#How discounts work on Substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Section 12: Practical Guide to Substack Discounts & Founding Memberships

Summary of my Udemy Course “From Zero to Substack Hero.” Image source from the video location Purpose of this Series for New Readers This is a new series upon request from my readers. I recently developed a course titled “From Zero to Substack Hero” and published it on Udemy and shared it on Content Marketing Strategy Insights owned by Dr Mehmet Yildiz who kindly allowed me to use his Substack…

[ameliasoulturner]

How I’ve Been Successfully Selling Short eBooks for Over a Decade (And How You Can Too)

There’s something magical about short eBooks. They’re quick to write, easy to consume, and—if done right—surprisingly profitable. I’ve been in the game for more than ten years, and I’ve seen the landscape shift dramatically. From the early days of Kindle Direct Publishing to the rise of platforms like Gumroad and Substack, short-form digital content has never been more in demand.

If you’re wondering whether it’s still worth jumping into the eBook world—especially the shorter format—let me reassure you: absolutely. But like anything, it takes strategy, consistency, and a bit of hustle.

In this post, I’ll share how I market and sell short eBooks after over a decade of trial, error, and success. Whether you’re brand new or just need a refresher, you’ll find plenty of actionable advice here.

Why Short eBooks Work So Well (Even in 2025)

Attention spans are shorter than ever. People want bite-sized content they can finish during a commute, over lunch, or in one sitting before bed. That’s where short eBooks shine.

But there’s more to it than just convenience:

They're faster to write and publish

They're often priced lower, which attracts impulse buyers

They allow you to test ideas without committing to a full-length book

You can build a library of content, creating multiple income streams

I’ve written everything from 15-page how-to guides to 50-page productivity books, and I can tell you this—some of my highest earners were the shortest ones.

Step 1: Pick a Topic That Solves a Problem (Fast)

If you're selling a short eBook, you're selling a solution. Period. That means your topic needs to be laser-focused. You’re not writing the definitive guide to photography—you’re writing “How to Take Stunning Instagram Photos Using Just Your iPhone.”

The key is specificity. Think about what your audience Googles when they’re desperate for an answer. That’s your book idea.

Here are a few examples that work great:

"How to Meal Prep for a Week in Under 90 Minutes"

"A Beginner’s Guide to Freelance Copywriting"

"10 Quick Ways to Boost Your Credit Score"

Don’t overthink it. Ask your audience (or browse Reddit, Quora, or TikTok comments) to see what questions pop up again and again.

Step 2: Outline Like a Pro (And Keep It Lean)

Short eBooks don’t need fluff. You’re aiming to deliver value quickly. I usually stick to a structure like this:

A personal or relatable intro

Set the reader’s expectations

Actionable content broken into clear sections

A call to action or bonus tip

For a 25-page eBook, I’ll usually write 4–5 core chapters, each around 700–1,000 words. That’s enough to deliver substance without overwhelming the reader.

Step 3: Design Matters More Than You Think

People do judge a book by its cover—especially a digital one. I’ve seen books with brilliant content flop because the cover looked amateurish. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Invest in a professional-looking cover. Use Canva Pro or hire a designer on Fiverr or 99designs.

Stick to bold fonts, legible titles, and clean imagery.

Design the interior with readability in mind. Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points.

When in doubt, mimic the design of bestsellers in your niche. There’s no shame in drawing inspiration from what’s already working.

Step 4: Pricing Strategy—Keep It Simple

I typically price short eBooks between $2.99 and $9.99. It’s the sweet spot—cheap enough for an impulse buy, high enough to earn decent royalties.

On Amazon KDP, $2.99 gets you a 70% royalty. On Gumroad or Payhip, you keep even more. I sometimes bundle several short eBooks and offer them at a discount to boost value.

Here’s a trick: test multiple prices. Start at $4.99. If it doesn’t sell, drop it to $2.99. If it sells like crazy, try bumping it up to $5.99 or add a bonus to justify a higher price.

Step 5: Marketing—This Is Where Most People Get It Wrong

Most writers think their job ends when they hit “publish.” Nope. That’s when the real work begins.

Here’s how I market every short eBook:

1. Build a Launch Team: Even if it’s just 5–10 people, having folks ready to buy and leave reviews makes a huge difference, especially on Amazon.

2. Email List = Game Changer: If you don’t have one, start now. I’ve built a simple list using ConvertKit. Every time I release a book, I email my list with a story, a benefit, and a link to buy. It’s the #1 driver of sales.

3. Tease on Social Media: I post tips, behind-the-scenes snippets, or mini-stories related to the eBook topic. On TikTok and Instagram Reels, even short clips like “3 lessons from my latest eBook” can drive serious traffic.

4. Repurpose Like a Boss: Turn a chapter into a blog post. Share a quote on Pinterest. Record a YouTube Short. These micro-moments build awareness and keep your eBook top of mind.

5. Use Affiliate Boosts: Some platforms like Gumroad allow affiliate selling. That means others can promote your eBook and take a cut. It’s a win-win and has helped me sell books I never even marketed myself.

Step 6: Go Beyond Just One eBook

Here’s where the real magic happens: when people buy one eBook and come back for more.

Think in series. I’ve created mini-series like:

“Side Hustle Starters Vol. 1–3”

“Quick Fix Finance Guides”

“Mindset MicroBooks”

Readers who enjoy one book are 3x more likely to buy your next. You can even bundle older eBooks or sell them as a membership through platforms like Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.

And don’t forget upsells—offer a short video course, a checklist, or a workbook for $7–$27. People love a deeper dive when they trust your content.

Common Pitfalls I’ve Learned to Avoid

After 10+ years, here are some lessons the hard way taught me:

Don’t wait for “perfect.” Publish when it’s good enough and fix things later.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Specificity sells.

Don’t ignore customer feedback. Reviews can guide your next edition or future topics.

Don’t forget your bio and call-to-action. Every book should tell readers where to find more of you—website, email list, social media.

Final Thoughts: This Isn’t a Get-Rich-Quick Game (But It’s Worth It)

Selling short eBooks isn’t about chasing trends or gaming the system. It’s about building trust, delivering real value, and showing up consistently. Some of my books sell a few copies a week. Others sell hundreds a month. It’s the collection of efforts that makes this a sustainable business.

If you’ve got knowledge, a story, or a solution to share, there’s someone out there willing to pay for it—especially if it’s wrapped up in a neat little eBook.

So whether you’re writing your first book or your fiftieth, keep it simple, solve a problem, and share it with the world.

Because short eBooks might be small in size—but they can make a big impact, both for your readers and your bank account.

[tknblog]

$15 a month for a single newsletter is unsustainable

#journalism #dollarnomics #editorial - Tyler K. Nothing reporting.

DATELINE INTERNETOPIA - #Substack has created a mythology in the form of the $15 a month newsletter. The claim was that it would help support independent writers who have been driven out of organized news gathering by capitalist greed’s desire to “trim the fat” (meaning people who cost money they’d rather have in their Cayman bank accounts), but the model is unsustainable. In reality, all it does is net Substack more revenue.

Of course, they need that larger cut to support the now far more bloated model that appears to include completely free hosting of a blog, unless you want to use your custom domain, and then you’ll have to cough up $50… and then do it yourself. Yeah. You pay them to then do all the legwork. Liberating, indeed.

Whinging about fees nobody else charges aside, most newsletters are asking for $15 every single month. That doesn’t get you an entire newspapers worth of content, but the words of one contributor. And Substack doesn’t offer discounts for subscribing to multiple newsletters, so if you pay for three newsletters you will be forking over $45 a month.

That comes to $540 a year which is more than double what we pay annually to heat our water and dry our clothes. Imagine floating an entire newspaper’s bullpen at those rates so one person could stay up-to-date with the news! Not that I would, but I can get a subscription to the Pasadena Star-News for $3.50 a week. That’s an actual newspaper with lots of contributors, sections, resources, and whatnot and it’s still a buck less a month than that single newsletter.

We can’t do this. It won’t work. We cannot continue to rely on insanely wealthy oligarchs owning all of our local and national news, whose collective bias against a free press has become increasingly clear over the past few years, to transmit that bias into our consciousness on a daily basis.

If there is one thing we can do as, and I’ll use the word yet again, a collective, it is to subscribe to an organic virtual bullpen of writers to produce open source news that everyone could benefit from, regardless of how deep (or shallow) their pockets are. Several such collectives would be even better. And let’s start it at $5 a month with a sliding scale so readers can select a contribution they can afford.

The mainstream media, popularly known as the MSM in various circles, and the internet as a whole, has been slowly and methodically subsumed by the rich and powerful and turned into outlets for their increasingly unhinged desires to terraform society into something better suited to their wants and needs.

Look no further than Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its rapid descent into madness. More recently Mark Zuckerberg has announced the end of fact checking on Facebook and other Meta platforms for reasons that are plainly disingenuous. X is much smaller than Facebook, but Facebook and Instagram represents 5 BILLION USERS.

If Mark is able to influence a mere 1% of his global userbase, that’s 50 MILLION people.

That’s just insane.

A solution requires two parties, creators and readers. We have the creators, but readers need to step up and be willing to pay a small monthly fee knowing that it will go towards the production of quality, reliable, fact-checked news gathering. Getting everything on the internet for free is a zombie shambling around a china shop, smashing everything and making a chaotic mess of things and we need to put it down, for good.

After all, you get what you pay for.

For more on my concept of Dollarnomics, read here and here.

[ladyazulina]

Azu is Talking — The Decision of Changing

I HATE to make decisions and that’s the first thing I had to do this week.

Not sure if you have been around long enough, but I have… “rebranded” my Substack account… Again. It bothers me A LOT to be changing things so constantly (fortunately, no one was there to see the many changes on my Ko-fi page [it went through another one recently]) (and don’t ever ask about my Instagram account, pretty pretty please), but I hope believe I have reached a resolution. If it is for better or worse… we will have to wait and see.

So this week has been stressful, and head-banging, with the new wave of changes I had to make. Hopefully it will be the last? But that’s the thing with social media. Did I already said I HATE social media? Yeah, too. Well, it’s constantly changing, so we have to change with it as well.

I don’t want to be in there, but that desire clashes with the fear of “how will people ever find me?”. The perks of freelancing. I can’t pitch or sell myself for the life of… well, me. So it’s been really hard and rough for me to have a digital presence.

(I’m also paranoid, so having a digital presence haunts me at night.)

So, well, yeah… Decisions.

And don’t let me get started with changes.

I have the worst tolerance for changes. Especially if those are made last minute. It could wreck not only my whole day but my whole week. And I’m not even square-minded about schedules, but there’s something about making changes, radical changes, sudden changes, that just… throws me off.

My life has been changing so completely this year… In fact, the hooker line that came to mind to use as the first-ever sentence of the very first weekly post was:

“If someone told me last year that I would cut off my thirteen-year-old friendship thanks to my six-month relationship…”

And that’s just the most recent of the changes.

I’ve been trying to fix or cut that relationship for years… Thanks, babe.

I know that doesn’t sound like the worst that could happen (while writing this I received a notification that talked about something that is REALLY, really worse–like, what am I even complaining about?), but… each their own, I guess.

The world is weird.

No, wait.

People are weird.

The world is perfect just as it is.

…

Anyway.

So, last week I told you that I have some dental issues to take care of and won’t be on the budget or the schedule for a month or so. Well, this past Thursday I went to another dentist, and what I’ve been told (that I had to extract three pieces and stuff) wasn’t completely true.

To start with, I went to the dentist because of a caries eating one of my teeth, and they wanted to remove three pieces of which none was the proper one giving me hell. So this new dentist prioritized that first and instead of starting with a root canal treatment as the previous place wanted to do after the massive extraction, he wanted to clean it and cover it because there was a high probability that it would take care of it with that simple procedure.

If not, he told me to go back and he will take care of the root canal treatment discounting what the cleaning and cover up costed.

So far I’m still in pain, but the usual timelines regarding health never worked on me. For some reason, everything worsens beyond comprehension and lasts longer. So I’m just waiting for a bit. Maybe a week more.

Apart from that, I still have to extract one of the three initial pieces the previous place told me about, and only because that piece is bothering a second one. It was not and is not (yet) the cause of pain, so it’s not a priority.

I’m more relieved with the matter, a little less terrified because the word ‘surgeon’ still appeared in the conversation with this new dentist. But it seems like I found a new place where I feel comfortable with. Even if it takes me two hours of commuting just to get there 😬

That, fortunately, wasn’t the highlight of my week. I had a good week productivity-wise. The thematic days seem to be working wonders.

I just told you about the decision of changing doctors. Which was easy enough once I found the new one. I felt calm and comfortable immediately.

I also had to make the decision of changing big details on a TTRPG card game I have on the making since December last year. I’m working on it during the Creative Mondays and I felt pretty satisfied with this week’s progress. It feels easier and more me in ways I haven’t even mulled on yet, but I still have to add and tweak things this or that way for everything to fit together and be comprehensive and cohesive enough for playtesting.

Yeah… I’m watching you, playtester.

I also had to make the unfortunate decision of changing things on my Substack account again. If you read my very first and most recent note, you would have known by now that I’m also human and make emotion-blinding mistakes. So, on Review Tuesdays (’cause I have a great stack of reviews to share yet, all of them already on my Tumblr and Instagram accounts), I went on the laborious work of reposting all the reviews I previously deleted from here last week.

I was trying to organize my accounts even more, but I ended up deeply mixing myself and acting rashly. Now the Azu is Reading, for my book reviews, and the TTRPG sections, for my campaigns and stuff, are alive and running for everyone. You can subscribe to what interests you.

I’m also trying to be more alive in my Instagram account, and for once remember to share everywhere what I’m doing, and those ‘random’ posts go anywhere in the week, not following the themes I have given them. For example, when I read a new book, I post the review on GoodReads, The StoryGraph, and Tumblr immediately if possible, scheduling to the next Monday the making of the template for Instagram and posting that template that Wednesday. Now that I’m branching to my own stories on Patreon and TTRPG campaigns (posts going weekly on Tuesdays), I have to share that too, so that was part of what I did last Wednesday (and Friday).

Thematically, though, it’s Working Wednesday and I was finishing a Collaborative Writing Workshop I’m planning to launch on my personal Patreon soon. I have to give it some final touches and translate it to English (I’m a native Spanish speaker), but if it’s not going live this month, it will go live next month. Finally. Practically eight months later than promised… Heheheh.

Thursdays are backstage days, where I’m doing things I have to do but don’t matter to anyone else but me. I was glad I did what I had scheduled early because most of my day was wrecked due to going to the dentist. Four hours of commuting aren’t a joke. I had a great time, mostly, anyway. I enjoyed the trip, for a change. But it was still a toll on the body. And mind. So I had a chill and relaxing night to make up for it. Principally because I didn’t have any extraction that day (didn’t know what I was going to get into) and I could still live my life outside of new waves of pain (lies, but I’m accustomed to the current amount of pain). So yay for me.

Fridays are likely free days. I can’t really say, they were A-Particular-TTRPG-Editing Day a few weeks ago, and it’s more like prepping gifts’ day for now, but I can’t expand on it ’cause the receiver is going to be reading this and I’m not going to give him any more spoilers. I’m doing things two months in advance to be ready for His Day™, so brace yourself. I would like to be this ahead of time for a lot more things, but you have to start somewhere, right?

Saturdays are Playful days where I would most likely be playtesting games. I’m one Saturday away from finishing my current solo campaign, so you will start seeing things about it this… Friday on Instagram, I believe. Don’t you worry, I will prep posts for here and other platforms when I finish with the Iron Valley campaigns I’m scheduling. In the meantime, I will probably be working on a public review of the game and sharing spoilers from my playthrough, so wait for it.

And that’s all for this week!

Next week I will probably be doing more of the same, with the add-up of this [REDACTED] adventure I’m creating for this [REDACTED] and stuff. I’m working on this whenever I have the smallest sliver of time, and I’m excited cause I’m doing a lot of new things already. I have a deadline and I suck with those, so I’m trying to finish the sooner I can. Maybe more [REDACTED] details about this stuff next week! Totally shouting out myself when I get the green light to share about it.

I still have to slide a bit of these weekly logs to write during the week, to not charge the whole Sunday into a Weekly Sunday kind of stuff. But it’s something new I have to accustom myself to, so it may take a bit of time. I’m not sure, we may know a little bit more next week.

[pennstateuniversitypress]

The Fascinating Lens of Online Video

John Jordan, author of The Rise of the Algorithms, discusses short-form content, AI and privacy, and more.

If you look closely, online video is at or near the heart of several current, complex issues: the emergence of new dopamine-driven forms of engagement, the role of Internet technologies in geopolitics, AI, and privacy. TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, and their kin are shaping large segments of contemporary life. 

If we consider the history of music, technology has driven music to get shorter and shorter. Symphonies could run well over an hour, LP records had two twenty-minute sides, radio drove the rise of the three-minute single, and now TikToks are measured in seconds. The benefit of these brief “works” is that they give the viewer a series of chemical rewards, shortening attention spans for both entertainment and education. Just ask any teacher. (The music and cultural critic Ted Gioia has an excellent series of Substack posts on the topic.)

If we look back to the 1990s, considering Microsoft as an actor in geopolitics would have overstated the company’s role: its revenue and market capitalization were a fraction of, say, Ford’s, not to mention Exxon’s. But now Facebook measures its global user base in the billions, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is the subject of both presidential and congressional threats, and YouTube wrestles with how to treat what might be satire in France but is considered heresy in the Arab world. Tech, including misinformation purveyed through it, sways elections, spurs boycotts, and challenges national norms.

Speaking of misinformation, AI is leading to creative uses of online video. Identifying and potentially removing fakes, whether in porn—ask Taylor Swift—or politics, grows more difficult every month as tools of synthetic creation outrun tools of detection. There might also be an emerging category of deep fakes used for good. Recently, a group of parents of children killed by gun violence created deep fakes of their children to create a message urging legislators to address the issue. Machine learning also powers the algorithms that feed us an endless stream of clickworthy content, so in many ways the history of AI is entwined with the development of online video.

Given the scale and ubiquity of online video, there are inevitably related privacy issues. YouTube was originally used to post videos intended for family and close friends, typically fewer than a hundred viewers. Now we have a system where viewers and followers are counted in the tens of millions. The kind of fame that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or a Kardashian brings to online video is markedly different from how people view Charli d’Amelio or Mr. Beast, who feel more relatable and inspire a false sense of familiarity. Creators in the latter vein frequently burn out from trying to satisfy the needs of their viewers for bigger stunts, better dances, edgier humor. Users also sacrifice privacy in return for ever more precisely targeted algorithmic clickbait.

All told, understanding online video gives one multiple insights into the state of politics, emotional health, and culture in the 2020s. It’s a fascinating lens, at once dynamic and enduring, personalized and massive, trivial and consequential.

The Rise of the Algorithms: How YouTube and TikTok Conquered the World is now available from PSU Press. Learn more and pre-order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09692-6.html. Save 30% w/ discount code NR24.

[bethestaryouareradio]

Holiday Tipping, Sleep, Retirement, Newspaper Decline:

What is a customary holiday tip for service? Are you getting enough sleep? When is it time to retire? Why are newspapers disappearing? https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/147841/holiday-tipping-sleep-retirementnewspaper-decline

Tune in LIVE weekly to the upbeat, positive lifestyle broadcast where producer and host Cynthia Brian showcases strategies for success on StarStyle®-Be the Star You Are!®. Available wherever you listen to your favorite programs!

It’s the holidays and time to show your gratitude to people who have worked for you or served you throughout the year. What is a customary tip for various services?

Do you have trouble sleeping? IF you are feeling groggy in the morning, you may not be getting enough REM. Without a good night’s sleep, your brain doesn’t function properly.

When is time to retire? Some people dream of retiring at 40, 50, 60 or never. Whatever your goal, you need to prepare emotionally, financially, and physically.

Local newspapers are disappearing. This accelerating trend will result in more “news deserts,” a phenomenon that occurs when a community lacks a credible source for local news.  Analysts now predicting the loss of one-third of newspapers by the end of next year.

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[fuckyeahgoodomens]

First and foremost, we want to thank you all for your continued support. Good Omens fans are the best in the world.

It’s no secret that the Kickstarter was more popular than even we had imagined – watching you all smash our additional funding goals before we even confirmed them was a surreal time at Good Omens HQ. We also know we’ve not given you a schedule update in a while.

We’ve been working hard to get merchandise manufactured, prints finalised and shipping planned, and no one is working harder than Colleen Doran, our artist, illustrator and colourist. Despite health issues she revealed last year – which she discusses candidly over on her Substack – she has continued working on the graphic novel throughout her diagnosis and treatment. We’re delighted that she is continuing to recover well into 2024 and is once again setting the drawing board on fire.

The Good Omens graphic novel is by all accounts a colossal project even without these circumstances. Above everything, Colleen and her wellbeing is our priority, and we have made the decision to give her the support to work in a healthy environment to get the graphic novel over that ineffable finish line.

Therefore, we have re-evaluated our timelines and this is the new projected schedule:

2024: PledgeManager launch (April), Good Omens HQ store launches (Autumn) 2025: Good Omens graphic novel publishes (Spring)

We understand this will be disappointing, but know you will understand the necessity of this, and will all join us in wishing Colleen well – especially as there is no one more keen to see the book completed than her. If timelines are accelerated, we will certainly pull everything forward as far as we can, but crucially this feels like a timeline that will be healthy for Colleen and will produce the very best graphic novel for you, and give a realistic timeline for our production partners to facilitate this change in their calendars.  

Details and fulfilment

And for you guys, the fans, we’re going to use this time to further upgrade some of the rewards, and add a few extras and flourishes without further cost to our backers. We’ll commission some extra art prints, which we’ll include in loot pack #1, increase the discount you’ll receive for the upcoming Good Omens store as a thank you for bearing with, from 10% to 15%, and are bursting with other ideas that will benefit backers of all pledge levels in the interim. We’ve got the backers-only events with Neil, Rob and Colleen – we’d already anticipated they’d be a joy for fans, but we’ll dig deep and find some extra surprises.

Kickstarter backers will have their orders fulfilled first, then those who opted in at PledgeManager stage, and there will be no wider release of the graphic novel (and surrounding items) until your pledges have been shipped.

The Good Omens HQ store will still be launching in 2024, now ahead of the graphic novel, but featuring only new merchandise. Items that originated from the Kickstarter will be held back until post-publication.

A message from Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins

As a team, we collectively support Colleen and the time and space needed to finish the graphic novel after the past year she has been powering on through, and have a quick note from both Neil Gaiman and Rob Wilkins, the manager of the Terry Pratchett Estate:

Neil: "I've been amazed and impressed by how much Colleen has done so far, despite dealing with health issues. We are proud of her and her dedication to adapting Good Omens with such care, and look forward to holding the finished books in our hands."

Rob: “Colleen is doing a fantastic job bringing the graphic novel to life. We’re absolutely delighted with each and every page and it is essential she can work comfortably whilst giving the book the time it deserves. She has our full support and we can’t wait for you to see the results.”

Onwards…

The PledgeManager will launch on the 18th of April to enable those who missed out on the original Kickstarter to be involved. We will have full details and an FAQ on how to add further items, arrange shipping, and so on. There is absolutely no obligation to immediately hop over to PledgeManager and pay for shipping – this is open-ended until the project is being fulfilled, and you can hold off until nearer this new publication date or still fill out your information immediately, as preferred.

Thank you for your continued support. We appreciate you all. We will keep you updated every step of the way.

– Good Omens HQ

All good things to those who wait! :) Wishing @colleendoran the best, health is a priority! ❤ :)

To be perfectly honest, it is so rare in the rough comic book industry to be working with people who prioritize your well being over the deadline, I burst into tears when the team backed me up.

[bradyoil]

On Set Electrician Jeanne Mailloux Talks "Birdman", Buddhism and Mental Health.

Jeanne Mailloux works on commercial sets as a union Electrician. (And spells out to me the difference between the Grips and Electricains.) She shares fascinating insights about her start in filmmaking meeting Nick Cage, working on "Birdman" and being a female Electrician in that male-dominated department. We delve into reflections on human suffering, ego, humility, and how Buddhism has shaped Jeanne's understanding of life and art. Her passion for mental health advocacy is clear. 

I never know where these conversations will go, but sure apprecate Jeanne's openess and sharing her journey. Check out her substack here. 

FLOW STATE Click MAGIC MIND and use this nifty discount code JB20 and gobble it up daily with your coffee. If you follow me on Instagram you've seen my geniune endorsment of this mighty mind power juice.

EVENTS My next in-person Commercial Directing Bootcamp is Saturday, January 20th, 2024. Sign up soon or miss out. Limit 12 filmmakers.

Check out my Masterclass or Commercial Directing Shadow online courses. (Note this link to the Shadow course is the one I mention in the show.) All my courses come with a free 1:1 mentorship call with yours truly. Taking the Shadow course is the only way to win a chance to shadow me on a real shoot! DM for details.

How To Pitch Ad Agencies and Director’s Treatments Unmasked are now bundled together with a free filmmaker consultation call, just like my other courses. Serious about making spots? The Commercial Director Mega Bundle for serious one-on-one mentoring and career growth.

  Jeannette Godoy’s hilarious romcom “Diamond In The Rough” streams on the YouTube, Tubi and more. Please support my wife filmmaker Jeannette Godoy’s romcom debut. It’s “Mean Girls” meets “Happy Gilmore” and crowds love it.

  Thanks,

  Jordan

  This episode is 70 minutes.

My cult classic mockumentary, “Dill Scallion” is online so I’m giving 100% of the money to St. Jude Children’s Hospital. I’ve decided to donate the LIFETIME earnings every December, so the donation will grow and grow. Thank you.

Respect The Process podcast is brought to you by True Gentleman Industries, Inc. in partnership with Brady Oil Entertainment, Inc.

Check out this episode!

[stoweboyd]

Work Futures Daily Minipost - Doublespeak

| Google's Shadow | Women and Air Conditioning | Is Holacracy Dead? | The Future of Work in Media | Mike Arauz |

Beacon NY - 2019-05-28 --- Apparently I have been doing this newsletter thing wrong. A recent update from the folks at Substack lays out what the most successful newsletter writers do.

I am going to change how Work Futures Daily works, with the goal of creating a greater incentive for readers to become sponsors.

A month ago, I started to move the Work Futures Daily behind the paywall after 30 days. I have been creating a summarized version of the Daily called the Minipost, which is going out to Linkedin and Medium. Starting with this issue, free subscribers will only see the Minipost, while paid subscribers will receive both versions. My hope is that this may lead to more paid subscribers. We'll see. There may be more experimentation.

:::

This is a summary of a longer post at workfutures.substack.com. Feel free to share it with others.

Consider becoming a paid sponsor to support our work, and to receive in-depth investigative reporting and discounts to other events, reports, and activities.

And paid sponsors gain access to our new members community. Visit members.workfutures.org to request a trial membership.

:::

Our new publication, On The Horizon, is dedicated to help spread greater understanding of the economics, structure, and behavior of platform ecosystems, and the corresponding reordering of business operations and organization. Sign up for the OTH weekly newsletter to be notified about new articles, interviews, events, and other news from the exploding domain of platform ecosystems.

Stories

Google's Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees | Daisuke Wakabayashi adds more meat to the discussion about the rising level of contractors working at Google, and the tech world at large. Apparently, using a temp worker can save the company as much as $100,000 per year. There seems to be no other motivation than cost savings.

:::

'Battle of the Thermostat': Cold Rooms May Hurt Women's Productivity | Veronique Greenwood reports on new research on the negative impact of colder temperatures in the office on women's productivity.

:::

Is holacracy the future of work or a management cult? | Aimee Groth chronicles the life and times of Brian Robertson, the founder of HolacracyOne, and inventor of holacracy. A long, long read, but worth the work for anyone interested in a recap of Medium's flirtation with the system, why Google rejected it, and what ever happened to Zappo's embrace of holacracy.

:::

How the US Media Covers the Future of Work | Emily Boardman Ndulue reports on research that Media Cloud undertook for the Ford Foundation analyzing how the concept the future of work is discussed in US media.

Here's the top article measured by inlinks: "What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages," McKinseyQuarterly.com, 11/27/17

Quote of the Day

When we started, the relentless doublespeak made me feel like I was living in George Orwell's take on the modern workplace.

| Mike Arauz, My company adopted a Holacracy. It kind of sucked.

Elsewhere

Playing Both Ends Against The Middle | At On The Horizon, I explore some questions about Uber's long-term vision, which is not moving atoms around in the back seat of cars. Apropos of that, see The race to dominate $1.5 trillion business of moving stuffby Erica Pandey, and Amazon's press release about its new Delivery Service Partnerinitiative.

:::

Fast-Food Workers Have a New Job Perk: Finish a Shift, Get Cash to Go | Leslie Patton reveals the newest job benefit: getting paid at the end of a shift.

crossposted from workfutures.substack.com

[playbillionaire]

Down in the Cheap Seats

How to get more affordable theatre tickets in New York City. Here’s the same post on my Substack!

I’m not a professional, but I have been lucky enough to be attending theatre in the tri-state area my whole life, so here’s everything I know to help anyone who wants to get into seeing theatre without spending too much.

The trick of seeing great theatre without skipping a meal is to look beyond Broadway. Theatre tends to be more fluid than its marketing- almost all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in the 21st century have premiered in smaller (more accessible) venues. Staying informed and being willingly to go outside of the usual Broadway houses is the best way to see theatre at affordable prices, and possibly catch new shows before they head to Broadway.

Here’s a couple of link that are good to know:

Playbill Weekly Schedule of Broadway Shows- A current schedule of the showtimes of every show currently running on Broadway. Shows are typically dark on Monday, but since the pandemic, schedules have changed and matinees have been added during the weekends, so it’s good to check which matinees are 2pm and which are 3pm, in case you want to try multiple lottos each day.

Playbill Broadway Rush, Lottery, and Standing Room Only Policies- Alphabetical list of all the discount ticket options for Broadway shows

Playbill Off-Broadway Rush and Inexpensive Ticket Policies- Alphabetical list of all the discount ticket options for off-Broadway shows.

Lotteries

When it comes to theatre, I feel that scheduling flexibility saves money. If you can go any time or day, you can snag cheaper tickets. I recommend entering as many lotteries as possible, as frequently as possible. When I was working at my desk job, I tried to make a habit of entering the lotteries every morning after checking my emails. Here’s all of the links to the digital lotteries- they usually email winners around 2, and give them an hour to purchase the tickets, so keep an eye on your email! (I’m not exactly sure why these shows are split up across these lotteries, rather than in one place, but it’s best to just go through all 3). As much as I love in-person rush, anyone with a full time job and commute is probably going to have a tough time getting to the box office when it opens at 10 or hanging around the theatre district hoping to snag a cheap ticket.

Broadway Direct Lottery

Telecharge Lottery and Rush- This requires signing into a social media account (very annoying), but also let’s you submit a lottery for more than one performance at a time

Lucky Seat- This one offers lotteries in several different cities, so make sure you are submitting for the New York performances

Today Tix- Need the app to get tickets, but some really great lotteries if you submit every day, especially for hot ticket Off-Broadway shows.

Discount Ticket Programs

A lot are mentioned in the Playbill article, but to keep everything together, below are my favorite ones that I’ve personally used. When a recent show I had tickets to was cancelled, I was able to check with these programs to get a last minute cheap ticket, so making/maintaining an account ahead of time is a good idea.

LincTix- Lincoln Center Theatre’s program for discount tickets for people between the ages of 21 and 35. With fees, tickets are $35.50 for any show at the 3 Broadway theatres at Lincoln Center. You can also purchase tickets for anyone else with a LincTix account in the same order. Don’t delete the email with your account number in it, you will need it to sign in every time you purchase tickets. Also, seats purchased with LincTix are always great, these are not partial view seats.

Playwrights Horizons Young Membership Discount Tickets- $20 tickets for any show for anyone under 35. You can also purchase $35 tickets for a guest to accompany you. There is also a $10 alternative for full-time students, at the same link. To sign up, you need to create an account and “purchase” a free membership, which will allow you to purchase the discounted tickets from your account. Remember to renew this every season, as it does expire.

2nd Stage Theater 30 Under 30 Discount Tickets- $30 tickets for any show for anyone under 30. When looking at performance dates, enter “30UNDER30” in the promo code window, and eligible seats will show up on the seating chart.

Manhattan Theatre Club 30 Under 35 Discount Tickets- $30 tickets for any show. Registering online allows anyone under 35 to buy 2 tickets per show. The best part is that you can bring a guest of any age- just make sure whoever purchased the ticket picks up the ticket at the box office.

Roundabout Theatre Company HipTix Program- $30 tickets for any show for anyone between the ages of 18 and 40. This program also allows you to purchase 2 tickets for any show, and your guest can be of any age. You’ll receive a promo code in an email that will let you purchase the tickets, and whoever purchased the tickets must pick them up at the box office.

Theatre For a New Audience New Deal Tickets- $20 tickets for any show for anyone under 30, or any full-time student. Enter the promo code NEWDEAL when purchasing tickets and the discount will be applied. Ticket must be picked up at the box office, so bring proof of ID.

Ultimately, it is possible to see theatre in New York City for less than a nice dinner! Having a flexible schedule, entering lotteries, and looking outside Broadway is the best way to do it (also, be under 30 I guess??). Good luck!

[topicprinter]

The weird thing about running a marketplace, especially in the beginning, is that everyone on the platform makes more money than you. When I started MentorCruise and maybe made $100 or $200 per month from the platform, I had mentors on the platform making upwards of $500 every month. That was weird.I want to show you a few ways to monetize your marketplace, then: taking a commission is not the only way! Some of these are great to experiment with from Day 1, and some more only become a viable option with scale, so hang in there!Become a SupplierAs a marketplace, you are creating easier access to a certain supply, which wouldn’t have been as easily accessible without it. A key to that are good suppliers, which will in return often make a lot more money than the platform.The easiest workaround to this is to become a supplier yourself. This has been quite a successful tactic, when looking at the history of some of the biggest marketplaces, since it allows you to:Earn good money as a supplierFill up the marketplaceExperience the product from a supplier viewLearn about your customersThis is definitely a Day 1 tactic, and also has allowed me to earn a few bucks on top of the platform revenue by mentoring others myself.Take a commissionThe golden standard is to take a commission. As a marketplace, you are connecting a supplier with a customer, so on whichever side there is a benefit, you would take a commission.For example, eBay makes it extremely easy to sell products thanks to the network effects, but buying those products is not much different from doing so through any other website, so the fee is often taken as a part of the final sales price.Airbnb on the other hand makes it extremely easy to book an apartment to stay in and slightly easier for the landlords to rent it out. That’s why the fee for owners is often under 3%, while the fees for customers is usually around 10% or more.By taking a percentageA common way of taking a commission is to take a percentage of the sales price. This works usually well, because your suppliers ends up with a bigger check, and so do you. Percentages really depend on how much you, and how much your supplier is offering. For example, Upwork sources all projects and takes care of the application process and charges 20% for that. Airbnb facilitates access to short-term rental, but for a landlord it would be quite easy to source short-term rentals in a more unstructured way, so the fee is a little lower.By putting a fee on topThe second way to do things is to put a fee on top of what you are going to pay out to a supplier.For example, at MentorCruise Sessions we promise mentors a certain amount per session that they do, and put a little markup on top for the public display. The difference goes to us.This is nice because it brings some more flexibility to things. You can experiment with different pricing strategies, enable discounts or promotions, and your supplier still receives their flat fee.Charge for AccessIf you are curating a source of suppliers which is hard to find and hard to get access to, you might be able to get away with charging for access to these suppliers alone. The good thing about this is that you will not have to enable any restrictions on the marketplace, and it turns the marketplace from being purely two-sided to…. one-and-a-half sided?GrowthMentor is doing this, for example, as they have created a resource of growth coaches, which are usually almost impossible to talk to. Plus, many of these mentors are ready to provide services for free or non-monetary payments (network, exposure). That’s why on GrowthMentor you can pay recurrently for access to the bigger resource, and then use that resource (i.e. schedule calls with mentors) either for free or one-time payments.If you are in a situation like this, where you are creating access to a unique resource on one side, and have a resource looking for exposure or networking on the other side, this may be suitable.Scale: Promotion and Exposure OffersAs a marketplace grows on the supplier side, it will get harder for suppliers to get seen, especially if they are looking to build reputation or it’s about a product that is available multiple times on the market.The most prominent example of this is ebay. As a seller on a global marketplace, you are entering a price and service fight with all other sellers. If you are missing the social proof (reviews) to back yourself up, or it’s simply a product that is more of an impulse buy than something that people search for, then promoting it could be useful.It gets really interesting in cases like ebay, where promotion leads to a win-win. ebay does not charge the promotional fee, unless the item is sold. The promotions are backed up by data, and on average lead to a x% higher sales price. Makes sense to the supplier, makes sense to the platform.Maturity: Premium Tiers and Exclusive AccessEspecially in consumer marketplaces, navigating a marketplace can quickly become a game. Sellers want to sell the most, get the best ratings. People who are creating courses want to become the best course providers for a skill. Everyone wants to get the best ratings, the most sales, the biggest tips. It becomes competitive.For platforms, this is interesting, because it becomes crystal clear who your best suppliers are, and who is providing the best service.This is interesting because it allows you to curate a premium tier, for example for enterprises or wealthy customers who appreciate the added luxury. That’s why Uber Black exists, that’s how Airbnb Plus was founded and how arc is getting access to so many freelancers.Pricing strategies are probably the thing I am most excited about when it comes to marketplaces in general. Wouldn’t it boring to just charge a recurring fee and be done with it? ;)----I write about two-sided marketplaces on my personal Substack, hope to see you over there.

[thelmasirby32]

Subscription Fatigue

Subscription Management

I have active subscriptions with about a half-dozen different news & finance sites along with about a half dozen software tools, but sometimes using a VPN or web proxy across different web browsers makes logging in to all of them & clearing cookies for some paywall sites a real pain.

If you don't subscribe to any outlets then subscribing to an aggregator like Apple News+ can make a lot of sense, but it is very easy to end up with dozens of forgotten subscriptions.

Subscription fatigue is turning into subscription stress. Something alarming, guilt inducing about having 40+ reoccurring charges each month. Financial death by a thousand cuts.— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) January 28, 2020

Winner-take-most Market Stratification

The news business is coming to resemble other tech-enabled businesses where a winner takes most. The New York Times stock, for instance, is trading at 15 year highs & they recently announced they are raising subscription prices:

The New York Times is raising the price of its digital subscription for the first time, from $15 every four weeks to $17 — from about $195 to $221 a year.

With a Trump re-election all but assured after the Russsia, Russia, Russia garbage, the party-line impeachment (less private equity plunderer Mitt Romney) & the ridiculous Iowa primary, many NYT readers will pledge their #NeverTrumpTwice dollars with the New York Times.

If you think politics looks ridiculous today, wait until you see some of the China-related ads in a half-year as the novel coronavirus spreads around the world.

Outside of a few core winners, the news business online has been so brutal that even Warren Buffett is now a seller. As the economics get uglier news sites get more extreme with ad placements, user data sales, and pushing subscriptions. Some of these aggressive monetization efforts make otherwise respectable news outlets look like part of a very downmarket subset of the web.

Users Fight Back

Users have thus adopted to blocking ads & are also starting to ramp up blocking paywall notifications.

Some of the most popular browser extensions are ad blockers & tracking blockers like Adblock Plus, Ghostery & Privacy Badger.

Apple has made tracking their users across sites harder with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention, causing iPhone ad rates to plummet: "The allure of a Safari user in an auction has plummeted," Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett told the publication. "There's no easy ability to ID a user."

The Opera web browser comes with an ad blocker baked in.

Mozilla is also pushing to protect user privacy in Firefox.

Google recently announced they will stop supporting third party cookies in Chrome in the next couple years. Those who invested into adopting AMP will have to invest into making yet more technical changes to manage paywalls on AMP pages.

Each additional layer of technological complexity is another cost center publishers have to fund, often through making the user experience of their sites worse, which in turn makes their own sites less differentiated & inferior to the copies they have left across the web (via AMP, via Facebook Instant Articles, syndication in Apple News or on various portal sites like MSN or Yahoo!).

A Web Browser For Every Season

Google Chrome is spyware, so I won't recommend installing that.

Not good enough for you? Not a direct enough corollary? How about this?Also out today: https://t.co/6dUWCCEyii Google has a backdoor to track individual Chrome users by installation ID.Even GG's denial admits pieces of the same complaints y'all had about Jumpshot last week! pic.twitter.com/Km2mQfOgbJ— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 4, 2020

Here Google's official guide on how to remove the spyware.

The easiest & most basic solution which works across many sites using metered paywalls is to have multiple web browsers installed on your computer. Have a couple browsers which are used exclusively for reading news articles when they won't show up in your main browser & set those web browsers to delete cookies on close. Or open the browsers in private mode and search for the URL of the page from Google to see if that allows access.

If you like Firefox there are other iterations from other players like Pale Moon, Comodo IceDragon or Waterfox using their core.

If you like Google Chrome then Chromium is the parallel version of it without the spyware baked in. The Chromium project is also the underlying source used to build about a dozen other web browsers including: Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Cilqz, Blisk, Comodo Dragon, SRWare Iron, Yandex Browser & many others. Even Microsoft recently switched their Edge browser to being powered by the Chromium project. The browsers based on the Chromium store allow you to install extensions from the Chrome web store.

Some web browsers monetize users by setting affiliate links on the home screen and/or by selling the default search engine recommendation. You can change those once and they'll typically stick with whatever settings you use.

For some browsers I use for regular day to day web use I set them up to continue session on restart, and I have a session manager plugin like this one for Firefox or this one for Chromium-based browsers. For browsers which are used exclusively for reading paywall blocked articles I set them up to clear cookies on restart.

Bypassing Paywalls

There are a couple solid web browser plugins built specifically for bypassing paywalls.

Academic Journals

Unpaywall is an open database of around 25,000,000 free scholarly articles. They provide extensions for Firefox and Chromium based web browsers on their website.

News Articles

There is also one for news publications called bypass paywalls.

Mozilla Firefox: To install the Firefox version go here.

Chrome-like web browsers: To install the Chrome version of the extension in Opera or Chromium or Microsoft Edge you can download the extension here, enter developer mode inside the extensions area of your web browser & install extension. To turn developer mode on, open up the drop down menu for the browser, click on extensions to go to the extension management area, and then slide the "Developer mode" button to the right so it is blue.

Regional Blocking

If you travel internationally some websites like YouTube or Twitter or news sites will have portions of their content restricted to only showing in some geographic regions. This can be especially true for new sports content and some music.

These can be bypassed by using a VPN service like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Witopia or IPVanish. Some VPN providers also sell pre-configured routers. If you buy a pre-configured router you can use an ethernet switch or wifi to switch back and forth between the regular router and the VPN router.

You can also buy web proxies & enter them into the Foxy Proxy web browser extension (Firefox or Chromium-compatible) with different browsers set to default to different country locations, making it easier to see what the search results show in different countries & cities quickly.

If you use a variety of web proxies you can configure some of them to work automatically in an open source rank tracking tool like Serposcope.

The Future of Journalism

I think the future of news is going to be a lot more sites like Ben Thompson's Stratechery or Jessica Lessin's TheInformation & far fewer broad/horizontal news organizations. Things are moving toward the 1,000 true fans or perhaps 100 true fans model:

This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the creator—to a value model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits themselves. What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals

A friend of mine named Terry Godier launched a conversion-oriented email newsletter named Conversion Gold which has done quite well right out of the gate, leading him to launch IndieMailer, a community for paid newsletter creators.

The model which seems to be working well for those sorts of news sites is...

stick to a tight topic range

publish regularly at a somewhat decent frequency like daily or weekly, though have a strong preference to quality & originality over quantity

have a single author or a small core team which does most the writing and expand editorial hiring slowly

offer original insights & much more depth of coverage than you would typically find in the mainstream news

Rely on Wordpress or a low-cost CMS & billing technology partner like Substack, Memberful, sell on a marketplace like Udemy, Podia or Teachable, or if they have a bit more technical chops they can install aMember on their own server. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I opened up a membership site about a decade back was hand rolling custom code for memberhsip management. At one point we shut down the membership site for a while in order to allow us to rip out all that custom code & replace it with aMember.

Accept user comments on pieces or integrate a user forum using something like Discord on a subdomain or a custom Slack channel. Highlight or feature the best comments. Update readers to new features via email.

Invest much more into obtaining unique data & sources to deliver new insights without spending aggressively to syndicate onto other platforms using graphical content layouts which would require significant design, maintenance & updating expenses

Heavily differentiate your perspective from other sources

maintain a low technological maintenance overhead

low cost monthly subscription with a solid discount for annual pre-payment

instead of using a metered paywall, set some content to require payment to read & periodically publish full-feature free content (perhaps weekly) to keep up awareness of the offering in the broader public to help offset churn.

Some also work across multiple formats with complimentary offerings. The Ringer has done well with podcasts & Stratechery also has the Exponent podcast.

There are a number of other successful online-only news subscription sites like TheAthletic & Bill Bishop's Sinocism newsletter about China, but I haven't subscribed to them yet. Many people support a wide range of projects on platforms like Patreon & sites like MasterClass with an all-you-can-eat subscription will also make paying for online content far more common..

Categories: 

publishing & media

from Digital Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/bypass-paywall

[toomanysinks]

Patreon’s future and potential exits

Through the Extra Crunch EC-1 on Patreon, I dove into Patreon’s founding story, product roadmap, business model and metrics, underlying thesis, and competitive threats. The six-year-old company last valued around $450 million and likely to soon hit $1 billion is the leading platform for artists to run membership businesses for their superfans.

As a conclusion to my report, I have three core takeaways and some predictions on the possibility of an IPO or acquisition in the company’s future.

The future is bright for creators

First, the future is promising for independent content creators who are building engaged, passionate fanbases.

There is a surge of interest from the biggest social media platforms in creating more features to help them directly monetize their fans — with each trying to one-up the others. There are also a growing number of independent solutions for creators to use as well (Patreon and Memberful, Substack, Pico, etc.).

We live in an economy where a soaring number of people are self-employed, and the rise of more monetization tools for creators to earn a stable income will open the door to more people turning their creative talents into a part-time or full-time business pursuit.

Membership is a niche market and it’s unclear how big the opportunity is

Patreon’s play is to own a niche category of SMB who it recognizes has particular needs and provide them with the comprehensive suite of tools and services they need to manage their businesses. A large portion of creators’ incomes will need to go to Patreon for it to someday earn billions of dollars in annual revenue.

The market for content creators to build membership businesses appears to be growing, however, membership will be only one piece of the fan-to-creator monetization wave. The number of creators who are a fit for the membership business model and could generate $1,000-500,000 per month through Patreon (its target customer profile) is likely measured in the tens of thousands or low hundreds of thousands right now, rather than in the millions.

To get a sense of the revenue math here, Patreon will generate about $35 million this year from the 5,000-6,000 creators who fit its target customer profile; if you believe this market is expanding at a fast clip, capturing 10% of the revenue (Patreon’s current commission) from 20,000 such creators could bring in $140 million. And that’s without factoring in the potential success of Patreon implementing premium pricing options, which is a high priority. If Patreon can increase its commission from 10% to 15%, it would need around 47,500 creators in the $1,000-$500,000/month range (9.5x its current number) to reach $500 million in revenue from them.

There is a compelling opportunity for a company to provide the dominant business hub for creators, with tools to manage their fan (i.e. customer) relationships across platforms and to manage back-office logistics. At a certain point it taps out though.

That’s one of the reasons why Patreon’s vision includes extending into areas like business loans and healthcare. For companies targeting small and medium businesses like Shopify, Salesforce and Dropbox, there is so much more growth tied to their core products that there is no need for them to consider such unrelated offerings as business loans. Patreon has to both expand its market share and also expand the services it offers to those customers if it wants to reach massive scale.

Patreon faces serious competition but is evolving in the right direction

Patreon is the leading contender in this market, and there’s a role for an independent player even if Facebook, YouTube, and other distribution platforms push directly competing functionality. Patreon will need to make three important changes to compete effectively: more aggressively segment its customers, make the consumer-facing side of its platform more customizable by creators, and build out more lightweight talent management services.

What’s next for Patreon?

Having raised over $100 million in funding over the last six years, what is the path to a liquidity event for investors and employees? 

In a worst case scenario, it is unlikely the company would go out of business even if it fell into disarray because it would be strategic for several large companies to takeover at a discount. Patreon may be on the path to IPO (as CEO Jack Conte hopes), but I find it more likely that the company gets acquired sometime in the next couple years.

Path to IPO?

If a public offering is in Patreon’s future, it’s several years out. It now defines itself as a SaaS company and has a plan to earn a higher blended commission on the sales of its customers through premium pricing options. It is a frequently misunderstood company, however, and needs to prove that a big market exists for mid-tail creators building membership businesses. 

According to a summary by Spark Capital’s Alex Clayton, SaaS companies who went public in 2018 typically:

had $100-200 million in revenue over the prior twelve months,

were 14 years old,

had an average year-over-year revenue growth rate of ~40%,

earned 90% of revenue from subscriptions,

had a median gross margin of 73%,

ranged from roughly 500 to 2500 employees,

had a raised a median of $300 million in VC funding,

and IPO��d with a median market cap of $2 billion

Public market companies to benchmark it against will be Shopify (as SaaS infrastructure for small businesses selling to, and managing payments from, consumers) and Zuora (Patreon can be viewed as a media-specific SMB alternative to Zuora’s “Subscription Relationship Management” system). Compared to Shopify, whose market of SMB e-commerce businesses globally is easily understood to be enormous, Patreon would face more skepticism from public investors about the market size of mid-tail content creators.

Patreon’s gross margins can’t be much more than 50% given that almost half of revenue is going toward payment processing. Patreon mirrors Shopify’s topline revenue growth in the run up to its 2015 IPO: Shopify reported $23.7 million for 2012, $50.3 million for 2013, $105 million for 2014 and I estimate Patreon brought in $15 million for 2017, $30 million for 2018, and will hit $55 million for 2019. Most of Shopify’s revenue came from subscriptions, however, with only 37% coming from the “merchant solutions” services where Shopify had to pay out payment processing fees. Patreon’s revenue net of payment processing fees is closer to $7.5 million for 2017, $15 million for 2018, and $27 million (predicted) for 2019.

There’s a lot of capital chasing late-stage startups right now. How long that remains the case is unknown, but Patreon can likely raise the funding to operate unprofitably a few more years — getting topline revenue closer to $150-200 million, proving creators will adopt premium pricing, and showcasing its ability to compete with Facebook and YouTube in a growing market. In that case, it could become a strong IPO candidate.

The acquisition route

The other scenario, of course, is that a larger company buys Patreon. In particular, one of the large social media platforms building directly competitive features may decide it is easier to buy their expansion into membership than build it from scratch. Patreon is the dominant platform without any noteworthy direct competitor among independent companies, so acquiring it would immediately put the parent company in a market-leading position. Competing social platforms wouldn’t have another large Patreon-like startup to acquire in response.

There are three companies that jump out as both the most likely acquirers. Each of these M&A scenarios would be mutually beneficial: advancing Patreon’s mission and providing strategic value to the parent. The first two companies are probably obvious, but the last one may be less known to TechCrunch readers.

Facebook

I highlighted Facebook as the top competitive threat to Patreon. This is also why it’s a natural acquirer. Patreon would bring fan relationship management to the Facebook ecosystem and particularly the company’s Creator App with CRM and analytics specifically fit for creators’ needs. It would also bring a stable of 130,000 creators of all types to make Facebook the primary infrastructure through which they engage their core fans.

Facebook is prioritizing human relationships more and clickbait content less. A natural replacement for the flood of news articles and viral videos is deeper engagement with the creators that Facebook users care the most about.

Since the annual churn rate of Patreon creators who earn $500 per month or more is under 1%, the ~9,200 creators who fit that category would likely stick around as Patreon’s infrastructure integrates with Facebook’s; the vast majority probably already have Facebook pages and possibly use the Creator App.

Facebook’s data on who fans are, what they like, and who their friends are is unrivalled. The insights Facebook could provide Patreon’s creators on their fans could help them substantially grow their number of patrons and build stronger relationships with them.

Like all major social media platforms, Facebook has partnership teams vying to get major celebrities to use its products. Patreon could lock the mid-tail of smaller (but still established) creators into its ecosystem, which means more consumer engagement, more time well spent, and more revenue through both ads and fan-to-creator transactions. Owning and integrating Patreon could have a much bigger financial benefit than solely revenue from the core Patreon product.

As a Facebook subsidiary, Patreon would stick more closely to being a software solution; it wouldn’t develop as robust of a creator support staff and the vision that it may expand to offer business loans and health insurance to creators would almost surely be cut. Facebook would also probably discontinue supporting the roughly 23% of Patreon creators who make not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content.

Given Patreon’s mission to help creators get paid, it may make a bigger impact as part of Facebook nonetheless. Facebook’s ecosystem of apps is where creators and their fans already are. Tens of thousands of creators could start using Patreon’s CRM infrastructure overnight and activating fan memberships to earn stable income.

A Facebook-Patreon deal could happen at any point. I think a deal could just as likely happen in a few months as in a few years. The key will be Facebook’s business strategy: does it want to build serious infrastructure for creators? And does it believe paywalled access to some content and groups fits the future of Facebook? The company is experimenting with both of those right now, but doesn’t appear to be committed as of yet.

YouTube

The other most likely acquirer is Google-owned YouTube. Patreon was birthed by a YouTuber to support himself and fellow creators after their AdSense income dropped substantially. YouTube is becoming a direct competitor through YouTube Memberships and merchandise integrations.

If Patreon shows initial success in getting creators to adopt premium pricing tiers and YouTube sees a strong response to the membership functionality it has rolled out, it’s hard to imagine YouTube not making a play to acquire Patreon and make membership a priority in product development. This would create a whole new market for it to dominate, making money by selling business features to creators and encouraging fan-to-creator payments to happen through its platform.

In the meantime, it seems that YouTube is still searching for an answer to whether membership fits within its scope. It previously removed the ability for creators to paywall some videos and it could view fan-to-creator monetization efforts as a distraction from its dominance as an advertising platform and its growing strength in streaming TV online (through the popular $40/month YouTube TV subscription).

YouTube is also a less compelling acquirer than Facebook because the majority of Patreon’s creators don’t have a place on YouTube since they don’t produce video content (as least as their primary content type). Unless YouTube expands its platform to support podcasts and still images as well, it would be paying a premium to acquire the subset of Patreon creators that it wants. Moreover, as much as a quarter of those may be creators of NSFW content that YouTube prohibits.

YouTube is the potential Patreon acquirer people immediately point to, but it’s not as tight of a fit as Facebook would be…or as Endeavor would be.

Endeavor

The third scenario is that a major company in the entertainment and talent representation sphere sees acquiring Patreon as a strategic play to expand into a whole new category of talent representation with a technology-first approach.  There is only one contender here: Endeavor, the $6.3 billion holding company led by Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell that is backed by Silver Lake, Softbank, Fidelity, and Singapore’s GIC and has been on an acquisition spree.

This pairing shows promise. Facebook and YouTube are the most likely companies to acquire Patreon, but Endeavor may be the company best fit to acquire it.

Endeavor is an ecosystem of companies — with the world’s top talent agency WME-IMG at the center — that can each integrate with each other in different ways to collectively become a driving force in global entertainment, sports and fashion. Among the 25+ companies it has bought are sports leagues like the UFC (for $4 billion) and the video streaming infrastructure startup NeuLion (for $250 million). In September, it launched a division, Endeavor Audio, to develop, finance and market podcasts.

Endeavor wants to leverage its talent and evolve its revenue model toward scalable businesses. In 2015, Emanuel said revenue was 60% from representation and 40% from “the ownership of assets” but quickly shifting; last year Variety noted the revenue split as 50/50.

In alignment with Patreon, Endeavor is a big company centered on guiding the business activities of all types of artists and helping them build out (and maximize) new revenue streams. When you hear Emanuel and Whitesell, they reiterate the same talking points that Patreon CEO Jack Conte does: artists are now multifaceted, and not stuck to one activity. They are building their own businesses and don’t want to be beholden to distribution platforms. Patreon could thrive under Endeavor given their alignment of values and mission. Endeavor would want Patreon to grow in line with Conte’s vision, without fearing that it would cannibalize ad revenue (a concern Facebook and YouTube would both have).

In a June interview, Whitesell noted that Endeavor’s M&A is targeted at companies that either expand their existing businesses or ones where they can uniquely leverage their existing businesses to grow much faster than they otherwise could. Patreon fits both conditions.

Patreon would be the scalable asset that plugs the mid-tail of creators into the Endeavor ecosystem. Whereas WME-IMG is high-touch relationship management with a little bit of tech, Patreon is a tech company with a layer of talent relationship management. Patreon can serve tens of thousands of money-making creators at scale. Endeavor can bring its talent expertise to help Patreon provide better service to creators; Patreon would bring technology expertise to help Endeavor’s traditional talent representation businesses better analyze clients’ fanbases and build direct fan-to-creator revenue streams for clients.

If there’s opportunity to eventually expand the membership business model among the top tiers of creators using Patreon.com or Memberful (which Conte hinted at in our interviews), Endeavor could facilitate the initial experiments with major VIPs. If memberships are shown to make more money for top artists, that means more money in the pockets of their agents at WME-IMG and for Endeavor overall, so incentives are aligned.

Endeavor would also rid Patreon of the “starving artist” brand that still accompanies it and could open a lot of doors in for Patreon creators whose careers are gaining momentum. Perhaps other Endeavor companies could access Patreon data to identify specific creators fit for other opportunities.

An Endeavor-Patreon deal would need to occur before Patreon’s valuation gets too high. Endeavor doesn’t have tens of billions in cash sitting on its balance sheet like Google and Facebook do. Endeavor can’t use much debt to buy Patreon either: its leverage ratio is already high, resulting in Moody’s putting its credit rating under review for downgrade in December. Endeavor has repeatedly raised more equity funding though and is likely to do so again; it canceled a $400M investment from the Saudi government at the last minute in October due to political concerns but is likely pitching other investors to take its place.

Patreon has strong revenue growth and the opportunity to retain dominant market share in providing business infrastructure for creators — a market that seems to be growing. Whether it stays independent and can thrive in the public markets sometime or whether it will find more success under the umbrella of a strategic acquirer remains to be seen. Right now the latter path is the more compelling one.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/23/patreons-future-and-potential-exits/

[fmservers]

Patreon’s future and potential exits

Through the Extra Crunch EC-1 on Patreon, I dove into Patreon’s founding story, product roadmap, business model and metrics, underlying thesis, and competitive threats. The six-year-old company last valued around $450 million and likely to soon hit $1 billion is the leading platform for artists to run membership businesses for their superfans.

As a conclusion to my report, I have three core takeaways and some predictions on the possibility of an IPO or acquisition in the company’s future.

The future is bright for creators

First, the future is promising for independent content creators who are building engaged, passionate fanbases.

There is a surge of interest from the biggest social media platforms in creating more features to help them directly monetize their fans — with each trying to one-up the others. There are also a growing number of independent solutions for creators to use as well (Patreon and Memberful, Substack, Pico, etc.).

We live in an economy where a soaring number of people are self-employed, and the rise of more monetization tools for creators to earn a stable income will open the door to more people turning their creative talents into a part-time or full-time business pursuit.

Membership is a niche market and it’s unclear how big the opportunity is

Patreon’s play is to own a niche category of SMB who it recognizes has particular needs and provide them with the comprehensive suite of tools and services they need to manage their businesses. A large portion of creators’ incomes will need to go to Patreon for it to someday earn billions of dollars in annual revenue.

The market for content creators to build membership businesses appears to be growing, however, membership will be only one piece of the fan-to-creator monetization wave. The number of creators who are a fit for the membership business model and could generate $1,000-500,000 per month through Patreon (its target customer profile) is likely measured in the tens of thousands or low hundreds of thousands right now, rather than in the millions.

To get a sense of the revenue math here, Patreon will generate about $35 million this year from the 5,000-6,000 creators who fit its target customer profile; if you believe this market is expanding at a fast clip, capturing 10% of the revenue (Patreon’s current commission) from 20,000 such creators could bring in $140 million. And that’s without factoring in the potential success of Patreon implementing premium pricing options, which is a high priority. If Patreon can increase its commission from 10% to 15%, it would need around 47,500 creators in the $1,000-$500,000/month range (9.5x its current number) to reach $500 million in revenue from them.

There is a compelling opportunity for a company to provide the dominant business hub for creators, with tools to manage their fan (i.e. customer) relationships across platforms and to manage back-office logistics. At a certain point it taps out though.

That’s one of the reasons why Patreon’s vision includes extending into areas like business loans and healthcare. For companies targeting small and medium businesses like Shopify, Salesforce and Dropbox, there is so much more growth tied to their core products that there is no need for them to consider such unrelated offerings as business loans. Patreon has to both expand its market share and also expand the services it offers to those customers if it wants to reach massive scale.

Patreon faces serious competition but is evolving in the right direction

Patreon is the leading contender in this market, and there’s a role for an independent player even if Facebook, YouTube, and other distribution platforms push directly competing functionality. Patreon will need to make three important changes to compete effectively: more aggressively segment its customers, make the consumer-facing side of its platform more customizable by creators, and build out more lightweight talent management services.

What’s next for Patreon?

Having raised over $100 million in funding over the last six years, what is the path to a liquidity event for investors and employees? 

In a worst case scenario, it is unlikely the company would go out of business even if it fell into disarray because it would be strategic for several large companies to takeover at a discount. Patreon may be on the path to IPO (as CEO Jack Conte hopes), but I find it more likely that the company gets acquired sometime in the next couple years.

Path to IPO?

If a public offering is in Patreon’s future, it’s several years out. It now defines itself as a SaaS company and has a plan to earn a higher blended commission on the sales of its customers through premium pricing options. It is a frequently misunderstood company, however, and needs to prove that a big market exists for mid-tail creators building membership businesses. 

According to a summary by Spark Capital’s Alex Clayton, SaaS companies who went public in 2018 typically:

had $100-200 million in revenue over the prior twelve months,

were 14 years old,

had an average year-over-year revenue growth rate of ~40%,

earned 90% of revenue from subscriptions,

had a median gross margin of 73%,

ranged from roughly 500 to 2500 employees,

had a raised a median of $300 million in VC funding,

and IPO’d with a median market cap of $2 billion

Public market companies to benchmark it against will be Shopify (as SaaS infrastructure for small businesses selling to, and managing payments from, consumers) and Zuora (Patreon can be viewed as a media-specific SMB alternative to Zuora’s “Subscription Relationship Management” system). Compared to Shopify, whose market of SMB e-commerce businesses globally is easily understood to be enormous, Patreon would face more skepticism from public investors about the market size of mid-tail content creators.

Patreon’s gross margins can’t be much more than 50% given that almost half of revenue is going toward payment processing. Patreon mirrors Shopify’s topline revenue growth in the run up to its 2015 IPO: Shopify reported $23.7 million for 2012, $50.3 million for 2013, $105 million for 2014 and I estimate Patreon brought in $15 million for 2017, $30 million for 2018, and will hit $55 million for 2019. Most of Shopify’s revenue came from subscriptions, however, with only 37% coming from the “merchant solutions” services where Shopify had to pay out payment processing fees. Patreon’s revenue net of payment processing fees is closer to $7.5 million for 2017, $15 million for 2018, and $27 million (predicted) for 2019.

There’s a lot of capital chasing late-stage startups right now. How long that remains the case is unknown, but Patreon can likely raise the funding to operate unprofitably a few more years — getting topline revenue closer to $150-200 million, proving creators will adopt premium pricing, and showcasing its ability to compete with Facebook and YouTube in a growing market. In that case, it could become a strong IPO candidate.

The acquisition route

The other scenario, of course, is that a larger company buys Patreon. In particular, one of the large social media platforms building directly competitive features may decide it is easier to buy their expansion into membership than build it from scratch. Patreon is the dominant platform without any noteworthy direct competitor among independent companies, so acquiring it would immediately put the parent company in a market-leading position. Competing social platforms wouldn’t have another large Patreon-like startup to acquire in response.

There are three companies that jump out as both the most likely acquirers. Each of these M&A scenarios would be mutually beneficial: advancing Patreon’s mission and providing strategic value to the parent. The first two companies are probably obvious, but the last one may be less known to TechCrunch readers.

Facebook

I highlighted Facebook as the top competitive threat to Patreon. This is also why it’s a natural acquirer. Patreon would bring fan relationship management to the Facebook ecosystem and particularly the company’s Creator App with CRM and analytics specifically fit for creators’ needs. It would also bring a stable of 130,000 creators of all types to make Facebook the primary infrastructure through which they engage their core fans.

Facebook is prioritizing human relationships more and clickbait content less. A natural replacement for the flood of news articles and viral videos is deeper engagement with the creators that Facebook users care the most about.

Since the annual churn rate of Patreon creators who earn $500 per month or more is under 1%, the ~9,200 creators who fit that category would likely stick around as Patreon’s infrastructure integrates with Facebook’s; the vast majority probably already have Facebook pages and possibly use the Creator App.

Facebook’s data on who fans are, what they like, and who their friends are is unrivalled. The insights Facebook could provide Patreon’s creators on their fans could help them substantially grow their number of patrons and build stronger relationships with them.

Like all major social media platforms, Facebook has partnership teams vying to get major celebrities to use its products. Patreon could lock the mid-tail of smaller (but still established) creators into its ecosystem, which means more consumer engagement, more time well spent, and more revenue through both ads and fan-to-creator transactions. Owning and integrating Patreon could have a much bigger financial benefit than solely revenue from the core Patreon product.

As a Facebook subsidiary, Patreon would stick more closely to being a software solution; it wouldn’t develop as robust of a creator support staff and the vision that it may expand to offer business loans and health insurance to creators would almost surely be cut. Facebook would also probably discontinue supporting the roughly 23% of Patreon creators who make not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content.

Given Patreon’s mission to help creators get paid, it may make a bigger impact as part of Facebook nonetheless. Facebook’s ecosystem of apps is where creators and their fans already are. Tens of thousands of creators could start using Patreon’s CRM infrastructure overnight and activating fan memberships to earn stable income.

A Facebook-Patreon deal could happen at any point. I think a deal could just as likely happen in a few months as in a few years. The key will be Facebook’s business strategy: does it want to build serious infrastructure for creators? And does it believe paywalled access to some content and groups fits the future of Facebook? The company is experimenting with both of those right now, but doesn’t appear to be committed as of yet.

YouTube

The other most likely acquirer is Google-owned YouTube. Patreon was birthed by a YouTuber to support himself and fellow creators after their AdSense income dropped substantially. YouTube is becoming a direct competitor through YouTube Memberships and merchandise integrations.

If Patreon shows initial success in getting creators to adopt premium pricing tiers and YouTube sees a strong response to the membership functionality it has rolled out, it’s hard to imagine YouTube not making a play to acquire Patreon and make membership a priority in product development. This would create a whole new market for it to dominate, making money by selling business features to creators and encouraging fan-to-creator payments to happen through its platform.

In the meantime, it seems that YouTube is still searching for an answer to whether membership fits within its scope. It previously removed the ability for creators to paywall some videos and it could view fan-to-creator monetization efforts as a distraction from its dominance as an advertising platform and its growing strength in streaming TV online (through the popular $40/month YouTube TV subscription).

YouTube is also a less compelling acquirer than Facebook because the majority of Patreon’s creators don’t have a place on YouTube since they don’t produce video content (as least as their primary content type). Unless YouTube expands its platform to support podcasts and still images as well, it would be paying a premium to acquire the subset of Patreon creators that it wants. Moreover, as much as a quarter of those may be creators of NSFW content that YouTube prohibits.

YouTube is the potential Patreon acquirer people immediately point to, but it’s not as tight of a fit as Facebook would be…or as Endeavor would be.

Endeavor

The third scenario is that a major company in the entertainment and talent representation sphere sees acquiring Patreon as a strategic play to expand into a whole new category of talent representation with a technology-first approach.  There is only one contender here: Endeavor, the $6.3 billion holding company led by Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell that is backed by Silver Lake, Softbank, Fidelity, and Singapore’s GIC and has been on an acquisition spree.

This pairing shows promise. Facebook and YouTube are the most likely companies to acquire Patreon, but Endeavor may be the company best fit to acquire it.

Endeavor is an ecosystem of companies — with the world’s top talent agency WME-IMG at the center — that can each integrate with each other in different ways to collectively become a driving force in global entertainment, sports and fashion. Among the 25+ companies it has bought are sports leagues like the UFC (for $4 billion) and the video streaming infrastructure startup NeuLion (for $250 million). In September, it launched a division, Endeavor Audio, to develop, finance and market podcasts.

Endeavor wants to leverage its talent and evolve its revenue model toward scalable businesses. In 2015, Emanuel said revenue was 60% from representation and 40% from “the ownership of assets” but quickly shifting; last year Variety noted the revenue split as 50/50.

In alignment with Patreon, Endeavor is a big company centered on guiding the business activities of all types of artists and helping them build out (and maximize) new revenue streams. When you hear Emanuel and Whitesell, they reiterate the same talking points that Patreon CEO Jack Conte does: artists are now multifaceted, and not stuck to one activity. They are building their own businesses and don’t want to be beholden to distribution platforms. Patreon could thrive under Endeavor given their alignment of values and mission. Endeavor would want Patreon to grow in line with Conte’s vision, without fearing that it would cannibalize ad revenue (a concern Facebook and YouTube would both have).

In a June interview, Whitesell noted that Endeavor’s M&A is targeted at companies that either expand their existing businesses or ones where they can uniquely leverage their existing businesses to grow much faster than they otherwise could. Patreon fits both conditions.

Patreon would be the scalable asset that plugs the mid-tail of creators into the Endeavor ecosystem. Whereas WME-IMG is high-touch relationship management with a little bit of tech, Patreon is a tech company with a layer of talent relationship management. Patreon can serve tens of thousands of money-making creators at scale. Endeavor can bring its talent expertise to help Patreon provide better service to creators; Patreon would bring technology expertise to help Endeavor’s traditional talent representation businesses better analyze clients’ fanbases and build direct fan-to-creator revenue streams for clients.

If there’s opportunity to eventually expand the membership business model among the top tiers of creators using Patreon.com or Memberful (which Conte hinted at in our interviews), Endeavor could facilitate the initial experiments with major VIPs. If memberships are shown to make more money for top artists, that means more money in the pockets of their agents at WME-IMG and for Endeavor overall, so incentives are aligned.

Endeavor would also rid Patreon of the “starving artist” brand that still accompanies it and could open a lot of doors in for Patreon creators whose careers are gaining momentum. Perhaps other Endeavor companies could access Patreon data to identify specific creators fit for other opportunities.

An Endeavor-Patreon deal would need to occur before Patreon’s valuation gets too high. Endeavor doesn’t have tens of billions in cash sitting on its balance sheet like Google and Facebook do. Endeavor can’t use much debt to buy Patreon either: its leverage ratio is already high, resulting in Moody’s putting its credit rating under review for downgrade in December. Endeavor has repeatedly raised more equity funding though and is likely to do so again; it canceled a $400M investment from the Saudi government at the last minute in October due to political concerns but is likely pitching other investors to take its place.

Patreon has strong revenue growth and the opportunity to retain dominant market share in providing business infrastructure for creators — a market that seems to be growing. Whether it stays independent and can thrive in the public markets sometime or whether it will find more success under the umbrella of a strategic acquirer remains to be seen. Right now the latter path is the more compelling one.

Via Eric Peckham https://techcrunch.com