Mark: How does Newpress make money?
From: About 95% of our revenue comes from ads, mostly host-read ads supplemented with AdSense. We hope to evolve that to attract more premium advertisers, which we anticipate happening as television ad budgets increasingly migrate to streaming and YouTube. This year, we are on pace to bring in around $7 million in revenue and have been profitable from day one. We have never taken any outside investment, but we have lately considered the idea as a way of accelerating our growth.
Mark: How does the revenue get split among creators and staff?
From: Newpress owns the intellectual property of all the shows, and we pay our creators and staff a salary. Once a creator’s show reaches breakeven, they get a revenue-share. Our pitch is that a solo creator might make more money on their own, but as part of Newpress they can focus solely on their work while we manage the business and provide operational support. We just brought on Max, and we hope to bring in one to two new creators a year.
Mark: Why YouTube?
From: We identified what we do well—creator-led visual journalism—and want to do that well over and over again. YouTube is the best home for that. We have been tempted to expand to other platforms but are doing so cautiously. We also find that, especially among younger audiences, people want to learn from people, and that the best stories come from creators excited about telling them. There really is no precedent for what we are doing, but we think this model is built for where media consumption is trending.