Our small town population of 3000 has been able to support an editor and ad sales person while also building a subscriber list of over 180. We will be testing the Daily Deal revenue stream shortly as well.

I think the entrepreneurial journalist has to think in multiple streams of income, while also partnering up with an ad sales person. We think this is the key to success. Have two experts to make your site work; one in content and one in sales. It really works out well, especially for the small town or neighborhood market where businesses want to attract your local readers.

Also, I would suggest farming out the initial IT tasks to get your site off the ground fast. I think there are too many people out there trying to put their sites together on the fly while they learn the basics of building a web site. You can get a professionally done Drupal news site started for about $500 now, which is worth every penny when you consider the time it saves you to learn it on the fly.

Anyway, I think memberships or subscriptions can be a valuable piece of the puzzle, but it should be considered just one of multiple income streams.

Thanks!

As to trends, here’s my sense:
—First and most importantly, it’s early on all this. So clearly, in starting to survey practices, it’s clear that metrics and standards have yet to be established, and even counting systems differ from organization to organization.
—MinnPost is about four times older than Texas Tribune at this nascent point and that’s meaningful. One thing I think we’ll learn from NPR is that the length of a relationship is an important driver of retention and donation size.
—At this point, a few big individual gifts — as opposed to institutional/corporate gifts (and sometimes that boundary may be fuzzy)– may throw averages off.

Most useful, I think, is for these sites to agree on similar standards for definition and counting, which can then serve as a foundation for best practices.

We had our first and only “pledge day” three years ago, before going commercial and selling ads, and while we were very appreciative of those who contributed almost $2,000 that day (a quarter of it coming from the first, and very generous, donor), we ultimately determined that the 70 or so people who donated represented about 3% of our daily visitors at the time. We have since quintupled our number of daily visitors, yet even if we managed to convert 3% of the new number to pledgers or donors, and say they somehow all agreed to pay $10/month, that would provide us $3,000/month, nowhere near enough to run a site on. So as much as we get dinged for the alleged non-”scalability” of the small, hardworking news org model, in reverse, things like this that may work OK for those with bigger orgs do not seem “scalable” in the downward direction.

If you say, “well, try that ALONG WITH your current model” – that would take time and effort that needs to be put into the content that people have come to expect us to provide 24/7. Back on our one and only Pledge Day, somebody even said “Look, don’t hound me for money. Just go sell some ads.” So we did.

Should that be million? [Yep, fixed — thanks! —Josh]