A Key, Critical Part of Our Operation

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I write a lot about our membership programs and how subscriptions are now the core of our business. There is a subset of our readers who are both interested in and have the means to support our operation at a higher level than a Prime or Prime AF membership. We know because a lot of you have told us. But first, if you are a Prime or Prime AF subscriber you are 1000% good with us! Your subscription is what makes TPM possible. Literally. Prime and Prime AF memberships make up over 50% of our revenue. This message is solely for those who would like to and easily can support what we do at a higher level. If you’re in that category please click to read more and join me after the jump.

So here’s the deal: It is absolutely critical that we get a small subset of our subscribers to upgrade to what we call an Inside membership. Now there are a bunch of cool things you get with this upgraded membership – our weekly webinar-style briefings with our reporters and outside newsmakers and policy experts, in person events and bunch of other stuff. (You can see more on all that here.) But that’s not really the purpose of this post.

TPM has two or three million readers – sometimes up to 5 million in a given month. (Wow, that’s cool!) It has 200,000 to 300,000 of what I’d call audience members, by which I mean people who visit very regularly, at least a few times a week and often multiple times a day and have a real relationship to the site. Of those just slightly under 30,000 have subscribed and become members. Of those, over the course of this year, we need to find 500 to join Inside which unlike Prime, which is $5 a month, or Prime AF, which is $9.99 a month, is $50 a month.

Now, a number of you are probably saying, Josh, I love TPM but I cannot afford $50 a month. To you my advice is, definitely do not upgrade to Inside!

We don’t want anyone putting themselves out to subscribe to TPM. Again, this is purely for those who are interested and have the means to do so. The thing is that I’m highly confident there are way more than 500 of our readers who can without much sweat shift to that amount and would be happy to do so because it’s critical to sustaining our operation. The key is getting their attention and explaining why it’s important. If you’re a financial services exec or a partner at a big metro law firm, dude!, we’re lookin’ at you! But seriously, we know a subset of our readers is in this category. So it’s important we get their attention and make our pitch.

So if you’re game, you can upgrade by clicking here and upgrading to either a monthly or an annual subscription. In our system it’s actually surprisingly easy. Just a couple clicks. You don’t even have to take out your credit card. If you’re interested but not sure, please click the thumbs up button at the bottom of this post and I’ll follow up with an email explaining a bit more what it’s about and why it’s important.

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