Struggling to build sustainable revenue

Almost nobody we interviewed is making all of their money as indie info providers. Only about half are making significant money.

Just three interviewees said that they could fully fund their lifestyle with the content they create while 10 said they could partially fund their lifestyle and 12 said they could not do so at all. The results were similar among the total pool of survey respondents: 23 out of 43 said they can’t fund their lifestyle at all as an indie info provider.

Like a large — and growing — number of U.S. adults, these indie info providers worry about their finances. About half of the interviewees worry about meeting their expenses, describing cash flow and finances in general as one of their greatest challenges. (Financial struggles are also a growing reality for journalists in legacy newsrooms.)

For many we spoke with, providing information to others is primarily a passion project, at least for now. These interviewees are relying on a partner’s income, a “day job,” or personal savings as a backstop. Some of them would be happy for it to remain a part-time project, but most either “hoped” or were taking active steps to create a financially viable business out of this work.

Freelancing and consulting are the most common sources of outside income. Most see this work as separate from their indie info provider business rather than part of it. In some cases, their freelance work is in a separate but related field, like PR or marketing; in others, they provide consulting to help clients make decisions related to their beat.

Many of the interviewees are just starting to see themselves as small business owners.

More than half of the interviewees spontaneously described themselves as “entrepreneurs” or “small business owners” during the course of our conversations. 

For most, the realization that they are small business owners was a watershed moment that changed their self-understanding. As one person put it, “I had no idea I was going to be running a business” when they started creating content.

Seeing themselves as small business owners helps them think about their work in terms of brand, product and the needs they are meeting. It takes a “mindset shift” from “just knowing you get paid every two weeks to now being like, ‘Oh, no. I need to actually tell people, y’all need to pay for this.’” For many of them, that mindset shift feels like work in progress. Those who had management experience or had worked in fields outside journalism found this way of thinking less jarring.

The competitive pressure of building a distinct, viable brand converges with difficulty self-assessing value, discomfort with self-promotion and imposter syndrome.

Articulating the economic value of journalism is a long-standing challenge: CNTI’s 2024 survey found that almost half of participating journalists think the industry is failing to communicate its value to the public. Less than one in ten U.S. adults thinks they have a responsibility to pay for news, and they believe that the industry is in much better financial shape than it is.

For many interviewees, especially former journalists, those challenges are compounded by a lack of skill or experience in pricing and marketing their value. In other words, they have a hard time asking for money. Sometimes that’s made worse by “imposter syndrome,” which four interviewees called out by name. They know there’s a lot of content out there, and while they want to be paid, they can’t shake the idea that other content is better or more deserving. Some of them are waiting to build a more consistent posting schedule or a heftier archive before they ask for money.

For interviewees, monetizing this work can feel fundamentally at odds with the desire to share information, even when financial viability depends on it. Many wonder how they can put a price on something that feels like a public service, even when payment is optional.

For most of the interviewees, success is about the mission, not just the money. Only five people defined success in primarily financial terms — “being self-sufficient” or “having enough money to do what you want to do.” 

The rest emphasized their mission-related goals, like “creating something meaningful that people are talking about” or “helping a community see themselves represented.” Most of the mission-related responses explicitly defined success in terms of both financial and mission goals. As one interviewee said, “If I can figure out how to build a sustainable positive business covering [beat], if I can figure out what the trick is, I can help somebody who wants to cover K-12 education or foreign policy or trans health issues.”

For many, especially former journalists, asking for payment sometimes feels at odds with their overall goals. They want to see a broad and diverse set of content, but they also “don’t think consumers can support everybody having their own little independent thing.” This framing implies that a paywall is the primary business model — but in truth, that isn’t the only option. One interviewee described their own business as “a NPR model where most people pay because they believe in the mission rather than specific content or what’s behind the paywall.” This person has a robust subscription business that employs multiple people, even though the only paywalled subscriber benefit is behind-the-scenes content. 
Asking for money, even on an opt-in basis, can also feel uncomfortable when money is tight for their audiences, a problem they share with legacy publishers. Two indie info providers in particular — one who provides actionable insights for job seekers and another who reports for an ethnic diaspora — reflected that their audiences don’t have much disposable income, which made it difficult to rely on paywalled subscriptions, mission-based donations or advertising dollars. As a third indie info provider observed, “Writing for a wealthy group of people is the only way at this point, as far as I can tell, to run a media business. … 90% of media businesses just write for upper-middle-class people if not just upper-class people.” This person, one of the most financially successful interviewees, had worked in management roles in legacy media before launching their current venture; their underlying model relies more heavily on making B2B connections than on a paywall or direct reader revenue.

Less than one in three interviewees has a formal or developed business strategy. Right now, successful revenue models depend largely on the type of audience they’re reaching.

All interviewees have at least some awareness about potential sources of revenue, but there is tremendous variation in the sophistication of interviewees’ business strategies. A plurality (12 people) expressed only vague goals such as “getting sponsorships” or “I’m just going to see how far I can take this and what’s supported by the market.” This group included several people who were not actively trying to do creator work full-time. A second group (seven people) described measurable goals they could use to assess their success and revisit their plans, such as reaching a certain number of subscribers or a certain level of revenue, but they lack either concrete plans or a sense of trade-offs between different sources of revenue. 

Another set of seven people laid out a more fully developed revenue strategy, or at least had revenue front and center, such as one who explained that “with almost any decision that we make, I want to understand how this leads to revenue.” Within this group, some shared pretty complex strategies, including multiple tiers of access or detailed explanations of their customer funnel. Notably, every single person in this group had held jobs beyond reporting. Even so, two of this group of seven still said they were making very little money. One of them was relatively new to this work and was still building out a plan, while the other was evaluating how to ensure a longer-term passion project could bring in more financial value.

Solving the business problem isn’t just a matter of training; there are also opportunities for collaborations.

These interviews clearly reflect a need for skill-building around business strategy and revenue generation. In addition to skill-building, there’s also an opportunity for forms of support that didn’t even come up in these conversations — perhaps because it does not yet exist at scale. Specifically, collaborations and collectives could help indie info providers build leverage to negotiate with sponsors, distribution platforms and others. Rather than limiting themselves to pre-existing options that could change at any time and have an outsized impact on their ability to monetize, indie info providers could use collaboratives and collectives to improve the overall ecosystem and make it more entrepreneur-friendly. The overall ecosystem would also benefit from more widespread options that rely on open-source and open-protocol software, such as Ghost or BlueSky.

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