South Africa’s Daily Maverick has built a sustainable business model by prioritizing reader engagement and a membership program over a traditional paywall, according to Julia Harris, the publication’s representative at a recent WAN-IFRA webinar.
Launched in 2009 with a staff of five, Daily Maverick now employs over 100 people, though not all positions are full-time. The publication averages 7.5 million unique visitors monthly, a figure that fluctuates with the news cycle. Though, Harris emphasized the importance of their 24 newsletters, which reach approximately 650,000 subscribers and deliver 18 million emails each month. Their “First Thing” morning newsletter received WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Awards Worldwide prize in the Newsletter category in 2022.
While primarily a digital publication, Daily Maverick too produces a weekly print edition, DM168, launched in 2020. The membership program, Maverick Insider, was established in 2019 after years of relying on funding from family and friends. “We had achieved a lot of editorial success, but meeting payroll each month was a challenge and it was becoming more and more perilous: The business was in trouble, and the reason for that is we had a revenue problem,” Harris explained. She added that the digital advertising model “is broken” and remains so.
Faced with financial difficulties, Daily Maverick considered a paywall but ultimately rejected the idea due to South Africa’s economic realities. “Paywalls restrict access to information, and in a country like South Africa, where there is not this wealthy society to pay for news, you are really restricting who can access your content if you have a paywall,” Harris said. “Our mission is to defend truth, and we can’t fully realise that mission if only a select few people have access to the truth.”
Instead, they developed a membership model focused on building relationships with readers. “You’re not going to convince someone to grow a member the first time that they read you. It’s going to take time to build that relationship with your reader, whereas paywalls are more transactional in nature,” Harris stated. The publication found that retention rates were higher for members than for subscribers.
The initial launch of Maverick Insider was not fully polished, serving as a testing ground for assumptions and data collection. Early experiments included a donation campaign that garnered contributions from 200 existing readers, demonstrating a willingness to support the publication. Surveys of these donors revealed they were frequent visitors who had been reading Daily Maverick for some time.
Daily Maverick discovered that members valued engagement with journalists and being part of the publication’s story, rather than receiving discounts or prizes. “People wanted to support us because they believed in what we were doing, not because we were going to give them free stuff,” Harris said. Ongoing surveys confirm that support stems from a belief in the publication’s mission and the impact of its journalism, including investigations that have influenced national policy.
The publication continuously refines its membership messaging and marketing channels, employing a “Test, track, improve and scale” mantra. They track metrics such as word count, time of day, and sentiment to optimize conversion rates, and utilize color psychology to improve marketing performance. An AI-powered tool, ImpactEngine, tracks the publication’s journalism’s impact by monitoring mentions in parliamentary meetings, providing data for marketing and impact reports to members.
Daily Maverick also offers a nine-point engagement journey for new members, introducing them to key products like newsletters, their app, and member-only webinars. A platform called Daily Maverick Connect facilitates interaction between members and journalists. Harris emphasized the importance of diversifying revenue streams, including philanthropy and traditional commercial channels, to ensure long-term sustainability, acknowledging that membership growth can fluctuate.
