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It’s not easy to build sustainability, but many of these fledgling media organizations are showing resilience despite complex challenges. Most start with small teams and many rely on the sweat equity of their founders, as well as volunteers and freelancers, especially in their early years of operation.
The digital native media we include in this report range from small, volunteer-run organizations with little or no revenue, to large regional and international media ventures with professional teams with more than $20 million in annual revenues.
To better understand the differences, we analyzed the data to compare teams of various sizes and included the average annual revenue at each level in the table that follows. This table shows the revenue analysis of the comparison we found in Latin America.
As might be expected, as team size increases, so does the average annual revenue. What is notable is that as news organizations grow to more than 30 employees, revenues take a sharp upward turn, from roughly $10,000 per employee to $20,000 or even $30,000 in the top income bracket.
This may indicate that an economy of scale is kicking in once teams grow beyond a few people. Larger teams, especially when they have diverse skills, also mean they have greater expertise in the myriad complexities of running a digital news business: from audience and analytics to product development, management, accounting, technology, and the many challenges they face in the ever-evolving world of digital media.
Looking at the data based on team size, it appears that the highest revenues require teams of at least 50 or more. This demonstrates the advantage to being able to grow beyond a startup model to a more enterprise-level organization, where the team members can specialize in their roles. This also helps make the case for creating media acceleration programs that combine direct grant support with tailored consulting and training to help build organizational capacity and fill skills gaps as teams grow.
There is also an anomaly in teams of 1-2. Based on anecdotal evidence from our research, this likely stems from outliers started by popular journalists and media personalities who bring large audiences to their new ventures.
We’ve consistently found that building a more diversified revenue model helps media become more independent and resilient. Over the years, we’ve identified more than 30 distinct revenue sources, which we organized into five macro categories: advertising, grants, consulting, content sales, and audience support (which includes membership, subscriptions, and event tickets).
Broadly speaking, we’ve found two paths to sustainability: building a large audience with enough traffic to earn revenue from advertising, or leveraging the loyalty of a small audience to attract subscribers and members, donations, and clients interested in their consulting services. Many also earn revenue through training and content services.
Diversity of revenue sources is key, but we’ve found that taking on too many projects at once can be counterproductive. Media organizations with the highest revenues generally report two to six revenue-generating products or services. Although some of the larger sites can manage more, having more than six revenue sources did not correlate to higher revenues in the directory.
Although grant funding was reported as the top revenue source across the entire directory, a significant difference emerges when comparing the primary revenue source between forprofit and nonprofit media outlets.
Nearly 60% of forprofit media rely on advertising as their primary source of revenue; while 68% of nonprofit organizations report grants as their primary revenue source.
The graphic below shows a comparison of average annual revenues between forprofit and nonprofit organizations in the directory across all three regions. The higher revenues reported by nonprofit organizations seem to be the result of grant support.
This disparity may also be the result of the relatively small percentage of nonprofit news organizations when compared with forprofit (32% are nonprofits vs. 60% are forprofit ventures); a few very successful nonprofits may outperform the forprofits, because some the forprofits receive significant grant funding, as well as other sources of revenue.
The Texas Tribune is regularly held up as one of the most successful digital media news operations in the U.S. (most recently by Poynter in July 2024). The site was founded in 2009 as a non-profit, non-partisan news organization in Austin, Texas, by a group of charismatic journalists and a deep-pocketed early investor. The founders said they started the new project because they were concerned by what they saw as a dangerous erosion in the quantity and quality of coverage of serious public-interest issues.
“Basically the idea was, in baseball terms, hit ‘em where they ain’t,” said Editor Evan Smith, who was running the Texas Monthly magazine at the time. “(Don’t) do what everybody else is doing. Focus on what nobody else is doing.”
In the pre-launch days, the startup was so secretive that Smith was referred to only using his codename of “Voldemort.” But after launch, the 11 journalists started referring to themselves as “Evan’s Eleven,” because their goal seemed as audacious as the casino heists in the Ocean’s 11 movie series.
Since the launch, the Texas Tribune has become so powerful and influential that Texas lawmakers have started referring to the “Trib Effect” because of the impact they’ve had on politics throughout the state. With a team of 80 staff members, and a yearly budget of $9 million, the news team has expanded operations to four additional cities.
They have won more than 100 awards for their reporting and investigative work, and were a finalist for the Pulitzer last year for their series on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
The Tribune relies on a “promiscuous revenue model” of paid members, newsletter subscribers, live events, membership, individual donations, and support from foundations. They’ve been especially innovative in using events as both a way to reach audiences directly, and to earn revenue with sponsorship. In addition to weekly news debates and forums, they host an annual conference that attracts CEOs, celebrities, musicians, community activists, and politicians as prominent as President Barack Obama and Senator Ted Cruz.
Historically, advertising has been the primary revenue stream for news organizations, from newspaper to television and radio, and our research shows that digital native media also heavily depend on ad revenue.
Nearly 60% of the media we’ve studied report advertising as either their primary or secondary revenue source.
Local advertising and other direct ad sales are an important source of revenue, especially in more developed countries like France, Germany, Uruguay, and the United States.
Data from “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions: 2024” from Reuters Institute shows that 80% of media leaders mention display and native advertising will be important or very important as a revenue source.
In countries like Chile and Mexico, the concentration of traditional media ownership in the hands of a few wealthy business owners, leaves many independent media at a disadvantage when competing for advertisers. These owners often control the advertising budgets of some of the biggest businesses in the country, as well as the media, which means that they can direct lucrative ad campaigns to compliant media outlets or stop advertising with media that publish news they find critical of their interests.
“Latin America is definitely one of the areas of the world with the highest concentration of audiences, where we see that few families and few elites control the information,” Nube Alvarez, project manager for Media Ownership Monitor in Latin America, told the Knight Center in a story on the LatAm Journalism Review.
In more authoritarian countries, local advertisers often face retaliation if they dare to advertise in media that have been critical of the government.
Most digital native media are too small to sell advertising to national and international brands, because big companies commonly use ad agencies and buy millions of page views at a time.
Programmatic ad networks have created new opportunities for digital media to earn ad dollars from big brands, and 26% of the news sites in the Project Oasis directory report that they accept advertising through digital ad exchanges. (Note this figure does not include Google Adsense, which we measure separately.)
There are a few reasons why the other 74% of the media in the directory don’t accept programmatic advertising. Some report that they make more money selling advertising directly and that they don’t have enough “extra” inventory to make it worth working with exchanges.
Most are also too small to qualify for programmatic ad networks, and if they don’t do direct sales, they are often limited to selling their ad inventory at the lowest rates — even though they often reach premium audiences with high-quality content.
To get around these limitations, some smaller media organizations have joined advertising marketplaces that combine traffic from many sites to deliver millions of page views for programmatic ad networks.
For example, in countries like Venezuela, where the local advertising market is nearly nonexistent because of the economic crisis, digital native media organizations have been able to use programmatic ad networks to capitalize on ad revenue from their diaspora audiences in the U.S. and Europe, where ad rates are much higher, by participating in international programmatic ad networks.
Advertising rates in countries like Venezuela, and other relatively low-income countries, can be as low as ten to twenty cents per CPM (Cost per thousand page views), while page views delivered to audiences in the U.S. and Canada can earn CPMs 400-600% higher.
According to Statista, the United States is expected to be the largest and fastest growing programmatic advertising market in 2024, with an estimated $264.66 billion in spending, and predicted growth at more than 11%. Throughout the region, ad rates vary dramatically. Mexico and Brazil generally attract advertisers with higher CPMs than the rest of the Latin American region, while rates in the U.S. can be 50 times higher than many of the countries in the region.
In the last decade, there were some promising indications that programmatic advertising was bringing much-needed ad dollars to digital media throughout the region, and significant revenues to media that attract page views in more developed markets.
The media development organization, Internews, has been leading an effort to create “white lists” of independent digital media through their Ads for News initiative. The goal is to attract international brands that want to support journalism, and take advantage of the high engagement, trust, and loyalty that many digital media have developed with their audiences.
While grants play a vital role in sustaining many journalistic media outlets, over-reliance on these funding sources can pose risks to long-term viability. In the U.S. and Canada, grant support has grown considerably in recent years, while in Europe it has remained relatively steady, and in Latin America, grant support seems to have dropped.
In Latin America, there are numerous examples of independent media outlets that have demonstrated that developing diverse revenue streams strengthens resilience, especially when grant funding is cut off.
Based on our research, media outlets that develop alternative revenue streams to supplement grants demonstrate greater resilience. SembraMedia’s prior research on independent digital native media, including the 2018 Inflection Point and the recent 2023 Project Oasis Europe, consistently highlight the importance of revenue diversification in fostering media independence and sustainability.
There is a relatively new movement among foundations to combine resources and create large funds for media. These include PressForward in the United States, which began by combining funding from a variety of foundations that support media, including the Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation. The founders of the fund are now conducting a national campaign to encourage other foundations that have not historically supported journalism to consider media as an important area of support. The U.S. has been a leader in private foundation support for media, but there is a global movement to create large media support foundations, as well.
On a more global scale, the new International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) seeks to bring new funding support to journalists in nearly 40 focus countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. IFPIM draws on years of experience working with media. Their current funding comes from a variety of donors, including USAID, MacArthur Foundation, Google News Initiative, UNESCO, Reporters Without Borders, and the Ford Foundation, and they are also seeking new partners.
Big donors can bring significant funding, which is essential to helping larger media organizations survive and grow. But bigger donors are often limited to only providing grants to relatively large media players.
At the International Symposium for Online Journalism (ISOJ) in April, 2024, Vanina Berghella, the Latin American Director for IFPIM, said the smallest grant that they can provide this year in Latin America is $75,000, and the total grant cannot provide more than 30 percent of the media organization’s total budget. Berghella said they hope to be able to provide more types of grants in the future, but at those levels of revenue requirements, more than half of the media organizations in the Project Oasis directory would not qualify based on their current annual revenues.
Although there are some advances in social investment around the world, for the most part, digital native media organizations rarely qualify for private equity or financing from financial institutions, even in more developed countries.
One of the few philanthropic media investors, Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), has taken the approach that investment and loans, rather than grants, help media build more sustainable ventures over time. But current financial trends are making it harder for digital media to qualify. “Money is expensive right now, and the currency fluctuations in the region are complicating investment opportunities,” said Maria Catalina Colmenares-Wiss, the former Latin American director of MDIF, noting that investors are generally more interested in businesses that can scale, like fintech and AI.
In 2010, Startup Chile gained international attention by raising funds from the Chilean government to provide startup investment to attract entrepreneurs from throughout the world. Although the program is open to a wide-range of entrepreneurs, they have invested in media organizations, including the AI company SharpShark, which went on to win the DW Akademie startup award in 2023 for its innovative work using Blockchain technology to protect intellectual property for journalists and photographers.
As media advertising revenues dropped over the last decade, many turned to subscriptions and membership to offset losses. The Membership Puzzle Project brought considerable attention to this trend with special grants and training, inspiring many digital media organizations to start membership programs.
Membership programs have proven to be a valuable source of funding for many of the digital native media in the Project Oasis directory, and audience support ranks third (after advertising and grants) as the most important source of revenue.
For some, reader revenue is a means of operating within an environment where media capture is widespread, while others seek audience support to build a sense of community and collectivism.
“Readers should donate because they feel they are part of a community, not because they are forced to do it,” said Alberto Puliafito, co-founder of the Italian multimedia publication Slow News.
In every region there are examples of media that earn revenue from membership, but even the most successful membership models rarely attract support from more than 1% of unique visitors. ElDiario.es from Spain, featured in the sidebar, is one of the most successful digital media organizations with a membership program, with 65,000 paid members that contribute nearly 5 million euros per year. When you analyze the numbers, their total membership represents only .6% of its nearly 10 million readers.
In Slovakia, Denník N, has also built a successful business model primarily based on website subscriptions. And like many of the media leaders in this report, they have been generous about sharing their knowledge with other newsrooms (including sharing their open source software for selling memberships and subscriptions).
The revenue some sites generate with membership is impressive, and it not only drives sustainability, it can strengthen reader loyalty. But media that have small audiences often struggle to reach a large enough pool of potential members to make these programs profitable. And many media leaders report that the cost of marketing and retention can make these programs unsustainable.
Only a few reported using a paywall to restrict audience access with subscriptions. Instead, the trend in digital native media is to ask audience members to give what they can. In some cases, that may be a few dollars, in others, membership campaigns can attract regular monthly and annual donors that make significant donations.
Nearly 15% of the media in our directory reported their primary source of revenue came from audience support. Although some 30% said they receive at least some support from members or subscribers.
Membership models were slightly more popular with the publications we studied, compared to website subscriptions. It is worth noting that the terms “membership” and “subscription” are often subject to regional and language interpretations. In some countries, “subscription” is used for a model that often includes community participation in non-financial ways, as well as financial.
Media cooperatives are also an interesting model among publications in our directory. As cooperatives, The Bristol Cable and The Meteor in the UK, Onderzoekscollectief Spit in the Netherlands, and RiffReporter in Germany are financed through contributions from members of the cooperative.
The Bristol Cable’s cooperative members are also “democratic shareholders,” which means they can attend the organization’s annual general meetings, vote on editorial campaigns, and stand in elections for the non-executive directors’ board. The board members help to guide, advise and steer the outlet forward.
Reader revenue, closely intertwined with community engagement, is also popular among digital native media outlets based in countries where media capture is widespread. Some of the examples you can find in our media directory include: OKO.press and Raport o Stanie Swiata in Poland, Telex and Mérce in Hungary, and Alternativata in Bulgaria.
Despite the relatively small numbers of membership and subscription programmes we found among media throughout Europe, when we asked the media leaders we interviewed there if they were planning to add any new revenue sources in the upcoming year, more than half said “yes.” This number was even higher among those that had only one revenue source, or none. Many of them indicated reader revenue would be a focus, particularly membership and website subscriptions.
Email newsletters have consistently proven to be one of the most effective ways to communicate directly with audience members — and drive membership.
ElDiario.es has shown that email newsletters can be a highly effective way to attract donations, and they offer a special incentive to members. They publish a daily email newsletter that goes out to the public every morning, but members receive it several hours in advance.
Newsmatch, a U.S. program run that provides matching funds to digital media non-profits that run membership programs, encourages the use of email newsletters to build connections and encourage readers to join.
“Email is the cockroach of the Internet,” said the late French journalist Jean-Francois Fogel at a journalism conference in Peru last year, noting that it is often underestimated yet it seems to be outliving many of its rivals when it comes to building a direct connection with your audience.
Some digital native news organizations have found value in printing monthly or quarterly publications with the highlights of coverage from their online news. Many find the print edition is especially valuable for members and advertisers.
ElDiario.es, a daily news website in Spain, also prints a quarterly magazine. Since it was launched in Madrid in 2012, the national news site has grown to nearly 10 million unique visitors per month, and often ranks as one of the top-10 most visited news sites in the country.
Often cited as an example for other media because of its success in building a sustainable news organization, and attracting more than 65,000 paid members, ElDiario is also highly transparent, and it shares annual revenues and salary information on its website.
In 2023, elDiario.es reported more than $15 million in revenue, an 8% increase over 2022. Total expenses were $13.7 million, with $1.4 million as reported reserves at the end of the year.
More than half their revenue was from advertising revenue (nearly $8 million), and more than a third was from paid membership ($5.5 million). They received a grant for about $260,000 for an investment in technology, and earned $1.7 million by selling copies of the print magazine, the rights to reproduce their content on other platforms, the sale of their technology and consulting to other media organizations.
Similar to other digital native media, ElDiario.es was founded by a team of journalists and editors “who contributed their money and their work to get it started… because we wanted to be owners of our own editorial team, in order to guarantee that the editorial line is independent and does not respond to hidden interests,” according to the site’s team page. More than 70% of the company” is owned by the people who work at the online newspaper.
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