“We’re still chugging along steadily in revenue, and we are brainstorming about new sources of income (stay tuned),” Sullivan wrote. The site had raised $680,000 as of Tuesday, up from $653,000 as of March 25.

“The most passionate readers have already joined. It gets harder after that,” Sullivan wrote. As he noted at the paidContent Live conference in New York last month (see video below), he is not taking a salary for the first year.

The Dish has already tweaked its payment model a few times. Initially, the site charged a minimum of $19.99 per year for unlimited access to premium content; in March, it lowered the meter and added a monthly payment option.

Among those questions are the following: Are people going to pay directly for content? Is native advertising going to subsidize media? Does sponsored content raise ethical issues for media companies? Are individual creators going to succeed by connecting directly with their audiences or by striking deals with existing media entities? And as far as I can tell, the answer to all of these questions is the same: Yes. And no. That may not seem very helpful, but I think it is.

You have to try everything

At one point during the panel on monetization — which also included Richard Tofel from ProPublica, Raju Narisetti from News Corp. and Bob Bowman from Major League Baseball — Atlantic Media president Justin Smith said that his organization didn’t really have a single answer to the question of how to monetize content, because it was more or less trying everything it possibly could (which is one of the reasons why I have said Atlantic is one of the media companies worth watching).

(L to R:) Richard Tofel, President, ProPublica; Justin Smith, President, Atlantic; Raju Narisetti,SVP and Deputy Head of Strategy, News Corp; Bob Bowman President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

For the Atlantic, that means experimenting with sponsored content (despite its potential pitfalls, which were highlighted during the Scientology incident) as well as doing live events, and introducing a premium offering — which Smith wouldn’t provide much detail about but is supposedly coming soon. As he put it:

“To say that the ad model is going to win over the pay model is foolish. I think the solution will be multiple revenue streams, it will be how experimental, how creative you are in seeking out those revenue streams… we must try everything. And we must not believe that one thing is going to work over the other until we actually experience it and see it over a period of time.”

The future isn’t going to be one model

Even just on that panel, we had almost every model represented, with ProPublica — which is built on a donation model, one that Dick Tofel believes will be replicated in dozens of states and cities, in the same way most metropolitan areas have symphonies or ballet troupes — and the Atlantic, and then News Corp. with its variety of hard and soft paywalls, and MLB with its app-based and content-focused strategy. Bowman said everyone should have some form of pay model, because why not give your hardcore fans a way to pay you for what they value?

(L to R:) Andrew Sullivan, Editor, The Dish; Andrew Ross Sorkin, Columnist, NYT; Maria Popova, Writer, Brain Pickings; Tim Ferriss, Author, The 4-Hour Workweek paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

The “blogging superstar” panel also had a variety of models, none of which was obviously better than the other. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings said that she didn’t even think of herself as a business — she wrote “for an audience of one” and was happy to get whatever donations she could get. Andrew Sullivan has famously bet his future on a direct-to-reader model, but he also said he isn’t opposed to advertising either (although he is adamantly opposed to native advertising). And Andrew Ross Sorkin says he is happy to continue building a personal empire of sorts within the New York Times.

Maybe that in itself is enough of a valuable insight, at least for now: that the future of media isn’t going to be one thing, or even a couple of obvious things — there is no one-size-fits-all solution (if there ever was) and waiting around for one to appear is a mug’s game. At least for the foreseeable future, the landscape of digital media is going to be a form of loosely organized chaos, with everyone trying whatever they can. As Clay Shirky said about newspapers two years ago, this chaotic environment is actually beneficial, because we need to try everything in order to figure out what works.

Note: You can find streaming videos of each of the major sessions at paidContent Live in this post, and links to transcripts of those sessions in this post, as well as a roundup of our live-blogging of the event.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Mark Strozier and Albert Chau

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Sullivan, who earlier this year took his popular Dish blog independent, has been using a metered paywall but has been tweaking that a bit in recent weeks, adding in a monthly subscription service, too. “Once you’ve gotten past the surge of Dish-heads, getting others to cough up online is new and difficult,” said Sullivan. He told the audience that the Dish blog is approaching $700,000 raised out of their goal to raise $900,000, and they have 25,000 subscribers. On the latter number, Sullivan compared it to the size of “a great little magazine.”

For Popova, who has amassed a huge audience through her tweets and blog posts linking to interesting topics, blogging isn’t first and foremost a business, it’s something she would do even if she didn’t make money off of it. “I created it for an audience of one, it’s just grown from there,” said Popova.

Author, investor and media personality Tim Ferriss uses his blog to test out ideas that he then uses for his best selling books. “The blog is where I experiment,” explained Ferriss. It’s also a community builder and communications platform, and Ferriss said that he’s connected with quite a few startups through his blog, which he later went on to invest in.

And for the New York Times’ Ross Sorkin, the DealBook blog, which he edits, is just one of the mediums that he uses to tell stories. The journalist also hosts a TV talk show, writes columns and features, and has written a best-selling book. “I wanted to create a site about a sensibility, not about me,” said Ross Sorkin, and he wanted it to be able, in theory, to live on for decades without him, he added.

The one thing the group did have in common seemed to be a love of creating content, a desire to share and connect with readers, and a drive to experiment with new ways to do this. Popova has another job; her blogging is her passion. Sullivan said he isn’t taking a salary for his new venture and put his own savings into it. He also said sometimes the sheer passion and mass intimacy can become so engrossing that you are sucked into it: “If it turns out that blogging kills people, I will be the first to go.”

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

Updated at 10AM PST, April 18, to correct that while Maria Popova has another job, Brain Pickings pays most of her bills.
A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

At paidContent Live on Wednesday in New York, we’re convening some of the people most responsible for that disruption as well as those tasked with turning big media companies on a dime. That schedule includes upstarts like Chet Kanojia, founder and CEO of Aereo, who has the old broadcasting powers scrambling to quash his innovative startup in the courtroom. It involves financiers like Lerer Ventures’ Kenneth Lerer, whose firm has backed buzzy media startups like Branch and Buzzfeed. And it features publishing veterans like Andrew Sullivan, who is attempting to remake the concept of paid content.

A live stream of the event can be found here, and all of our coverage from the event will be featured below. We hope you can join us.

• 65 percent of Buzzfeed’s traffic now comes from mobile devices
• How the public is reshaping media at Reddit, Vox and LinkedIn
• Content personalization still has a long way to go
• One-third of the Guardian’s readers are American, with US traffic growing 37% last year
• Tumblr CEO David Karp says at least 70 users have turned blogging into book deals
• The definitive answer of web or apps as the future of mobile content? It depends.
• The Atlantic is going to launch a paid content offering soon
• Can brands evolve from digital advertisers to mass communicators?
• Why digital book publishers are starting to embrace data
• Native advertising: winners, losers and a lot of hype
• A lesson from the blogging elite: there are many ways to the top
• Aereo CEO says free content might be on the way
• 5 startups changing the way the news business delivers content

That’s one of the ideas contained in a new book from Nicco Mele, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School who acted as operations director for Howard Dean during his 2004 presidential race. In the book, entitled “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath,” the author looks at how the social web and digital technology in general have altered the balance of power between the individual and the organization. And in a recent piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Mele argues the same thing is happening to the media:

“Some news personalities now play a strong role on Twitter and Facebook, but they often get little institutional support for this, and such participation and engagement remain merely part of a narrow web traffic strategy. But what if news outlets decided to flip their model, so that the editorial staff was not subservient to the brand, but the ‘brand’ became a platform for talent?”

Embrace the trend or be disrupted by it

Although Mele doesn’t explicitly say so in his Nieman piece, the flipping of this model is already occurring, whether media outlets want it to or not — as I tried to point out in a recent post about the shifting balance of power. Where platforms like the New York Times and Newsweek used to hold all the cards, and individual writers were forced to cut deals in order to find an audience, bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo have shown there is an alternate route (one we’ll be discussing with Sullivan and others at the paidContent Live conference on April 17).

While Sullivan’s experiment as a standalone media entity is far from complete, he has raised over $600,000 to fund his team, which means he is well on his way to being self-sustaining, instead of just being a part of the content at The Daily Beast and subject to their broad paywall. And a big part of what Sullivan (and pioneers in other fields, such as musician Amanda Palmer) see as the benefit of this approach isn’t just the money, but the personal connection with an audience.

As Mele suggests in his piece at the Nieman Lab, many traditional media organizations not only don’t help their journalists make use of social tools to connect with their readers, they actively discourage it with restrictive social-media policies. But what if they tried to enhance that connection and build on it — and perhaps even tried to share in the monetization of it? They could even experiment with allowing readers to subscribe to individual writers. Says Mele:

“On Election Day 2012, more than 20 percent of NYTimes.com traffic visited Nate Silver’s blog. At the same time, his book had just been released. The Times had little role in Silver’s book. But imagine it had a big one; imagine the way it would open revenue possibilities, taking advantage of the giant platform the Times provided Silver. Publishing books, hosting events, and public speaking are just the beginning.”

Why not a personal paywall for writers?

This is the essence of the “personal paywall” that I tried to describe in a recent post: the idea that individual writers are what increasing numbers of readers are connecting with and seeking out — not impersonal media brands or institutions. Why not provide Nate Silver or Nick Kristof with as many tools and resources as possible to make that easier? The New York Times is clearly thinking along those lines, according to new executive editor Jill Abramson, but it would be nice to see that idea expand and accelerate beyond just a chosen few at one newspaper.

Instead of thinking of the newspaper as the pre-eminent brand, why not think of it more like a talent agency or a record label: an entity that gets its value from helping to develop and promote a variety of voices — in whatever way it can, across whatever platforms. Newspapers have always promoted their star writers, but any value captured has gone solely to the larger brand, the assumption being that those journalists should consider themselves lucky to have been chosen. But as Mele notes:

“Talented people — their voices, personalities, tastes and ultimately news skills and judgement — are the filters that digital era consumers want, not archaic, anonymous news brand names. With the decline of trust and loyalty in large institutions, it is increasingly hard to imagine people in the coming decades subscribing because of loyalty to an institutional Big Media entity. Yet it’s easy to imagine them wanting to fund several people whom they trust to bring them information they care about.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz, as well as Shutterstock / olyy and Shutterstock / Daniilantiq

In a recent interview, CEO Steven Kotok explained how The Week has bucked the fate of the troubled magazine industry, and how the publication plans to stay relevant in the future.

An American Aggregator

The idea of a “weekly” news magazine seems quaint in the age of the internet, but The Week has carved out a niche by distilling current events into a smart bundle of excerpts and opinions. It aspires to provide tight writing and snappy headlines that let readers feel in-the-know about news, culture and policy.

According to Kotok, this style of curation was considered a “weird thing” when The Week launched and the site had to persuade advertisers it was viable. Now, nearly publication does it one form or another  – a situation that would seem to erode The Week’s strategic advantage. But Kotok says the publication is still growing its subscription base by catering to a distinct “psychographic” (read: affluent, educated folks) and by promoting a left-right political discourse.

“Kids buy it for their parents and vice versa. You might buy it for your conservative uncle or your liberal nice – it’s a way to get the other side in.”

The pitch appears to be working. The company says it has a rate base of 550,000 readers and annual revenues of about $50 million. It says it has had annual profits of between $4 million and $5 million in each of the last three years.

Most of that profit is coming from home subscription sales (fewer than 1% of its readers come by way of a newsstand) but, increasingly, The Week is looking to the web to make money.

Building the digital domain

With a few exceptions, like the Atlantic, legacy print titles have fared badly online – slow starting and caught between two worlds, they lose to digital natives.

In the case of The Week, Kotok admits it was late to develop a web strategy, but says its site is now profitable. Citing February comScore numbers of 2.3 million unique visitors, he says The Week has surpassed the Economist in two of the last three months.

The Week’s website doesn’t reproduce the magazine’s content but instead offers a stream of smart, snackable news bites along with “Guilty Clicks” from around the web (“Do we really need a drone hoodie”, Ke$ha, etc). The online fare is produced by a separate group of writers that represent about half of The Week‘s 29-person editorial team.

The site earns its keep by selling advertising to major companies like IBM, Xerox and Zurich Insurance but also serves as a vehicle to heavily promote its print cousin. Kotok credits the site with bringing in $1 million a year worth of magazine subscriptions.

On the tablet front, Kotok says iPad advertising and subscriptions (access is free for print subscribers) are producing almost $1 million in sales but that the Apple relationship is difficult. “It’s hard because we’re used to having a reader relationship but Apple controls that. Sometimes they promote you and sometimes they don’t.”

The future: commerce not a tin cup

Having discovered that readers are not put off by price increases — The Week‘s average annual price has risen from $30 to $50 in the last six years — Kotok says he is now focused on revenue rather than subscriber growth. Gift subscriptions, which are a big part of The Week’s business, will be an ongoing source of income but, in the long run, the company still confronts a magazine business that is in wide and permanent decline.

The Week also faces a more immediate challenge in the Post Office’s plan to end delivery on Saturday (the day the magazine arrives in readers’ mailboxes). Kotok says he can meet the Saturday challenge by shifting production schedules, but that the publication is also focusing on developing other revenue streams – a tactic that is becoming necessary to media outlets of all kinds.

For now, he says, that will not include a paywall or donations experiment of the sort being conducted by Andrew Sullivan. Instead, The Week is betting on ecommerce to compliment its editorial strategy. “We won’t put out a tin cup. Many of our subscriptions are gifts so our ecommerce will be too,” Kotok says, suggesting that The Week fans will buy each other t-shirts, books and more.

The Week’s ecommerce experiment will be helped by its 2011 acquisition of Mental Floss magazine, which has an online store that brings in 30% of its $10 million. Items for sale include smart people t-shirts (“Pi Hard,” “Spell Czech”) and quiz books. In its push into retail, the company will be joining the likes of Gawker Media and Thrillist, which are likewise trying to leverage content into ecommerce.

Ferriss will be taking part in a panel looking at how some individual writers and media creators have become independent media entities in their own right, and have been able to carve out a healthy living for themselves outside of the traditional industry channels set up by the book, magazine or newspaper industries — and what the benefits and disadvantages of that approach are.

Unlike some of our panelists, Ferriss has always been an independent operator: he first appeared on the scene in 2007 with his book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” and then quickly followed that with other books applying the same approach to health and cooking. Ferriss has built his following on social media into a powerful publicity engine, and is also showing other authors some potential routes for success: according to Ferriss, BitTorrent — normally thought of as a source of pirated content — drove more clicks to Amazon than any traditional ad has.

Sullivan, Ross Sorkin and Maria Popova

Blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is also on our paidContent panel, is another poster boy for the independent media movement: Sullivan recently embarked on a closely-watched experiment by quitting the Daily Beast to launch his own standalone site, funded entirely by his readers. For Sullivan, this move is a return to his past in a sense — he was an independent blogger early in his career and tried the self-funding route before joining The New Republic, followed by The Atlantic and then the Beast.

Also on the panel is Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times writer who also appears regularly on CNBC and other outlets, and has created a booming enterprise for himself within the NYT by building his DealBook blog into a multi-faceted entity with a conference and other elements. Hopefully Sorkin will tell us whether he has thought about taking the same route as Andrew Sullivan and becoming truly independent, and why he has so far decided not to do that.

And rounding out our panel is blogger/curator extraordinaire Maria Popova, who has built her blog Brain Pickings into a destination for hundreds of thousands of loyal readers, who help support her both through donations and by clicking on affiliate links to Amazon when she mentions a book. Although this approach caused some controversy recently, Popova has been able to make a living solely from blogging, without any help from traditional media channels.

Is this kind of approach viable for anyone, or are Sullivan and Ferriss and Popova exceptions? Are there benefits to remaining inside a traditional entity like the New York Times, the way Sorkin has, that outweigh the benefits of being independent? And will more writers and other creators choose to stay independent or become so in the future, thanks to the social web and platforms like Kickstarter? Those are some of the questions we hope to ask at paidContent Live. Please join us.

This post was revised on April 8 to clarify that Tim Ferriss has not self-published his books. Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user seanosh

The monthly option is set up to renew automatically, meaning Sullivan is poised to receive thousands of small but steady revenue streams — it seems a good bet the renewal rate will be high since few people will blanche at $2 charge on their credit card.

“The point of course is to make this available to as many people at as many price points as you want and need, above a minimum baseline,” Sullivan wrote in a blog post. (He’ll be speaking more about The Dish’s payment model on April 17 at paidContent Live in New York.)

Last week, The Dish made its paywall stricter, lowering it to five free “read-on” stories every 60 days.

Sullivan also wrote that The Dish has now raised $653,000 of the $900,000 it needs for its first year, up from $644,000 last week.

Therefore, Sullivan writes, “we’ve decided to lower the meter to five free read-ons and extend the reset period from 30 days to 60 days. In all other respects, the meter will remain the same.” That’s 2.5 free read-on stories per 30 days — a big decrease from the seven per month that had been allowed. (“Read-on” stories refers to longer stories on the site; much content, including posts that link out to other sites, remains free.)

Sullivan, who will be speaking about pay models at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York, notes that The Dish has collected $644,000 in revenue since announcing its $19.99-per-year subscription in January. That’s up $33,000 since February 25, when we suggested The Dish might need to tweak its paywall, and a little over two-thirds of the way to its $900,000 goal.

Sullivan promised that new content will come with the tightened meter: “[We] are eager to begin commissioning long-form journalism and other projects like podcasting, and we can’t begin that in earnest until we have our basic operations funded.”