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To write a state of play post for our members, I put together some charts about what we've changed at TPM over the last five years. Like swapping out an airplane engine in flight we basically changed the company's business model. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/okay-le…
2/ I think it's fair to say virtually no media companies share these kinds of internal details. So even if you don't care or know about TPM, the numbers may interest you. Here are trend lines for where our revenues come from. 
3/ For context this is over a period in which both expenses and revenues went up each year, more or less in tandem. More details about that in the piece.
4/ Here's the evolution of our membership program. The 2019 number is projected, not final. One critical advantage we have is that we started growing our membership aggressively in 2014-16. So we we already had a functioning membership system in place when the storm hit.
5/ Many publications were forced to begin from a cold start in 2017 or even 2018. That's very difficult. An additional detail we sell credit subscriptions for people with financial hardship or registered students. Readers purchase those and we assign them to readers in those ...
6/ categories. We don't include that revenue stream under memberships because they're not recurring. They're one-offs. But that makes up a big part of miscellaneous revenues. So if you included those in the membership category the percentage from memberships wld be ...
7/ significantly higher. This program helps us buffer the inherently class/income exclusionary of any membership system while giving our more flush readers a way to support us beyond their membership fee.
8/ As I said at the top, it's basically swapping out your engine in mid-flight. But I'm proud to say we did this not with retrenchment but actually significantly increasing spending on salaries and benefits over this period. TPM's editorial employees formed a union in mid-2018.
9/ We just signed our first collective bargaining agreement in May. But the real increases on the spending side came prior to that. Over this period (2014-2019) salaries across the company went up 29.5%, for editorial employees 35% and for non-management editorial ...
10/ employees 50%. Between 2017 and 2018 we raised spending on benefits 44%. The addition of a 401k match came the year before. We're now in a big push by the end of the year to get to what we believe is a threshold membership to consider the transition complete and ...
11/ overtime. This is who we are and what we're doing. If you a reader, consider subscribing. If you're a subscriber consider upgrading to Prime AF. Thanks and that's all.
