The Icon Monthly Nov 2022 | Monetizing the News

I want to make money; it’s a relatable statement. But how we go about making that money is a bit murky. We all (Hopefully) want to make money ethically and without exploiting anyone. There seems to be more ways to monetize our passions than ever. If you’re an artist, you can start a Patreon, use the Youtube Partner Program or create an NFT project.

Depending on who you ask, there are issues with all those options. Making money from your passion isn’t easy, and that goes for me here at The Icon. So how do I ethically monetize this site?

Websites like Bloomberg and Forbes charge you a subscription to read their articles. Which I think is fair. They’re often detailing breaking news stories that took time and years of collecting sources to produce.

But the problem with that is it puts news out of reach of people who don’t have money. Not that a subscription to Forbes is expensive, but if you can barely afford dinner, then subbing to a news site isn’t a priority. But no matter your financial situation, we all need to stay informed.

Additionally, it’s tough to get people to read news articles. Half the time, you’re lucky if people read past the article’s title on social media. Most of the time, at least with my site, people read the title and immediately comment or just read what other people are commenting. The problem with this is that it can aid find misinformation spreading on the internet. Still, when you lock information behind a paywall, that limits the number of people getting that information.

It’s a struggle to get people to click on the article, and getting people to pay to read it is much more challenging. This means people turn to people in the comments and other secondhand accounts to get the information.

On a related note, have you ever played the game ” Telephone?” You get a group of friends and whisper a phrase to one of them, and they’re supposed to whisper it to other people, and once it gets to the last person, you see how much the phrase has changed. Usually, the phrase has changed somewhat. That’s because most people can’t recall exactly what was told in the time it takes to hear the phrase and then repeat it. So the more people the information goes through, the more human error is filtered in.

Same with information on the internet; when we get information secondhand, the person’s biases and interpretation get filtered in, and god forbid, they’re an idiot. If you’re blocked access to the sources of information, you’re denied the ability to scrutinize the data for yourself and to form your own opinion.

*Obama voice* Let me be clear. I don’t think anything is wrong with Forbes and Bloomberg charging money. Still, I believe it puts up a wall that could potentially facilitate spreading of fake news by limiting access to information from people.

For instance, recently, there was a dispute between Platinum Games and the former voice actress for Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor. Hellena claimed Platinum Games only offered to pay her $4000 to voice the title character in Bayonetta 3. However, Paul Schreier of Bloomberg discovered that that wasn’t exactly true through documents and various sources.

He tweeted his article and said Hellena Taylor’s claims were misleading, which some people in the comments said he needed to provide proof. He did. The evidence was in his article, but it seemed most of the comment section hadn’t read it. There were a few who did who tried to explain what was happening. The problem with this is that it’s that person’s interpretation. The others who didn’t read the article were losing out on the ability to scrutinize the information for themselves.

Again Bloomberg is great, and their prices are more than reasonable. But writing something and putting it on social media is 50% hoping people read past the title, 45% defending yourself against people who didn’t read past the title and begging them to do so, and 5% wondering why you even bothered.

And as much as we hate tactics like clickbait, if it didn’t work, sites wouldn’t do it. We’ve all done it, given in curiosity, and clicked on a clickbait article. However, I think clickbait is a toxic practice and breaks the trust you’re trying to build with your readers.

With all this said, I wanted to devise a way to monetize  The Icon while avoiding some of the pitfalls mentioned above. And remember, we’re not as big as Forbes or Bloomberg ( yet), so our founding needs aren’t as vast.

We will try to avoid pay walling content and instead offer optional ways to help fund us.

We’ll have to build trust with our audience, and that means giving them the information they need without clickbait and without adding a bunch of padding to the article. This means some articles might be short, or some information doesn’t need to be articles at all and will instead be a Twitter post. Posts will have critical information immediately at the beginning of the article. We want to keep you all moving forward, so we don’t want you scrolling for necessary information. We want you to get the information you need and decide if you want to keep going.

We’ll employ ads, but we’ll keep them from being intrusive, and additional funding options will be optional for those who enjoy our content and want to support us.

It’s easy to say all of this now. But creating something and making money from it has a slew of struggles, some I’ve spoken about and some I’m unaware of. So, we’ll see.