hub is a service-oriented, hands-on nonprofit that helps news organizations monetize their audiences and generate revenue. This involves working on member recruitment and retention, audience engagement, and developing software to specifically address the needs of fundraising in the news industry. Think of the Hub as the outsourced, centralized team for news sites that want to build a business model around reader revenue.
We’ve worked together for a while now — the News Revenue Hub was one of the first groups the Single Subject News team consulted when kicking off the study last summer, and we’ve been sharing best practices and thematic findings ever since.
Our Shared Values
We both believe the healthiest business model for news is one in which the people who consume and value good reporting help pay for it.
We also believe journalism’s biggest problem, above all else, is a lack of revenue. Our goal is to ensure the sustainability of quality journalism, both for our clients, study participants, and the sector at large, so news organizations can achieve long-term viability.
Four Key Performance Indicators for Revenue
Through our work, we have identified four key performance indicators (KPIs) that impact a digital news organization’s ability to generate reader revenue:
- Audience growth
- Email acquisition
- Donor /member recruitment (cultivation and conversion)
- Donor / member retention
These KPIs orient our work and strategic planning. Our hope is that this collaboration will help us to test and build strategies and tools that have a direct tie to increased revenue for news organizations, with priority given to projects that have a high likelihood of achieving results (i.e., move the needle) and a high return on investment (i.e., low cost to impact ratio).
What This Means
- In order to experiment and measure various audience growth and monetization initiatives across newsrooms, research centers like the Shorenstein Center benefit from working with service providers like the News Revenue Hub. The News Revenue Hub adds a necessary layer of implementation assistance, technical know-how, and data driven insights that the Shorenstein Center can leverage to produce more thorough analysis and benchmarking across the field.
- The News Revenue Hub supports overlapping Shorenstein Center research participants with technical help and expertise.
- The Single Subject News team offers an additional layer of analytics to overlapping News Revenue Hub clients via our benchmarking research that will include our research cohort and their client base.
- We will mutually test new and emerging technical tools for revenue and engagement, and produce, review and publish white papers, playbooks, tool kits, and blog posts that report back on our findings.
We’re excited about this collaboration, because we believe it will yield meaningful results at a time when the business model for journalism faces unprecedented disruption.
Stay tuned for tool kits, guides, white papers, and other resources. Want to learn more in the meantime? The Single Subject News team AND the News Revenue Hub will be at ONA — give us a shout!
- News Revenue Hub’s COO, Christina Shih: christina@fundjournalism.org
- The Single Subject News Project Manager, Emily Roseman: Emily_Roseman@Hks.harvard.edu
