A hybrid/ our biz at birth

We want to be born as two businesses: a nonprofit and a for-profit.

The Nonprofit will own controlling shares of the for-profit. The reasons seem good. We expect coaching on this

There is a lovely synergy between the two, given our goals.

A nonprofit can own the user data, and brand itself as very safe. Trust is our key value.
First security, so we can offer safety as a core value. Then add-in privacy, which is a complex policy issue, especially since we want to partner with thousands of sites globally. This privacy as a core of trust becomes a reason to “own the data” as is repeated over-and-over in our planning.
You cannot offer privacy tools without strong security. There are both technical and policy issues to solve.
We have safety as a core benefit (safety and showing new content at a known site, a partner, are the two key benefits). A nonprofit, of course, has no shareholders. There can be no hostile takeover. There is no fiduciary duty to shareholders, since there are none. This means we can talk about all that. Your data is not for sale, not now, not ever.
Here we can seek donors. We can speak to major foundations and individual donors. We seek wills which give us the user data. We can ask users to “donate data” to the site where they use us, since it makes the site stronger. (Is there a tax deduction, based on the lifetime value of the data? Some social sites value data at over $100 per use per year, but our reduced use of ad-tech income may lower that number. Still sponsoring pages, or our service for a site, is valued. Marketers do talk about different kinds of promotions – and we could become part of some types of ESG branding, which is growing decade by decade.)
The for-profit can generate cash. It is owned by the nonprofit, which appoints the majority of its board members. Here is a place to give employees of both sides (for profit & nonprofit) a way to have stock options. (Is that legal?) We can have investors, and if we do well, an IPO. We can buy back shares, another kind of liquidity event. The risky part is our model may prohibit an M & A event.

Results For The Last 3 Years

For the first few years, we must grow slowly, become good at our tasks, and learn the market.

Lean marketing is key.

Saving the news is a big push. We need a great team to win big, since others can copy us. It is risky enough, in a few ways, that we don’t expect a lot of startups. Angel.com shows 400 media startups in a decade, so that is not a giant sector. Only a handful are as ambitious as we are.

Some guesses: the largest firms will not be pushed out.

But we do not compete with the social media sites, who are ad-based.

The digital ad market is changing rapidly. Apple and Google are both moving away from cookies, which have been at the core of targeted ads. This may be a main reason that Twitter and Meta/Facebook are seeing share price drops.

If privacy offers become big in online content, then we are seeking the heart of that market.

Since we do not work closely with ads, we need to try new models there. We move content to new sites – can it be paired with ads, without knowing the reader? This was the heart of ads for many decades.

In talking this over, a big idea is to think of content as fiction vs. non-fiction. If we think of arts and entertainment as “fiction” that may be an ideal entry market. We can avoid the controversies of politics and religious-politics, and left vs. right. At first.

Dilbert in my emails has ads with it. Digital comics is an entry market. If we can get 5% of that revenue we are in the low millions.

Comics for college newspapers is a possible entry product. (They may be approachable, if the price is very low. In my first content-sorting startup, we wanted to recommend books. We had a Letter of Intent from the UC Berkeley Alumni, in our best weeks.)

College newspaper and alumni associations are not giant markets. They both have limited budgets for such things. But could we donate some or all of our services, just to get started? We do need rich user data. Gathering comic strips feedback gives us some emotional and cultural data, which we think is strong.

Being a marketplace where new content means new subscribers is possible, especially if they use our site to get the subs. So we benefit from packaging a few sources, since we will offer this package. Still, the biggest hope may be donations. We would love to see the giants, who are fighting to win trust, donate to us, and maybe buy a few shares (though under half of course, based on our nonprofit-as-key-owner model).

It is a win big or fade away market.

Much lean marketing needs to be done, to know what is possible.

Syndication marketplace. We help the big syndicators sell to the smaller markets. There are easily a dozen rivals here. Our filtering lets us suggest content to the editors (site-level-sorting).
Free extra content (freemium model, start free, offer add-ons). We trade content for user data – and offer pricing options.
Subscriber marketplace. More content for more money. Since we own the user data, we move the content. This creates a steady stream of income: we rent the user data, and never lose it. If this works out, we will win a solid share here.
Big content firms will reach sites whose editors like them, meaning more users will like them than if randomized. Syndication deals will be offered – we are a B2B marketplace.
Small news sites are dying off. Visual news, both TV and YouTube type, is up. Text is down, online and printed news. We can help a local paper offer a mix of community-based news (“site-level-sorting”) and personalized news. For some papers this will add new pages, new readers, new money.