Since then, Sebastian has served as a kind of gateway drug to audience revenue for a great many people in Europe. Steady has become one of the most important membership platforms in Germany, particularly for individual creators and smaller independent newsrooms. And Sebastian has continued to show up, explain the mechanics and share what he has learned. Last year, I invited him to Budapest to speak to local publishers with roughly as much experience of audience revenue as I had when we first met. In December, I asked him to do the same for a group of exiled newsrooms meeting in Berlin. Both times, he was as thoughtful and generous as he had been a decade earlier.

More recently, our conversations have expanded from membership models and our customary plans for world domination to a more difficult question: what responsibilities come with operating the infrastructure through which speech is distributed and monetized? Sebastian and I do not begin from precisely the same position. I am probably closer to a free-speech absolutist and more comfortable with platforms carrying speech that I find deeply unsavoury. But the question becomes harder when a platform is not merely carrying an opinion. It is providing its audience, its payment infrastructure and the means of building a profitable business around it. Does freedom of speech also imply a right to distribution and monetization? And when a platform says no, is that censorship, curation or simply a decision about whom it wants to do business with?

Those questions sit at the heart of Sebastian’s essay below (published originally on Steady, of course). It is an unusually honest account of how his own thinking changed as Steady grew and these decisions stopped being theoretical. It also develops a serious argument for transparent rules, predictable procedures and a plural ecosystem of platforms rather than demanding that every platform remain neutral about everything. Readers of our recent provocation, Why Europe Should Buy Substack, may recognize some of the territory. Sebastian approaches it from a different direction and from the perspective of someone who is actually responsible for deciding where a platform draws its lines.

Subscribe now

Recently, a German YouTuber named Benjamin Berndt sat down for a four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Björn Höcke. Höcke is the most prominent hardliner of the AfD, Germany’s far-right party; a German court has ruled that he may legally be called a fascist. For four and a half hours, softly lit, Höcke muses about his nationalist fantasies — and his host never contradicts him, never adds context, never asks a critical question. The video has been online for about two months and has passed six million views.

Berndt says he is not a journalist. He lets people talk, he listens, and besides, Germany has freedom of speech. After he received a letter from the state media authority of North Rhine-Westphalia — one of Germany’s regional media regulators — asking him to add context to a false claim Höcke had made on camera, Berndt has cast himself as the victim of state censorship.

That argument bothers me. I regularly face the same question myself — whether or not I want to help spread a particular opinion — and sometimes I decide against it. I am certain this is not censorship. Here is why.

An opinion doesn’t have to be sayable everywhere

The freedom to state your opinion matters; most people can agree on that. It is the freedom to form a view and express it, even a view others find controversial or extreme. But at least in Germany and most of Europe, freedom of speech is not absolute. It has limits. Article 5 of Germany’s constitution draws the line at human dignity, and also at the protection of minors, insult, defamation, slander, and what German law calls Schmähkritik — abuse dressed up as criticism. If you don’t like where those lines are drawn, you would have to assemble a majority to change the constitution.

But freedom of speech does not mean that every opinion must be sayable everywhere. The right to say something does not oblige anyone else to print it, broadcast it, recommend it, or turn it into money. No one claims that a conservative newspaper violates free speech by declining a left-wing guest column, or the other way around. Newspapers, publishers and broadcasters have political identities — German law even protects that editorial slant; it’s called Tendenzschutz. Historically, freedom did not arise because every newspaper had to print everything. Freedom arose because there were many different newspapers.

Censorship is a precise word. It means an authority forbids or suppresses an expression. Someone who is censored can no longer speak. Someone who simply isn’t invited onto a podcast can still speak — just not on that particular podcast.

So inviting someone like Höcke, making him look good, and organizing millions of views is of course a political act. Freedom of speech does not require Benjamin Berndt to do any of it. He chose to clear a large stage for Höcke’s views. There can be many reasons for that — political, financial, and of course the honest belief that everyone must be allowed to say anything, anywhere, at any time. But that would be a private opinion, not a fact. Benjamin Berndt is not protecting free speech, and he is not threatened by censorship.

“You’re not allowed to say that anymore”

I don’t want to make this too easy for myself. In 1990, 78 percent of Germans still felt they could express their political opinion freely; more recently, only 46 percent did. Much of what people experience as “you’re not allowed to say that anymore” is, as far as I can tell, something else: disagreement, criticism, often a loss of status. We have to endure all of that. Enduring it is precisely what the freedom to disagree consists of.

But cancel culture is real, of course — on the right and on the left. I won’t deny that some people experience this new communication culture as a constraint. In certain spaces, extremely strict social expectations now apply. They are simply not the same thing as censorship. These interpersonal rules are set neither by the state nor by any other powerful villain. We are all free not to abide by them.

My channel, my rules

Whoever spreads an opinion carries responsibility — and with it comes a right of its own: the freedom of distribution. No one can force me to spread an opinion, or to help it spread, if I don’t want to. As a host, I should make sure everyone knows and follows the rules of the place where opinions are exchanged. But anyone who won’t follow them can look for another place, with other rules.

Put differently: freedom depends on a plurality of spaces, not on the neutrality of every space. That does not threaten free speech. It protects it from being destroyed by whoever shouts loudest.

Distribution means shared responsibility

Benjamin Berndt provides a large space on YouTube, and his rules say: people like Höcke get undisturbed, benevolent access to an audience of millions. But that does not release Berndt from responsibility for distributing those views. Whether he admits it or not, his choices shape public debate.

Which brings me to myself.

I am ultimately responsible for the opinions published on Steady — the membership platform I run — as the company’s CEO. And over the past few years we have fairly often declined to work with people, even when the content in question wasn’t always illegal. I share responsibility for its distribution, and that is why I now insist on my own freedom not to distribute certain opinions.

For a long time I argued the exact opposite. Here is how I changed my mind.

After I first made this argument publicly, someone sent me an anonymous reply:

Your opinion piece was completely inappropriate. On top of that, you openly admitted that you intervene in your creators’ content on Steady. That alone is reason to keep well away from the platform. You’re basically doing exactly what you’ve accused Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos of in other pieces, if I remember correctly. A shame.

Ouch.

That criticism is harsh, but I’m not hearing it for the first time. I take it seriously, because for a long time I argued exactly the same way. Let me explain why I nevertheless believe our position is right.

How extreme is too extreme?

Let’s start with Andrew Tate — the British-American former kickboxer known for his ultra-masculine lifestyle and his misogyny, who radicalizes young men with his videos. Since 2022, he and his brother have faced proceedings in Romania on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal organization.

Banned from Meta, TikTok and YouTube for hate speech, Tate has been building reach at breakneck speed this year on the newsletter platform Substack. His publication reportedly has close to a million paying subscribers; it ranks number one in the “New Bestsellers” category. On Substack, an extremist like Tate is one of the most visible and most lucrative creators on the platform. At Steady, we would not work with someone like him. Who is right?

Substack’s founders see themselves as especially principled defenders of free speech. Substack does have content guidelines, but Tate’s content doesn’t appear to conflict with them. Substack’s line is that what authors and readers accept is what matters most; the operators intervene only in the most extreme exceptions.

I don’t fundamentally disagree. Platforms must not become ministries of truth. Independent media makers must not be at the mercy of the operators’ personal taste. Otherwise social pressure could push out legitimate minority positions that simply don’t suit a majority — and that would restrict free speech. And readers are, of course, perfectly capable of forming their own judgment about what they read.

So in Steady’s early years, we held exactly this position: it is not our job to make such decisions.

Or so we thought.

I see it differently today

As I argued above, freedom of speech creates no entitlement that every platform, every newsroom, every venue must distribute, amplify or monetize an opinion. Being legally allowed to say something does not mean others have to spread it.

Because distribution is not neutral. Whoever distributes decides which topics become visible, which content earns money, which communities grow, which norms take hold. A podcast, a newsletter, a publisher, a broadcaster cannot pretend to be a mere technical service provider. The selection itself is already an act. Whoever organizes reach is part of the effect.

That may sound a little glib; it is, of course, complicated. So let me take it step by step. Distribution happens on several levels. I’d distinguish three:

1. There is a kind of base infrastructure: internet access, the hosting of your website, payment providers like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard. These should act largely neutrally. Anyone excluded at this level would effectively be stripped of their freedom of speech.

2. Above that sits a layer of aggregation and recommendation, which I would not count as base infrastructure: Google, Apple’s App Store, Chrome, Spotify’s rankings. Here selection is unavoidable, and that gives whoever controls these layers an uncanny amount of power. This level needs transparency, consistency and clear procedures.

3. And third, there are editorial spaces. By that I mean traditional media, but also websites, podcasts, communities — and membership platforms like Steady. Here selection is legitimate, even desirable. The closer someone sits to the editorial and community level, the more legitimate it is for them to curate what they distribute.

For media, there are two competing approaches today: platform neutrality and platform plurality.

Neutrality or plurality?

Platform neutrality says: every platform should permit as much as possible, because any restriction would be censorship. Anything legal must be sayable. Hate, intimidation and extremism can be monetized as long as they stay below the threshold of what is legally actionable. In this model, even moderating comments would be a questionable exercise of power.

Platform plurality — which I find more convincing — aims to secure a pluralistic ecosystem. Free speech exists only if there are alternatives, places to express your opinion elsewhere. Those alternatives have to exist, and switching has to be realistic: users, publishers and creators must not be trapped on a single platform. This plurality is the precondition for freedom of speech not being curtailed.

Because distribution becomes a problem when a single channel is so important that being excluded from it effectively means being excluded from the relevant public sphere — for example YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. Add to that the informal and formal pressure on these companies’ decisions — in the United States under Donald Trump, and of course in China. And it all happens opaquely: the algorithms of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and TikTok decide what we get to hear.

Whoever profits from hate is not neutral

Which brings me back to that anonymous message, and the charge that I behave like Elon Musk by intervening in creators’ content. On the level I’m actually responsible for, I don’t think it holds. Steady is one platform among many. Anyone who isn’t comfortable with us can easily find a new home at Substack, Patreon, Ghost, Beehiiv, Kit — or Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. There are options.

We would never alter content, or even so much as comment on our customers’ content. Plenty gets published on Steady that I personally disagree with completely. We tolerate that without difficulty, and we have a spine sturdy enough to protect opinions that deviate from the mainstream. But in extreme cases we do end the business relationship — not arbitrarily, abruptly and for public effect, but according to transparent rules and a fair process.

Substack, by contrast, has repeatedly had to admit that it hosts far-right newsletters and earns money from them; in 2024 it removed a number of neo-Nazi publications only after a user revolt. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that Substack continues to make money from newsletters spreading Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism.

Substack is a competitor of Steady’s, so perhaps I have a credibility problem here. Even so, the direct comparison raises a fundamental question: where does free speech end, and where does complicity begin? Substack’s position is that bad ideas lose their power in open debate. My answer: that may be true of debate. But whoever provides the payment infrastructure, the reach and the monetization enables not just the debate, but the business model behind it.

We made this mistake too

We had exactly this problem ourselves. A few years ago there were publications on Steady whose content we, as founders, could not reconcile with our values. But our community guidelines at the time drew such imprecise lines that we had no good arguments for acting against them.

I won’t name specific examples here, because even when I no longer want to work with a partner, it is not my place to spread the details in public. Steady is not a bar you throw someone out of for misbehaving. We are a payment infrastructure with membership management, a publisher community, a business foundation and a space of trust for the media makers who work with us and whose livelihoods depend on it. Destroying that business overnight is not only legally problematic; it would destroy the trust of every one of our customers.

In any case, we took public criticism that was justified. So a few years after founding the company, we expanded and rewrote our community guidelines.

Not everything that’s allowed is okay

The basic stance: Steady has rules, and anyone who follows them is welcome. Anyone who doesn’t, we ask to publish their content elsewhere. Not because we deny them the right to free expression, but because our space is not the right one for that content. There are plenty of other spaces — Substack, for instance — that are less choosy.

Steady does not draw the line only where criminal law kicks in. Like other far-right figures, Höcke is practiced at approaching those limits without quite crossing them. A piece of content can be legal and still not fit our community standards. Our guidelines spell out what we don’t want to distribute: systematic intimidation, hate as a business model, misogynist or racist content, extremist propaganda, fraud, pseudo-scientific health promises, the exploitation of vulnerable people. And, importantly: these community guidelines are not legal rules. In the end they are subjective judgments about content that we have to make at our own discretion.

There are economic reasons for this stance, too. As a provider that handles payments, we are subject to obligations well beyond criminal law — for instance the requirements of our payment providers around know-your-customer checks against money laundering, sanctions lists and fraud risk. Legality was never the only limit. Our providers’ compliance forces stricter standards on us.

More important still is the trust we depend on. Steady’s model rests on members entrusting us with their payment data and publishers entrusting us with their income. A platform seen as a monetization channel for hate damages the business foundation of every other publisher on it. So our approach doesn’t protect society in the abstract — it protects our other customers, concretely.

When we say no, we do it fairly

None of this is censorship. We forbid no one to speak. We decide whom we give our infrastructure, our brand and our reach. Not every rejection is a ban on speech — it is only the end of a business relationship. When we don’t want to work with someone, that doesn’t mean: you may not say this. It means: we are not the right partner.

So yes, Steady draws lines — but we have committed to a procedure that keeps the process fair. I am not the one who decides. A committee of three rotating colleagues does: prompted by a user’s report, they compare the flagged content against our guidelines and judge whether a publication violates them. Ending a collaboration demands particular care — early warning, predictability, a stated reason, proportionality, a chance to correct course, a transition period, portability of data and members, no public humiliation, and immediate measures only in especially acute cases.

These rules have worked smoothly since 2020. Every so often we have declined or wound down our work with a particular publication. The processes have mostly been civil ever since, even when we strongly disagreed with the content.

What I’ve learned from all this: platforms are allowed to say no — though not lightly. That doesn’t make me Elon Musk.

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Eleven ideas of what news is worth to the EU

• 25 active calls (3 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Exactly a year ago, to the day, the European Commission published its proposal for AgoraEU, the €8.6 billion programme meant to fund culture, media and civil society under the EU’s 2028–2034 budget. Since then the text has been through several rounds of member state surgery in the Council and a draft report in the Parliament. Now the amendment stage has arrived: 1,544 amendments from MEPs, of which 372 touch media and journalism (at least according to our count), adding up to eleven distinct visions of the programme’s architecture.

In this piece, we’ll walk you through the most important amendments and what they mean for the future of media funding in Europe and introduce the MEPs who would cut all funding from media in the next EU budget.

The zero-sum game, now in writing

Read more

After being pushed off screen, she did not disappear. Instead, she built a successful audience-funded interview show on Patreon: long-form, public-interest conversations with some of Hungary’s most important cultural figures, from across the political spectrum, paid for by a loyal community of viewers. This is exactly the sort of thing that sounds impossi…

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• What are we good for?

• What your open rate, conversion rate, and price should actually be

• Local news is routine, but not automatic

• 24 active calls (2 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

What are we good for?

(by Peter)

A few years ago, I found myself at breakfast in a Brussels hotel during yet another two-day media funding event. You know the type: name badges, aggressively burgundy carpets, and people trying to solve the world’s wicked problems from panels and PowerPoint decks.

Suddenly a reasonably successful media investor sat down next to me. I introduced myself, and over dry scrambled eggs and soggy bacon, we started talking about public subsidies, private capital, and how to get more resources into public interest journalism.

At some point he told me to stop trying to prove journalism’s “societal” value. Go down that road, he said, and you’ll lose: some of the value is self-evident, and the rest is a fight you can’t win.

He was half right.

He had a point about the fight: set journalism against malaria nets in an aid budget and you will lose most days, and probably you should. But I think he was wrong that the value is self-evident. It is not evident to most funders, investors, to the audience and, if we’re honest, not always to ourselves. We need to understand what journalism is for, and not only when we’re asking someone for money.

Which is why I believe The Value of Journalism study (by Mel Bunce and Beth Pearson) is so important. It does the unglamorous work of gathering the evidence, and grew out of the research working group of the Media Viability Manifesto, where some of us spent last year arguing that the sector had to get better at demonstrating exactly this.

The strand I care about most is journalism as an economic enabler. The report presents evidence showing every dollar spent on journalism can return more than a hundred in recovered funds, better public services and lower corruption. A decline in press freedom tracks a one-to-two per cent fall in real GDP growth. In Uganda, publishing school budgets in local papers raised the share of funds actually reaching schools from 13 per cent to 80 per cent. None of this is self-evident, it had to be measured.

This is, of course, not going to change the minds of people who think “media freedom” is what happens when they personally own all the television channels. But there is a large and important group of decision makers who are neither hostile nor fully convinced. They have watched the business model collapse, platforms extract value, creators build direct relationships with audiences, AI take over search, and public trust in institutions weaken. They are asking legitimate questions. Is journalism still a business? Where is there market failure? What should philanthropy fund? Where can private capital help? When are public subsidies justified? And, perhaps most uncomfortably, are we trying to save something because it is valuable, or because we used to value it?

We really shouldn’t dismiss these questions and I think the report gets us a little closer to some of the answers.

Evidence of value is one argument; what to do with it is another. Reflecting on another, more recent media funding summit in Brussels (I swear these are like waffle kiosks in that city) Leonard Novy wrote about how newsrooms, and perhaps the wider sector needs to move from fundable to investable. It’s a great line, in large part because in 5 words it describes a process so painful and complex that many newsrooms don’t even attempt it.

Moving from fundable to investable means rebuilding almost everything about how an organisation runs, including the editorial side, which was never a separate thing. The durable ventures will be the ones that manage it, and most people underestimate how much of a retooling this actually requires.

A new brief titled Private Capital Mobilisation in Support of Media (by Clare Cook, Ole Dahl Rasmussen and Giordano Zambelli) maps that terrain.

It opens with two full pages of acronyms, which may frighten off the faint-hearted, but push past them: what follows is very useful. The brief works at two levels at once. It handles the macro, systems-level questions, how you build a market where one barely exists, while staying concrete about specific actors, specific instruments.

For a policy crowd, I think the value is in the comparisons. The brief looks at how agriculture and off-grid energy built their financing landscapes over two decades, pipeline-building, guarantees, sequenced capital, patient concessional money, and asks what transfers to media and what doesn’t. The honest answer is: less than you’d hope, but not nothing.

For an operator, it’s a different kind of useful. If you run a small independent newsroom and you’ve started wondering what investment might even look like, who invests, through which instruments, and you don’t already live in the world of impact finance, all of it sounds alien. This is as good a starting point as any, and there aren’t many starting points. And if you want to go deeper, get Aunnie Patton Power’s Adventure Finance, it is the clearest guide I know to how these instruments actually work.

Taken together, the two reports point in the same direction. We need better evidence about what journalism is good for, and better financial machinery to support the parts of journalism and media infrastructure that markets alone will not sustain.

What your open rate, conversion rate, and price should actually be

(by María)

In a first-birthday post for his Substack, Derek Thompson noted the newsletter had nearly 110,000 subscribers and a paid conversion rate of around 5.5%. He did not disclose his income, but said it had surpassed his former Atlantic salary after about five months and kept growing.

Thompson is an excellent and well known reporter. He is the ceiling, which is very useful to see, but the floor and the middle are where most of this market exists.

Beehiiv’s State of Paid Newsletters 2026 offers a wider view. Paid subscription revenue on the platform grew from $8 million in 2024 to $19 million in 2025, with $35 million projected by the end of 2026. The share of revenue-generating users earning through paid subscriptions doubled, from 15% in Q1 2024 to 30% in Q1 2026.

• Pricing has a stable midpoint, but the range varies by niche. The median paid newsletter charges $10/month or $100/year, unchanged from 2024. Investing sits at the high ($27/month, $292/year); Travel sits at the low end ($7/month, $80/year).

• Conversion rates are low at the median, but much higher at the top. The median free-to-paid conversion rate is 0.62% (about six paying subscribers per thousand free ones). Investing converts at 0.84% at the median and 18.69% for the top 10%; Finance at 0.78% and 20%. Sports has the highest median at 1.93%, but the sample size is relatively small.

• Retention changes what each paid subscriber is worth. Estimated lifetime runs from about six months for Money to nearly 20 months for Food & Drink, with News close behind at around 18 months. Monthly churn moves in the opposite direction, from 16.67% in Money down to 5.06% in Food & Drink. Median LTV ranges from $83 in Community to $230 in Investing.

• List size alone does not predict revenue. A 5,000-subscriber Investing newsletter, using median conversion and pricing, can generate roughly $13,600 a year. The same-size Travel list, at its median conversion and pricing, generates about $1,260.

Despite how well independents are doing, our review of 859 newsletters from 32 enterprise publishers across 10 European countries found enterprise publishers still underuse the format.

On an ever so slightly related note: we are the #10 newsletter on Substack in Hungary. We are not sure what this means, but◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜

Local news is routine, but not automatic

(by María)

A recent study from the Media Insight Project looks at how Americans across age groups get informed. It is based on a nationally representative poll of 1,009 teenagers ages 13-17 and 1,092 adults. The main frame is generational, but the section on local news includes findings worth a closer look.

• Local outlets still lead, but they are part of a wider information mix. Sixty-five percent get local news and information from them often or sometimes. But 58% get it from people they know personally, 33% from local creators or influencers, and 29% from community organizations. For publishers, the information market extends beyond newsrooms.

• The most followed topics are practical and repeatable. Weather or traffic leads overall, at 65%, followed by crime and public safety, 49%, and government or politics close to home, 39%. These are everyday information needs, the kind that can bring people back to alerts, newsletters, guides or other service formats.

• Regular use does not mean high marks. Local outlets are present in people’s information habits, yet the top-box ratings are modest: 27% say they do extremely or very well at covering important community issues, 24% at verifying facts, and 23% at being transparent. That presence can create openings, but durable revenue depends on becoming a source audiences value enough to return to, recommend or support.

Daily utility can open the door. The harder task is becoming distinct and trusted enough to be the go-to source people rely on, and turning that position into something they will pay for.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the 24 active calls (2 new), with the largest at the top:

Read more

This work happened through MDIF’s Amplify Europe programme and it sits alongside an investment Pluralis (an MDIF managed fund) has since made in HotNews’s parent company ZYX Publishing. That being said, neither HotNews nor MDIF sponsored this edition, it’s our own editorial production.

I asked Isa to write up the experience because I think it’s useful to understand what it took to get there in a market that keeps insisting reader revenue won’t work.

Four weeks before the launch of HotNews Premium, I was in Perugia at an aperitivo, talking with a few Romanian media people about audience revenue and publisher sustainability. I was building the audience revenue programme for HotNews, a large horizontal news publisher in Romania. While I was explaining the project, someone running a newsroom looked at me and said: “This will never work back home.”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that. Over the year I spent building the project, that sentence was the first argument I had to overcome in both internal and external conversations. I understood where it came from.

The subscription culture that exists in parts of Western and Central Europe or the US does not have the same foundation here. Before HotNews Premium, no large generalist news publisher in Romania had built a digital subscription product around its journalism. There was no obvious local precedent to point to and say: this is what success looks like.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Audience revenue does exist, but in a very specific form. Romania has a 3.5% fiscal facility, which allows taxpayers to redirect part of their income tax to an NGO of their choosing. The outlet that has mastered this is Recorder, the investigative publication where I started my career. Tens of thousands of people fill out forms each year to redirect taxes toward their journalism. In 2024, that mechanism helped them raise over 1.1 million euros, plus another 290k through the corporate profit tax donation. That is nearly 60% of their total revenue for the year.

Those numbers are impressive, but they are not the norm. The system creates a winner-takes-all dynamic, with a few strong players capturing most of the money and the rest left with small amounts. It also creates a particular kind of support habit. People who care about journalism are used to helping by redirecting money that would otherwise go to the state, not necessarily by taking out their card and paying from their own pocket every month. It is a form of voluntary support, but it is not the same as a subscription habit.

Outside that mechanism, the donation market is thin and in the for-profit part of the sector, audience revenue is even thinner.

At the same time, advertising is still a real business in Romania. Television captures around 50% of all advertising spend, but digital advertising remains vibrant, and some of the money that historically went to television is still moving online. For a publisher like HotNews, advertising is not a declining legacy revenue stream kept alive out of nostalgia, it still pays the bills.

In 2025, HotNews recorded total revenues of 3.5 million euros, with 94% coming from advertising, 4% from copyright licensing, and 2% from grants. We were operating at a 17% EBITDA margin.

That also changes the incentives. If there is still meaningful money to be made from digital advertising, the case for audience revenue becomes more complicated. A membership or subscription product can introduce questions about reach, product friction, advertising inventory, editorial priorities, and how commercial partners will react. When advertising is collapsing, experimenting with reader revenue is easier to justify. When advertising is still generating significant income, the internal question becomes: why risk disturbing something that works?

So the scepticism was rational.

What made HotNews’s case different, and unusual in a global context, was that we weren’t doing this under pressure. It was an intentional management decision to explore audience revenue before it became existential. That gave us room to think, to test, and to be wrong in controlled ways. But it also raised the stakes: in a crisis, experimentation is easy to defend because doing nothing is obviously worse. In our case, there was something to lose. That meant the project had to be ambitious enough to matter, but careful enough not to damage a business that was already working.

I came to HotNews as Head of Data and Research after a master’s at The London School of Economics, where I focused on the impact of audience revenue programmes on the journalism that publishers produce. The subscription project became mine to build.

We started with an audience survey, mapping the habits and spending behaviour of HotNews’s most loyal users. At the same time, we started to think about the necessary tech and after months of vendor evaluation, we landed on Piano for paywall and related infrastructure. We launched author-driven newsletters, grew them, and planned to gradually move them behind the paywall.

The HotNews Premium we landed on is a freemium model where, in addition to exclusive content, subscribers get access to all newsletter editions, priority in the comments section, a 40% discount for books purchased from our partner, and, for annual subscribers, access to The New York Times.

A little bit about the NYT deal:

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Society pays for what helps society. People pay for what helps them.

• The drive to hold AI companies accountable is gaining ground

• What local news audiences actually pay for

• 24 active calls (3 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Society pays for what helps society. People pay for what helps them.

(by Peter)

I’m in Vilnius this week for GlobalFact, talking to fact-checkers and the information-integrity crowd about money. Telling people about platforms cutting support, philanthropy shifting priorities, public money being political, and the “market” being very hard makes for really cheerful conversations. I can highly recommend it.

My title was: “Society pays for what helps society. People pay for what helps them.”

I think most of the information-integrity world lives somewhere between those two sentences and would rather not choose. I understand the reluctance.

The value of fact-checking, anti-disinformation work, and media literacy is real but diffuse. Improving the information environment benefits society in the aggregate. This is valuable but really hard to bill for. The broader and fuzzier the benefit, the harder it is to get any single person to pay for it.

This is the classic public-good/market-failure problem. When markets fail, usually the public sector or philanthropy steps in. For years, there was an elite consensus around the value of this work, which helped sustain public subsidies, philanthropic money, and platform support. In many contexts, that consensus has now cracked.

So my pitch was to take the other route seriously. If you want individuals, companies, or institutions to pay you, you need to solve a problem concrete enough, urgent enough, and useful enough that someone reaches for a card. Not “support democracy.” A patient deciding whether to take a drug, a small business trying not to get scammed, a pharmacist fielding the same misinformation twenty times a week.

The new Reuters Institute Digital News Report arrived just as I was writing the speech, and proceeded to support my argument almost suspiciously well.

(I will allow myself a tiny bit of tasteful bragging here. Jim Egan, the new lead author of the report, was generous enough to tolerate some of my unsolicited advice while the questionnaire was being developed, especially around what the survey might usefully ask on payment and motivation. I am very good at giving unsolicited advice, as friends, family, colleagues, restaurant waiters, and most recently several confused staff members at Warsaw airport can confirm. I’d like to claim credit and will settle for proximity.)

Among people who pay for online news, 81% say direct benefits are at least part of their reason for paying. Almost half also mention values-based motivations, such as supporting journalism because it matters to society, but the hierarchy is clear: a lot more people pay because the product helps them directly than because journalism is good for everyone.

This is not some depressing finding about human nature. People can care about society and still need a personal reason to take out the credit card.

For information-integrity, this is uncomfortable because the field has often been built around the opposite logic. The work is packaged for funders, platforms, policymakers, and society in the abstract. Less often is it packaged for a specific user with a recurring problem and a reason to pay.

The DNR also shows how fast the competitive landscape is changing. Among online news payers, 56% report paying a traditional news organization, 23% pay a digital-only outlet, and 15% pay an individual.

That gap between digital-only outlets and individuals is not very large, which is a very large structural problem for institutions.

Even digital-only news organizations have editors, managers, finance teams, product people, lawyers, systems, meetings, and at least one person whose job appears to involve walking slowly between rooms with a laptop and a reusable water bottle.

A creator may be one person, or a tiny team with a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, and direct payment relationship with an audience. If the revenue lines are becoming even vaguely comparable while the cost structures remain wildly different, the economics will become increasingly difficult for institutions.

Which brings me to how people pay, where the report and our own Capital Stacks of Journalism research point in the same direction. (I’ll say as little as possible about Capital Stacks, partly because it isn’t finished and partly out of superstition.)

Across the payment modalities, pure voluntary donation, where you get nothing in return but the warm feeling of having supported the cause, is consistently the smallest category, a minority habit even in the market where it runs highest.

That matches what we’re seeing across the European publishers in Capital Stacks: audience revenue is the center of gravity, and the overwhelming majority gate something. Of roughly twenty outlets, perhaps two or three live on voluntary donations alone, and two of those are quietly building an exclusive product. Voluntary support is the model organizations aspire to escape, not the one they build toward.

That is also difficult for the information-integrity space, where gating content or creating exclusivity still feels alien to most operators.

So this is the uncomfortable place I left the fact-checkers of Vilnius. If your public funding is secure, defend it and serve the public. That is a gift; use it well. But if it isn’t, and for much of this field it visibly is not, then wanting market revenue without changing how you operate is not a realistic strategy.

The drive to hold AI companies accountable is gaining ground

(by María)

Publishers are trying to take a more active role in setting the conditions under which AI companies use their work. SPUR, a coalition created to develop standards and licensing frameworks around usage rights, shows how quickly that push is becoming more structured. Launched in late February by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group, it recently announced 30 new members and released draft specifications for reporting content-use events.

Others are also thinking about the usage-compensation problem. In Harvard Business Review, economist E. Glen Weyl and computer scientist Raul Castro Fernandez propose a collective royalty-style system built on two datasets AI companies already produce during model training: the data mixture (which tracks how sources are blended and reveals the relative value of each) and scaling laws (empirical estimates of how performance responds to additional data and compute). They argue those inputs are enough to price content, making the objection that paying large numbers of rights holders would be too complex overstated.

But those efforts address only one side of the debate. The other begins when AI systems turn source material into something of their own: outputs that may go beyond, or contradict, what the originals actually say. At that point, the question is who bears responsibility for the result. A preliminary ruling in Germany gives an early indication of how it can be answered.

In a dispute over false accusations in Google AI Overviews, the Munich Regional Court found the company liable for the content the feature generated as the damaging claims in the summary did not appear in the cited sources, weakening Google’s argument that it was only directing users to third-party material. The court treated the difference between retrieving and generating as legally significant: ordinary search surfaces links; an AI Overview produces something new. That was enough in this case to exclude Google from the protections available to hosting providers, including the Digital Services Act’s safe harbours.

What local news audiences actually pay for

(by María)

When a U.S. local daily opened its records to researchers Gregory J. Martin, Shoshana Vasserman, and Cameron Pfiffer, they gained access to four years of data that captured which stories people clicked and which ones led them to subscribe. The dataset included 1.2 billion user sessions, 605 million article visits, and more than 55 million individual paywall events.

Depending on the metric, reader demand looked different. Sports, entertainment and syndicated columns tended to draw traffic. Public health, local politics and economics (the kinds of coverage typically described as hard news) tended to generate subscription value. The average local news article generated roughly twice as much subscription value as the average entertainment piece.

Martin, lead author of the paper, told Nieman Lab: “Willingness to pay in attention is really different than willingness to pay in dollars”. A click can mean interest, habit, distraction or just a good headline. A paywall conversion signals a stronger commitment: money behind the decision to keep reading. Traffic shows what draws attention; subscription value shows what turns some readers into subscribers. Both matter, but they measure different things. Treat them as interchangeable, and the picture can be misleading.

At this newspaper, the most popular stories often drew casual visitors, the group least likely to subscribe, so more clicks did not necessarily mean more subscriptions. The choice of metric also has strategic implications: had it optimized for traffic, it would have expanded entertainment and cut local news. Optimized for subscription revenue, the opposite.

That data also revealed how individual behavior shifted depending on access. Before subscribing, when the paywall limited how much users could read, they were more likely to devote that scarce access to civic coverage. Once the limit disappeared, entertainment and columns took up more of the extra time. Civic coverage was diluted, but did not disappear from the mix.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the 24 active calls (3 new), with the largest at the top:

Read more

When something went wrong for journalism in Hungary over the last 16 years, you knew exactly who arranged it, why, and which state-aligned oligarch or government decree would deliver it. The global version worked the sameish way. Whenever the business of news got turned on its head somewhere, you could reliably trace it back to a trillion-dollar tech company explaining, with great patience, that it was merely a neutral platform, that it doesn’t make content, it just happens to collect most of the money your content generates.

An antagonist gives you a story, a strategy, and on some days, maybe even a sense of purpose.

The bad news we’re bringing today has no antagonist. The MEPs involved are probably well-meaning. The cultural sector is well-meaning. Civil society is well-meaning. Everyone is conscientiously advocating for their own corner, exactly as they should. But the sum of all this well-meaning self-interest is that the invisible hand is now somewhat visibly showing the finger to the journalism industry.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

What the rapporteurs propose

Two editions ago we briefly covered the draft report by the two MEPs in charge of AgoraEU, Emma Rafowicz (Culture committee) and Alice Kuhnke (Civil Liberties). Having now spent more time with the text, and having compared notes with partners across the sector, the picture has not improved.

If you are new to the EU budget negotiation process, start here:

• We need to change the way journalism is funded in Europe

• The Motion, the Myth, the Multiannual Framework

• An in-depth look at the most important media funding programs proposed in the new EU budget

• The problem at the heart of Europe’s journalism funding debate

• What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget

• Microlooting the next EU budget

  ---

The headline change: journalism would get its own strand. Under the Commission’s original proposal, news support was bundled into MEDIA+ alongside the audiovisual industries, the stated logic being that movies, games and news face some overlapping structural pressures (platform dependency, AI disruption, collapsing distribution, the usual suspects). The rapporteurs propose to carve out a separate “Information and Journalism“ strand instead.

On the architecture itself, we are mostly agnostic. There are respectable technocratic arguments for both setups, and a dedicated strand has one real advantage: the money is visibly ours and harder to quietly reallocate to the next European prestige film fund. So while separation could be fine, separation with a smaller budget is not, and it seems like that is what’s on the table. Our position, shared by partners across the sector, is that a standalone strand only works with a fixed allocation of at least 20% of AgoraEU: roughly what journalism could have expected under the Commission's original architecture. The rapporteurs are proposing considerably less.

The math is going the wrong way

The Commission gave MEDIA+ €3.2 billion without specifying the split between audiovisual and news. We didn’t love the ambiguity; our proposal was 40% audiovisual, 40% news, 20% flexibility buffer, since “flexibility” is one of those Brussels magic words that, like competitiveness and security, seems to act on European officials as a powerful psychedelic, rendering them highly suggestible. If we assumed something around a 50-50 split, it would have meant roughly €1.6 billion for journalism over seven years.

The rapporteurs propose increasing the overall AgoraEU envelope from €8.6 billion to €10.7 billion, and allocating a fixed 11.7% of it to “Information and Journalism”. That’s about €1.25 billion. So: a bigger overall program, a smaller journalism share than the one implied by the Commission’s smaller original proposal. Culture and civil society allocations grow substantially, ours shrinks.

And €1.25 billion is the optimistic scenario. The Parliament can wish for a larger envelope; the member states pay for it, and the prevailing mood in the Council at any given moment is not generosity. If the final budget lands closer to the Commission’s €8.6 billion baseline, 11.7% becomes roughly €1 billion, which against the current MFF is little if any increase. When the rapporteurs’ defenders suggested in the Parliament debate that this amounts to a tenfold increase for journalism, that is, to put it gently, not a calculation we can reproduce.

For scale: by the Commission’s own estimates, EU news media revenues are running about €7 billion lower per year than in 2019. Nobody is asking the EU to backfill that hole. But if Europe’s answer to a €7-billion-a-year structural disruption is €1 billion over seven years, we should moderate our expectations about what Europe actually intends to do for its pluralistic information ecosystem.

Should a budget proposal tell newsrooms what to write about?

Read more

Since that side of the story is well told by now, and we also covered it last year in our 2025 Newsletter Playbook, this year we wanted to look at the other side, and see what large, enterprise publishers do.

These entities have a lot to gain from newsletters and despite having the brand authority, archives…

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• Media development works

• Launching the Newsroom Pivot Program 2026

• The journalism strand might be a demotion

• The EU’s top court just narrowed platforms’ room to challenge news compensation rules in Europe

• Two studies for local media

• 26 active calls (6 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Media development works

(by Peter)

A lot of independent publishing in Central and Eastern Europe runs on a mix of media development funding, journalism support and innovation grants, philanthropy, and the occasional public subsidy. It has for two decades, and the money involved is not trivial. There are complicated debates whether this has produced sustainable structures or just elaborate forms of dependency. I’m in no way a neutral arbiter: I’ve led organizations that received this kind of support, and more recently I’ve ended up on the other side of the table, sitting on juries, advising funders, and providing some of the mentoring and technical assistance that follows once the money is allocated.

More specifically, I have worked with the ZYX Publishing Group in Romania, the subject of this story, for over a year. MDIF is also a long-term partner of ours, and we have collaborated on multiple projects. So while I’m going to write about media development, and about a case where I think media development worked, I am not a curious anthropologist discovering a successful intervention in the wild. I am part of this ecosystem, part of this story, and this inevitably colors my analysis. That being said, neither MDIF nor ZYX has asked me to cover them, this is my own editorial production.

On Wednesday, Pluralis, a media investment fund managed by MDIF, announced it had signed an agreement to acquire a 17% stake in ZYX Publishing Group, the Romanian publisher behind HotNews. Pending regulatory approval, this marks Pluralis’s entry into the Romanian market. On Monday, two days before the announcement, HotNews launched a paywall and membership program, the first mainstream digital-only outlet in Romania to do so. These two announcements are really one story.

Pluralis is a blended investment fund with tens of millions of euros to deploy. Blended means it involves some market driven and some philanthropic actors. It’s not a grant program with better hotel placement and nicer stationery, it needs to put meaningful capital into independent media companies that can grow, become more resilient and, ideally, generate returns.

This creates a very practical problem in Central and Eastern Europe: there are not that many independent publishers that can absorb a larger equity investment. A €100,000 ticket and a €1,000,000 ticket do not require the same amount of capital, obviously, but they can require surprisingly similar amounts of legal work, due diligence, structuring and portfolio management. At some point, the economics push you toward larger bets. (Okay, maybe not you or me, but MDIF.)

But larger bets are difficult if the market does not produce enough investment-ready companies.

That is why MDIF created the Amplify Europe program. It was designed to build the missing investment pipeline: to identify publishers with potential, then support them with grant funding, mentoring, expert advice and peer learning so they could become stronger, more disciplined and, ultimately, more investable.

ZYX/HotNews is the cleanest example of that plan working end to end.

In the last two years HotNews has migrated CMS, absorbed another newsroom, improved advertising yield, doubled revenues, launched premium products and newsletters, selected a technical partner for membership infrastructure and implemented the solution, designed a tiered subscription product and secured the New York Times as their launch bundle partner.

A decade ago, when these conversations started, the standard CEE refrain was audible in most meetings: “this could never work in our market”, “our audience won’t pay”, “our market is too small”, “the timing is wrong”. Those objections aren’t stupid: limited disposable incomes, market size, language reach, digital development can all be real constraints. But they aren’t verdicts. There are very few CEE markets where a well-designed audience revenue program cannot work for a serious publisher. Success almost always depends on whether the organization is willing/able to do what’s required (which is a lot), not whether the market will permit it.

Ukrainska Pravda, which we covered earlier this year, is the extreme example: Pluralis investment, followed by a paywall launch, in a country under active invasion. If you can do it there, the geography of excuses gets very small.

Amplify Europe was not designed to tick a funder box, improve someone’s annual report, or generate flattering participant satisfaction scores. Its goal was to help publishers become investment-ready, because Pluralis needs investable companies to deploy capital into, and it only succeeds if those companies grow. The outlets want sustainability and growth; MDIF and Pluralis want the same thing, for compatible reasons and on a similar timeline. This does not mean every media development program needs this structure, or that every Amplify participant will become investable. But when the funder, the program, the investor and the publisher are all pulling toward the same definition of success, you get a tailwind: programs select for ambition rather than compliance, publishers use the support rather than game it, and ultimately it becomes an on-ramp toward the market, not another grant cycle to shield publishers from it.

Launching the Newsroom Pivot Program 2026

(by Peter)

A five-year strategy is a strange object in the 2026 information ecosystem.

The world in which information is produced, distributed, consumed, trusted, and monetized is changing faster than most planning cycles can handle. Strategy still matters, but in this environment it mostly means staying close to audiences, testing fast, and being ready to change direction.”

That is the thinking behind the 2026 Newsroom Pivot Program, which we are running with JX Fund and Gazzetta.

The program, simply put, is built around launching useful things in exile information spaces. It is highly practical, with a focus on one-on-one mentoring, peer learning, and getting something live.

It looks something like this:

• You come with an idea.

• We work on it together.

• You build.

• You launch within 8–12 weeks.

• You test, learn, improve, and iterate.

There is modest financial support, up to €3,000, tied to launch and iteration milestones, but the real value is the process: hands-on support from people who have built, launched, and monetized public-interest products before.

The program is open to exiled newsrooms, independent creators, journalists, product teams, platform-based initiatives, civic information projects, and anyone else serving audiences with useful public-interest information.

Don’t worry if you don’t fit neatly into someone’s old institutional category. If you deliver information people need, or you are building something that could make public-interest information work more sustainable, we want to hear from you.

You can find more details about eligibility and timelines, and submit a lightweight expression of interest here.

EU budget: The journalism strand might be a demotion

(By David & Peter)

Let’s try peak EU budget lingo:

“The European Parliament rapporteurs’ AgoraEU draft does something that looks like a win: it gives journalism its own strand.”

If you understand what this sentence means, you no longer need to read this newsletter, please unsubscribe now. On the other hand, if for some weird reason you haven’t followed our minute-by-minute reporting on the EU budget negotiations and its potential effects on journalism funding:

“Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in charge of the AgoraEU program, the envelope that is meant to support culture, journalism and civil society from 2028 to 2034 under the EU’s next seven year budget are proposing a seemingly positive structural change.”

Let’s stick with version two.

So under the European Commission’s original proposal from last summer, most journalism support spending was bundled up with support for the movie industry and video games under a strand called MEDIA+ under said AgoraEU program. The Commission’s logic was that the audiovisual industries and news are facing at least partially similar structural challenges (👋platform dependency, AI disruption, distribution bottlenecks, intellectual property extraction, audience fragmentation, market concentration and weakening revenue models) and therefore support can be managed by overlapping/adjacent administrative structures. While this makes sense, there was also a reasonable argument that journalism needs a dedicated strand so it’s more visible and support for it is politically harder to hijack or dilute.

Now the MEPs keeping an eye on the proposed AgoraEU program are saying: let’s have a dedicated structure for journalism. This could be good news, but we are afraid it’s not.

The MEPs are also suggesting new numbers on funding: they would increase the overall size of the AgoraEU program from the original €8.6 billion to €10.7 billion and propose journalism get 11.7% or around €1.25 billion over the 2028–2034 period.

Under the original scheme, journalism didn’t have a fixed allocation (something we didn’t like), the MEDIA+ strand was supposed to get €3.2 billion and how this would be divided between movies, games and news was anyone’s guess. We were hoping for a 50% split, so around €1.6 billion over seven years, which is about €400 million more than what the MEPs are proposing now.

While at this stage the MEPs report is a sort of suggestion and it doesn’t bind the Commission and the Council, it is not a great sign. The final budgets have a way of shrinking once national governments discover who pays for these programs (hint: they do). If the final AgoraEU envelope moves closer to the Commission/Council baseline of €8.6 billion the 11.7% becomes a much smaller number.

In the meantime, EU news media revenues are running roughly €7 billion lower per year than in 2019, by the Commission’s own estimates.

A separate strand only counts as recognition if it comes with the resources to back the recognition. If Parliament wants to argue journalism is democratic infrastructure, the math has to look like it.

The EU’s top court just narrowed platforms' room to challenge news compensation rules in Europe

(by María)

On 12 May, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that Italy’s system for regulating negotiations between digital platforms and news publishers is compatible with EU law. The case concerns Article 15 of the EU’s 2019 Copyright Directive, which gives press publishers the right to seek compensation when platforms use their content online.

Italy adopted one of the bloc’s more interventionist implementations of the directive. Its communications regulator, AGCOM, can require platforms to negotiate with publishers, demand the data needed to calculate payments, define criteria for fair compensation, and impose penalties on companies that refuse to comply. Meta challenged the framework before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court, arguing that Article 15 created a private exclusive right for publishers rather than a basis for regulator-supervised negotiations and price-setting. The dispute ultimately reached the CJEU, whose Grand Chamber found that member states have discretion to build enforcement systems around the directive.

The ruling also upheld one of the framework’s most contested features: regulators may require platforms to share the data necessary to determine compensation, addressing an informational imbalance that would otherwise leave publishers negotiating largely in the dark. It further validated Italy’s restriction on platforms reducing the visibility of publishers’ content during negotiations.

At the same time, the ruling imposed limits. Platforms are covered by the framework only if they actually use, or intend to use, press publications. Publishers must remain free to authorise use without payment, refuse authorisation entirely, or negotiate independently. The system cannot function as a mandatory state tariff detached from publishers' consent. The case now returns to the Lazio court for further proceedings.

The question of whether systems like Italy’s are legally permissible is not Italy’s alone. Belgium adopted a similar framework in 2022, and that law is currently subject to an annulment appeal and a separate preliminary reference to the CJEU. The ruling weakens one of the main objections to systems of this kind and, more broadly, gives governments more room to make Article 15 operational rather than merely symbolic.

But a stronger legal footing for these systems does not change a more fundamental problem: platforms can still decide they do not want news. When Canada introduced legislation with a similar objective, Meta blocked news on Facebook and Instagram rather than negotiate, a ban still in place after more than two years. The two systems differ structurally, but Canada demonstrated that platforms may choose withdrawal over negotiation.

Two studies for local media

(by María)

Local news organizations grapple with recurring questions around audience growth, revenue diversification, and long-term sustainability. Two recent publications offer insights into how some independent publishers are navigating those pressures.

• LION data shows centering audience grows publisher revenue: An analysis from LION Publishers looked at nearly 400 Sustainability Audit records to assess how 15 audience engagement indicators relate to revenue growth and audience size among independent local news outlets. It found that organizations investing more heavily in audience engagement, direct reader relationships, and community feedback tended to report stronger revenue performance and more diversified revenue streams. It also suggests that audience work is increasingly functioning as core business infrastructure rather than solely an editorial or marketing function.

• Meeting the revenue challenge: philanthropy’s role in local news growth: A report from the Wyncote Foundation examined the financial evolution of local news organizations by reviewing 17 groups in depth, conducting over 50 interviews, and analyzing tax filings from more than 100 nonprofit media organizations. It identified four recurring patterns among those moving toward sustainability: journalist-founders adopting a stronger business mindset, deliberate diversification of revenue streams, catalytic investments accelerating growth, and the ongoing role of local philanthropy as a stabilizing force.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the 26 active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

The two countries share a train line, a border, several excellent dishes, and media systems in which the state matters enormously. Both struggle with political influence over advertising, the role of the public broadcaster, and the design of government support for journalism.

In Austria, these instruments were used mostly to stabilize. The result is a deeply conservative media market: subsidized incumbents, generous public advertising, weak incentives to innovate, and a striking absence of new digital-native challengers.

In Hungary, especially over the past sixteen years, similar instruments were used to subdue the information ecosystem. State advertising and political pressure on private advertisers were used intentionally to starve independent outlets. Public media became a weapon of mass deception. The regulator mostly served to legalize politically motivated media capture. Independent media were pushed into scarcity and, because of that scarcity, into experimentation.

Both countries are now redesigning their information ecosystems.

Austria wants to reform before its soft dependencies harden into something worse. In Hungary, the regime that captured most of the media space has collapsed, and the new government has to decide what to do with the ruins.

We think the two debates would benefit from listening to each other. This is our attempt to start that conversation.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Subsidized stagnation or authoritarian innovation

Austria distributes media support through two channels. The first is direct subsidy: around €80 million per year in formal media funding. The second is public advertising: €418 million in 2024, spent by federal ministries, federal state governments, chambers, and public enterprises. For comparison: Austria spends roughly nine times more on government advertising than Germany does, for a media market a fraction of the size.

Every existing subsidy is tied to a minimum number of years of existence, which means new media organisations cannot access public support at all. The dominant metric is economic size, which means larger outlets receive proportionally more, reinforcing market concentration. Two thirds flow through processes directly exposed to political discretion.

The advertising side drew sustained criticism, both domestically and from the European Commission, which raised concerns about the scale of public spending and the fairness of its distribution. The corruption scandal around former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz showed that it was an instrument of editorial influence rather than public communication.

In Hungary, there is no Austrian-style subsidy architecture to speak of. The Fidesz government had no interest in transferring public money to outlets it did not control, and the outlets it did control did not need a formal subsidy system because they had something better: a completely weaponised advertising market.

Loyal outlets received state advertising on a scale entirely disconnected from their actual audiences; independent outlets, regardless of reach, received nothing. Private advertisers, particularly in regulated sectors, learned quickly that spending money with 444, HVG, Telex or 24.hu created political and regulatory exposure they did not want. Total government advertising spend since 2015 exceeds one billion euros, almost all of it directed by political logic rather than market logic.

The two systems, unsurprisingly, produced very different outcomes.

The last serious wave of new entrants (private radio and tv stations) to the Austrian media market arrived in the mid-1990s with the liberalisation of broadcasting. The incumbents are protected, the print sector is propped up, the public broadcaster is comfortable, and the few attempts at digital-native journalism operate at the margins of a system that was never designed to make room for them. Austria has lost roughly a third of its journalism jobs in two decades, from over 7,000 in 2006 to well under 5000 today, and yet the structure of the market has barely shifted.

In Hungary, the advertising-market interference was followed by media capture and extreme levels of consolidation: according to some estimates up to 80% of the scene got captured with entities like the government aligned Central European Press and Media Foundation controlling 470+ outlets alone.

Those who did not want to become a cog in the government comms machinery had to choose between innovation or going out of business. Lots of people lost their jobs. The outlets that survived did so by becoming digital-only, audience-funded, and structurally lighter than a lot of their peers in the region. Print, with its overheads and its vulnerability to distribution pressure, is essentially gone as a serious business or political force. The major independent outlets and a long tail of regional and vertical players are digital natives with diversified revenue streams: some advertising, audience revenue, paywalls, memberships, events, book publishing and in several cases the 1% income tax redirection mechanism.

The Austrian outcome is a market that does not produce challengers because it does not need to. The Hungarian outcome is a market that produces challengers because it had no other option, but at the cost of losing a lot of great people and newsrooms to intimidation and capture.

Hungary’s three layers of reform

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The market for belonging

• One of Substack’s biggest success stories is leaving the platform

• Australia tries to get platforms to pay for news, again

• How El Tímpano is monetizing trust with underserved communities

• 23 active calls (1 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

The market for belonging

(by Peter)

For years, I subscribed to The New Yorker in print, despite barely ever reading it.

Every week, it would arrive full of elegant prose, careful reporting and cartoons I seldom understood. I would occasionally open it, read three paragraphs of a 9,000-word profile of a theatre director I had never heard of, then place it on the living room table. Especially when guests were coming over.

Obviously, if anyone noticed, I would make a great show of being mildly embarrassed. Oh, how clumsy of me, I seem to have left this serious, tasteful, intellectually respectable magazine right here, where everyone can see it. What an unfortunate accident. Let me put it away so we have room for the plates.

I did not really pay for information, I paid for a costume, an identity. I paid for what I wanted to believe about myself, and what I wanted others to believe about me.

This is why I loved Francesco Marconi’s new thesis, Who Will Monetize Truth?, but also why I think it leaves part of the picture unfinished.

Marconi proposes a very elegant structure. He says the information business is splitting into three species: the Intelligence Business (Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, etc.) , the Attention Aggregator (HuffPost, CNN, most legacy newsrooms), and the Public Good (local accountability, investigations, foreign desks). The first sells reduced uncertainty to people who need to make decisions. The second sells awareness, which AI is making cheaper and often clickless. The third produces socially essential information that probably cannot survive as a normal business.

This is a great and useful way to think about the information ecosystem.

The most valuable information in the world is not “news” in the way normal people use the word. It is structured, timely, decision-useful intelligence. If a hedge fund, pharmaceutical company, law firm or logistics business can make or avoid losing millions because it understands something earlier or better than others, the pricing power is obvious. Bloomberg does not charge terminal prices because traders enjoy the prose. But if you can make $50,000 with access to information that costs $30,000, a lot of organisations will be happy to pay.

But people do not only pay for information because it helps them make money. They also pay for voice, taste, entertainment, belonging, habit, status and, in some cases, surprisingly deep emotional attachment.

This is not a marginal issue, it is one of the central forces reshaping the information ecosystem.

The same fact can be worthless, mildly interesting or worth €10 a month depending on who tells it, in what tone, with what jokes, and with what implied relationship to the audience. This is why people pay for newsletters whose underlying information is technically available elsewhere. It is why they listen to podcasts containing seven minutes of insight distributed across 83 minutes of friendship simulation. It is why creators can build businesses around personality, not just expertise.

“Content is worthless, connection is valuable” was the thesis of the Pornification of human attention piece last year. That was about sexuality, AI and the grimly predictable way every new information technology eventually discovers the monetization power of arousal. But I think the broader point applies here too: attention does not flow only toward what is useful. It flows toward desire, intimacy, identity and relationship.

Marconi’s framework is strongest when explaining where the largest economic surplus will go. And he is almost certainly right that this value will be captured by those who turn information into intelligence. But the broader information ecosystem also contains another market beyond decision-useful facts: the market for relationships with voices, institutions and imagined versions of ourselves.

This market will not produce Bloomberg Terminal margins. Nobody is paying me $30,000 a year because my jokes help them hedge regulatory risks, though I am 100 percent trying to game that out as well. Still, a few hundred people do pay for this newsletter. Some of that is clearly about access to information on grants and funding mechanisms and business strategy, the intelligence layer if you will. But I suspect some of it is also about tone, trust and familiarity.

Last night at the IPI Innovation Festival in Vienna, while moderating a panel with media funders, we ended up in the familiar argument about core grants: are they necessary operating support for independent journalism, or do they insulate newsrooms from the useful discipline of the market? Marconi’s third category, the Public Good, makes the dilemma clearer. If some forms of journalism have no plausible business case, as he argues, then core support is not a temporary bridge to sustainability: it is permanent infrastructure, like funding libraries, courts or public broadcasting. But if parts of that work can be turned into intelligence, or attached to a trusted voice, community or product people value, then grants can be understood differently: not as life support in perpetuity, but as runway to discover whether a market exists.

Look at Hunterbrook, a newsroom funded by a hedge fund that trades on its own reporting. They recently uncovered evidence that a U.S. company was supplying parts for Russian drones. I want that story published, and I am relaxed about who profits along the way. This is Marconi’s thesis in action: when the intelligence layer can be plugged in, the journalism gets funded, when it cannot, we are back to grants or silence.

AI will make many types of information abundant. It may destroy traffic, it will very likely compress the value of awareness toward zero. But it will not eliminate the human desire to belong, to attach ourselves to people, groups, styles and identities.

So yes, truth will be monetized, some of it spectacularly.

But not all payment is a bet on utility. Sometimes people pay because information helps them act, sometimes they pay because it also helps them belong. Sometimes they pay because it helps them feel clever, tasteful or morally aligned. And sometimes, embarrassingly, they pay so a magazine can sit on a coffee table and tell visitors a small, flattering lie.

One of Substack’s biggest success stories is leaving the platform

(by María)

After years of expansion, The Ankler is moving its subscription business off Substack and onto its own platform, powered by Passport, a joint product between Automattic (WordPress owner) and Ben Thompson (Stratechery founder). What began as a single Hollywood newsletter written by Richard Rushfield has grown into a media company spanning 15 newsletters, podcasts, video and live events, with an 18-person staff.

In a note to readers, CEO Janice Min framed the transition largely in product and operational terms: greater control over design, subscriptions and audience data, along with a more integrated experience across Ankler Media’s growing portfolio.

Economic factors likely played a role as well. For smaller publications still building their audience, Substack’s 10% cut can be a reasonable tradeoff in exchange for payments infrastructure, recommendation systems and discovery tools. But as a business grows larger and more complex, the costs of that arrangement rise while some of its benefits become less important.

Even so, The Ankler is not leaving entirely: a weekly newsletter and live video will remain on Substack, alongside The Rushfield Jamboree, Rushfield’s newest publication.

This hybrid strategy probably reflects overlapping tensions. A complete break would have mattered to each side. Substack was not just where The Ankler distributed its work, but part of the infrastructure through which the company expanded into a larger media business. The Ankler, meanwhile, became one of the publications most closely associated with Substack’s own rise, making the relationship valuable to both commercially and reputationally.

The move also fits a broader dynamic analyzed by media expert Simon Owens, in which publishers continue benefiting from Substack’s recommendation and discovery systems while shifting paid subscriptions onto infrastructure they control themselves.

Australia tries to get platforms to pay for news, again

(by María)

Last week, Australia’s Labor government published draft legislation for a News Media Bargaining Incentive. If enacted, Meta, Google and TikTok would be subject to a charge of 2.25% on their Australian revenues. Platforms that sign commercial agreements with local news publishers would be able to offset more than the value of those deals against their liability, at rates ranging from 150% to 170% depending on the size of the publisher.

This is not Australia’s first attempt to redirect revenue from platforms toward journalism. The 2021 News Media Bargaining Code required platforms that carried news to negotiate deals with publishers or risk binding arbitration. According to government documentation, within its first year of implementation, it produced more than 30 commercial agreements, with their combined value reported at around AU$200–250 million annually. However, in 2024, when Meta’s deals expired, the company chose not to renew them and reduced the availability of news on its platforms, thereby limiting its obligations under the code.

The 2026 proposal addresses that gap: the charge applies whether or not a platform carries news. Yet it creates new points of tension. For example, it would exempt professional networking services such as LinkedIn, as well as AI-powered information tools (including some operated by Microsoft and OpenAI), even though both can surface or distribute news content. At the same time, platforms would only need to secure agreements with at least four publisher groups to fully offset their liability, a threshold that Rod Sims, former head of Australia’s competition watchdog, warned could concentrate benefits among larger publishers.

But the deeper issue may lie in the logic of the mechanism itself. The government has already outlined how funds would be redistributed if platforms chose to pay the charge instead of negotiating deals: eligible newsrooms would receive funding based on journalist headcount, under clear, publicly defined criteria. If such a transparent redistribution system has already been set out, why insist on private negotiation as the preferred route? As Rasmus Kleis Nielsen noted: “A straight levy, introduced by politicians who take responsibility both for who should pay and who should receive, seems a much clearer, more transparent, and predictable model”.

How El Tímpano is monetizing trust with underserved communities

(by María)

In 2019, the Alameda County Census office (in California) needed to connect with a segment of residents ahead of the 2020 count but could not do so through its usual methods. It turned to El Tímpano, a San Francisco Bay Area newsroom serving low-income immigrants since 2017, built primarily around a Spanish-language SMS service. At the time, the text list had roughly 400 people (about 6,000 today). It was a modest audience, but a highly targeted one. The $6,000 contract that followed marked the beginning of a revenue model the outlet now calls civic partnerships.

El Tímpano defines these as paid collaborations with public agencies, nonprofits, and other mission-aligned organizations to “distribute vital information to hard-to-reach communities”. Some are fee-for-service arrangements tied to specific deliverables, such as Mam-language videos or sponsored SMS messages in Spanish. Others take the form of longer-term grants supporting broader outreach campaigns, from public health alerts to school enrollment drives.

The model generated $12,000 in its first year and by 2025 had brought in approximately $350,000, making it the second-largest source of income. Founder Madeleine Bair puts it plainly: “The asset El Tímpano is monetizing isn’t eyeballs. It’s credibility. And credibility can only be built one way: by earning it, over time, through journalism that genuinely serves the community.”

Drawing on years of experience connecting underserved communities with public resources and information, El Tímpano published a free playbook on civic partnerships. Written by Ariel Zirulnick in collaboration with the team and funded by the Knight Foundation, the guide is aimed at local newsrooms exploring alternative revenue strategies, particularly those serving immigrant, low-income, and other marginalized groups. It explains how the approach works, how to assess whether it fits, how to develop a strategy, find and secure partners, and evaluate results.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the 23 active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

Hasan Piker is a prominent political streamer in the US. He broadcasts on Twitch, talks for hours about politics, capitalism, war, media, and whatever else is currently making people angry on the internet. He is extremely online, and very good at generating attention. He is also, depending on your politics, either an unusually effective communicator to young audiences, an outrage merchant with a webcam, or some combination of the two. The precise mix is not our main concern today, which is nice, because adjudicating Hasan Piker discourse is not what I hoped to do with my one wild and precious life.

The recent controversy came after Piker appeared on a New York Times Opinion podcast in an episode about “microlooting”: the idea that small-scale theft from large retailers such as Whole Foods can be understood or at least discussed, as a form of political protest.

You will be shocked to learn that this did not produce a calm and context-rich debate about property, capitalism, public order or moral philosophy.

Noah Smith wrote one of the more useful responses, making the fairly obvious but still necessary point that if you steal from a store owned by Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos is unlikely to be the person meaningfully harmed by your act of revolutionary lemon acquisition. The costs are more likely to be borne by workers, customers, and local communities. So if your plan for confronting extractive capitalism is shoplifting from the self-checkout area, you may want to workshop the theory of change a little more.

Piker is a known quantity, his politics and style are not unpredictable. He has built a large and extremely engaged audience precisely because he is not a cautious, polished, institution-trained commentator who says “on the one hand” often enough to be safely invited to donor dinners. So why does the New York Times want him in the room?

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

I think the Times wants him for his energy, youth relevance, cultural proximity, the sense that the conversation is happening somewhere alive rather than on a panel with the word “epistemology” in its title. Piker, meanwhile, gets institutional legitimacy, a place inside the symbolic architecture of respectable public debate.

This is not necessarily a scandal, the important thing is that both sides understand the transaction. And for today’s edition, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this transaction is becoming one of the defining features of the modern information ecosystem.

Let’s look at someone radically different from Piker: Dwarkesh Patel.

Patel is a young, very plugged-in interviewer whose podcast has become an important venue for conversations about AI, technology, science, economics, and power. He is a solo-ish creator with a podcast, yet some of the most influential people in technology, industry and politics now sit down with him for long, detailed conversations. His recent conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang turned, productively, into a debate about US export controls on advanced AI chips, the kind of exchange most legacy outlets would struggle to produce at the same level.

Hasan Piker’s creator influence is emotional, combative, parasocial, and ideological. Dwarkesh Patel represents creator influence as specialist institution: prepared, technically fluent, trusted by a hugely powerful audience.

Neither is a newsroom, and neither fits comfortably into the institutional categories through which public policy understands the media sector. And yet both are important parts of the information ecosystem: they shape what people know, argue about, what elites respond to, what ideas become legitimate, and what millions of people encounter as political or technical reality.

So when we think about the future of the information ecosystem, it’s worth keeping these new kinds of information entrepreneurs in mind. Which brings us, more directly than you might expect, to the latest leaked text of the AgoraEU proposal.

What is EU funding actually for?

The text, obtained by Contexte, contains some very good news.

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• The toxic story journalism tells its funders

• Repression is an effective product manager

• Second-hand fashion CEO invests in public-interest journalism

• What the numbers say about local news sustainability

• 26 active calls (7 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

The toxic story journalism tells its funders

(by Peter)

Wednesday evening in Perugia, I found myself sitting across from a Russian editor whose work I admire. At some point bottles appeared, glasses were filled, and someone asked the standard question: red or white? There was chatter, people were distracted, and before he really noticed, someone had poured him white wine.

He looked at the glass, paused, and muttered something. I asked whether he had wanted red. He smiled, said it was fine, and then, half-jokingly, added that one of the first things you learn in exile is to drink only from bottles opened in front of you. I was enjoying my pasta with gorgonzola, beets and poppy seeds while he was doing an involuntary security check on a bottle of Orvieto.

Perugia is full of conversations about how hard journalism has become, and many of those conversations are justified. In some places, difficulty means broken business models, shrinking margins, exhausted teams and endless fundraising. In others, it means intimidation, surveillance, exile, and the need to think twice about something as ordinary as a glass of wine. Journalism operates across a very wide spectrum of hardship, and it helps to keep that spectrum in view.

We tell stories about what is broken in the world, often because that is the job. But living so close to crisis, fragility and failure means we also become very fluent in telling stories about our own challenges, whether objective or subjective, systemic or personal. And while many of those stories are true, I increasingly wonder what happens when they become the dominant way the sector describes itself.

Spend enough time around fundraising conversations and you start to hear a familiar narrative. Platforms extracted our advertising revenue, Big Tech swallowed our audiences, governments harassed us, underfunded us, or actively tried to destroy us. We deliver a public service that markets consistently fail to support. We are in trouble, again, still, send help!

To be clear, this is not a fabricated story, in many places, it is simply a description of reality. It can also be an effective one. Philanthropic funders often respond to the language of public value, democratic need and institutional fragility. Public sector funders frequently do too. Audiences, especially in places where independent journalism is visibly under pressure, can also rally around it.

But the same story that can unlock solidarity is often deeply unattractive to capital markets.

Risk capital does not flow toward sectors that have internalized their own decline. Investors - including impact investors, who care about more than pure returns - need a credible theory of how they get their money back. “We are a public good that markets consistently fail to support“ is not that theory.

Some publishers tell a different kind of fundraising narrative. They may still acknowledge the difficulty of the market, but they lead with momentum rather than precarity: they talk about the audience they serve, the product they are building, the niche they understand, the loyalty they have earned, the demand they can see. Their invitation is not to “rescue us”, it is to “come along for the ride”.

For capital markets, this is almost certainly the better fit. If journalism wants access to more of that capital, it cannot speak only in the language of crisis, it also has to learn to describe opportunity. This is a large part of why we launched the Capital Stacks of Journalism project in Perugia in collaboration with Milo Tesselaar.

The project looks at digital publishers founded over roughly the last 15 years, especially audience-revenue-first businesses that have actually made it to profitability. We want to understand who backed these companies, how much they raised, on what terms, how long it took to break even, whether anyone exited, whether anyone paid dividends, and what all this tells us about journalism as a business rather than a sector defined only by rescue narratives. We’re only at the beginning of this work, but already finding reasons for cautious optimism. Watch this space for updates.

Repression is an effective product manager

(by Peter)

On Tuesday I was in Vienna for an event called “Acht Tische für die Vierte Gewalt” (Eight tables for the Fourth Estate) an attempt by Gabriela Bacher, Sebastian Loudon and a large part of the Austrian media ecosystem to redesign the country’s journalism subsidy scheme. Between talking about the EU’s media funding mechanisms and eating Central Europe’s weirdest sandwich topped by something that felt like leberkäse in soft pâté form, I kept thinking about the contrast between the Hungarian and Austrian media environments.

Austria has a very generous subsidy regime for media and probably not unrelated to this, one of the most conservative media markets in Europe dominated by legacy players, with very few digital-native challengers. In 2026, the system still meaningfully rewards print production, which means people who want to do journalism sometimes end up launching print quarterlies they don’t actually want to publish, just to qualify for support. It’s not quite anti-innovation by design, but it gets there in practice.

Hungary is the opposite picture. For sixteen years, the Orbán government distorted the market not through a formal subsidy scheme, we don’t really have one, but through state advertising and coordinated pressure on private advertisers, allocated on political grounds. Almost all print was captured or compromised. Anyone who wanted to do quality journalism went digital and had more than a decade to figure out what worked. You now find local newsletters on Ghost and digital paywalls in small Hungarian towns. Repression, it turns out, is an effective product manager.

Brian Morrissey made a version of this point to me in Perugia: public sector subsidies can dampen innovation because they shield publishers from the market signals that force them to change.

The Austrian initiative proposes a new subsidy system that tries to avoid these traps. Less rewarding of incumbency, more oriented toward journalism rather than media formats, technology-neutral, with an independent commission in charge of allocations. It is an attempt at a genuinely hard problem: how do you underwrite independent journalism without insulating it from market pressures that keep it moving forward?

Vinted CEO invests in public-interest journalism

(by María)

At a founders’ summit in Palanga last summer, Thomas Plantenga, the Dutch CEO who took Vinted from a near-bankrupt Vilnius startup to one of Europe’s leading second-hand fashion platforms, stood up and pitched an idea: a charity endowment fund to finance a €200,000 annual prize for the best investigative journalism in Lithuania. He would put in €2.2 million personally, but needed others to make it large enough to last. The crowd of entrepreneurs did not hesitate. In fifteen minutes, they committed over €1 million in donations, a response he later described as unambiguous: “Lithuanians wanted to strengthen their democracy by celebrating their finest and bravest journalists.”

A team of volunteers was assembled afterwards to build the fund and an independent selection process. Six months later, Pamatai was operational, and by his account, the largest cash prize for investigative journalism in the world. It is now accepting nominations for works published in 2025. The selection committee includes Pulitzer winners Marina Walker Guevara and Bastian Obermayer, alongside other renowned international journalists and Lithuanian experts.

The award is only part of what the fund is designed to do. Its statutes also commit it to consulting for journalists and media organizations, public education on media literacy and corruption, mentoring programs for young people, and partnerships with international human rights and democracy organizations. Running all of that indefinitely, requires a financial structure to match the ambition. It is set up as a long-term investment vehicle rather than a spend-down pool: the capital is preserved and invested, with returns used to finance all the activities and the operating costs. The mandate is to generate stable, periodic income.

Plantenga has said he will continue working to grow the endowment.

What the numbers say about the sustainability of local news

(by María)

Pew Research Center published its most recent Local News Fact Sheet earlier this month, tracking Americans’ experiences with and preferences around local news since 2016. For sustainability, three categories are telling.

• Attention: down by half. In 2016, 37% of Americans followed local news very closely. By the end of 2025, that share had fallen to 21%. This indicator has moved steadily downward for nearly a decade, mirroring a broader retreat from news generally. A less attentive audience is a harder monetize, regardless of how the ask is framed.

  

• Perceived importance: eroding at the top. Eight in ten Americans still say local news is at least somewhat important to their community, but that broad agreement conceals a sharper shift: the share who say it is extremely or very important dropped from 44% to 34% in a single year.

  

• Paying: remains the exception, and it is not growing. Only 12% of U.S. adults paid or donated to a local news source in the past year, a three-year low and roughly the same as in 2018. Among those who haven’t paid, half say they can find enough for free, and a growing share (29%, up from 26% in 2018) say they are simply not interested enough. Price is the least-cited barrier. The willingness-to-pay problem is not a pricing problem.

  

While the data only covers the US market, the patterns emerging are likely not unique to it.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

I know some of you might find it a little too meta to read a newsletter about a journalism conference while at that journalism conference, but bear with me. I want to tell you two stories that I think describe what Perugia is actually for. One is straightforwardly good news, the other is more complicated. Don’t worry, both are about money.

Read more

Tisza had the broadest electoral victory in the brief history of Hungarian democracy. There are many reasons why that happened: economic mismanagement, corruption, arrogance, the moral collapse after the clemency scandal, the general decay that sets in when a political system stops receiving honest feedback, and a broader international dynamic in which voters seem increasingly willing to punish incumbents. But most of you are not here for my comprehensive theory of Hungarian electoral behavior.

I do think part of the story has to do with the structure of the information ecosystem and how that structure changes the value of media capture. That seems worth exploring here because it is, at heart, a media-and-money question, which is the only kind we pretend to have authority over.

It is about how political actors convert resources into attention, attention into influence and power. It is about what happens when a governing party spends 15 years building an enormous captured media system, only to discover that the information environment underneath it is shifting in ways that make that investment less effective than it used to be.

So I want to spend this edition on that narrower point: not on every reason Orbán lost, and not on what Tisza’s victory will mean for the Hungarian media landscape, which we already touched on last week, but on why structural changes in the information ecosystem may have made media capture a weaker political technology than it once was.

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Viktor Orban’s empire of attention

Over the past sixteen years, Fidesz built a remarkably sophisticated machine for dominating the information ecosystem, and it did so in roughly three layers.

The first layer was interference on the advertising market. This is the part we have covered before, with extensive evidence for both the scale of it and the damage it caused. The Hungarian state remained one of the largest advertisers in the country and consistently directed spending toward loyal outlets while starving independent or merely insufficiently obedient ones. Most private advertisers, especially those operating in heavily regulated sectors, drew the obvious conclusion and followed suit. The result was a media market in which it became extremely difficult to run a non-aligned business sustainably. Weakening outlets economically made them easier to intimidate, marginalize, and, eventually, to acquire by government-friendly businessmen.

The second layer was capture and consolidation. Once enough of the market had been distorted, ownership could be consolidated into an enormous pro-government portfolio of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, online outlets and local titles. By the late 2010s, the government and its allies had reached critical institutional mass through the Central European Press and Media Foundation and other properties. This mattered especially outside Budapest, where old consumption patterns held longer and where the offline dominance of aligned media remained particularly strong.

The third layer was adaptation to the platform age. And here, in a coldly technical sense, one has to acknowledge the innovation. Fidesz understood earlier than many of its critics that owning newspapers, radio stations and television studios, while still useful, was no longer enough in a platform-mediated information environment. Attention was moving elsewhere, into platforms that were too big and too unruly to capture with the same methods they had used so effectively against Hungarian media. The governing camp did not abandon its captured institutional empire; it built a second system on top of it. This newer system crystallized mostly around the Megafon Incubator Center that relied on platform-native voices, pro-government influencers and heavily amplified low-grade political content designed less to persuade than to saturate. Censorship by noise, if you will.

The point of this model was not primarily to win elegant intellectual arguments. Much of the content was too crude, too aggressive and too transparently instrumental for that. Its function was to flood newsfeeds, reward loyal messengers, smear opponents, intimidate critics and make participation in public discourse feel exhausting, ugly and sometimes personally risky. If this was the discourse on offer, many sane people would simply decide they wanted less of it.

They spent enormous sums of money amplifying these voices. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, government-affiliated actors accounted for 87 percent of the HUF 4.1 billion (EUR 10.6 million) spent on Google and Meta ads in Hungary. That is an extraordinary resource advantage, and it helps explain why this strategy worked for as long as it did. The ruling camp was able to turn money into platform reach at a scale no opponents could even begin to match.

Fidesz built a system that could shape institutional distribution, dominate offline visibility, and carpet-bomb platform feeds with aligned messages. It promoted government narratives, distorted public discourse and raised the cost of dissent. For a while, this machine worked exceptionally well.

An advertising ban jamming up the information autocracy

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget

• Let’s meet in Perugia!

• Trustfnd may be a sign we’ve reached peak newsletter fragmentation

• Cameo tried celebrities. Now it’s betting on TikTok creators

• Mediacités: the French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders

• 26 active calls (3 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

What the sector actually wants from the next EU budget

(by Peter)

The reason I think our Brussels event went well is that after six hours of discussing EU media funding policy, we still couldn’t kick people out, and by 8:30 p.m. the venue was threatening us with an extra day’s charge if we didn’t leave. More than fifty organizations attended, including publishers, intermediaries, funders, policymakers and others from across the information ecosystem, to think through what kind of policy architecture the sector needs as the next EU budget negotiations move forward.

The first year or so of the advocacy effort has been relatively straightforward: it is not terribly hard to build a broad coalition around the proposition that the sector needs more money. The tricky part begins when you move to actual mechanisms, programmes and policy design. Different organizations have different vantage points on the ecosystem and different ideas about what it needs. Because of this, our goal was not to force consensus, but to surface as many reasonable ideas as possible.

We organized the lab around a simple three-step logic. First, each table was asked to describe the status quo: what is and is not working in the EU’s current support for journalism and the wider information ecosystem. Then we asked people to imagine it was 2034, the MFF had ended, and things had gone remarkably well: what does a healthier ecosystem look like? The last, and longest, part was about getting from one to the other, identifying the mechanisms, reforms and practical solutions that could move the sector from the present system to that desired future. (This was a slightly bastardized version of a format the excellent Gabriela Bacher and Sebastian Loudon pioneered in Austria when trying to rethink their national subsidy system.)

We published a longer document collecting the roughly 17 pages of ideas and recommendations that surfaced during the lab, covering everything from intra-EU and extra-EU funding to programme design, priorities and support mechanisms: a sort of everything-bagel of media funding. You can read it here. Still, this is our newsletter, not a multistakeholder communiqué, so I’m going to be a little selfish and spend more time on the proposals that feel closest to us at CSM.

We would like to see three separate funds for the information ecosystem.

The first is a matching fund under AgoraEU: public money that matches revenue organizations raise directly from readers, members, subscribers or small donors. Conceptually, it is similar to NewsMatch in the United States. It rewards demonstrated public support, strengthens direct audience relationships and crowds in private contributions. The second is a dedicated information integrity fund, also under AgoraEU, to support work addressing digital deception, foreign information manipulation and interference, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and media and information literacy. The third is an innovation fund, ideally under the European Competitiveness Fund, where media organizations and technology companies could apply jointly to build shared sovereign infrastructure for digital publishing: CMS and CRM tools, payment systems, audience and identity infrastructure, and distribution pipelines. The goal is reducing dependency on non-European platforms.

Beyond these, we think the horizontal design of EU support matters as much as the envelopes. Applications should move to a two-stage process: a lightweight first round, with full proposals only for shortlisted applicants. The mandatory cross-border consortium requirement should end; strong national or local actors are currently excluded not because their work is weak, but because they do not fit the consortium model. Funding intensity should also be as high as possible in most instruments, or the EU risks designing programmes that only organizations with reserves and co-financing capacity can actually access. And while grants will remain essential, the EU should make serious room for impact investment, investment subsidies, and other financial instruments such as loan guarantees, especially when the goal is to help viable public-interest organizations invest in growth, technology, long-term resilience, and competitiveness.

Two further issues matter a lot to us. Pre-financing needs to be addressed seriously: even generous grant rates are functionally limited if organizations cannot carry costs while waiting for reimbursement. And the no-profit rule needs revision. The Commission cannot simultaneously call for sustainability and penalize organizations for generating revenue during or alongside a funded project. Safeguards against misuse are legitimate, punishing earned income is not.

You can read our more carefully argued policy version here. This is not an exhaustive blueprint for EU media funding, nor a claim that every existing programme should be discontinued and replaced by my hobby horses. Some current mechanisms work well, others work badly, and many land in the large European category of functioning, but not quite as intended. We are simply highlighting the gaps, missing instruments and design flaws that we think matter most.

All of these are the product of a genuinely collective effort. I’m very grateful to Deutsche Welle Akademie and EFCSN, who helped make the lab possible, to Civitates for supporting our broader work, and to the many organizations and individuals who showed up, shared ideas and stayed in the room long enough for the venue to consider charging us extra. We may have facilitated the process, but these ideas do not belong to us alone; they belong, in the broadest sense, to the sector. That is exactly why we are publishing them openly and encouraging others to use them however they see fit: circulate them, build on them, disagree with them, wave them in front of your national government, your permanent representation, the Parliament, the Commission, or anyone else involved in shaping the next MFF. The negotiations are still underway, which means the advocacy is still underway too.

Let’s meet in Perugia!

(by Peter)

Like lemmings, salmon, or caribou following some ancient migratory instinct they can neither explain nor resist, we are heading to Perugia. A few things to know if you’re also making the journey:

On the 16th, half past noon, Brian Morrissey and I are recording an episode of The Rebooting live on stage. We’ll be talking somewhere in the vicinity of the attention economy, creators, and funding models. I’m excited about this to the point of low-grade anxiety, which is usually how I know I care about something. I’m aware we are competing with the powerful counter-programming force of bruschetta and April sunshine, but if you feel like joining us instead, we would be delighted.

Later that afternoon, Catarina Carvalho from Mensagem de Lisboa, Laura Moore from Deutsche Welle Akademie, and Diego Agúndez from the European Commission will be discussing - and I hope you are sitting down - the next EU budget and what it means for media funding. If you are reading this newsletter, you care about this, so come.

And on 17 April, we’re also launching a new project with our Vienna based co-conspirator Milo Tesselaar called Capital Stacks of Journalism, looking at digital media ventures founded in roughly the past 15 years that managed to build real sustainability or profitability, how they launched, what kind of capital they used, and how their businesses evolved. The basic premise is that investing in journalism is not, in fact, always identical to setting money on fire. If that sounds interesting, drop us a note. It’s a side event, so space is limited, but we’ll do our best.

And more broadly: my co-founder Miklós, our Director of Advocacy David, and our senior associate Marton will all be in town. If you want to talk media business strategy, EU funding, audience revenue, or commercial partnerships, find us or drop a note to hello@funds4media.org and we will sort something out.

Trustfnd may be a sign we’ve reached peak newsletter fragmentation

(by María)

For $8.50, readers can get 30 days of access to the newsletters of journalists Marisa Kabas, Katelyn Burns and Kat Tenbarge at roughly half the combined individual price. The offer, reported by Nieman Lab, is sold through Trustfnd, a startup that lets creators on Ghost and Beehiiv run joint subscription trials. Michaël Jarjour, who co-founded the company, claims two of the three creators gained more paying subscribers during the test period than they had in the entire previous year, though conversion data has not been disclosed.

No major newsletter platform currently supports this kind of cross-platform bundling natively. Both Ghost and Beehiiv told Nieman Lab they are watching the space; though, as Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk put it, bundling can get “messy and complicated”, especially when participants are not part of the same company. The challenge is less technical than structural: how to split revenue, who owns the subscriber relationship, what happens when one contributor outgrows the arrangement.

Trustfnd sidesteps those questions with a time-bound format (30, 60, or 90 days), turning bundles into acquisition tools rather than long-term products. That lowers the stakes, but it also means the hardest frictions remain untested. However, the startup’s bet fits a broader pattern. After a period of extreme unbundling, where individual creators built their own paid audiences and readers accumulated subscriptions, the market is beginning to swing back toward aggregation. When individual subscriptions pile up and solo creators struggle to expand, aggregation starts to reassert itself.

The question is whether bundling can remain lightweight or has to eventually become something more structured. The Every started in 2020 as a simple bundle between two Substack writers. As it grew, it built its own CMS, editorial process, and revenue-sharing system. Five years later, it operates as an organisation combining editorial output with its own tools and infrastructure, including software products. It suggests that bundling may be a starting point, but rarely stays that way.

Cameo tried celebrities. Now it’s betting on TikTok creators

(by María)

Cameo is a platform where people pay creators and celebrities to record short personalized videos: birthday shout-outs, pep talks, that kind of thing. It blew up during COVID, doing ~$100 million in gross revenue in 2020 with a team of nearly 400. A year later it hit a $1 billion valuation. Then it fell hard: multiple rounds of layoffs, a team that shrank to a few dozen, and a valuation down more than 90%. The company has been rebuilding since.

Last week, Cameo and TikTok announced a partnership to let U.S. creators sell personalized videos directly inside the app. TikTok creators have been one of Cameo’s fastest-growing segments, and according to CEO Steven Galanis, they drove the platform’s strongest year yet in 2025.

TikTok users already spend money within the app. Live gifting, series subscriptions, and TikTok Shop (estimated at ~$19 billion in global GMV in Q3 2025, roughly on par with eBay) have made in-feed purchases routine. But those are either tips, access, or products. Cameo adds a different category: a creator making something because you asked for it.

OnlyFans shows that this model can scale. Some top creators there earn more from custom content and paid direct messages than from subscriptions. The platform works in large part because the, ahem, closeness is the product. People pay for direct, personal attention from the creator, and that is a big part of what brings them back.

TikTok produces a similar dynamic, but most of it happens without a transaction. Creators talk into their phone cameras, respond to individual comments, address their audience as if they know them. Viewers develop a sense of familiarity that feels more immediate than what a YouTube video or a podcast generates. Whether that is enough to build a paying habit without the “intimacy” that OnlyFans has going for it, is what this partnership will test.

Mediacités: the French investigative outlet where readers can be shareholders

(by María)

In most of France’s major regional cities, local media is typically dominated by a single legacy newspaper. Mediacités was founded in 2016 on the premise that these regions had strong political and economic powers but not enough independent reporting to hold them accountable. It operates small newsrooms in four cities: Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Toulouse.

It carries no advertising. Their view is that ad revenue can represent a conflict of interest when the pool of potential advertisers and the subjects of your investigations can overlap. Subscriptions account for nearly 80% of revenue instead, supplemented by donations (which nearly doubled in 2024, from around €34,000 to €61,000), public subsidies, occasional grants, and some income from article resale and editorial services.

The outlet also lets its audience become shareholders. Through a programme called the Société des Amis (SDA), people can buy actual shares in the publishing company at €1.56 each, with a minimum investment of around €201 and a cap of €5,000. Because Mediacités qualifies as an “entreprise de presse solidaire d’information”, France gives investors a 50% tax deduction, cutting the real cost roughly in half.

The programme had 208 members holding 6.34% of the capital at the end of 2024. It has since grown to 238, with over €168,000 invested collectively. The co-founders and newsroom journalists collectively hold 43%, and no individual shareholder owns more than 7%, meaning the SDA is the single largest.

The programme has its own governance, with an elected president and annual assembly. Those who want to can get more involved: attending the weekly team meeting, joining working groups on strategy, and testing new features early. But editorial independence is non-negotiable: shareholders have no say in what gets published.

Mediacités posted its first positive operating result last year. Public subsidies played a role in it, but so did readers. A frequent argument against paid local journalism is that people won’t pay. This outlet has them subscribing, donating, and even buying equity in the company.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

Yet, despite at least ten years of growing research into how publishers could stop “building their houses on someone else’s land”, it remains unclear if publishers are actually willing to disentangle from platforms. On the contrary, some have argued convincingly that publishers may want to disentangle in principle, but in practice, they still value too much certain platform benefits: audience reach and the revenue expectations tied to it, above all. And, in fact, while the ‘disentangle-from-platforms’ discourse grows popular, many news media are already “working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms”. First it was SEO - trying …

Read more

Recent data by Median, historically the most reliable pollster in Hungary, put Péter Magyar’s Tisza party 23 points ahead of Fidesz among decided voters, and other, non-government aligned research institutions also show the opposition party ahead. Prediction markets have also moved in that direction: Polymarket’s Hungary page currently gives Tisza a big lead. (The platform is VPN-only in Hungary; the regulator blocked it in January, citing unlicensed gambling, shortly after the opposition’s lead started making the rounds in mainstream news.)

I’ve been asked a lot recently whether the government will simply “steal” the election, or whether Russia, the United States, or some combination of foreign and domestic actors will do it for them: I really don’t think so.

Hungary has had, for a long time, what I’d describe as free but unfair elections. People went to the voting booth and were allowed to cast actual ballots, the interference happened elsewhere: in gerrymandering, in media capture, in the systematic suffocation of opposition resources. Last year there was a genuine push within the governing party to escalate further. The proposed Foreign Agents Law would have criminalized organizations critical of the government, effectively turning free-and-unfair into something much darker, but they walked back from the edge. If they wanted to dial up autocracy in any serious way, they had their chance and didn’t take it. With less than two weeks until election day, it is probably too late to change the calculus.

That does not mean the government will behave beautifully, especially if the result is close. In a very narrow Tisza win, I can absolutely imagine procedural contestation, institutional grumbling, and a lot of noise about foreign interference, Brussels, Facebook, and dark forces from the planet Soros. But in the event of a clear Tisza victory, I suspect Fidesz would eventually accept defeat. Orbán, for all his ideology, has always been a pragmatist. Losing power is bad, but triggering an uncontrollable crisis can be worse. And there is a scenario in which they decide, as others in the region have before them (👋 Poland), that letting the other side govern under dreadful fiscal and institutional conditions may be the best mid-term investment available.

But this is not, after all, a politics newsletter, and the more interesting question for me is what all this means for media funding, so in this piece, we’ll discuss

• What a Fidesz win would mean for Hungarian media (short answer: very bad, very fast);

• Why a Tisza win is more complicated than it looks across advertising, audience, and institutional revenue;

• The civic substitution problem: what happens to outlets built on political urgency when the urgency fades;

• What Poland, the Washington Post, and the New York Times can tell us about post-regime-change media economics;

• The labor market shock that concerns many media executives in Budapest;

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If Fidesz wins

I’ll keep this short because I think it’s the less likely scenario and because the implications are unfortunately straightforward.

A Fidesz victory, whether through polling error or something more deliberate, would mean the gloves come off. They’ve signaled, implicitly, that the Foreign Agents Law returns. We should expect a significant escalation of pressure across all revenue streams: more interference in advertising markets (which are already badly distorted), new legislative barriers to collecting individual donations (declaration requirements, chilling effect by design) and an aggressive push to cut off institutional funding from abroad. That is, after all, exactly what the Foreign Agents Law was designed to do. A renewed Fidesz mandate, especially after such an existential campaign, would likely be read internally as permission to escalate. The position of independent media (and the wider civil society) in Hungary would become very difficult, very quickly.

If Tisza wins

This is more interesting and, I think, more complicated than most coverage suggests. Let me take the revenue streams one at a time.

The pressure on private advertising markets that has built over 16 years, the fear that spending money with 444/HVG/24hu/Telex might put you on the wrong side of a regulatory decision, will ease. Not overnight or uniformly, but it will ease. Private advertisers who have been cautious will gradually become less so. Depending on the scope of Tisza’s victory and their ability to restructure the institutions that control state advertising budgets (some of which were locked in by supermajority legislation), even state and quasi-state advertising could eventually flow to a wider range of outlets. Overall, I expect a gradual and meaningful increase in advertising revenue for independent media operators. This is probably the clearest net positive.

Audience revenue is complicated, and I want to spend some time on this because I think the dynamics play out similarly in other places we’ve watched closely.

Read more

This week on Media Finance Monitor

• We gave up on advertising too soon

• Two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers

• Meta tries to court creators, again

• How to run a media fundraiser without a tote bag

• 22 active calls (1 new)

Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money really moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.

Paid subscribers get premium editions, full access to the archive and all our research reports, for about the cost of a pistachio éclair and a good espresso a month.

For deeper engagement, our Partnership Program offers one-on-one strategic advisory, curated briefings, and access to our internal databases and invite-only events.

Join as a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

We gave up on advertising too soon

(by Peter)

Somewhere in the last two decades, a lot of independent media stopped thinking of advertising as a revenue stream and started treating it as a character flaw.

Programmatic advertising and platform intermediaries gutted the model that had underpinned public interest journalism for decades. New technology enabled increasingly grotesque brand safety obsessions, blocking words like "conflict" and "protest", making advertising nearly impossible for hard news. Money flowed to fraud farms, made-for-advertising slop sites, and Google's and Meta's own exchanges, while publishers were left with a pittance and a growing sense of moral contamination.

So, understandably, much of the sector decided that advertising was broken, perhaps irreparably, and urgently needed to pivot to subscriptions, philanthropy, grants, basically anything cleaner. We internalized the defeat completely and built anti-commercial identities around it.

A new policy brief from the Forum on Information and Democracy (FID) pushes back on that consensus. Without being nostalgic for the banner ad era, it argues that the $1.17 trillion digital advertising market is actively misallocating value: toward fraud, slop, and Big Tech’s own exchange systems, while penalizing journalism. It also tries to define policy levers to reshape the market for better outcomes for public interest information.

Before getting to the specifics: it is entirely reasonable to decline certain advertisers on principle, to worry about editorial capture, to draw lines. What is less reasonable is treating all commercial revenue as equally contaminating while insisting that reader revenue, philanthropy, or foundation grants arrive somehow free of power dynamics or dependency. They don't. (See also: The elaborate hierarchy of “cleanliness” in media funding)

FID describes a digital advertising space heavily shaped by Google and Meta, noting that Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon together account for more than 55% of ad market share outside China. It cites estimates suggesting that of every dollar spent on programmatic advertising, only 36 cents reaches the publisher, and that a single campaign is served across an average of 44,000 websites.

Brand safety mechanisms have compounded the problem. A 2024 study found that 45% of Reach's coverage of the Euro final was flagged as unsafe, blocked over words like "shoot" and "attack". A recent French study estimates that 30-40% of news content is excluded from advertising altogether.

One of the brief’s most valuable contributions is the inventory of what already exists. The authors catalogue advertiser coalitions trying to redirect spend toward quality news, civil-society groups building commercial capacity, publisher alliances pooling inventory, alternative adtech experiments, certification schemes, and contextual targeting tools. The picture is not of a sector waiting to be saved, but of one throwing everything it has at the problem even if without much coordination.

The recommendations span four audiences: governments, advertisers, publishers, and intermediaries.

Some fall into the “why isn’t this already standard?” category: supply-chain transparency, measurement standards, basic due diligence for adtech actors. Helping smaller publishers build sales capacity or aggregate inventory (the Ethical Media Alliance is doing interesting work on this in CEE) is similarly uncontroversial. These require no particular love of journalism to support, just a belief that fraud and monopoly are bad.

A second group is promising but messy. Tax incentives for ads placed with public-interest media, government ad set-asides, and verification systems that let news outlets identify themselves in programmatic pipelines could redirect real money. They also invite favoritism, eligibility fights, bureaucracy, and, in some contexts, the long shadow of state advertising as a tool of control. (See also: Media funding, weaponized)

The final group functions more as horizon markers than near-term plans. Mandating a “democratic responsibility” for platforms to support journalism, building public-interest ad infrastructure, or structurally curbing platform dominance would require political alignment that most contexts currently lack.

For years, parts of independent media could afford a certain purity on this question. Commercial money is messy, let’s prioritize other models. That position made more sense when institutional funding was reliable and traffic was growing. Now, with foundation money wobbling and AI making referral traffic increasingly fragile, abandoning commercial revenue looks less like principle and more like a luxury belief.

Independent media was right to distrust the system. It was probably wrong to mistake the system’s failures for a verdict on commercial revenue itself.

Two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers

(by María)

The argument that AI companies should compensate the publishers and creators whose work trains their models is now also coming from an AI company. Arthur Mensch, CEO of French startup Mistral AI, recently made the case for revenue sharing in the Financial Times.

His proposal: a revenue-based levy on all commercial AI providers operating in Europe, proportional in theory to their use of publicly available online content, though in practice, usage is hard to measure. The proceeds would flow into a central fund supporting new content creation and cultural sectors. In exchange, AI developers would receive protection from liability when training on publicly accessible material.

Whether that reads as a genuine concession or a strategic move depends on how cynical you are about European AI companies trying to differentiate themselves from American competitors.

Mensch isn’t conceding that Mistral did anything wrong. The current opt-out framework is “unworkable,” he argues, because copyrighted works spread uncontrollably online and the legal mechanisms to stop them are too fragmented to be effective. The levy would replace legal uncertainty with a predictable cost. That’s a reasonable offer for AI companies, but not necessarily for rights holders who may want a say in how their works are used, not just a share of the proceeds.

A month earlier, five of the UK’s largest media organizations announced a different approach to the same problem. SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), launched in February by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky News, and Telegraph, proposes technical standards, licensing frameworks, and a push for AI developers to access journalistic content through rights-cleared channels. The goal is to reduce licensing friction while publishers retain control and get paid. The obvious catch: it only works if AI developers choose to use it, despite already being able to access most of that content without permission.

The trade-offs are clear enough. The levy makes access easier but reduces control; SPUR preserves control but is harder to scale. Both approaches ultimately rest on the same recognition: that the current situation is neither fair nor stable, even if one requires political will and the other industry alignment.

Meta tries to court creators, again

(by María)

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s next chapter would be the metaverse and renamed the company to signal how seriously he meant it. He envisioned replacing the social media feed with a digital world accessed through a headset, populated by avatars, experienced in real time. Five years and tens of billions of dollars later, it hasn’t paid off. Focus and resources are shifting from VR to AI.

While Meta went looking for the next internet, Facebook kept losing relevance. Growth slowed in key markets, and creators, particularly those building video-first audiences, gravitated elsewhere. Zuckerberg acknowledged as much last year: “I just don’t think that a lot of creators today think about Facebook as the primary place they can go.” More than two billion daily users, and the platform still can’t make itself matter to the people who shape where audiences spend their time.

Meta’s answer is the Creator Fast Track: a program designed to lure established voices from TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram into posting Reels on Facebook. For three months, participants receive between $100 and $3,000 a month, depending on audience size. The content doesn’t need to be new, just original and not previously posted on Facebook. Back catalogs qualify. “If you have a great back catalog of best hits, that qualifies,” said Yair Livne, VP of Creator Product at Facebook. After the three months, participants move into Facebook’s Content Monetization program, which is normally invite-only.

This is not the first time Meta has made this kind of offer. In 2018, the Gaming Creator Program attracted streamers away from Twitch and YouTube with financial incentives; by 2021, it had surpassed YouTube Gaming in hours watched. Three years later, those numbers had collapsed as payments declined and audiences consolidated elsewhere. The program was wound down in stages, with full retirement scheduled for 2026. Then came the Reels Play Bonus Program, launched in 2021 to compete with TikTok, shut down abruptly in March 2023. Zuckerberg explained why with unusual candor: “The monetization efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed. So the more that Reels grows…we actually lose money.”

The pattern has not gone unnoticed. “How many times do we have to go through this?” wrote Simon Owens, who covers the media business. His point: until Meta commits to sharing a defined, published portion of revenue with creators, no incentive program will build lasting loyalty. YouTube’s Partner Program offers exactly that, 55% of ad revenue for long-form video, 45% for Shorts. A creator weighing where to invest their time can work with a fixed number. Facebook’s Content Monetization program offers no equivalent figure.

How to run a media fundraiser without a tote bag

(by María)

Journal B is an online magazine that has covered Bern’s city politics, culture, and local life since 2012. Its reporting ranges from the future of the Schützenmatte square to council debates and the local hip-hop scene. The newsroom has five people and publishes more than 200 articles a year, all free to read.

The outlet is financed in equal thirds by membership fees, donations, and institutional grants. Some of these were intended to bridge the gap until cantonal media funding came through, but several expired at the end of 2025, leaving the publication short of 25,000 francs a year.

Faced with that shortfall, the team went to remake it, on one of Switzerland’s largest crowdfunding platforms, asking for CHF 50,000 to secure the next two years. The drive launched on March 10, and 15 days in, 156 backers had pledged more than half of the goal. While most efforts of this kind default to perks like mugs, tote bags or names in the credits, Journal B built a catalogue that reads more like a map of the city.

• The coverage becomes the product. Photographer David Fürst has documented Bern for Journal B for years. The team turned his images into postcard sets (CHF 40 for four, CHF 50 for eight) with specific motifs: Bern’s best swimming spots, the Gurten hill after the festival, folk performances in the Reitschule courtyard. These are the newsroom’s own images, printed and mailed. A t-shirt with the logo would have been easier. This is better.

• Contributors step forward, by name. Music columnist Fabio Lang curates an exclusive Bern playlist. Slam poet and columnist Jovana Nikic records a custom voicemail greeting for your phone. Ukrainian columnist Svitlana Prokopchuk hosts a cooking class through her local diaspora organization. Each reward is attached to a person whose work readers already know from the site. Backing the campaign starts to feel like supporting someone specific, because it is.

• The reward ladder follows the relationship. At CHF 25, you get a handwritten postcard from the editors. At CHF 130, the literature columnist reads your favorite books and sends personalized recommendations. At CHF 500, a current and a former city council president take you out for a beer and explain how Bern’s local politics actually works. At CHF 1,000, the board co-president leads a personal “democracy walk” through the city. The higher you go, the closer you get.

• Local cultural venues show up as collaborators. Tickets to the Tojo Theater, Kino Rex, dinner at the Heitere Fahne, a table at Blauer Engel (closing this summer after 30 years). These rewards place Journal B inside the city’s cultural calendar. All four sold out.

• The team sells its skills at higher tiers. For CHF 2,500, backers can book a portrait session with the staff photographer or get editorial feedback on any text they’re working on. The newsroom is offering its professional capacity directly: we know how to do things worth paying for beyond articles.

This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.

Here are the active calls, with the largest at the top:

Read more

Europe should acquire it.

We talk endlessly about digital sovereignty: “to enhance Europe’s strategic autonomy in the digital field“ as the European Parliament puts it with characteristic flair. The debate centers on cloud infrastructure, AI models, chips and data centers. Important things. But we keep ignoring the obvious: the digital public sphere. The infrastructure where public discourse actually happens, where opinions form, where elections are won and lost.

We communicate entirely on platforms controlled by foreign entities: Meta, Alphabet, TikTok/ByteDance, LinkedIn, and whatever Elon Musk decides X should be this week. In an era where information flow correlates so closely with power, Europe has outsourced most of its information ecosystem to American companies subject to American law, American politics, and increasingly erratic American billionaires.

The standard response has been to regulate. GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, we seem to excel at writing rules for other people’s playgrounds. But regulation without ownership is ultimately just commentary.

Europe has zero social networks at scale

China operates behind its Great Firewall with WeChat and Weibo. Russia, with a fraction of Europe’s economic power, maintains VKontakte. Even smaller markets have managed to build social platforms of national significance. Europe, with 450 million people and the world’s second-largest economy, has produced precisely zero social networks of critical scale. Not one.

The one partial exception is instructive. Spotify, Swedish, European, global, isn’t a social platform, but it is the only European-built content platform that competes at world scale. And it’s worth noticing why it works: it runs on subscriptions. It pays creators (imperfectly, but it pays them). It doesn’t need you to be angry to keep you engaged. Its incentive structure rewards quality and catalog depth, not viralisation. Compare that with TikTok, where the entire architecture is designed to hijack your attention span. Spotify isn’t perfect, but it’s proof that European platforms can compete globally and that the subscription model produces something fundamentally less toxic than a purely ad-driven alternative.

Substack follows the same logic. Which is precisely why it’s interesting.

This isn’t about pride. When push comes to shove (and geopolitics suggests quite a bit of pushing and shoving in the near future), the platforms answer to Washington, not Brussels. They collect and exploit the data of European users to generate advertising revenue while systematically destroying the business models of European media companies. And so far we’ve mostly responded by writing more rules about how they should destroy us more politely.

Why Substack?

Substack is developing into something beyond a newsletter platform. It’s becoming a social network built on trust rather than doomscrolling, on subscription rather than surveillance, on writers rather than trolls and bots. The verification mechanism isn’t a blue checkmark sold to the highest bidder, it’s readers paying for content they value. A concept that nowadays feels almost quaint: quality as credential.

Its business model, writers charge readers directly, platform takes 10%, aligns more closely with what Europe claims to care about than anything Meta has ever attempted. Like Spotify for audio, Substack is building infrastructure where the economic incentives and the public interest roughly point in the same direction. That alone makes it an anomaly worth protecting.

The platform hosts over 5 million paid subscriptions and is growing, particularly among the kind of serious writers and thinkers who could anchor a genuine European public sphere. Unlike TikTok or Instagram, where European adoption is cultural colonization almost by default, Substack could plausibly become more European while remaining globally relevant.

For context on the price: media giant Axel Springer bought Politico in 2021 for more than $1 billion, and more recently the Telegraph Media Group for €665 million. These are clearly not unthinkable numbers. It just requires someone to think of them.

There is, however, something uncomfortable to acknowledge about the platform.

Substack is, by European standards, close to a free speech absolutist and not only does it permit content that would be illegal in many European jurisdictions, it allows creators to monetize it. Hate speech, conspiracy theories, and political extremism generate revenue on the platform. The Guardian documented the extent of this problem just weeks ago, and it wasn’t the first time. From a US perspective, this is the cost of prioritizing the First Amendment above other values. From a European perspective - where hate speech laws, dignity rights, and democratic protections routinely override speech freedoms - some of what Substack currently hosts simply wouldn’t be legal. This is a core tension in the proposal, and we’ll return to it.

There is a market for digital infrastructure that doesn’t need your rage

Read more