With online ad revenues in terminal decline, The Quietus has successfully pivoted to reader funding
The Quietus is an independent music and culture magazine online with hundreds of thousands of readers. After testing the waters of reader funding by accepting donations over the past four years, editor and co-founder Luke Turner tells us how The Quietus has crafted a membership offer perfectly tailored to the interests of its community.
You’ve hit 600 members in your first month on Steady, which is a great achievement. What did you do to prepare your membership program and get it in such great shape?
We possibly had a head start on some other publications because we’ve been going for 12 years, and we already offered the option for people to support us via PayPal. We knew we’d already have a base to build on.
Instead of buying a copy of The Quietus in the shop, they were essentially paying to read it online and support us. We’d initially been very wary of introducing anything like that, just because there was that assumption that things on the internet ought to be free.
But in the end, people were very willing to voluntarily give us a bit of money every month. And that has kept us going for the past four years, as advertising revenues have declined. That made us realize that people were actually willing to pay for things online.
I think people are really aware now that if they want things to survive, they have to pay for them.
And now that you’ve made the move to memberships, what benefits are you offering your members?
What people really like The Quietus for is longread articles. So we felt that by offering a longread element to our paying members, and then building in a podcast that related to the longread, that would be two things that stay focused on how our site works, which is championing under-regarded bits of culture. We thought if we combine these two things, and then also try and release some music, too, this could be a really nice offer.
At The Quietus, we’re a music magazine and we feel increasingly like we’re part of a cultural ecosystem with artists. We wanted to be able to give something back to the wider community. So we felt that releasing music and funding that would be a good way of doing that. We are very pleased to have a partner with this, State 51, which is a music distribution company, and they’re helping us fund these releases for members of our top plan.
We thought we knew our readership well enough to know they’d probably like extra longreads, they’d enjoy a podcast, and who doesn’t like free music? People liking free music has destroyed the music industry, after all. So if we can give away some music where the artists are actually getting paid, that just seemed like a real positive.
What made you want to switch to memberships and change your offer to include these added benefits for your members?
I think there were quite a few reasons really. It’s nice to be able to give something back to readers. Plus advertising revenue just isn’t going anywhere, and then there was the big disruption of Coronavirus, which wiped out our last ad revenue stream, working with live music.
Then we were fortunate to get a grant from the Arts Council England to help us survive some of the Coronavirus period. That’s been a huge help to keep The Quietus going and we thought we’d invest some of that money in getting our membership program off the ground. Obviously, Steady doesn’t charge upfront fees. But we were able to bring someone in to set it up — that’s Anthea, who’s been amazing helping with this.
You have to find a way of making your platform or publication sustainable in the long term.
Rather than lying awake all night worrying if there was going to be any more advertising, I felt that this was a really good way of making sure we could be sustainable.
And how is Steady working out for you so far?
Our website is 12 years old, which is pretty ancient in internet terms and it’s a bit cranky. And we don’t have any tech staff, because we can’t afford them. I was very worried that it wouldn’t be compatible with Steady, but it’s been fantastic. Steady is just very functional and setting it up was really simple.
There were quite a few reasons why we chose Steady, but one of the big ones was all of the functions. Being able to put a paywall on an individual page is just amazing. That means we can offer exclusive essays — they still sit on our site, but they’ve got a paywall on them and that means we’re instantly driving people to sign up for a membership. I love the little floating button on the side that encourages people to sign up. I think all that functionality is really nice and I’m relieved it works with our steam-engine-ancient website.
Is there anything else you think people should know about memberships or Steady?
I would like to make a point of saying how amazing [Steady Membership Consultant] Sanket has been in the run-up to our launch. We explored different platforms and different combinations of platforms and he was just so amazing to work with. Steady also provided really interesting reader data and has been great with any troubleshooting.
I think it’s very striking that Steady is run by publishers — it comes across that publishers are put first. A lot of the other tools we could have used seemed to be very tech-focused. And that’s not necessarily helpful if you’re a publisher. You need people to understand what you’re trying to do, how publishing works. This is a real strength of Steady’s: it’s not a tech platform trying to make money off publishers, it’s publishers trying to make the publishing ecosystem work.
I think without Steady, we would have struggled to launch a membership model that fits so well with what we do. And when we saw that Gay Times and gal-dem were already working with Steady, we said, “alright, this is the platform that works with people who’ve got similar values to us”. That was a big motivating factor, as well.
Become a member of The Quietus on Steady:
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