404 Media founders: Paying for content works
Jason Koebler, Samantha Cole, Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, founders of tech news site 404 Media, write what they have learned two years into striking out on their own.
Koebler, Cole, Maiber and Cox write, “It has been a relief that this business strategy of ‘publish good articles and ask people to pay for journalism’ still works, despite the fracturing of social media, the slopification of every major platform, AI being shoved into everything, and the rich and powerful trying to destroy journalism at every turn.
“That it is working is a testament to the support of our subscribers. We have no real way of knowing exactly where new subscribers come from or what ultimately led them to subscribe, but time and time again we have learned that the most important discovery mechanism we have is word of mouth. We have lost count of the number of times a new subscriber has said that they were told about 404 Media by a friend or a family member at a party or in a group text, so if you have told anyone about us, we sincerely thank you.
“It wasn’t obvious when we started this company that it would actually work, though we hoped that it would.”
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