The Spinoff’s young, urban audience embraces news media membership

New Zealand’s on-line media brand, The Spinoff, is marking its fifth anniversary as a self-proclaimed “smart, funny, provocative” site with a sophisticated membership program to help keep the site’s content free to access.

Launched by Founder Duncan Greive in 2014, the Auckland-based organisation now claims an average monthly unique audience of about 800,000 (about one in six New Zealand residents) and a daily organic social reach of about 100,000. Their site boasts: “Our audience is young, urban, and earning, and they love what we do.”

Greive says: “I was working as a freelance journalist and I was always interested in the commercial side because all the magazines I’d written for had gone defunct and I thought “that’s annoying”.

The Spinoff was originally launched as a site for talking about television, supported by New Zealand’s SVOD supplier Lightbox, although, says, Greive, “through television, you could talk about politics or sport.”

It’s now expanded to offer content grouped around 10 verticals — still including television, but also across politics, social issues and culture. Usually, each vertical has its own sponsor — for example, the books vertical is supported by the Unity Books stores. “We got sponsorship for parenting coverage, sport and books and we also opened the politics and media section,” says Greive. “We just opened them and hoped that sponsors would come — which turned out to be wrong.”

It’s been bootstrapped. Growth has depended on cash flow, both through the site and through white-labelled content, including video, produced for other companies. They now have about 25 staff, including 15 journalists producing content.

However, the site has avoided straight advertising. “Our audience is very resistant to advertising,” says Greive. “We’re aggressively anti-advertising, so no programmatic, no CPM. About half our audience have ad blockers.” (And only 60 per cent have linear television.)

The Spinoff has been taking donations through the New Zealand start-up PressPatron (since July 2017) and has been thinking for some time about a more structured program. As a result, in June this year they launched a membership program based on a member chosen level of contribution either monthly or annually.

Apart from some swag (tote bag, annual book), the membership offering is network and values based, highlighting: “Opportunities to tell us what topics you’d like us to cover” and “Undying gratitude and love”.

The membership program took six months of planning and prep work: programming to accept monthly continuing payments, design and artwork, getting the book ready. “We really sweated the copy and the message of the membership landing page because we wanted to emphasis that this wasn’t a aywall and would not change the experience of The Spinoff, but would allow us to do more and open up a two-way conversation where members could speak to, inform and contribute, “ says Greive.

By launch, he says: “I was pleased that it felt like we had figured out the proposition that made sense for us.”

About 1,000 people signed up in the first week. Although there was no minimum payment (members can pay as little as $1), the average contribution is about $NZ100 a year. Greive says they are continuing to pick up members every day and are on track for a target of about 2,500 people by the end of this year on the way to a tripling of current membership income. Although The Spinoff is Auckland based, the membership growth has largely come from outside, particularly Wellington which has contributed about 25 percent, although it is only 10 percent of the country’s population.

They have launched their first membership based product — a pop-up newsroom to cover local government elections around New Zealand.

The challenge is to respond to members, without, Greive says, being edited by members.

They conduct monthly surveys of readers to identify interests and then consider how or whether they can bring an appropriate stand-point to the subject. Major topics so far have been climate change followed by national politics. They are currently road-testing climate change coverage with the aim of developing an ongoing unique coverage that doesn’t duplicate what others are doing.

Jacqui Park publishes The Story, a fortnightly newsletter on reinventing journalism in the Asia Pacific. She is a journalist, maker and advisor to new media ventures, and a senior fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at UTS. You can sign up for the newsletter here: http://bit.ly/TheStory-AsiaPacific