How Taegan Goddard’s Political Blog Gets Up To 10 Million Visitors/Month

Taegan Goddard’s been in the blogging game for a long time, launching his first website before WordPress even existed. 

He went on to create his current website, Political Wire, which has been not only running but growing consistently for the last 25 years—no easy feat.

Taegan has built “the anti-website,” using non-SEO strategies to win over his political junkie readers and convert them into diehard fans while using several different business models.

He has a different approach to how he treats readers and how he thinks about content compared with a “normal blog,” and in this insightful interview he shares it all.

Watch the Full Episode

Taegan talks about creating his first website, Political Insider, and how he went about developing an audience there, eventually leaving that behind to create his current website, Political Wire back in 1999, predating WordPress.

He talks about his inspiration for creating the site, which has been around for 25 years, and his thoughts on AI.

He then talks about building up his site, which gets 3 to 4 million visits monthly on a non-election year and during an election year like this one, he gets up to 10 million visits per month leading up to the election. Along these lines, he shares his biggest challenges and his reader profile.

He talks about the team working with him and how and why he breaks all the SEO rules. Instead, he takes measures to optimize his content for his readers’ second visit and talks about the strategies he developed to create “the anti-website.”

Taegen talks about when he knew his website would be a viable business and the process of getting people to sign up as members, a possibility that’s been available for 9 years, and the advantages of doing so.

When it comes to content creation, Taegen talks about what he tries to achieve each day with his articles and the importance, and how he goes about finding the special nuggets of information his readers love.

As for monetization, his site is monetized with ads and he also has a membership component, which provides subscriber revenue. 

He shares the details of creating the membership program, what’s surprising about his subscriptions, and how he decides what goes into memberships. He shares what he believes to be the key elements of a successful subscription business.

Then he talks about the difference between subscription revenue and advertising revenue and where he earns more money.

Lastly, he talks about social media and political content and offers some very insightful tips for anyone looking to create something similar.

Links & Resources

• Political Wire
• Memberful

Topics Taegan Goddard Talks About

• Venturing into blogging
• His inspiration for creating his site
• His thoughts on AI
• His traffic numbers
• The main challenges he faces
• Who his readers are
• His team
• His thoughts on SEO
• Optimizing for his readers
• Creating his strategy
• Signing up members
• Content creation
• Monetization
• The membership component
• Social media
• Final tips

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today we're joined by Tegan Gutter. Tegan, welcome. Hey Jared. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you here for a number of reasons. Number one, the story you're going to share with us is a long one, a very successful one.

You're going to share with us kind of this journey you're on with your website, your brand. And so we're going to learn a lot from that. But the timing of this interview as well is so well timed out. Um, you commented before we hit record, like you're kind of entering the Superbowl. In terms of this site and its specific timing in the marketplace.

So we also get to hear a story about a site that is going to be somewhat top of mind for a lot of people. Why don't you, um, before we get into it, though, give us a little backstory yourself and tell us about your story leading up to a political wire and the site you have right now.

Taegan: Sure, I'd be happy to.

So, uh, back in the 1990s, Jared, I, um, the mid 1990s, I wrote a book. It took about two and a half years to write the book. The book was published and it came out and my co author, it was, it was published by Simon Schuster. My co author came to me and said, Hey, should we write another book? And I said, you know what I'd like to do?

So put yourself back in 1997. I said, I'd like to start a website. Actually. Um, the internet is at its early, early days and I'd like to study. Our book was about politics. I'd like to start a political website. And so the two of us for a couple of years ran a website called political insider, and we, uh, Started developing an audience.

We developed a business model. It was from day one. It was a for profit website in a time when everyone's still trying to figure out all these models. And anyway, I caught the bug pretty early. I never did write that other book. But after my partner dropped off on political insider, I started political wire back in 1999 is when I started writing.

I registered the domain name, uh, and then built it up and I've been doing it consistently ever since.

Jared: I mean, that is like a journey back. We joke about how people will come on and reference Panda or Penguin right from the mid 2000s, early 2010, 11, 12, that era. But I mean, you started this site back when, like, I mean, you know, I mean,

Taegan: was there even WordPress at the time?

I'm trying to think. No, no, there was the first CMS I used was something called gray matter, which I'm sure you've never heard of, but no, I haven't. It was done by this young guy, um, who basically was the very first person to create server side software that allowed you to have reverse chronological posts.

And when I saw that, because I had been using a program called Microsoft front page, oh, yeah, to push my website out. I have heard as soon as I. As soon as I came up with, as soon as I found out about gray matter, uh, just the, the bells went off. This is exactly what I need to do my site. So political wire was a blog before there were ever blogs.

Um, and gray matter was the first CMS. I moved to movable type after that. And then. You know, eventually to wordpress, which is what it runs on today, but to kind of, you know, date myself and to show you how I started political wire, the inspiration was actually the front page of the paper wall street journal, because when I was back in college on Fridays, every morning, a Friday mornings, I would get the wall street journal and on the right hand column, Was my favorite editorial feature of any newspaper.

It was called Washington wire, and it was a bunch of tidbits about politics that had happened that week and from their Washington bureau. And I found it fascinating. And I just devoured that column every single Friday. I look forward to it all week. And I read it first thing on my way to classes in the morning.

And when I when I came across gray matter, I said, you know, something That is the site that I want to create. I want to create a site that is based on this wall street journal column that ran once a week on Friday mornings in print. And I created a website called political wire. Um, but instead of just focusing on political news coming out of one publications, You know, Washington Bureau.

What I did was I created a website that focused on political news that I found important and interesting from around the country, from multiple publications. And as the internet evolved from social media sites, from, you know, even including Instagram accounts, Facebook posts, you know, Twitter posts, blogs.

So all of a sudden the, the amount of information that I could link to and curate became quite large. And so I also didn't want it completely Washington focused. I wanted it on politics more generally. And so that's why it became political wire. And when the domain name came available in 1999, someone had actually registered it beforehand and then dropped the registration.

I picked it up and political wire was born in 1999. So as we record this, it's coming up on 25 years.

Jared: What can I say? It's 2024 when we record this, so it's got to be hitting a 25 year anniversary, which again is a milestone that very few websites can say they've achieved so far.

Taegan: Well, it's been great fun, you know, and I didn't know how long I was going to actually do it.

Um, I'll be perfectly, perfectly honest with you. I actually started the website and thought that I could eventually automate my way out of a job. Um, and that I could have, you know, I could use RSS feeds. Um, so Dave Weiner, who was the inventor of RSS, um, I, I, I. It was in contact with him on many of these newspapers.

Many of these publications online didn't have RSS feeds at the time. But as soon as I understood RSS technology, I realized, Hey, maybe I can automate so much of what I do. And the reality is, is 25 years later. I have never been more. Convinced that humans are necessary to do a site like political wire. I just don't think that automation or even some of these great AI programs that we have are going to be able to replace what I do.

You know, I say that I should knock on wood because they're getting better every month, but, um, and I use them all the time to, to, to try to help me in my work. But the reality is, is that, um, it takes human judgment and insight sometimes to find out what humans actually really want.

Jared: Yeah, that was, uh, that was a far different world, obviously, in terms of AI, in terms of automation.

Um, that's interesting to hear your thoughts on AI as it relates to the progress that's made. Um, let's stop. Let's do this. Maybe tell us a little bit about the site as it stands right now, what it's doing with anything you're comfortable with in terms of traffic or, or how you've structured that site.

And let's get into the process of how you built it to where it is. I've got a lot of questions that I know you and I've gone back and forth on in preparation for today, but just the constant iteration that obviously has to happen on a website is 25 years old. So so much for us to learn. But let's talk about where it is now to give people some scope and some perspective.

Taegan: Sure. So political wire is a site that if you are interested in politics, it is the place to go where you can find out what's important in politics right now. That's the way I phrase it. So anytime 24 7 if you want to find out what are the important Political stories that are happening right now. It's the place to go.

And over the course of all these years, I've built up a decent audience. So I would say that in an average off year, you know, an off year, meaning there's not a national election, I get between three to 4 million visits per month, you know, fairly consistently. And as we move into a national election year, and as we March towards November, the traffic escalates, you know, Quite a bit.

So the month of September 2024, you know, my traffic, uh, I had more than 5 million visits, I would expect the month of October would be closer to the, you know, eight to 10 million mark in November is always a big month as well. So it's quite a bit of traffic. Um, it's a nice problem to have. Uh, my biggest problem during this time is to keep the, keep the servers running.

Keep everything going. You've got to have a flexible server set up for that sort of environment. No, definitely. And that, that has actually been one of the biggest challenge over the challenges over the years. And one of the great things about a site, you know, that was when I was using movable type as a CMS, um, was that it wrote flat text files to, to the server.

And. Those are a lot easier to serve than WordPress, which every page is dynamically generated. Um, and then caching kind of helps with that problem. But unless you're getting, you know, on the, you know, close to 10 million page views every month. You begin to realize you begin to hear the server creaking as it's trying to keep up with the traffic.

So that's one of the biggest challenges that I have during this time of year. Um, but then the, the challenge I don't have is there's plenty to write about. So, um, you know, there's the reason so many people are coming to a site like mine right now is because there's so much going on in the political world.

So I have a kind of a built in two year cycle every two years. And this has happened really for the last 25 years is that every two years, the traffic marches up towards the November election, then it falls off a bit as we get into the new year and but every single time over the last 25 years, there has been a, it is plateaued.

At a higher level than the previous two years. And so this is the time. This is kind of like the time when people are introduced to political wire. Um, you know, people find out about it. And that is really the key to the key to this site is that I have repeat regular readers. The average reader of my site keeps the site open in a browser tab.

All day long and they come back to the site two, three, four, five times a day, sometimes a dozen times a day, and they just hit refresh to find out what's going on. So when they call my readers, political junkies, it's true. They're true junkies. They want to find out the latest. They want to find out what's happening.

And so when you look at, you know, my statistics, 85 percent of those page views that come are from repeat visitors. They're not from new visitors. So it is one of the secrets to. Uh, two political wire and it's how it's been been such a successful business over the years.

Jared: Yeah, I was going to mention, I mean, you know, a lot of people listening have organic search or SEO background.

I look at your website in an ah refs or one of these kind of platforms, right? And, you know, I see an estimated traffic of 42, 000. Visitors per month. And so then when you get on and tell me you're getting three and four million, obviously, we know age refs for these other sem rushes kind of tools can misreport a little bit, but there's got to be a strong direct traffic component.

So that that that lines up and that makes sense. Um, I want to come back to that. Let me ask you, you know, what does your team look like? Um, because just the nature of being on political wire, seeing the frequency with which you publish. Knowing that there's, we'll call it seasonality. It's really like yearly seasonality or for every four or two years seasonality to the point you made, like what's your team look like?

And, and how do you structure that in terms of what you're trying to do every day?

Taegan: So because my name is on the site, nothing goes up on the site that I don't see. Um, and so while I do have a handful of people who contribute items, um, you know, and find interesting items for me, it is really much more on a, you know, a freelance or contractual basis, uh, than it is a full time basis, but I have plenty of, uh, I have plenty of things to post, um, because it's not just.

It's not just myself or my contributors that help me. It's my readers who send me interesting things. It's journalists who have, you know, a reporter for the New York Times has just written a story in the, in the paper. It's going to be up the next morning. And he sends me an email to let me know because he would like it featured on political wire because he knows I have the type of audience that likes to read.

Political stories. And so I, I really get fed an awful lot of the information. So while I frequently will have over 50 posts a day on the site, um, and really, even though you say it's seasonal, it's remarkable that I don't, I don't think even in the off years, I don't think I have a day, um, Where there's fewer than 30 posts in a day, maybe a weekend day, maybe a holiday sometimes, but it's fairly consistent and granted.

So I kind of break all these rules of SEO, right? I don't have very long articles. I keep them short. Sometimes they're a sentence long, which is. Which is interesting. And that's probably to the point. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to present information as efficiently as possible. I'm much more concerned about my readers becoming regular readers than I am about getting someone from Google to come in, you know, on a drive by visit, and they're there once.

And the reason for that is that they don't really Monetize very well, you know, I can get links to the very famous political website called the drudge report. I can get a link on the drugs report. I can get a million views over the course of 36 hours and, you know, you know, referred from the drugs report.

And they monetize poorly. It's not the greatest traffic in the world. And the next day it's gone. And it's just, you know, it just disappears. And most of those readers never came back. So early on in the development of political wire, what I tried to do is I said, I'm not going to optimize. Yeah. For that one reader who comes from Google or from Twitter or from Pinterest or from some other social network.

So I'm, so if I'm not going to do that, I'm not stuck to some of these basic SEO rules. You know, you don't, you'll also notice that on my posts, I don't have photos on my posts. I've read through some of

Jared: them now. Yeah. Yeah.

Taegan: Yeah. Photos do really well on social networks and they, they increase. Click through, but that's not my goal.

My goal is to get people to the site so that they can see what I have to offer. And what I optimize for is the second visit that they come because if they come once, they may or may not like it. Who knows? But I try to get them if I get them as a second visitor. Then I read, then I haven't, I haven't, uh, then I have an ability to kind of pull them in and make them that regular reader who starts refreshing the website, you know, every three or four hours, you know, in there, you know, while they're at work or while, while they're at home or they keep it, you know, as a, you know, They keep it on their phone regularly.

Those are the type of people that I really want. And so it's different when you optimize for the second reader who comes to your website. The way that you do that is you try to make the website a little unique. One way that I make it unique is, as I said, I don't use photos. So instead what I do is I create a website that.

It is designed to pull people in so that they can get information quickly because that's what my readers want. They tell me, you know, I've done plenty of reader surveys over the years. What they want is they want the, they want the information as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So I leave out extraneous detail.

I have short, concise posts. frequently. Um, it's all text based. Um, if you're, there's two, two sides to the site. There's an advertising based site, which anybody can see. And then there's for subscribers, all the ads drop away. And when all the ads drop away, it becomes an extremely clean presentation of the best information you can get.

And so that's why I optimize for the second visit. Because once I get them for a second visit, I have a really good chance of keeping them at that point. And that's how you can build a business that lasts over 25 years.

Jared: A lot of people listening are going to hear what you're talking about, going to go look at the site, and it's going to hit them as very different than a lot of the websites we see on the internet.

I mean, to your point, I'm sitting here and I stopped scrolling. I'm on page two. All of these are articles you published today. I mean, we're recording. It's only midday. I'm on page two. I probably get to page three before I see an article from yesterday, you know? So to your point, I don't know how many you published today.

You probably know, but it's definitely, I'm at 30 or 40 articles. They're all very short. They're one, two paragraphs. Um, I'm looking at on mobile. It just, it's so clean and simple to go. It reminds me a bit of, Like almost like following a social media account for like a journalist who's kind of hitting you with little tidbits all day How much of what you've created is?

Is the anti website in many ways. And when did you learn that that was the way that you wanted to talk about it? Cause you're clearly very strategic about how you go about this.

Taegan: Yeah. Well, you know, it was, I wish I could say I under, I would understand how the internet would evolve over this period of time, but it really was going back to that front page of the wall street journal back in, you know, 1999, where.

It was the short, concise posts of interesting tidbits that they found that they thought would be interesting to an audience of political junkies. And I knew what I did, what I did, as I mentioned, as I put it on the web, and I brought in the scope to all politics, and I brought in the scope from not just the Wall Street Journal, but.

All publications that I would reference link to. And those links now are very valuable. I get, you know, reporters, as I mentioned, who, who seek links, they want readers of my website when I realized that it was, it was going to be a, a commercial go was back in 2006, which was a pretty exciting midterm election in three of the top political.

Um, election forecasters, you might call them, um, all within a period of two weeks, emailed me asking if I could put their political forecast, their election forecast up on my website. And I realized at that moment that this is going to be a big deal because I have clearly broken through. If these guys, the guys were Charlie Cook, Stu Rothenberg, and Chuck Todd.

And when I realized that they were reading my website every day, that if they wanted access to my audience, that I realized that this was probably going to be a very viable business longterm. So while I had toyed with a variety of business models in those early years, um, That was when I really started to run this thing like a business and not, not really as a hobby and only a couple of years later, uh, I actually quit my day job and went on to do this full time.

Um, but, but I had to, like, as, as I was saying, I had to break some of these rules because I knew, I knew from the beginning that I needed that loyal, dedicated audience who would come back. Over and over again. I didn't want to be on that hamster wheel of just chasing traffic from search engines. Um, I wanted to make sure that I was creating something Pete that readers would, uh, would gravitate towards that they would find it as part of their day.

You know, this podcast. That we're on is the similar thing. You know, we love when this podcast comes out once a week. We love when you're, you know, you and Spencer talk about the news on Fridays. You know, it's something that becomes part of our media diet. And that's what I wanted with political wires. I wanted political wire to become part of the media diet of.

Political junkies. Now, most of these people, they work in politics there. They work on campaigns. They, they, they're staffers to the U. S. Senators. They work in the White House. They, they work, may work in state capitals. They're all over the country, but they, they all have something unique in that they want to know what's going on as quickly as possible.

Um, you know, and, and, and get reliable, good information. And so that's a little bit also where I talk about, I'm not so worried about AI and automation, because sometimes it takes a human to actually read something and determine whether it's a good source or a bad source. You know, AI doesn't necessarily always do that.

And we find that AI hallucinates frequently, you know, on facts and other things like that. And really to keep a readership like I have, you have to be factual. You have to, you have to put up the best information that you can. And then it's something that they. Can rely on, but if you can do that, and if you can, like I said, optimize for that second visit, you have a real chance of building a long term business because, uh, those are the types of readers who are just a little bit more valuable.

So I can talk a little bit about how I actually do that. Cause when you come to the site for the very first time. You're not logged in as a member. So you see this, you see the site with advertising on it, but you'll notice that several times as you scroll down the page, you'll see that there's a chance for you to enter your email address because you may have come from Google, you may have come because a friend referred you, you may have come from a post on Twitter or some other social network.

But once you're there, I want you to at least have the chance. If this, if, if you, if it's, if this is something that you like, put your email in, sign up for my newsletter, and then I get two things from that. The first thing I get from it is I get first party data, which makes my. Advertising, uh, RPMs. Much higher than they otherwise would be.

Um, so when I get readers where I know something about them, you know, it helps my advertising side of my business. So that's the first benefit. The second benefit though, is it puts me, it allows me to put that reader at the top of my marketing funnel, so to speak, so that I now have a chance to convert them, to bring them back to the site.

Time for that 3rd, 4th, 5th time so that they might actually want to subscribe because the subscription part of my business is probably is the biggest part of my business right now. Um, it dwarfs the advertising side right now, and it's because, uh, What people get when they subscribe is they get a much cleaner version, no advertising on the site.

They get exclusive analysis that isn't available elsewhere. Um, they get some other features. Like I have a 24 seven newswire essentially that runs on the site. They get, I've got some licensing deals with a couple of political newsletters where, uh, they get exclusive access to those newsletters. You know, and then there's a variety of features such as, you know, sometimes we have, oh, we have a, uh, a podcast called trial balloon, which is just for subscribers.

It comes out every Friday morning and it's, it's my chance for 20 minutes to get into my reader's ears and to talk to them about what I thought was interesting in politics that week. I do it with a cohost who apps who actually. Is the guy who I wrote the book with all those years ago. So we do this podcast together and, um, and the podcast is extremely good at retaining readers because like you found with this podcast, when you get into somebody's media diet, you know, they, they always, they want to keep subscribing because it becomes part of what they do.

And so anyway, that's what you get is if you get as a member and. You know, when you sign up for membership, um, you know, there are the, all of a sudden the calculations change a little bit because, because these are political junkies and because my retention rate is so high, you know, I have a very high lifetime value for those readers.

You know, they sign up and they, and they become. Members for years and years at this point, I've had the membership, I think he's coming up on nine years at this point and, um, I cannot tell you how many have been members for that entire nine years. It's pretty extraordinary and you know, every one of these election cycles is a chance to do the same thing again, introduce people to the site.

They see the ads, they give me their email address, they get my newsletter, they come back to the site. Hopefully I've done a good job at optimizing that site for repeat visits. And once they get hooked at some point, they'll become a member and get the full benefits and the full experience of being of political wire.

So that's the nuts and bolts behind the business. That's how I, that's how I look at it. And you know, it is a little bit different than a lot of what you talk about on this podcast, like some of these SEO strategies, because I kind of go anti SEO in a way. Okay. Because I'm not optimizing for that one time click through from Google, I'm, I'm, I'm looking a little further ahead.

Jared: It sounds like a true funnel. I mean, you know, a true optimized funnel for what your specific business, your use case, your audience wants. I mean, I think the two big topics. I want to get into here are your content, your creation process, how you do the content in the monetization and you just kind of talk through both of them.

So maybe let's get into the details of each one separately. If we could. I know people are going to be. I know I have a good page long list of questions on the monetization side of things. Let's talk content first. Um, sure. In many ways, as I listen to you talking, you're right. Like we did the news podcast every Friday.

So I've got to kind of come up with ideas. I've got to come up with topics. We're going to talk. We've got to sort and sift and figure out which ones are that week's news. So I'm like a tiny mini version of you. We feature like three articles a week, three topics a week, three news items a week. You feature apparently like 45 a day.

So very mini version, but it reminds me, um, You know, like in the SEO space, Barry Schwartz is a go to for news and a lot of how you talk about it and how you present news on your site has a lot of similarities. They're short articles, quick soundbites, quick snippets, quick little feature stories. What is your, you know, what is your content creation process like?

How do you, uh, Um, go about creating the content for the website on a daily basis. And again, I ask because a lot of people listening know that direct traffic is somewhat of a Holy grail. And so we can just understand a little about what goes into your content creation process. I think it'll help us understand more about maybe some of the things you do to create this direct traffic, this referral traffic basis you've created.

Taegan: Sure. No, I'd be happy to. So I think one of the keys to my success content wise is that I created the site because I wanted it to exist. For me, if this site existed, I might not have ever created it because I wanted a site exactly like this because I am the type of reader who would find a site like this, who would keep it in a web browser all day long and hit refresh.

So, first of all, I kind of get the audience because I am the audience. And so what I try to do literally from the moment I wake up each morning is to try to create an experience every single morning for that reader who is always. Find something interesting or surprising or, you know, educate them something they didn't know about, something they can talk to friends about, something that they can show their own worlds that they're smart about, that they understand politics because it is one of their passions.

And so, That is really my goal every single morning is to create that site that has some surprise or something interesting and that keeps it new. And sometimes you can do that by simply linking to a source that somebody has never heard of. You know, maybe it's a local newspaper, um, that nobody's ever heard of, but there's a really interesting story about a politician who got caught up in a corruption scandal or something like that.

Sometimes, you know, there's plenty as any of your listeners will know. There's plenty of political news on the national media, on the national level. And we'd have all sorts of storylines from, from this election alone about, uh, the, uh, Donald Trump talking about eating pets in a town in Ohio. And, you know, um, I mean, anytime it, let's just say it never gets boring.

So there's always, there's always something that is, that is at least new or interesting that you can't see. So that's the first thing that I try to do. But in terms of how I actually compile it and how I, people are kind of sometimes amazed that they can come to political where, and they find out about things before they're anywhere else.

And frequently a lot of what I like to do is I like to highlight a story that might take place somewhere across the United States. And it's not in the New York times until 48 hours later. Um, but I found it first in a local newspaper somewhere. And the way that I do that is I have a variety of systems that I've kind of, I'm a amateur programmer at best, but I was able to put together a few backend systems, which had, you know, again, they, they started based on RSS feeds and they evolved when I, you know, looking to social networks and taking, you know, taking cues from social networks about what types of short stories are being shared by people who I think are legitimate or good people to follow.

And I kind of put that all into a. You know, into a program and try to begin to show at least myself, here are things you should go take a look at. And so then I go read the stories. And so I have a bunch of stories, you know, which, um, my own very, uh, uh, amateur AI, you know, gives me an idea of what, what I, what are the most important stories of that day.

And I kind of cycle through them and I try to read them. And this is the part where I think the human judgment become comes in sometimes for me and for my readers. The interesting fact, these are people who know about politics, so they don't really need the electoral college explained to them. They don't really need to know some of these details about politics, but what they do need to know is sometimes what they do want to know is it's not the lead of the story in the Washington post or the LA times or the Chicago tribune.

Sometimes it's the eighth paragraph. That is, you know, most readers don't even get to because they read the headline, they read the beginning of the story, and they don't make it to the eighth paragraph where there's some really interesting nugget that I know my audience will kind of devour. And so that's the type of thing where I think human judgment matters.

And I, I really love when I find those because, um, you know, every time I put that up. I know that that's giving my readers that thing that they know they can't get elsewhere that they know they will keep coming back. And so while a lot of people have, you know, have suggested that political news is a commodity and you can get so much political news from everywhere, that's very true.

But there is some value in editorial judgment of putting together what I think is important. And because I am one of the readers. Of my site. I am that I fit the same profile. You know, I know what they want. I know that I know what will, I know what will cause them to keep coming back, which as I've said from the beginning, that's always been my goal is put something together, put an editorial product together that keeps them coming back.

Jared: Well, to some degree, if I were to lean into that even more, you're almost like you're, you're a curator of the political news. There's, you've almost tapped into the fact there's so much political news. Yeah. That it's almost overwhelming for a lot of people. I'm sure there's so many sources and there's so much stuff that and again, we're guilty of this in the SEO world.

You know, we've got to write that article on the electoral college. We've got to write that article and we've got to tease every single article that we write with this overview where the meat potatoes is 810 paragraphs down to some degree. You're the curator. And you've actually amassed a large audience because they look to you as the curator, the person who sifts through all the political news out there that's overwhelming otherwise, and gives them almost a curated newsfeed.

Taegan: Yeah, no, that's exactly it. So, you know, back in the day when I first started this site, you know, I would read the New York Times every morning and what I'm relying on there as I'm relying on the New York Times to Uh, to write story to report and write stories and then an editor to decide which ones are important and the way that they were placed in these days back on a paper newspaper or the way that they're placed on their website to kind of showing some sort of editorial judgment about what is important.

Well, that's great. But, you know, the reality is, is that's one source of information, just the New York times, which, you know, is one of the great newspapers in the world, but it's not perfect. Sometimes it gets things wrong. Sometimes there's, you know, there's issues with it. But what I, what I like to do is I like to, I like to get it.

All these sources, I like to, I go to the Washington Post, I go to the Wall Street Journal, I go to the Dallas Morning News, you know, I go to the San Francisco Chronicle, you know, I take a look at newspapers all over the country because there are interesting political stories that are happening all across this country and sometimes they don't become national stories for a day or two later, um, you know, sometimes they never become national stories.

Sometimes I put them up and only my readers really care about them. But frequently they become national stories a day or two later. And what I love about that is that political wire readers feel like they knew that before other people. And, you know, the, the value of the information, the value of being a political wire reader becomes very apparent to you.

Um, and so, you know, again, if that's probably the second thing that I optimize on, I optimize for that, for that second visit to the site, but then I also optimize for the fact that I want them to feel. special every time that they read this, that there's something, something special. And so even though political news is a commodity, it's not a commodity for my readership.

My readership really does care about some of the nitty gritty power struggles that happen in city hall or in state capitals around the country. They want to understand that because they know that it makes a difference. They know that it changes people's lives. They Who has power changes the public policies that are implemented in their area.

And that's what they really care about. So, um, uh, anyway, that's. That, that's kind of the, uh, that's what I'm trying to do when I put that together.

Jared: No, I mean, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, it's funny. I went into this conversation. I'm going, we're going to talk about how to get direct traffic. Like how, how do we do this?

And I feel like it's, it's, it's crystal clear to me now. Like the process you set up, the way that you treat your readers, the way you think about content. It is so different from a lot of the other interviews we've done. And yet it makes so much sense. Uh, so much sense. Um, I want to make sure we have time to talk about the, the kind of the monetization angles that you pursue, because they dovetail perfectly with the content that you're, that you're creating, you, you, you teased it.

You told us you have an ad, uh, an ad focus site, right? So it's monetized by ads, but then you also have a membership component. The membership is offered to people and you get a lot of benefits if you become a member. Um, I When did you discover or implement this membership model? What led you to try that out?

And how was it at first? Is this something that's been successful out of the gate or that you've really had to work hard? And make a lot of tweaks to, to get it to where it's at now.

Taegan: Does that, that's a great question. I actually, I actually had a false start on my first, first attempt at membership or it wasn't called membership at the time, but the first attempt at subscription revenue, I created what was a kind of a sidecar to political wire, which was a newsletter that I wanted paying, you know, paying subscribers to subscribe to.

And. I found that it didn't work that well. And the reason it didn't work that well was because political wire readers were used to getting their political information in the political wire feed. They didn't want a separate email sent to them. That's not, that wasn't interesting to them. They just wanted, if I had something interesting to write, it had to go up in the feed.

And. At the time, I didn't really have the technology possible to do that. And to put a paywall up just on a, just on a post by post basis. It wasn't very simple to do. It wasn't very simple to take credit card payments. And so what happened is about a year, a little over a year later, um, Memberful came, you know, launched.

And, um, As soon as I saw Memberful, I was like, Oh, This is exactly the type of software that I need. It was easy to integrate on WordPress. It was very simple for me to, um, you know, set up various membership plans. It was very simple for me to put up paywalls on my site. In fact, I put the entire software up on my site, created the membership plan in about 90 minutes.

And it took me 90 minutes to do. Um, I remember this. vividly because I was picking up my son from college the night before Thanksgiving because he had forgotten to get a ride back. So I drove up to his school. Um, and I stayed in a hotel that night. I was going to pick him up the next morning. And that night in the hotel room, I installed Memberful.

I set the membership up and I had thought about it on the entire drive on the way up to this hotel and I pressed publish and I launched it. I closed my laptop and I went to bed in the next morning. I had dozens and dozens of new members. And from that point on, I never really looked back. It became, it was a hit from the very beginning because essentially what I was doing is I was providing my most loyal readers, the ones who would have supported the site anyway, if given a chance, because it became such an important part of their day.

It gave them the ability to get something else and to get something more. And like I said, when you drop the ads. For members, it gives them an even cleaner reading experience than they got before they get exclusive analysis. I used to do freelance writing for places like the week magazine or for, um, for the daily beast.

I stopped doing that because I only write now for my members. Um, before I thought, Whoa, it'd be really good to get your, to get a link and some other publication to help drive traffic back to you. But the reality is, is that I find when I put. My own analysis up people who have become a regular reader of the free site.

They want to know what I think. What do I, you know, here's the, here's a guy who, whose site I visited for the last four months and they want to find out. So what is he thinking about this vice presidential debate tonight? Well, he's got a piece on it, but I have to be a member to subscribe. And so there's a monthly option.

There's an annual option, but one of the great surprises of this membership is that the vast majority, I would say over 80%. Of my members choose the annual option because they're, they're just all in. And many of the monthly members all of a sudden realized that, you know, they upgrade to an annual membership because it's a little cheaper, but they realize very soon that this is something that they're not going to, uh, they're not going to let their subscription lapse.

Jared: How did you determine how have you arrived today at what goes into the membership versus what doesn't? Cause I think that's the tricky balance, right? Getting people like, you want to have a site that is attractive. For people to come and get to know you and your brand and has enough value that they feel like they're getting something, but also you don't want to give away everything to the point where your membership doesn't have value to it or doesn't have as much value as it possibly could.

And I see you giving away a ton of value. Like I can access a 30 or 40 or 50 articles you published today alone. It's only lunchtime. I can access. That for free. I'm not a member, so I don't know what you have behind that. You've, you've hinted at it a bit, but how'd you land on what goes into memberships?

And, and I'm just so curious to hear the details about that.

Taegan: So I started with my own analysis. I, like I said, I used to write for all the other publications kind of in a way to promote political wire. Now I simply write for my readers. Um, and so that's one thing. So that, that became the core of the membership offering.

So, you know, my take on a debate, what happened at the state of the union address. You know, what's happening in a Senate primary in a key state, what's happening in the seven battleground states in the presidential election. Here's my take this morning based upon what's happening in the world. And everything I write is well sourced with links to, you know, to articles that have come out, but that that's kind of the core of the membership offering.

But from, from that point on, what I realized was The key to the key to a successful membership or subscription business is that you want to create a bundle of things that are interesting. And the important thing is, don't worry if not everything is interesting to everybody. So my podcast, Trial Balloon, is part of the bundle that I offer to members.

Not all of my readers are podcast listeners. Um, Why? I don't know. They should be because podcasts are awesome, but, um, not all of them are, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the ones who are interested in podcasts in the ones who become regular listeners to trial balloon when it drops every Friday morning, they're much less likely to let their membership laps because they like listening to this.

There's another feature that I have for members, which is a weekly news quiz, and it's also on Fridays. And so it's These are political junkies. These are people who are refreshing political wire all week long. And now all of a sudden I come up with eight questions to ask them. Do they, were they really paying attention to the news?

How, you know, these are people who pride themselves on knowing more than their friends and family about politics. And so I give them the weekly news quiz. Now, is that something that every. Reader likes or wants it's not, but enough of them are and enough of them look forward to it and like sharing their results each week with the other readers that it becomes just an important thing.

And then I offer some other premium content, you know, like, uh, these. I've got some licensing deals with a couple of these old school political forecasting newsletters and that's useful and people get that as part of the bundle. And so I kind of pay for that separately, but give it to them at my cost, um, as part of the membership.

Uh, so it's actually a much better deal for them in a way. Um, and then I offer some other features to the site. So like I said, no advertising on the site, but also there's a page that is extremely popular, which is. You know, it's based on RSS, but what it is is it's a trending news page that shows you that regularly scans over the course of, you know, every 10 minutes, 24 7, um, several dozen political news sources, and it populates the headlines.

So that you can see what is happening and what people are writing about all over, all over the country from a wide variety of sources. And so that becomes a pretty popular page. So if I'm not posting enough articles for you that day, you know, Jared at 45 articles already today, isn't enough for you. You can go there and you can even get more if you want.

Um, but anyway, you know, and, and is that a feature that everyone wants? It's not, but the key to a subscription business is to. It is to bundle together of things that become some of them become must haves, you know, fortunately, when I survey my audience and I say, what are the, what are the things you value most?

Fortunately, my readers overwhelmed, overwhelmingly want my analysis. That's what they subscribe for. So that's gratifying. I'm glad that I'm providing something that they want, but I know that these other things that I put in the membership are also useful from a business point of view. And it just keeps them, it makes the membership a lot stickier.

And so, you know, having a low churn rate is really the key to subscription business. And because you, you know, it is much harder. To, um, find a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. You know, if you've, if you've got an existing customer who's taken out their credit card and who's signed up for an annual subscription, it is much easier to convince them that they should do it again next year than it is to find a brand new one.

And so the ones I have, I'd like to keep, and I've been very fortunate to keep the vast majority of them.

Jared: Um, You had alluded to it. Well, I mean, just to recap, so we have on the front end on the non member side of things, uh, 34 million visitors a month. That's monetized with, um, with Mediavine ads. I can see you also have this membership component and that's, uh, you say most people kind of end up going for the annual subscription.

Like, Just in terms of high level revenue, what's, what's the bigger of the, of the pots, the, the, the front end ad revenue model, the more, um, membership focused, uh, model.

Taegan: So it's a great question. And actually I realized I didn't answer a previous question of yours, which is why did I create the membership?

And one of the reasons why I did was to flatten out the variations in the digital ad revenue. And so as you, as we all learned, you know, some of us quite harshly during the early. Weeks of the pandemic is that digital advertising can fluctuate dramatically from time to time and throughout the year. And so having now I started the membership well before that, but a membership based revenue stream is much more predictable, particularly if you have a low churn rate.

Um, then advertising revenue now, advertising revenue is awesome. I would never want to lose it. And I'm a big, big fan of Mediavine. I think they do an excellent job at helping us monetize our sites. But, um, but, but it, you know, just due to the nature of digital ads, things change and, you know, I just didn't want to be subject to that one vault, more volatile stream of revenue.

So I wanted to pair it with something that was much more predictable. Interestingly enough, they, they both work very well together because it allows me to provide a free side of the site and the free side of the site, you know, getting the 4 million visitors a month. Those are visitors that I can convert into paying members, you know, over time.

And so the idea, and it also, the ads allow me to put more. On the other side of the paywall. So I don't, I don't have to pay wall stuff because I, you know, it, it becomes a something to draw new readers in and to make them regular readers. And eventually they want to sign up for membership. So, um, advertising plays a key part of the overall business strategy, but right now, um, while for, for a long time, it was about 50, 50, the subscription revenue is up significantly at this point.

And I think this is one of the benefits. Of this election year is people who really want the latest political analysis. Um, they sign up for that subscription, um, that I have, and which is, which is fantastic because I'm very confident once they sign up, they're going to want to keep being members because it really is a better experience.

It's the full experience of political wire. So if you like the free experience, you're going to love the, the, the, the experience when you actually pay for a membership.

Jared: I have so many questions I want to ask. I'm starting to have to realize I got to pick and choose here because we're coming to the end.

Um, I want to ask about social, uh, we haven't talked about social is that I would imagine your content would, would maybe do well on social. Like, do you, do you, um, do you, do you have a social component to your, your website and your brand? And if so, like what, what have you seen work or not work there?

Taegan: So this is something with political content.

This is something has changed over the years. Um, and so political content can be controversial. Um, we, we see this election cycle versus the 2016 cycle. Um, you see, uh, companies like Metta with Facebook, Instagram, and threads. Dramatically downplaying political content. They don't want to promote it. It becomes very hard on a, on a service like threads to get much in engagement or much interaction.

Even though I have a lot of followers over on threads, it's very hard to get any traction over there like Twitter was back in the day, Twitter, however, has kind of, you know, or X as they call it today has kind of fallen apart. Um, and while it's still. A hotbed for political activity. It's not necessarily the, the audience that I necessarily need.

I don't really engage in conspiracy theories and, you know, and, you know, racist rants and things like this that you frequently see Twitter. Twitter has become an ugly place right now. Um, and so it doesn't, you know, I don't really find the traction that I used to. If I, if you go back to the early 2010s, uh, Twitter was really unbeatable.

It was a fantastic source. Of new readers, um, and all of that. So the social networks aren't that great to be perfectly honest. Um, right now it's not really the best place to, you know, I've actually interesting, I've had some traction on blue sky, um, which has been interesting, but you know, here, here, once again, it becomes a lot harder from my perspective.

If you're, if you're. If you're trying to maintain content on threads and Twitter and blue sky, it becomes a little bit much and you have to kind of pick and choose. And so it's not really, I'm finding it's not necessarily worth the effort. Facebook has never been very good for me. You know, and again, it's pretty bad right now because Facebook has made a company decision to downplay political content, um, certainly for this cycle.

Um, and I think it's working for them. So I would not expect that necessarily to come back. Um, so social networks, um, they've been good at times right now. I can't say it's a main focus of mine.

Jared: Another reason or benefit of having direct traffic and referral traffic as your, uh, your primary traffic channel, you don't have to worry as much about the ebbs and flows of your right.

Some very like just fundamental shifts in the way social media and politics kind of merge together in society. Um, let me give you this kind of broad statement to help. Maybe bring us to a close here. It's very open ended on purpose. A lot of people listening probably have their mind spinning a bit because they've gone about creating content, publishing content, creating a brand, create a website, maybe in a very different way, or at least certain aspects have been very different.

I mean, it's no secret that there's stories that come out every day that kind of news is dying off, right? And that, um, you know, these, these Big outstanding papers that have been there for so long, New York Times, like all of them are hurting in terms of revenue in terms of readership and all that. Yet you're thriving.

You're succeeding. We've been through a lot of the reasons why that is. But how does somebody who's listening to this kind of like what tips do you have for people to, uh, Try to adopt more of the mindset that you've taken. Um, and again, it's an open ended question on purpose. There's so many people who maybe are worried about their business model because they're relying too heavy on social or relying too much on SEO or relying on these other traffic sources that you haven't historically relied on.

Like, what tips do you have for people to start getting outside of their comfort zone and, you know, kind of adopting more of the mentality you brought?

Taegan: Well, that's that's a great question, Jared. Um, I think that I'll tell you, I'll tell you a little story. So for me, it's all about expense, the expense side, keeping your expenses low.

And the biggest problem with the news media is that the expenses grow beyond the point where advertising and subscription can support it. I mean, it's pretty simple economics. Um, and. If you keep your expenses low, I think you can have a very viable and sensible business. And for me, I can keep my expenses low because I'm relying on so many other sources of information.

And the great secret here is I may Excerpt a paragraph or two from the New York times. They want that link. And I know they want that link because their PR people are emailing me all day long with their stories, with stories they want me to feature. And the same is true for every newspaper in this country.

They want that traffic back to their website. And so they allow me to use their content. Um, I mean, what I do is I use it under fair use. I do a brief excerpt of something that I think is interesting, but I always link back to them. And so those those links have real value for these for these news organizations.

But I'll use an anecdote, but this is back, uh, This is probably back to like 15, 15, you know, 14, 15 years ago. Um, there was a situation where Senator Evan Bai, the Senator from Indiana had given an interview to the Indianapolis Star and he announced his resignation. He was stepping down from the Senate.

And this was kind of a shock because people had always viewed him as a future presidential candidate. And it was pretty shocking that he had stepped down. Well, uh, one of the websites that I had a partnership with in Washington, D C called roll call, which is a Capitol Hill newspaper, you know, very niche for the, for the Capitol Hill audience.

I had a partnership with them and I was waiting for them to run a story about this, the fact that Evan Bayh was resigning. The entire interview was up in the Indianapolis star. I had it. Immediately on political wire, I had one sentence with a link to his interview so that anybody who wanted to get the full story could go read the interview.

Instead, what happened with roll call and what happened with all of the other major news organizations is they spent resources writing the story about how Evan Bayh was stepping down from the Senate, even though the story was in the interview with that was one link away to the Indianapolis star. I don't rewrite stories.

Because the link is what my readers want. They want the link to the source that says, Oh, he's, he, he, this is where the interview was published. They, they get the headline from me. They get a little bit of description and analysis, but then they get the link to that story. That's how I keep expenses low. I don't rewrite stories that don't need to be rewritten.

Um, you know, the news was that he was resigning and really all it required was a link back to that interview where he said, Hey, He was resigning and the reasons why instead, what happens is so many of these organizations, these news organizations try to rewrite news so that it's their own. And that's the mindset that they have.

And sometimes it is their own. When, when the Washington post has an expose about a member of Congress, sometimes they are the source for that information. They have put the legwork in and they have reported the story. And it's fantastic when they do that. And I always link to them. Um, But you don't need to then rewrite somebody else's story just so that somehow you capture the page view.

I've never believed in that. And that's unfortunately so many of these web based advertising businesses, they worry too much about capturing the page view instead of capturing the reader. And what I try to do is capture the reader because once that reader realizes he can get political information. From me as efficiently as possible here.

She's going to come back to my site the next day and the next day and the next day. And that's much more valuable to any that's much more valuable to me than any page view that I might get.

Jared: You have optimized so well for both the front end experience. your avatar of your reader, but also how you manage it on the back end and how it's structured in a way that can be done by you.

And like you said, a few contractors, basically it's, it's really an amazing juxtaposition.

Taegan: Well, anyway, thank you, Jared. It's been, it's been great fun. And the best fun about doing this as a business is I, for the last 16 years where I have done this as my full time job. Um, it has never felt like a job. I mean, I wake up every morning.

I never tire of it. I always find it interesting. And the other thing, the reason I like talking about the business side with, uh, with you is that in many ways, that's the most exciting part about the business. I love the politics. But digital media is such an interesting, um, place to do business. The rules are constantly changing.

The models are constantly changing. It's exciting. You have to stay up with things. You know, there's opportunities that pop up. I know you and, um, Spencer talk about them all the time on your podcast. And that's just exciting. It's exciting to be a part of. So, um, Extremely lucky to have stumbled into this 25 years ago.

Jared: Well, what a treat to have you on and what a fantastic hour we got to spend with you. Thank you so much for sharing so much. Thanks for joining us, especially during a very busy time for you. Let's be clear. This is a listeners are going to be hearing this right on the eve of, you know, the biggest period in, in a four year kind of election cycle.

So thank you for, for taking the time out to join us. We've talked about political wire, obviously, but, but where can people kind of follow along with what you have going on? If, if beyond there,

Taegan: yeah, the easiest place is political wire. com. Um, I'm also on X as at political wire, uh, as well as the other similar social networks.

Um, the best place is really just to come to political wire. I hope you become a reader and, uh, and possibly a subscriber. But, uh, but anyway, that's where to find me. So if you love politics, I think you'll love political war. But Jared, I love digital media and I love, uh, the niche pursuits podcast. So thanks for having me.

Jared: Thanks for coming. Taking, it's been great to have you until we talk again next time. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you, sir. That was great. An hour flew by. I only got to cross out a few of my questions. It's okay though.

Taegan: Good. Good. I'm glad. I'm glad you found it interesting. So it was wonderful. It's a different story than, than a lot of the people that you probably have on.

I did find the one that you did, uh, A few weeks back on medium fascinating.

Jared: Yeah, yeah,

Taegan: that's something, that's something I'm looking to at some point. Yeah, I sent you over those, um, those, the couple of, yeah, I need a side hustle.

Jared: They're on my list to look into. I've put them on my list. I didn't respond to that email because I realized now, because we were talking about the podcast interview, but they're on my list to kind of look into and dive into.

Taegan: I mean, you might find them interesting or not, but, uh, but it is, that's the, one of the reasons why I love what you and Spencer do on Fridays is I love those. Those like little projects that you, you, you see a little opportunity and then you play around and see if it works. And sometimes it works great and you know, sometimes not so much, but I do the exact same thing.

So I always have, I always have a half dozen side hustles going.

Yeah, I had this one, one I sent you, which is electoralvotemap. com and what it is, is an interactive electoral map. And so you can imagine right now it's become very popular, you know, people are getting on it. So I, I invested a thousand dollars. With a programmer to develop an interactive map and it's a little bit different because an electoral map is different.

There's different rules and things like this. So, you know, I had to get a programmer to do it for me. It was beyond my skill set. Um, I spent a couple thousand dollars on freelance writers, um, to just get a little SEO traction. And then I just kind of let it ride. And I spent 3, 000 on the site. It made in this first, first year, uh, made over 60, 000.

And I have done nothing to it since then, unfortunately, except adjust the electoral map because of the census. And I am, it looks like I am headed to beat that this year. And it's one of these things where it doesn't, you know, it gets a few thousand, you know, readers, you know, every week during the, uh.

During the off years and in a year, like, and you know, and this month, uh, this, this month I'll get over, over 2, 3 million readers. So it's like, just want to, it's just one of those things where it's like, you know, that's a nice little side hustle. It's fun. So anyway, I thought I'd share that with you, but

yeah.

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