INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Is there an audience for a center-right news publication focused on original reporting and analysis? That the proposition that The Dispatch
set out to test when it launched last October, and the early results are promising
The startup says it now approaching 10,000 paying subscribers, adding up to more than $1 million in annualized revenue.
Editor and CEO
Stephen Hayes (former editor in chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard) told me that his vision for The Dispatch was to &slow down the
news cycle.& That doesn''t mean ignoring the day headlines
But rather than just recycling the same stories about, say, Bernie Sanders or the COVID-19 pandemic, The Dispatch aims to ''take a breath&
and try to approach important news in a fresh way.
In order to do that, Hayes said that building a subscription business with
newsletter-focused digital media platform Substack (the Substack team also handles all of The Dispatch technical and product needs) was
key.
We&re not trying to monetize eyeballs,& he said
&What Substack was doing fit pretty much exactly with what we wanted to build — a company with an editorial-first philosophy.
As part of
that strategy, The Dispatch has gradually been rolling out its membership program and paywall
At launch, it offered a lifetime membership ($1,500), then added an annual membership ($100) when it launched its full site in January, and
finally introduced a paywall and a monthly membership ($10) less than a month ago.
Hayes said it been largely &an ad hoc process& of
figuring what should and shouldn''t go behind the paywall
Apparently, one piece of advice that has been helpful is, &Don''t hide your good stuff behind the paywall
You need to be serving some of your best, most substantive work in front of the paywall, so that you get people into the top of the
funnel.
Newsletter platform Substack raises $15.3M round led by a16z
On top of its paying subscribers, Hayes said The Dispatch is reaching
about 60,000 people with its newsletters
And it partnering with podcast company Sounder, with plans to participate in Google Play Me The News program for Google Home, where it will
offer short-form audio news stories.
The startup has also raised $6 million in funding from individual investors (none of it comes from
venture capital firms).
Hayes acknowledged that one of the constant questions he had to answer during the fundraising process was whether he
was aiming for too narrow an audience — namely, the #NeverTrump slice of the political right.
It might look that way on ''the traditional
political spectrum,& but in Hayes& view, it more accurate to see the spectrum as a &hardcore 15 percent& on the left and another 15 percent
on the right that &more partisan than ideological& and will root for their party no more what
And while The Dispatch is &unapologetically center-right,& he hoping to appeal to the remaining 70 percent, who are looking for a
publication that can &help you make sense of all this stuff that doesn''t make sense,& regardless of political leanings.
The Dispatch is in
many ways the flagship among full-fledged news organizations built on Substack, but the list of publications now includes Asia Sentinel, Let
Go Warriors and Write for California
The startup is also announcing that it now reaching more than 100,000 paying subscribers across its platform.
Substack CEO Chris Best said
that The Dispatch success so far shows that there &ahunger out there.
He added, &Are readers willing to pay for something that helps them
make sense of the world and adds value to their lives? I think the answer is unequivocally yes.
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