It’s now obvious that the rise of specialist newsletters and information channels is due not to a shortage of information but to a surfeit.
Let me explain.
Even among the most reputable news and information sources, there is a seemingly endless amount of aggregation. You subscribe to one strand of information and get bombarded with emails selling the sizzle of everything else.
By contrast, specialist, targeted newsletters can meet the specific needs of their audiences. All the best examples also show that, if they deliver, readers will pay. Apart from all else, it’s all about giving readers exactly what they want and nothing else: quality not quantity.
Even the New York Times’ unprecedented success in winning subscribers for its mighty bundle of news, information, and lifestyle creates the opportunity for independent verticals to target people who only want sports, foreign policy, puzzles or cooking. Over time, the competition can come from very small verticals employing a fraction of The Times’ staffing or funding. Of course.
In this way, the independent media business models keep changing. You may be surprised by the scale of some of the early winners.
Can you imagine a team of just 11 people in total (six until fairly recently) providing news and information in a B2B vertical and achieving revenue of almost $10mn – and solid profitability – after just two years? It’s not an obscure market but one of the most prominent business sectors and is populated by large, well-funded media brands.
This is the story of Ankler Media, a two-year-old startup that has expanded from a seven-year-old, DIY newsletter (The Ankler) by veteran Hollywood journalist Richard Rushfield (ex LA Times, Vanity Fair, Gawker and BuzzFeed) into eight newsletters, three podcasts and a mushrooming portfolio of events for the entertainment industry. In 2002, he was joined by Janice Min, who had been credited with transforming The Hollywood Reporter from a struggling trade magazine into a successful, large-format glossy.
Min bought a shareholding, became CEO of Ankler and, with Rushfield, embarked on fundraising, through Y Combinator, the start-up incubator known for its early investments in Airbnb, Reddit and Stripe. They raised some $1.5mn to expand the business. The investors – which included former Time Warner chief Dick Parsons – valued the company at $20mn.
Ankler Media has no shortage of well-known competitors including Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and The Wrap. But it sees itself as a distinctive, uncompromising alternative to traditional trade reporting, led by Rushfield who has been described as “Hollywood’s unsparing gadfly, narrating the industry’s unending chaos and skewering the actors, agents and executives responsible for creating it”.
It’s clear that Ankler Media – in its third year – is punching well above its weight, as measured by the general media coverage it garners and by the $10mn of revenue (60% sponsorship/ 40% subs) it expects to reach this year or next. Substack, which ranks its client newsletter clients by revenue, says The Ankler is one of the platform’s top three business publications.
The sharp-tongued, uncompromising reporter Rushfield says: “Our advantage is the great writers and reporters working with us, who have the freedom just to try to be interesting, not distracted or dilluted by a thousand other corporate priorities that get working in a legacy publication these days. The newsletter format where everything you publish is on center stage for a really concentrated audience, forces you to be interesting in a way that writing for a website doesn’t – in which you’re accustomed to writing things that are stuck in some corner of the site. Having a great editor in Janice Min, with a once-in-a-generation sense of what the audience is interested in, is a great thing.”
Min has said: “We’re trying to be thoughtful, we’re trying to go under the surface of traffic-driven conversation. We don’t do things like what people say on Twitter about this story. It’s been a pleasure to not be in the traffic chasing business but in the subscriber acquisition business. It’s a very different kind of conversation.”
Ankler’s two leaders, arguably, reflect the emergence of a new class of newsroom which view themselves as stables of star writers:‘influencer-journalists’. Just like Semafore and Puck, which also share an ethos of ‘quality not quantity’ and relatively low-cost.
It’s the ‘New Model Journalism’.
Ankler’s fast-growing audience of almost 100k paying and non-paying subscribers is claimed to include “nearly every entertainment CEO, Oscar-winning producers, directors and writers, actors, and a wide breadth of executives who live and breathe this industry”. It is also increasingly targeting the entertainment industry in the UK, where it now has a local correspondent and will, in November, be hosting its first Documentary Spotlight event in London. In a further gentle push into Europe, Ankler this year partnered with the UK-based Screen International to provide newsletters and events at the Cannes Film Festival.
Rushfield claims “a surprisingly healthy swath of our readers are outside the US and international expansion is very much in our plans, and very authentic to our mission to provide insightful coverage of the entertainment story. On both ends – in production and consumption – entertainment is very much an international story and of enormous interest to our readers”.
For all the apparent revenue success, the actual finances of Ankler Media are no more transparent than any other cost-conscious startup. But it seems likely that – at anywhere near the $10mn revenue – the business is now cash-positive. Min said they finished 2023 with revenue “well into mid-seven figures”. The Ankler flagship newsletter is said to have some 64k subscribers on Substack, again not all paid. Paid subscriptions cost $149 a year or $17 a month.
Ankler Media is presumably the envy of the bosses of Axios and Penske Media (publisher of Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Deadline) both of which reportedly wanted to acquire the company, even when it was only Rushfield himself. He might also be the one who got away from Jessica Lessin – whose subscription success with The Information first inspired him and who provided early support and funding for The Ankler.
With Richard Rushfield and Janice Min hinting at tapping investors for additional funds to expedite their international plans, we should not be surprised if next year will see a determined push into the UK, perhaps with some kind of JV or further collaboration with Screen International.
Ankler Media, a startup which – lest you forget – has revenue per head of almost $1mn, will continue to show how and why this New Model Journalism is so different – and is built to last.
