We learned this week from Kos that the business has lost a significant source of income. This has resulted in a significant shortfall and the announced layoffs to cover the shortfall. Reducing staff will reduce the number of staff articles and creates the danger of a death spiral as seen elsewhere in the media industry. Daily Kos is learning the wrong lesson here. If anything the loss of one particular revenue stream causing this much disruption speaks to the need to diversify revenue streams, not shrink one of the remaining two.
The strength of Daily Kos is a community of diverse professionals and a strong activist core. The power of the previous email list business was that Daily Kos offered a focused group of people likely to contribute to important causes. The burning out of email fundraising by outside parties was fundraising vandalism produced by insane fundraising practices. Instead of retreating here, Daily Kos should pivot.
Daily Kos should invest in and develop multiple related campaign offerings. Daily Kos should cater to small and medium scale democrat campaigns with different levels of assistance in running campaigns. It should have a variety of templates which are easily modified to suit the candidate. This could be templates for campaign speeches, mailings, events, radio scripts and TV graphics. Daily Kos could hire some campaign specialists who would consult for small campaigns with workshops, strategies, how-to materials, and some amount of coaching. Daily Kos already has the series of articles on running a campaign. It’s time to cash in on those. Daily Kos would also then use its current platform to bring attention to and fundraise for those candidates.
Daily Kos could get a specialist on opposition research, something we recently all discovered is currently lacking in democratic circles. With multiple clients, there may be creative new ways to poll and compiling internal polling numbers across campaigns.
Daily Kos could open up its own Mastodon server. Some servers have monthly or yearly fees. A Daily Kos specific server would allow Daily Kos to make changes to its instance of Mastodon’s look and feel. It would allow for moderation of members. DK could run more than one instance one of which could be offering verified accounts for individuals, campaigns and politicians. There may be a way to recapture part of the old email list business through use of the Mastodon server (all above board and with permission of individuals of course).
There are other ideas already being proposed by folks and I’m sure we can brainstorm many more as well. The point is Daily Kos needs to diversify income, not shrink it. But how to fund this?
Kos may have to bite the bullet and turn Daily Kos into a benefit corp and sell shares. By maintaining a 51% majority of stocks he would keep his iron grip on decisions. However, it offers a way for him to both start planning for retirement 20 some years down the road while also turning some of the value of the current company into profit taking now(ish) after the current crisis is resolved. For long term stability, other than Kos, there could be a maximum numbers of stocks any individual could own. When he decides to retire, his shares would be sold off. The Green Bay Packers could be a partial model for this. They have @5 million shares outstanding with a maximum of 200,000 shares for any individual to prevent takeovers. It’s how they have kept the Packers in the tiny media market of Green Bay. They are a non-profit, but the model can be applied to benefit corps.
But really, it’s time to grow, not shrink. Figure out what makes Daily Kos special and what the staff really does well. Then turn those into new revenue streams. Don’t death spiral into oblivion.
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