COVID-19 accelerated what we’ve known for some time: Newsrooms cannot rely on advertising. Now more than ever newsrooms need to grow reader revenue — soliciting direct support from their readers.
We have subscriptions. A new study from the International News Media Association found that 39% of digital news publishers across 33 countries charged for online news in early spring 2020. But according to the Digital News Report survey conducted by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University, the percentage of American readers who paid for news remained flat at 16% from 2017 to 2019, suggesting that the appetite for subscriptions has plateaued. “Subscription fatigue” may be a factor, given the number of subscriptions a reader is already paying for, e.g. Netflix, Spotify. The same survey also found that more than half of U.S. news subscriptions are going to just two publishers: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
I wanted to explore whether micropayments could do for local news what subscriptions have done for the big national papers. I was able to do a trial of a product, XeePay for News (XPN), which has a direct connection to the U.S. banking system’s ACH network, on a local non-profit newspaper. And that’s how the Columbia Missourian became the first publisher in the U.S. to launch a pay-by-text micropayments donations platform on June 17, 2019. XPN began asking for donations at 50 cents and on Sept. 11 increased the donation ask to $1.
