The Business of Smart Brevity
How Axios uses its expertise and audience to make money in a difficult media environment
Welcome:
Greetings from a gloomy, rainy winter week. If it was just 10 or so degrees colder we’d had some lovely snow. Instead we have an uncomfortable freezing rain. Woof.
One Big Trend: You know, I actually stole this “one big trend” idea from Axios!
Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash
When Axios launched back in 2017, I made it a goal of mine to read everything that they produced. This was not an exaggeration, I literally tried to engage with every item the upstart organization wrote up for those first few months. They only had a few newsletters and limited additional coverage at the time, so I thought this was possible. I had a desire to understand the topics they were covering at the start – politics, health care, energy policy, business news, tech, and media – and so I attempted to keep up.
For obvious reasons, this did not last very long. The company grew quickly and certain beats that I had been following were not particularly relevant to my interests. Still, I learned a great deal and Axios’ trademark “Short Brevity” made it pretty easy to breeze through complicated topics rather quickly.
6 years later, Axios is now one of the most well known players in news. They cover a wide range of topics, even sports, and wield a significant amount of influence. Their editorial style, oriented around delivering information in short bullet points in an effort to be as efficient as possible, has been both embraced for that efficiency and lampooned for being wildly oversimplistic, stripping away necessary context.
I would not dream of attempting to read everything they produce these days. The volume is far too high and wide-reaching. After spending a bit too much time deep in the Axios-verse, I’ve also re-embraced gathering news from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes you need to read a few thousand extra words and take a few journeys with a writer to really think through things. However, I still read quite a bit of Axios. I find Sara Fischer, Felix Salmon, and the daily Axios Macro to be essential. I’ve also found them to be a fascinating company to follow when it comes to their business.
Axios targets a “decision-making” audience, CEO’s, industry leaders, lobbyists, politicians and the like. This is part of the reason why their writing is so abbreviated. It’s meant to be consumed by those who tend to have some understanding of what’s going on and don’t have a ton of time to read a few thousand words. They don’t need to be walked through everything, they need the key takeaways.
Acquiring this kind of readership is difficult. Axios had the advantage of being launched by a few well connected folks who had been at Politico for years. They went and found other established journalists who truly owned their beats. Some of the earliest employees, Mike Allen, Ina Fried, and Dan Primack for example, could all boast not just a high volume of readers, but also a high quality of audience. Axios was a new company, but they had an all-star team of writers. Those writers then helped to establish new talent, who grew their own high-quality readership. It was a great plan, and it worked.
Axios makes money primarily through advertising. It’s been that way since the start. Their audience, though, means that they can support a unique kind of advertising. Companies with an interest in influencing public opinion or politicians will often choose to advertise with them. The advertising is often closer to lobbying or public relations than anything else, looking to garner support more than sell something specific. The budgets for that kind of advertising are often larger and less likely to disappear.
This has been a successful endeavor. But Axios always intended to be more than that. Even in the earliest interviews about the site, the founders spoke about their intention to create and sell an ultra-premium subscription product. That came to fruition in January of last year.
Digiday recently reported on how that first year of the subscription product, Axios Pro, was going. According to them, Pro has 3,000 subscribers and generates $2 million in revenue. They offer a wide variety of newsletters in verticals like media or climate, with one newsletter available for $599 per year and all access available for $2,499 per year. There is also a reported 100% retention rate, although given that the product launched a year ago and the subscriptions were for a year, it’s quite possible that number will change.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have a corporate subscription to Axios Pro for a few months. The reporting is excellent and in-depth, with numerous scoops and exclusives. I’ve sent follow ups and questions to the journalists who deliver the paywalled information, and they’re usually really responsive and helpful.
While the price point is quite high, the offering fits the Axios brand perfectly. I’d expect that they will continue to expand Axios Pro.
On the most recent episode of the People vs Algorithms podcast, hosts Troy Young, Brian Morrissey, and Alex Schleifer spoke about how niche media products with great value were likely to thrive in 2023. Mass media may have a few survivors, but going deep with expertise is likely to be the business model of the future, while platforms that empower creators to do that will thrive in the background. The hosts were talking mostly about a platform like Substack, but my mind went right to Axios.
There are differences of course. Axios is a company with editors and copywriters, an accounting department, HR, and the like. Their writers are employees tied to all of that. Starting a Substack is infinitely more independent. But as far as established companies go, Axios is well positioned in this environment. Axios is and always has been very personality driven. It was way ahead on newsletters and author-centric distribution. Even as they’ve expanded, they’ve stuck to this principle.
Given their reputation and roster of journalists, the company is well-suited for the future. Digital media is sure to continue to face difficult times. It’s hard to predict who will continue to be around, much less be successful. All that being said, Axios is in a great spot.
Why should you care?: We often write about how media is going through an upheaval. As much as that is true in traditional media, it’s even more true in digital media. And yet, somehow, Axios has not only survived, but thrived. It’s unique model, ahead of its time, has positioned it well for continued success.
Recommended Reading:
Axios Pro generated $2 million in 2022 with more than 3K paid subscribers
Digiday’s Kayleigh Barber dives into Axios Pro and provides some good information on how the business is doing and where it might go from here.
Folks to Follow:
If you’d like to get a sense of what Axios is like, there’s no better way to do so than reading Mike Allen’s Axios AM. I read it almost every day myself.
Wrestling Fact of the Week:
I had the chance to go to Raw on Monday. I had an absolute blast. We had great seats, but it really wasn’t about that. Being in the crowd to cheer and boo and be surprised and enjoy with the rest of the WWE Universe was awesome. My advice to you is to go to a show or event where you’ll get to feel alive and part of a community. I’m guessing you’ll be glad you did!
Have a great rest of your week.