Maverick Insider, one year later

It’s not often that the opportunity arises in life to enact change, to make a genuine impact, to better the country you live in. South Africa was already a damaged place before Zuma took office. After 10 years of his rule, he has left a country almost completely decimated. Almost. Perhaps what he didn’t count on was the individual will of South Africans and the communal power that we possess, together.

Despite State Capture and the omnipresent tentacles of corruption, incompetence and cynicism gripping the country, we’re still here.

The life in South Africa is an everyday struggle for the poorest of the poor, millions of whom have lost hope of a better future.

There is also is an-ever present fear penetrating the middle class parts of our society over the implementation of National Health Insurance.

Both spheres are scared out of their wits around our teetering economy and, justifiably when the army are deployed on the Cape Flats, the safety of a poverty purged nation. It would be easier, like many are doing, to pack up and leave for more prosperous, and peaceful, shores.

You’re still here, though. And so are we.

Wherever there are real problems, there is also the opportunity for innovative, sometimes radical, solutions. Daily Maverick’s problem for the first part of its existence has been surviving; not just the obvious threats to the lives of our journalists in a gangster state, but the actual day-to-day keeping the business going kind of survival obstacle course.

On 15 August 2018, we announced to attendees of our Media Gathering in Cape Town the start of our Daily Maverick membership adventure -- Maverick Insider. At the time we weren’t entirely sure how we were going to fund December’s payroll. Now, with more than 7,000 members joining us and a 75% growth in head count since we started, things look a lot brighter.

To understand how bad a life in a media wasteland these days is, you just need to take the media apocalypse in the US or Europe, subtract a lot of skills and add a steroid injection of political chaos, all inside the decade of digital disruption and you would be getting at least a glimpse of it. To say that our industry is in a deep, dark hole from which it might never escape is to downplay the size of the problem.

Government’s influence on the economy remains unhealthily large and businesses are loathe to be seen supporting editorial shining a light on any malfeasance. Running lean was therefore not a strategy but a necessity, and every bit of the available budget was allocated to our reason to exist – great journalism. For two years in our past we couldn’t even afford office space, and despite the utmost respect in fulfilling our salary obligations to staff the same could not be said for that of the two founders. A scrappy junkyard dog (which now has 1.7-million monthly readers and 115,000 newsletter subscribers) would be an apt description of most of our time in the news media arena.

To make media great again, we will not build a great big wall

The debate over the possibility of implementing a New York Times-style paywall was always going to be a short one. Over the years, many readers, funders and experts had urged us to adopt a subscription paywall model, arguing that our quality editorial would be strong enough for the effort to be successful. We resisted this because South Africa is already a poor country. Allowing only those with means to access Daily Maverick content would make us even poorer.

Membership, however, is a social contract between a news team and its members who want to support and offer more than just finance for its sustainability and prosperity. It is this concept that underpins the entire existence of any membership programme and its ability to succeed. For Daily Maverick, this value system resonated with our beliefs and our journalism. We planned to offer membership as a completely voluntary effort, allowing members to choose their level of financial support and involvement. They, in turn, would help keep our content free for everyone to access, especially those who can’t afford to pay, a notion critical in a poor country like ours.

Innovation is sometimes butting your head against a wall for eight years and then figuring out the answer was there all the time. Without changing who we were, or selling our souls to one devil or another, we were able to unlock an avalanche of opportunity, financial and otherwise, by tweaking just a few things. Call it a pivot, or anything else you like, but the Maverick Insider programme is the most innovative business thing we’ve done in our 10-year history.

Building a recurring and significant revenue stream has been liberating. While advertising remains a high margin business, it remains a place filled with dark spaces and intentions. From the lack of transparency in the programmatic marketplace to media planners with directives and mandates not always congruent with public service journalism, it’s an area that we’d prefer not to depend on. Reader revenue has freed us from the shackles of potentially being slaves to others we can’t see or who don’t care about anything we do. We took back control of our own destiny through the direct relationship with our members. If we continue to do our jobs well, they will continue to come with us.

While our newsroom and our organisation has indeed grown by 75% in the year since we started Maverick Insider, not all of that has been funded by readers. Philanthropy remains a big part of our revenue as does commercial trading in advertising, events and other sponsorships. Maverick Insider now accounts for 30% of a much enlarged payroll and 18% of all running costs. July’s reader revenue would have covered more than half of the August 2018 payroll, when we launched the programme.

So while not all the growth has been funded by readers, having that security has allowed us to invest in the newsroom growth and experiment with a view to funding new sections through grants or commercial efforts. You may have noticed our expansion. We’ve been able to launch Business Maverick, Maverick Life and Thank God It's Food, to invest in more climate crisis journalism (Our Burning Planet) and in September we will launch Maverick Citizen.

When our CEO, Styli Charalambous stood up on that stage a year ago, asking those in attendance to join our cause, he said that we could no longer do this alone and that we no longer wanted to do this alone. We believed that we would transform into a better news operation because of membership. That the time to fight this battle for the future of our country should not be shouldered by a brave few. And yet, despite our growth and the initial success of Maverick Insider this year, we are still far from being sustainable. Our goal is to welcome 30,000 readers as Maverick Insiders by the end of 2021; if we achieve that, we will be able to thrive.

Daily Maverick readers number 1.7-million people every month; 1.7-million people do that because they want to know what’s happening in their country and trust us to tell them the story. It’s often not a happy read. They do it because they care about the future of their lives here, they care about the future of their family’s lives here; they do it because they care about the future of the country.

While we don’t expect 1.7-million people to sign up to Maverick Insider, if those who have signed up are indicative of the kind of reader we have, then the future is bright. Our mandate is to Defend Truth -- regardless of what dark road that takes us down. Our Insiders help us in this mission, not only by financially supporting us, but also in their expertise and knowledge. Journalists don’t know everything but with over 7,000 people now part of our community, our opportunity to be better informed and to draw on their expertise has put both us and our journalism in a much better position to deliver on the mandate we accepted.

Of course we want you to sign up to Maverick Insider because your support will strengthen our ability to hold power to account, to reveal and hopefully eradicate corruption. Put simply, it will enable us to continue to do our jobs. But there’s something that we want even more: whatever industry you work in, whatever part of the country you live in, whatever political persuasion you may have -- become part of the solution in whatever way you can. Maverick Insider is a microcosm of the potential that this incredible country has. We’ve seen first hand what can happen when the public care enough to actively participate. In one year, our readers have changed the future for Daily Maverick. Now let’s see what we can do for the country. Together. DM