At the end of March, the annual Mega-Conference took place in Austin. It’s not an event you’d call loud or hype-driven, but it offers a rare opportunity to hear what local media in the U.S. is actually living through.
Over the course of a few days, the Membrana Media team held around 25 meetings with publishers. We spoke with small regional newsrooms and with representatives of large media groups.
And if you try to bring all these conversations down to one underlying idea (though it almost feels more accurate to call it a problem), it sounds nearly paradoxical:
“Everyone wants change, but not at any cost.”
Local publishers don’t look passive or indifferent. Quite the opposite: they closely follow new models, discuss AI, try different approaches to subscriptions, and experiment with formats.
But when it comes to monetization, there is a boundary they are reluctant to cross. That boundary is the user experience.
Any product solution that could potentially “disrupt the familiar reading experience” of the reader (even if it is economically justified) triggers internal resistance. Especially from editorial teams, for whom content accessibility remains almost an ethical issue.
That caution exists for a reason: protecting reader trust is core to the business.
At the same time, publishers, while still cautious, are already beginning to accept that not all new approaches “break” the logic of content consumption.
The problem is that caution easily turns into a lens through which decisions are made. And this process is already reflected in the market’s structure.
The story of billionaire David Hoffmann is still fresh. Over just a few years, he has become the owner or co-owner of more than 100 American newspapers.
His position is a return to strong local journalism and a rejection of excessive digital experimentation.
But the very need for “rescue” is already a worrying signal. And, unfortunately, there won’t be enough benefactors for everyone. And if this model becomes the path forward, publishers will have to accept that their own voice may be muted in exchange for the ability to stay afloat.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has already lost around 40% of its newspapers. In many regions, so-called “news deserts” have formed, places where local news has effectively disappeared.
Small and mid-sized players either shut down entirely or become part of larger media groups.
If you imagine the media model as a layered system, then between subscribers and the “non-paying” audience, there is an almost empty space. That space is attention.
Not as an abstract category, but as a measurable resource: one that can be approached carefully and selectively. At the same time, a large part of the audience today remains effectively unmonetized: most users read, leave and generate little to no revenue.
We suggested to participants that it can be monetized in a meaningful way, without turning every contact into a transaction.
Membrana offers publishers an advertising product based on a rewarded model.
The key point is that this is not aggressive extraction but a careful extension of the existing stack.
It won’t replace existing revenue streams, and it shouldn’t.
In practice:
And even with these limitations, the results look unusual for classic digital:
We are not proposing to refuse existing revenue sources. On the contrary, we aim to preserve the models that are proven and familiar to the publisher, while offering a way to start earning from the audience that previously remained under-monetized.
In conversations with publishers during the event, we repeatedly returned to subscriptions as the main and almost non-alternative model. They do work. But they have a natural limitation.
The majority of the audience (up to 80-90%) is not ready to pay for content. And, as years of experimentation show, conversion beyond a certain point has historically been very hard. This is a behavioral factor that is difficult to overturn.
The industry is effectively trying to balance two things that often conflict: maximizing revenue while preserving accessibility and trust.
That’s why the question now is different: What do you do with the part of the audience that remains outside the subscription model?
Ignoring it means giving up a significant share of potential revenue in favor of habit and the underlying anxiety publishers feel about changing anything.
Local media in the U.S. does not look like an industry on the verge of disappearing. But it also doesn’t look like an industry in a phase of growth.
Rather, it is a state of prolonged equilibrium.
We understand that in a stable media environment where any change is perceived as a potential risk, arguments rarely work on their own. It is far more convincing to see results firsthand.
This approach allows you not so much to “believe” in a model as to test how it behaves in real conditions.
For the first three publishers, we are ready to open access to a demo format and show how this model works in practice.
Access can be obtained via the demo page. All you need to do is fill out the form, submit a request and make sure to include the promo code: yellow duck.
After that, our team will carry out a test integration of Rewarded ads under your close supervision, so that you can evaluate its effectiveness in practice.
P.S. The main risk for local media today is not so much making the wrong decisions as making none at all. Because the longer changes are postponed, the higher the likelihood that they will happen anyway but already within someone else’s strategy, structure and rules.
In that sense, the real question is not whether change is needed, but who will be the one to manage it.
