🔴 Monetizing taste in a newsletter

Today’s guest is Daisy Alioto, CEO of Dirt Media, a portfolio brand that includes two newsletters: Dirt is a daily-ish newsletter about digital pop culture; Prune is a design newsletter acquired last year.

The Dirt audience, as Daisy puts it, is “the person who works in technology that wants to be seen as more culturally advanced than other people that work in technology, and the person that works in culture that wants to be seen as more technology-fluent than other people that work in culture. “

In this issue:

• 📕 The magazine model and the creator economy becoming the taste economy

• 🧬 Understanding how to navigate media’s “primordial soup”

• 📰 Ownership and becoming the platform give publishers a more assured future

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Daisy or watch it on YouTube.

P.P.S. Daisy and I also cohost another weekly podcast called Tasteland.

A magazine is a container for taste

Daisy Alioto, co-founder and CEO of Dirt Media, is more a media founder than she is a creator. Dirt is a daily-ish newsletter about culture, technology, and how these two categories affect each other. Daisy occasionally contributes as a writer — her most recent piece, on attention as the crucial differentiator between humans and AI, is a great read — but she shines as an editor, in curating a roster of exciting writers at all levels of their careers.

A recent piece from Max Blansjaar critiqued ‘honesty’ as a dominant aesthetic value in popular music. It’s an excellent read and a perfect example of what Dirt aims to publish: a rising writer (he’s 21 years old), unabashedly opinionated, and has something to say about both tech and culture (he lambasts “Spotify’s anti-art ideology”).

Dirt is always open to pitches from new writers and generally pays $0.50 per word for pieces between 500-1,000 words.

All creators and all media companies sit in the same primordial soup

Dirt Media isn’t a creator-column style newsletter; it’s a digital magazine, a vessel for specific, opinionated points of view under Daisy’s editorship. If she were a solo operator — a creator in a more traditional sense, or simply continuing to do the audience development work she did freelance before co-founding Dirt — Daisy would be, she says, making a significantly higher salary than she is now. Most months, it costs $10,000 to $15,000 to pay freelancers, infrastructural costs, and, with what’s left over, herself.

Dirt publishing multiple writers instead of just being a mouthpiece for Daisy has the added benefit of creating a thriving community in which people have a real stake, not just the actual contributors but their fans and friends. It’s a stage, not a soapbox.

Relative to any traditional media business, Dirt's overhead is remarkably low. That it only costs this much to run the publication is a huge advantage that she shares with any ambitious media startup operators and creators. Daisy described the media industry as being a primordial soup; inasmuch as any outlet, from solo newsletterists to Dirt to Condé Nast’s portfolio, are competing for scarce attention, especially on digital channels, they are in this soup.

The “soup,” in other words, is the state of uncertainty and risk in which any media business operates. I’m writing this one day into 2025. In the past few weeks, I’ve read hundreds of little predictions about the state of media and the creator economy in 2025. I always enjoy reading this type of thing, but in the same way, I sometimes like putting a $1 six-way parlay on a soccer game. None of us have any sure idea what will happen in 2025, though some can see clearer through the fog; it’s about winning, yes, but all the more, it’s about seeing what percentages of your guesses were correct, a temperature check on your understanding.

In planning and resourcing for a new year, creators and media companies of all sizes must place real bets against those predictions. Planning mitigates the risk; a large media company further mitigates that risk to the extent that they have capital to burn, a protective profit margin, or cash reserve; a small media company like Dirt might lack that protective cash margin, but they can move with the wind as it changes.

Taste is a moat

Last year saw a glut of writing and podcasts about taste and tech. Daisy wrote about “the Taste Economy” back in March 2023, positioning the idea as the next evolution of what we still call the creator economy.

When Daisy uses the word “creator” here, she’s talking about walled-garden creators, the kind whose work exists primarily on algorithm-distribution platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Working for media companies pre-Dirt, she suffered the whiplash so many media companies did during the transition, throughout the 2010s, to a digital-dominant media landscape.

Taste is the new moat, as is ownership; Dirt started on Substack but eventually moved to a custom website, beehiiv as a newsletter CMS, and Discord to host their thriving paid member community. Daisy points to a context collapse across distribution platforms and believes the solution is for publishers to “become the platforms again.” Besides the low overhead, audience and platform ownership are what form that “agility” in the primordial soup; Twitter or whatever platform tweaking the algorithm against your favor means less when you’re more self-reliant. It’s a higher up-front investment (Dirt contracted a firm to build out their website) but quickly pays off.

“My particular experience of audience development,” Daisy says, “was comprised of strategies to be successful in that environment of traffic and scale, or to at least be responsive to. Towards the end, it became how do you build a moat that's not reliant on traffic and scale?” In Dirt, she has dug such a moat.

Follow Daisy on Twitter.
Read and subscribe to Dirt.

🎙️ In the full interview, we cover:

• 👀 Daisy’s background in audience development for other media companies

• 🤝 How Daisy pulls off exciting, original, sold-out collaborations

• 🫂 The responsibilities you have to your audience and team as an editor

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Marrying editorial and commerce; media as streetwear

I’ve seen many newsletters encouraging readers to pay for a subscription, pointing out that the $5 (for example) monthly fee is just the cost of one beer or latte a month; the problem with this is the reader probably doesn’t want to forgo their beverage, as Daisy said:

In other words, a healthy media business includes multiple revenue streams. Daisy mentioned “content, community, and commerce” as three important pillars for any digital media company.

Dirt runs on paid subscriptions, advertising, grants, and merch sales. They don’t have a print edition, but they do have a perfume. And T-shirts and tote bags. These are limited-edition, like a sneaker drop, collaborations with other forward-thinking organizations and creatives, teased for weeks and quickly sold out.

The point is scarcity, the excitement of what’s fleeting. Longtime free subscribers who have never paid for the newsletter often buy the limited products Dirt puts out.

There are also, of course, hats that aren’t elaborate, multi-party collaborative projects. But they’re always different colors, released in seasons, with paid subscribers collectively choosing the color each season. And Dirt has released a few limited print projects, like the 60-page “Nightlife Review”, a physical artifact compiling writings also published in the newsletter.

I’m a paid subscriber to 404 Media, a journalist-owned publication covering tech. They had their-first anniversary party last summer and announced entry would be free for paying subscribers and $30 for everyone else. I’d guess at least a few people became paid subscribers in part to attend the party; the entry fee is already 30% of the price of a $100 year-long subscription.

It’s not about asking people to forgo their beer or latte; it’s about giving them something different and compelling enough to spend money on regardless. They still want that beer; I didn’t go to that 404 party, but I heard there was an open bar.

Last summer, The New York Times published a profile on Daisy and Dirt Media. It’s much more thoroughly reported than this newsletter; give it a read if you’re interested in the full history and vision behind Dirt Media.

Daisy and I have a podcast together called Tasteland. It comes out every Wednesday. In the last two episodes, we answered listener questions, but we usually have guests. If you’ve never listened, I recommend these episodes:

• With Trevor McFedries: How creator payouts on X corrupt the platform, AI as a form of spell-casting, how tech addresses humanity-level problems at the expense of person-level problems.

• With designer David Rudnick: Why Megalopolis gave us the defining cinematic images of the Biden era, AR/VR representing cultural solipsism, the death of album art.

• With Lauryn Menard of Gob: Frictionless consumerist culture, designing for the 22nd century, building innovative consumer products out of experimental biomaterials.