‘What makes people really pay isn’t any one piece’
FOIAball uses public records to report on college football and pulled in 7,500 subscribers in its first year. Of those, 420 pay $70 a year or $7 a month. Sarah talked to FOIAball proprietor David Covucci this week about his business and what he’s learned about how to get people to pay up. This is one of my favorite Lab story genres. From the piece:
Building FOIAball as a business feels like running “both a sales operation and a nonprofit” at the same time, Covucci said. He described a frustrating and fundamental tension with paywalls: He needs readers to pony up because they’ve fallen in love with FOIAball, but how will they if all the best content goes behind a paywall? Although the number of subscribers has steadily risen, Covucci hasn’t found a silver bullet for getting people to open their wallets. Right now, he mixes hard paywalls with softer “institutional support” asks.
“So much of it is trial and error,” Covucci conceded.
While hard paywalls can work when a story goes viral (see: this Aaron Rodgers post on X), subscriptions from a single big story tend to be “soft” and “drop off,” Covucci said.
Instead, he’s found direct, transparent appeals to readers convert better than hard paywalls on their own.
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.