The Interledger Community 🌱: Jonathan Gershberg

The Nordly — Final Grant Report

Jonathan Gershberg — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 04:38:04 +0000

Here we are at the end of our project. It has been a wild ride for the team behind the greatest (and only) satire site in Minnesota, one that we were so honored to have the opportunity to take.

Project Update

At the conclusion of our project, we are confident that we made the best written topical satire Minnesota has ever seen, made possible by Grant for the Web. We generated more, better content, created by a diverse group of contributors on timely topics relevant to our hyper-local readership. However, despite these achievements, we still struggled to generate significant Coil subscriptions.

Progress on objectives

Immensely Scaled Up Production
In the 10 months of our grant we’ve produced as many articles as we did in the two years prior! In short, this grant allowed us to more than DOUBLE PRODUCTION in less than a year. This demonstrates the value of having the resources to compensate writers for their work.

Supported Diverse Group of Local Writers
This increase in production was in large part thanks to the work of our staff writers, a group that represents the diversity of our state. Because of their efforts, more than 50% of content was produced by writers from underrepresented groups.

This may be the objective we are most proud of accomplishing. Comedy is an industry dominated by white men, and we were determined to not let The Nordly be part of that problem. Instead, it became a space that championed voices rarely given a platform in satire and Minnesota media at large.

Not surprisingly, the quality of the writing, and the breadth of subject matter have dramatically improved thanks to a more diverse group of writers, which has allowed us to reach new audiences. Not only is it the right thing to do, but prioritizing a diverse team has paid dividends in many other ways.

We Published a Book!
Although we greatly underestimated just how much time and energy it would take, we finally finished a satirical book about Minnesota culture called How to Minnesota, that is available for Coil subscribers. They include some great graphics Check it out!

One Big Challenge - Coil Subscribers
Despite the success above the one thing we were not successful in doing was driving new Coil subscriptions. Could we have done a more aggressive subscription acquisition campaign? Yes. But our revealed some structural issues that prevented adoption among our fan base.

The biggest feedback we’ve received is that the extra steps of downloading an extension, or using a specialized browser, prevented people who would otherwise be interested from subscribing.

Also, our experimentation with the 100+20 model did not generate nearly the number of subscriptions we thought it would. While it is hard to pinpoint exactly why each reader didn’t decide to subscribe to read that extra paragraph of jokes, we have a theory that reveals a bigger problem with the online written satire industry.

In conversations with the editors of similar sites across the country, we have heard that many are shifting to shorter form content, more akin to meme pages. Our data show that most readers tend to read headlines mainly on social media, and never click on the link to the site in the first place. Then the vast majority will skim the article (avg article pageview time is <30 seconds), and once they get the gist of the joke, they leave the site.

This means that our incentive of putting a few extra jokes, or even a whole article, behind a paywall didn’t work, because most readers already got what they came for - the headline.

In short, audience demand is changing, and longer-form satirical articles may be read by less people, rather than a mass market product.

Because of all these factors—even as our site traffic increased significantly — Coil revenue remained flat and negligible during the entire grant period.

We hope that in the future there will be a big enough adoption of Web Monetization that would be able to bring in significant revenue for sites like ours.

Communications and marketing

Press Coverage
The biggest newspaper in the Twin Cities, The Star Tribune, did a large, glowing feature on us in the Variety section (which is particularly funny given just how many articles we have devoted to making fun of them).

This feature was the best advertising a site could ask for, and immediately spurred the expansion of our audience beyond our typical audience of young, urbane Minneapolis residents, to include older folks in the surrounding suburbs.

Social Media
Thanks to the social media wizardry of Maddie Spott, one of our staff members, our audiences have increased more than 200% across platforms in the last 10 months.

What’s next?

We are so grateful to have this opportunity to experiment with Web Monetization and fully realize the potential of what an equity-focused regional satire can be.

We believe that once our collective efforts spur a large-scale adoption of the web monetization model, when a Coil subscription is just as ubiquitous as a Netflix subscription, it could be the main driver of our site revenue.

Until then, Web Monetization will continue to be one of the many ways, including ads and direct contribution, that readers can help sustain this little Midwestern comedy website that will continue to mercilessly mock the mayor of Minneapolis.

Additional comments

Huge thanks to Ayesha Ware and the rest of the GftW team for everything! Because of your support, we believe that we are at the beginning of a fundamental shift in how we sustain vital digital community resources, like local satire sites.

The Nordly - Grant Report #1

Jonathan Gershberg — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 04:13:03 +0000

Oh hi there! We’re The Nordly, a satirical publication based in Minneapolis. We are GfW-Spark level grantees and our mission is to become a sustainable hub for regional specific comedy in the Twin Cities metro that supports the diverse satirists that make it possible. We’re really excited to report our progress thus far.

What We’ve Accomplished

Scaled Up Content Production
Since receiving our grant just a few months ago, we were able to bring on a group of staff writers in addition to our contributor model. This has scaled up content production immensely.

While we were previously producing an average of 30 pieces of content a month, now we are producing 55 articles a month, an increase of a whopping 84%. This far exceeds our initial goal of a 50% content production increase by the end of 2021.

As the amount of our content has increased, so too has the quality of the content. We have a higher proportion of full articles (compared to just headline jokes). And since we have a core group of writers we are in closer contact with, we are able to make revisions more quickly to ensure that the content is published in a timely manner.

Writers Who Reflect the Diversity of the Twin Cities
We are committed to creating locally focused content that reflects the diversity of our city and our region. Our initial goal was to have, by the end of 2021, 50% of our content to be written by writers from backgrounds historically underrepresented in satire publications: namely BIPOC, women, trans and gender-nonconforming writers.

In the last 3 months, more than 60% of our content is now produced by writers from these underrepresented backgrounds, exceeding our goal several months early. This has been driven in large part by our recruitment of a class of “staff writers” that is majority women, and 42% BIPOC.

The staff writer model allows us to mentor comedians in the craft of satirical news writing and give them the skills needed to translate their unique viewpoints into effective, pitch-perfect satire.

Where We Could’ve Done Better

Exclusive Content Integration
Prior to receipt of the grant, our website was run through Squarespace, which, as of now, does not have a Coil plugin to share exclusive content.

Upon migrating the site to Wordpress, we encountered a series of issues. First, the Wordpress style we chose had issues with the Coil integration, which broke the site. We had to contact some engineers from the Coil end to fix the issue, which delayed us fully incorporating Coil-exclusive content onto the site.

In addition, we are still troubleshooting some elements of the Coil integration. One issue is the appearance of the lock symbol even if most of the article is accessible in the 100+20 format.

We have seen that the lock drives down visitors to click on the article in the first place because they assume that everything behind that link is behind a paywall. This undermines the entire point of the 100+20 model which attracts readers and then encourages them to subscribe to Coil once they are already in the article.

One clear demonstration of this: our site traffic has increased but we have not seen significant increases in Coil revenue.

Another issue we are encountering is apprehension from our writers. While they are getting paid, one of the big added benefits of getting published is the ability to add the article to their portfolio and use The Nordly as a launchpad for other opportunities. Many of our writers have been concerned that if the entirety, or even part of their work is behind a paywall, they would lose the exposure and accessibility.

This just shows the importance of getting the internet ecosystem as a whole to move to this model, so that it is an expectation that the average reader would already be a Coil subscriber and therefore able to read the content on the site.

Book Production Delayed
Our massive increase of content has come with a costly time burden. Our collaborative editing and revision process has been strained by the sheer number of articles we have, and there have been weeks where we have not been able to get to every article that is in our inbox.

This has led to a delay in the writing of our e-Book. We have a complete rough draft, but had hoped we would be closer to the final stages than we are right now.

Events Not Happening Right Now
When we had originally applied for this grant we had envisioned live events that were exclusively available to Coil subscribers. Of course, the pandemic has made live events— especially indoor events—both illegal and unethical.

We have not done any live events and do not foresee ourselves to be able to do any by the end of the grant period. This is why we are asking to shift funds to writer compensation instead.

How the Community Can Help Us

We are really interested in maximizing the web monetization model to bring in new Coil subscribers effectively. How have you strategically monetized your content? What kinds of user outreach has been successful for you?

We are so honored to be part of this community and we look forward to continuing this grand experiment in shifting to a new, more ethical and sustainable model for internet creators!