All The Ways To Make Money In Media Without Ads

Paywall for individual contributors: This is an area with the most innovation over the last five years as creators look to get paid. If Patreon is a digital tip jar, Substack is a Stratechery-in-a-box.

Clubs: The clubs model focuses on recurring revenue memberships to access discounts on products that align with a media company’s audience.

Synchronous Pay-as-you-go: This is the same model as above but with the added thrill of real-time interaction between creator and fan.

Job Listings: Since media brands are nodes in larger information webs and those webs are merely connections between people, it’s no wonder media companies have an edge in building talent marketplaces.

Selling to the Enterprise: Defined here as selling content products and services to large corporate (1,000+ employee) customers in which the organization is the customer, usually as part of a service-level agreement. Typical of B2B, this process involves more stakeholders and longer decision cycles offset by the promise of stable revenue and higher... See more

Production: Unlike subscriptions, in which the consumer pays for content, the production category refers to creators selling their content services to an enterprise customer.

Credentialing: In a system of many choices, it pays to have a trusted brand navigate consumers towards your desired product. This model directly leverages your brand equity to help drive sales activity for another company.

Asynchronous Pay-as-you-go: Whether it’s Lance Bass singing happy birthday to your aunt or your favorite fubol star revealing he’s much more charismatic on the pitch, these platforms host talent to sell their time on-demand.

Paywall for bundled content: Represents various ways of rationalizing a subscription cost by offering original, licensed, and UGC content. Example: Medium