Andrew Sullivan announced in January that he was taking his blog, The Dish, from its home at The Daily Beast and striking out on his own, using a metered content model to encourage regular readers to support his efforts. CJR interviewed him for our most recent issue, where he discussed his goal of raising $900,000.
A month ago, Sullivan tweaked his original $19.99 a year subscription model to include a $1.99 a month option, giving readers the opportunity to pay for membership in smaller increments. And at the paidContent Live conference on Wednesday, he updated attendees on his efforts to attract more donations. So far, Sullivan said, he’s raised about $672,000 of his $900,000 goal, which he says is enough to support the site’s staff through next February, though he is not currently drawing a salary from his efforts.
He added that he is considering whether a different payment model–or a scaled-back version of his site, which hosts about 250 posts weekly–should be implemented going forward. “The one thing I’m not going to change or tweak,” he said, “is a core advertising-free, sponsored content-free, lots-of-white-space, simple blog which people pay for.”
Kira Goldenberg was an associate editor at CJR from 2012-2015. Follow her on Twitter at @kiragoldenberg.