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Let’s jump into it…

Quick hits

How B2B publisher Skift scaled its business by diversifying its revenue streams. [The Business of Content]

"Facing competition across genres and formats, Spotify found that exclusive podcasts generally don’t draw subscribers away from its rivals." [WSJ]

This is a fun rumination on what it was like to enter the field of journalism when blogging was at its peak: "There is no longer a landing space for the fun blog, nor is there nearly the necessary commercial incentive to create a fresh one. Readers simply don't go to websites to look at articles anymore, which has long been the elephant in the room." [On Posting]

Amazon built a massive ads business in a very short period of time, and it currently has nowhere to go but up. [Yahoo]

Slowly but surely, most of the major tech platforms are getting better about sharing their revenue with content creators. [The Publish Press]

How a B2B outlet that covers the corporate travel industry built up a loyal subscriber base

For most B2B media outlets, advertising plays a central role in how they generate revenue. Because corporate vendors have long sales cycles and charge high prices for their products, they’re often willing to pay top dollar to reach highly niche audiences within their industries. That’s why it’s not uncommon for B2B publishers to charge tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor a webinar that’s only attended by a few hundred people. 

But when David Jonas and Jay Campbell launched The Company Dime — a B2B media outlet that covers the corporate travel industry — in 2014, they decided to mostly eschew any business model that relied on sponsorships. “We’re trying to avoid getting into advertising and the other marketing models that typically generate media revenue,” they wrote early on. “We hope we won’t ever do ‘custom’ publishing. The biggest driver of revenue in the B2B media industry is events, but we don’t want to start a conference that requires sponsors in order to be economically feasible. We want to keep saying ‘No, thanks’ to industry players offering to invest in us.”

Given the size of the corporate travel industry — some estimates put it at $711 billion — that’s a lot of potential money left on the table. So how did they plan to generate revenue? Their thesis laid out on their “about” page is fairly straightforward: “What you see here is a simple, reader-funded service. We don’t have investors and are not looking to sell the company when it grows. It’s risky, but we’re betting the professionals we serve will reward us with continued self-employment.”

As Campbell explained to me, they launched The Company Dime without grand ambitions to sell it at a high price, partly because both had already succeeded at selling another B2B outlet they jointly owned. Instead, their only goal was to generate a full-time income while putting out high-quality journalism. 

For the most part, they’ve succeeded at reaching this goal. Though they take on the occasional research project or brand partner, The Company Dime reached the point in 2018 when it was generating enough subscription revenue to cover expenses and pay their salaries. “It was at that point when we said, you know what, we can do this with subscriptions alone,” Campbell told me. 

In a recent interview, he walked me through how he learned the corporate travel beat, why they stuck to a subscription model, and what lessons he carried over from his first stint as a media entrepreneur.

Let’s jump into my findings…

Learning the corporate travel beat

Campbell has been covering the corporate travel industry for about as long as he’s had a career.

It actually started when he was a college student at Boston University; he got a part-time job at Air Travel Journal, a newspaper that focused specifically on covering Logan International Airport. “It was started by an entrepreneur who was kind of a legend in Boston,” he recalled. “He created a couple of different trade publications around the travel industry in New England, including that airport paper.” It was distributed via newspaper stands around the airport and read by both the travelers and the people who worked there. “He would sell ads for both of those crowds.”

Learning that beat required Campbell to read lots of national trade publications, and after college he mailed out his resume to several of them. He ended up getting a job as an airlines reporter at Business Travel News, which was the leading publication at the time focused on the corporate travel industry. 

Who reads such a publication? Not the business travelers themselves. “Our core readers were the purchasing and HR managers who are in charge of those travel policies, budgets, and contracts. They're really administrative type folks rather than the end user travelers.” Collectively, this group controls a massive amount of spending. Campbell estimated that, on airlines alone, business travelers represent between 30 and 50% of customers, and they also tend to spend more per customer because their trips are often booked at the last minute. Or at least that was the reality prior to the pandemic. “Nowadays, that number is probably down to something like 25%, and that's something that the industry's really grappling with.”

After four years at Business Travel News, Campbell left to cover the same beat for a news wire service called Bridge News. While there, he started an email newsletter he sent out to his industry contacts. It eventually dawned on him that internet distribution would change the way that users consumed news. “There was something happening in business travel where a lot of the manual, telephone-based work was moving to the internet with sites like Travelocity and Expedia on the consumer side,” he explained. “Similar things were happening on the business side, and I just felt that so much change was underway. People needed information more quickly.” A print publication that was physically mailed out once every two weeks wouldn’t cut it, even if there was a website version as well. While this doesn’t seem very revelatory today, it was in the early 2000s, especially for reporters who’d adhered to print deadlines for their entire careers. “It was a fairly new idea to email the news as it happened rather than, say, daily or weekly.”

Launching his first media venture

Campbell eventually went back to work at Business Travel News, this time as its executive editor, but in 2004 he quit his job to launch The Beat, a five-times-weekly email newsletter focused on business travel technology. This was, of course, long before the rise of the modern Creator Economy; back then, most people didn’t have much experience buying stuff on the internet.

In fact, there weren’t many options for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs to collect online payments. I asked Campbell what made him think that a newsletter business was even viable given that they weren’t exactly common back then, but he pushed back on my question. “There was a long history of subscription newsletters. I remember receiving fax newsletters back in the nineties. Email was interesting in terms of the new delivery mechanism, but other than that, it wasn't that different from things that had been out there before.” As for how Campbell collected payments, he basically utilized a traditional invoicing system, one that involved him manually billing his clients. He doesn’t really remember which products he used, just that it was a gigantic headache that distracted from his reporting. ...