The Daily Maverick deliberately rejected a paywall in favour of a membership model, a choice that now generates nearly half the publisher’s revenue while reshaping how its product and technology teams operate.

During last week’s INMA Africa Newsroom & Tech Summit, Julia Harris, head of reader revenue at South African news company, said the decision was made because “access to the truth shouldn't be reserved only for those who can afford to pay for it.”

From boulder-pushing to a business vision

The Daily Maverick, founded in 2009 and best known for investigative journalism, spent nine years “pushing a boulder uphill” before landing on a sustainable model, Harris said.

Pageviews were never the core concern, she said, but “making payroll each month was a struggle” because of a threefold revenue problem: a broken digital advertising model, an exhausted pool of friends and family willing to donate, and a philosophical opposition to erecting a paywall.

Solving that problem required more than a new revenue mechanism, she said. It demanded a shift in thinking, anchored by a clear business vision to first survive and then thrive, aligned with an editorial mission “to defend truth” and supported by a nimble, test-and-iterate approach to product development.

Membership over subscription

The result was the Maverick Insider membership programme. 

Harris drew a sharp distinction between membership and subscription: 

• Subscriptions are transactional. A reader sees an article, pays, and thatTs the relationship.

• A membership builds a slower, more emotional connection, meaning it typically takes longer to convert readers into paying supporters. 

Membership at Daily Maverick starts at about US$3 a month, with no ceiling on how much a member can contribute. The data shows membership drives markedly higher retention than subscription models, since members see themselves as part of a community rather than as customers of a product, Harris said.

The programme launched as a minimum viable product, built on a simple WordPress plugin that took two days to set up. The case illustrates a broader lesson, Harris said: “Don’t indulge the endless pursuit of perfection, just jump in and launch it.” 

Maverick Insider now accounts for nearly half of the organisation’s revenue.

Testing, tracking, understanding the audience

Harris credited early success to testing the waters with once-off donations, then engaging directly with those initial donors to learn from them, a philosophy of surveying, gathering data, and making decisions from it that has continued ever since.

The team adopted a “test, track, improve, and scale” mantra, running many experiments — most of which failed — but keeping and scaling what worked.

Citing a line from the Membership Puzzle Project, Harris said it captures the philosophy behind Daily Maverick’s approach: “Subscribers pay their money to get access to a product. Members join a cause and participate because they believe in it.” 

Three reasons consistently dominate the why for readers becoming and remaining Maverick Insiders, Harris said: supporting independent journalism and investigations, keeping Daily Maverick sustainable, and contributing to South Africa’s democracy.

Purpose, engagement, sense of belonging

Mission-driven support is the foundation of Daily Maverick’s retention strategy, which rests on the belief that a sense of belonging, created by combining purpose with engagement, drives long-term retention, Harris said.

Engagement begins with an eight-step onboarding journey that includes letters from Harris herself, the CEO, and the editor-in-chief, information on membership benefits, a heavy emphasis on newsletters, and a three-month survey to check in on members. 

Webinars and events give members a chance to engage directly with the journalism, and customer support, even when it starts from a complaint, is treated as an opportunity to show “there are humans behind the journalism.” Members also receive a biweekly behind-the-scenes newsletter available only to Maverick Insiders.

Building community through Daily Maverick Connect

The company’s hypothesis was that consuming difficult news in a country “not short on bad news” can leave readers feeling isolated and that this desperation “fuels a need to be part of something positive.” 

The response was Daily Maverick Connect (DMC), an online community platform where readers engage with staff and with each other, shifting the relationship from one-directional communication to a more complete exchange.

Members have used DMC to suggest story topics and provide tip-offs that journalists have turned into published journalism, Harris said.

A related initiative, the Maverick Insider Expert Database, lets members offer their professional expertise for use as commentary or context in articles — Harris cited an example of two chartered accountants who are members providing important context for one of the outlet’s investigations. 

The organisation has also recruited from within its community, including comment moderators and its in-house counsel, who was initially a member.

Building tech for a trust-based model without a paywall

This trust-based community fundamentally shapes how Daily Maverick approaches product and technology, Harris said, because most subscription businesses rely on a single enforcement mechanism: Stop paying, lose access. 

Without a paywall, she said, every system that would normally lean on that mechanism has to be rebuilt to function without it.

She illustrated this with the problem of failed payments. On a platform like Netflix, a failed payment breaks the product immediately, motivating the user to fix it themselves. At Daily Maverick, when a membership expires or a payment fails, “nothing happens,” the site keeps working, newsletters keep arriving, and many readers do not even realise they have stopped paying. 

The company once had roughly one in seven Insiders with failed payments, representing about 14% of revenue. And because this was involuntary churn, recovery had to be run entirely in-house: custom-designed dunning sequences, code changes to optimize retry timing on recharges, and continuous work with payment providers given weaknesses in the South African payment ecosystem. 

“If you don’t withhold your product, you have to absorb the operational cost of recovery yourself,” she said, calling payment infrastructure one of the most time-consuming, highly leveraged areas her technical team works on.

A second challenge is acquisition without the natural prompt a paywall provides. Because Daily Maverick cannot rely on an “engaged moment” at a paywall to ask for support, Harris said every ask draws on limited reader goodwill, requiring a careful balancing act. 

The company built an in-house messaging tool called Mavio, kept deliberately separate from its CMS, so readers are targeted based on their relationship with Daily Maverick rather than the specific article they are reading.

Most engineering effort goes into suppression, deciding who sees a message, how often, and after which actions, to avoid the user fatigue that can come from being “bombarded” and to optimise for the long-term relationship rather than any single impression.

Because off-the-shelf tools generally assume a subscription funnel built around a paywall, Harris said Daily Maverick built its own first-party engagement layer, RevEngine, which tracks reading behaviour and sessions with server-side authentication to identify readers approaching the point of supporting the outlet, including propensity-to-subscribe modeling. 

“If the thing that drives your revenue is proprietary to your model, you will end up building it,” she said, crediting her technical team for developing much of this infrastructure in-house.

One unresolved challenge, Harris said, is the ongoing tension between ad tech and membership tech, since Daily Maverick still runs advertising alongside membership messaging on the same pages and every ad unit draws on the same reader goodwill that membership asks for. Members can turn off ads, which helps, but the underlying tension between the two revenue lines persists.

Diversified revenue as the real lesson

Responding to an audience question about sustaining newsrooms, Harris said revenue diversification, not a single “silver bullet,” has been key to Daily Maverick’s stability. 

While Maverick Insider accounts for nearly 50% of revenue, the company also relies on advertising revenue, philanthropy, and grants, and Harris said the combination of the three is what makes the model sustainable. 

Despite the organisation’s progress since 2018, success at Daily Maverick “is never straightforward” and “not linear,” whether measured through revenue, community engagement, or technology development. “Success is always a little bit messy,” she said. 

Banner photo: Adobe stock by izzetugutmen.

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