Your Freedom of Speech Is My Freedom of Distribution

An opinion you are free to hold is not an opinion I am obliged to spread and a platform can say no without becoming a censor.

Sebastian Esser, the co-founder and CEO of Steady, was one of the first people who taught me anything about audience revenue. We met about ten years ago, when I was trying to work out how membership might fit into the business of 444 and Steady was still a young company. Sebastian was naturally interested in persuading us to use the product, but he was also remarkably generous with his time despite knowing that a larger publisher like us, with slightly complicated needs might ultimately choose something else. We did choose something else, but much of what I understood in those early days about membership, conversion and the relationship between publishers and their audiences came from conversations with him.

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 c…