The market for belonging
An exciting new thesis on the information ecosystem, Substack is loosing one of its biggest brands, trying to get platforms to pay for news, a case study in community monetization and 23 active calls.
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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)
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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: