Monetising a media venture through diversifying services
Most entrepreneurs sell tangible products, but tapping into a market where you are selling audiences in exchange for advertising space has never been easier, but alas, it’s achievable.
New content creators fail to understand how media makes money. As a media entrepreneur, I too failed to understand the monetising component of a media venture until I had a training and mentorship opportunity through the Zimbabwe Entrepreneurial Journalism Program for Emerging Content Creator (EJP). Since the beginning of the year 2022, the EJP has been sharing insights and mentoring me on how to manage a media business.
Without further ado, my project which I introduced to you four months ago is an online newsletter, ‘Weekly Round-Up’ whose niche is not only to improve access to credible information but to build employment for new age media gurus being churned out of higher education institutions annually. To employ or motivate future mediapreneurs however, needs a clear strategic plan of how one will commercialise their enterprise.
Weekly Round-Up draws its content from the Community Talk project, a project I initiated in 2020. Seeing there was a need to sustain the project, the newsletter was a unique idea I thought would compete in the media marketplace of saleable ideas. The newsletter, which is for free and distributed via email, seeks to bring the weekly broadsheet in an online format. In simpler terms, created and still under development is a version of your known weekly hard copy newspaper coming straight to your email.
Changing just the medium; from the traditional hard copy newspaper to an online platform, but the concept of selling audiences to advertisers remains the same. I would say the product to date has passed the content creation stage as, along with my small team of five people — all new recruits — have managed to produce and publish the newsletter on set deadlines every week.
Making money has remained partly an idea and a reality as we have managed to get three local advertisers. Motivating, isn’t it? However, these are not enough to build a media empire we dream of. What is our strategy now?
Going forward; we have explored work being done by those who have made it in the media entrepreneurship industry and decided that we should offer more than just adverts. Our products will now improve from mere story publishing to public relations consultancy, social media management, production and publishing services.
It however, sounds easier said than done, but definitely, Community Talk’s ‘Weekly Round Up’ is here to stay and so shall we dare every profitable endeavour we are exposed to and achieve our set goals of improving access to credible information as well as creating employment for the youths with a major bias to those emerging from rural disadvantaged communities.
One hanging question that still remains however, is how does a mediapreneur build a database for such specialised services? Would partnerships work, or maybe reaching out to potential clients? How much money will be involved especially considering that I am running a media startup that would need low budget investment?
Seized with such questions, I hope my next blog post will be able to answer those as I continue to take you through my journey to building a sustainable media product.
