Note to readers: If all you are interested in is understanding how Mere Orthodoxy is going to operate going forward, just read the text immediately below under "The Mere O Model" heading. If you want to understand the broader thinking about tech and media that has led us to this model, keep reading.
Financing media endeavors in a digital world is a complicated problem that still hasn't really been altogether solved. We know that paid email subscriptions can work for private individual producers. We know that digital subscriptions can work for large-scale organizations like The New York Times or The Atlantic, both of which are now profitable, quite profitable in the case of the Times. The solution for midsize institutions, which encompasses the vast majority of what you read outside of Substack, the Times, and The Atlantic, is still not altogether clear.
That being said, I think the writer Tim Carmody may have already described what the solution ought to be in a post written several years ago called "Unlocking the Commons."
Carmody's key idea is that media organizations could both retain digital-age advantages of media production and have a viable business model if they shift away from thinking in terms of "customers" (whether those be their readers or paid advertisers) and toward a "patronage" model.
Here is the key idea from Carmody:
I call this “unlocking the commons,” and it’s the same approach I’ve taken with my Patreon and newsletter. Fans support the person and the work. But it’s not a transaction, a fee for service. It’s a contribution that benefits everyone. Free-riders aren’t just welcome; free-riding is the point.
This, I think, is key to understanding the psychology of patronage. Normally, if you buy a product — let’s say you’re buying a book. Books aren’t perfect commodities, but they’re still commodities. As a shopper, you’re trying to get as much value for your book as you can for your money. If I can get the book cheaper and faster from retailer A(mazon) than retailer B(arnes & Noble), most of the time, that’s what I’m going to do.
If I’m skeptical of A, and prefer to support B or C(ity bookstore of my choice), I’m not strictly speaking in a purchasing relationship any more, but something closer to a patronage one. I don’t just want my money to buy an object; I want it to support institutions and individuals I like, and I want it to support the common good.
Going forward, Mere Orthodoxy is going to be built off this idea, though we will be using the language of "membership" rather than "patronage." As an organization, Mere Orthodoxy exists to create Christian media for cultural renewal. In other words, we don't simply care about renewing the church or securing power and advantage for Christians; we care, rather, about seeing a broad renewal of trust and common life in the various cultures and institutions that our readers participate in.
To accomplish that goal, we will rely on a variety of people participating in what we do. Our senior leadership, myself and Mark Kremer, will set the editorial vision of the organization and insure that our organization has the structures and processes required to successfully advance that vision. Our contributing editors and writers will contribute work that exemplifies and advances that vision. Our members, meanwhile, will provide the financial resources we need to succeed.
How will this work practically speaking?
Beginning today, we are implementing something we are calling an "e-wall" on the website. Everything on Mere Orthodoxy will remain free to read for everyone. However, all content on the site older than one week is going to live behind the e-wall. To remove the e-wall and access the content, you simply need to give us your email address and sign up to join our email list. That will give you full, ungated access to all of our archives. It will also give you access to a weekly newsletter which will share links from everything we have published in the past week. You will also receive occasional updates on our work.
To state it clearly: All of the content on the Mere Orthodoxy website will remain free to read for everyone. We are just now asking people reading our archives to give us their email address in exchange for reading those older essays, reviews, and columns.
Meanwhile, those of you desire to join us as members can click on the "Subscribe" button in the top right corner. That will bring you to a form that you can fill out to give a gift of $60 or $120 to support our work. Members will receive other additional benefits, including:
The key idea here is that our members are not simply customers paying for a product; they are, rather, people who value the work that we do and want to support us on an ongoing basis so that we can reach more people with our work. Your membership isn't giving you exclusive access to a product; it's enabling (basically) universal access for all people to the ideas and arguments we promote at Mere Orthodoxy.
For this model to work, we need the people who value our work to give what they can to support us. (You can also choose to give larger gifts through our New Horizons Foundation giving portal, which will allow you to receive a tax receipt for your gift.)
Somehow, after the craziness of the past month, I actually feel more hopeful about our future. Within a day or two of the news that we needed to return two quite large gifts that were given to us by mistake, Mark said to me that he believed this might be the best thing that ever happened to us. It would give us an opportunity to re-state why we do what we do and ask our large readership that clearly appreciates our work to join us in it by supporting the work financially. So far I think he has been proven right. We are, therefore, quietly confident that God will provide and are looking forward to the chance to continue to do this work long-term. Thank you for reading.
If you want the fuller explanation for what we are doing and why, keep reading.
When Matt Anderson and some friends from Biola's Torrey Honors Program launched Mere Orthodoxy in 2005, Facebook was two years old. LinkedIn was one year old. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snap, TikTok, and the late Google+ did not yet exist.
It was the golden age of blogging, what some have referred to as an "open internet," as opposed to the "closed internet" that has come about in the age of social media. At that time the primary way work was circulated online was via hyperlinks from one blog to another—and so much of the notable work Mere O did at that time became such because it was either shared across other blogs or they were projects undertaken with other bloggers.
This era could be called the "open internet" because the network of blogs that knit that internet together was basically all platform agnostic—social media networks didn't exist in the way they one day would and what we did have didn't care what type of computer you were using, what browser you used, or anything like that. If you could access websites and knew how to build your own site (or use a platform like Blogspot or Wordpress) you could participate in the conversation.
What was fun about this era was the relative openness and chaotic energy of it. This is when contemporary media staples like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, and others were getting their start in online writing. In some cases they did this via blogging at established media institutions, as with Sullivan and Douthat. In others they were using smaller blog platforms, as with Klein, Yglesias, and Dreher. But as social media platforms grew and, especially, after Facebook launched the News Feed and Twitter began to grow, this all started to change.
The change was somewhat predictable: The internet as a piece of technology made information distribution more or less free. However in the days of the open internet, participating in the free exchange of information oneself still required some degree of tech competence. You needed to know how to build and host your own website or, at least, how to set up an account in WordPress or Blogspot and then how to use their software to create content.
If you lacked those skills, it was hard. This is also when I started writing online and I remember these difficulties myself. Though more technically adept than the average person at that time, I still needed help getting a WordPress blog at a hosted domain set up. After that blog, which I did with a friend, was abandoned, I worked from a blog with a wordpress.com domain for a number of years before migrating most of my work over to Mere Orthodoxy.
What the advent of social media did was further democratize the process of sharing information and discussing it with others. With the Facebook News Feed or a Twitter handle, you could access a far simpler content management system (if one could even call it that) than anything you'd find on WordPress or Blogspot and you had guaranteed connection to friends and it was very easy to see how many followers a person had, how many followers you had, and so on. And so the open internet of the blog era was replaced by the closed internet of social media.
We are, I think, now moving into a new era—or rather we are several years into that new era already. What happened to the social media internet?
If you think about social media networks, the biggest traditional social media platforms are almost certainly Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Facebook and Twitter launched between 2003 and 2006 and both grew quickly. Instagram launched in 2010 and really depended on mass smartphone adoption to help it grow, which makes it somewhat different from the older two networks. That said, Instagram has now been owned by Facebook's parent company, Meta, for many years. So their fates are in many ways tied together.
All of these platforms became valuable because they democratized participation in digital media. They helped people who didn't understand how to use Wordpress or how to build a website still be able to enjoy the benefits of digital technology and to connect to a wide range of local and online friends. This digitization of relationships also served a valuable commercial purpose for the social media platforms. It created something called a "social graph," which referred to the web of connections each person had on a social platform—connections which, in theory, helped secure their engagement on the platform and provided the platform with highly personal data on their users which couldn't be rivaled by other platforms or advertisers.
Once you get past those early networks, however, and moved into networks founded between 2007, when the iPhone was launched, and 2016, when TikTok launched, the picture changes significantly. There are basically no major success stories in social media from this era if "success" means reaching a scale and influence comparable to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Google+ launched in 2011. It was plainly intended as a Google-owned Facebook app. It failed. Pinterest launched in 2009, had a lot of energy in the early 2010s, but has mostly plateaued at this point and isn't terribly relevant as a company beyond its very niche and less valuable user base. Snap also launched in 2011. Like Instagram, it relied on smartphone architecture to work, but it had a more limited appeal than Instagram and also has never been able to figure out how to compete with Instagram. So it has also somewhat plateaued and not terribly relevant, even if it is worth quite a bit more than non-tech people probably realize. So up through the late 2010s, before TikTok took off, the social media landscape was still dominated by the old behemoths—Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
For media producers, this era had a playbook: You maximized your traffic, then you sold advertisements and sponsored content against that audience, such that your content was always free, but your "customer" was not your readers, but rather the advertisers who bought ads from you. This is how websites like Buzzfeed became media juggernauts for a very brief space of time.
Now we need to introduce two disruptive forces: First, the polarization accelerant that was 2020, which made online interactions more fraught and politicized. As social media accounts became more and more vessels for expressing political outrage and showing ever more extreme forms of devotion to one's preferred political cause, the value of the social graph began to shrink. Second, the rapid growth of TikTok. The one-two punch of these factors both made social media less valuable and interesting and suggested that the defining value of social networks, their unique social graphs for each user, were not actually as valuable as we had thought.
TikTok didn't work with a social graph. Rather, TikTok was algorithmically dominated in a way no other platform was at the time. The design of the platform said "we don't care about the social graph of how users are connected to each other; all we care about is what our engagement-based algorithm tells us about them." And it worked, from an engagement and commercial standpoint.
In the aftermath of these developments, the new social networks that have launched are not really anything like the 2007-16 era networks like Google+ or Pinterest, which either presented as copycat products of successful networks or derived their value from a more targeted, specific audience using the product to do something more specific than "connect with friends on the internet."
Specifically, these new networks, such as Gab, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Truth Social, are all strongly aligned with specific political blocs or interests. This is important because, once again, it signals the end of the social graph: These networks aren't deriving their value from the unique hybrid information they have about users based on local and digital friendships and engagement patterns. The value, at best, is something closer to a smaller, less lucrative LinkedIn in which a niche network of users (well-off professionals in LinkedIn's case, hyper-online politicos for these new networks) congregate together.
But whereas LinkedIn genuinely can help people find jobs, grow businesses, and so on, these new networks mostly help people self-radicalize over politics and signal their dissent from the "mainstream" social media apps. The former is easy to monetize as a business. The latter is little more than a breeding ground for grifters. All of which meant that the business model that financed much of online media during the social media era needed to change.
These changes raised an obvious question for media creators. If legacy institutions are largely in decline, with a few important exceptions, and if the social media era of blogs and magazines propped up by social media traffic is ending, what comes next?
Some will choose to double down on social media, building their online platforms off of new dissident platforms or trying to salvage what they can from the larger platforms, principally Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. However, making this choice will usually require locking yourself into that platform. So instead of using those platforms to drive traffic to their website, they will increasingly have to actually build their organization on the borrowed turf of social media networks—thus the move to publish whole essays on Twitter, use Twitter spaces, and so on.
In other cases, producers will reason that social media is not as valuable as it once was and will go in search of new ways to build and maintain audiences. The primary way this is being done is through email newsletters, popularized through services like Substack and Buttondown.
The appeal of email newsletters isn't hard to discern. The monetization process is simple. It basically mirrors the business model of older subscription-based business models for media. That model had been broadly abandoned in the internet era. In the social media era especially you could offer "free" content. With a bit of luck, your organization could live off of high traffic to freely distributed content (facilitated by social media) and then drive that audience toward sponsored content and advertisements, which created revenue. But when the social media traffic tapered off (largely because social media networks realized it was more lucrative to lock users on the platform and advertise to them there), the ad revenue for media firms collapsed.
Email allows producers to revert to the older model where readers simply pay for the content producer for their work. That is the biggest benefit. But there are other benefits of email for content producers. The producer owns their audience in a way they don't with social media networks. An email list can be directly accessed and moved from one email platform to another whereas a social media following is still accessed via algorithm and is trapped in that one network.
That being said, as powerful as email has become, it doesn't completely resolve the problem facing media producers. Replacing that revenue for midsized media organizations is a problem we still haven't totally resolved. The email model works well for small producers who don't need a large number of subscribers to be viable and who exclusively produce a single-author email newsletter. The subscription model works well for the large legacy organizations like the Times or Atlantic. But if you're a midsize organization with more costs than a Substack producer and fewer subscriptions than the Times, it's hard to make things work.
Additionally, there is a cost to putting your content behind a paywall. In embracing an older, pre-digital business model you are also taking on the limitations of pre-digital media and limiting the potential reach of your work. After all, not everyone will be able to afford a subscription, especially in an era in which subscription fatigue is a growing problem due to the multiplication of streaming video services, email newsletters, and other subscription-based services. What is the alternative, then? We think it is memberships, as described above.
In other words, what we're about to attempt really is a kind of experiment: Can we mobilize enough people invested in this work that we can afford to keep our content free forever? I don't know the answer to this, but the quality of our readers is such that I'm extremely hopeful.