My job is to make my subscribers happy, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to stay as true as I can to what I set out to do in the beginning: write things that are original and valuable. When I succeed I’m happy, and the numbers take care of themselves; when I publish something I’m not happy with, I have trouble sleeping. When tech companies or investors or anyone else is mad, I am free to not pay them any attention. - Ben Thompson (Stratechery)
It’s very clear that Frontier Fintech will grow to be a media company and down the line will have revenue lines that look like a Media Company’s revenue lines. We’ll have subscription revenue, sponsorship revenues and partner generated revenue. I always argue for pragmatism in business and tech and this is a pragmatic take on what my business will grow into. Nonetheless, a very unique conflict is created by this approach. Frontier Fintech has grown on the back of original and valuable content and has therefore generated a lot of TRUST from its readership. I put that in caps because it’s the ultimate currency for internet based creators. If I were to simplify my KPIs now and into the future into one simple task, it would be to “Maintain trust with my readers”. Whilst this trust is the primary goal of my writing and all efforts around Frontier Fintech, I have to balance this with the commercial goal of growing revenue. Without revenue there’s no Frontier Fintech and therefore the idea of maintaining trust becomes irrelevant.
This exchange highlighted by Ben Thompson in his blog Stratechery very succinctly highlights the thinking that I have about our monetisation efforts;
There was a fascinating exchange between Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Marques Brownlee, the brilliant YouTuber behind the MKBHD tech review channel, on the most recent episode of Patel’s podcast Decoder:
Nilay Patel: This kind of gets into one thing that I personally was very happy to see on your channel. You made an entire video about your ethics policy and what you will and won’t do with advertisers. Just to draw the stark contrast, I have almost nothing to do with the revenue of The Verge. I’m a very traditional journalist in that mold. Like, I know who our sales team is and sometimes they parade me out in front of executives to seem fancy. But I don’t know what our rates are. I’m very insulated from sales. It’s your inbox, it’s your deals, you’re setting the rates. How do you balance that tension, because it’s a very YouTube-specific tension in one way, but I think we’re seeing it across the entire kind of creator ecosystem?
Marques Brownlee: The way you phrase it is interesting. I think our rates for an ad in a video are pretty fluent. But it’s a balancing act, because you don’t want to overdo it or pick the wrong thing or not consider some part of this that should be considered. You want to make more, so that you can pay for that camera car.
But the other end of that seesaw is a channel that does way too many ads…I never put three mid-rolls in a video. It’s zero or maybe one. That applies to the ads that we build in and make ourselves, too. If it’s a bad product, it’s not worth doing it at all, even if we would’ve made a ton of money. If it’s a bad integration or if it’s a bad company to work with, I have to say no, because it just doesn’t fit. So that fit is often more important than the math of the per-minute or per-project basis.
Marques makes the point that his monetisation efforts are greatly influenced by the need to retain trust. This is serious enough for him to create an ethics policy that goes into who he works with and who he doesn’t. Without such a policy it’s very easy to have your trust eroded.
This is a good framing for announcing that I will be introducing “Partner Pieces” to Frontier Fintech. These will be deeply researched articles written by myself and sponsored by partners who are keen to educate the market on what they do. They will be published on Thursdays once or twice a month. The idea of a Partner Piece would generally raise eyebrows because they’d seem like “Puff Pieces”. Traditional media has unfortunately fallen prey to this often writing features about companies or individuals who are more keen on reputation laundering than educating the market. To this end, I have to be clear and highlight my own ethics policy on who I work with and how we’ll work together. Remember, I have to balance revenue generation so I can invest in better content and a wider reach (podcasts, conferences, education etc) with TRUST, my core asset.
The partner piece and sponsorship ethics policy will be based on four key principles;
The thing about this Ethics policy is that any of my subscribers both paid and unpaid can simply write to me if they think that the policy has been ignored. It also makes it very clear to any potential partner of how we work. Hopefully this will enable us to balance the conflict of a new media company between growing revenue and retaining trust.