🔴 On trust as a business model

By Natalia Pérez-González

Trust doesn't appear on a balance sheet, but it functions like capital.

Like capital, it accumulates through consistent, repeated deposits, pays dividends in the form of loyalty, and can be lost in a single, careless withdrawal.

Trust, in the long term, is a creator’s most valuable asset. Trust is the connective tissue between a creator and their audience, especially when the content exchanged between the two parties is defined by a strong set of values.

In 2006, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, published "1000 True Fans," an essay often cited by those of us working in the creator economy. He theorizes that a creator doesn't need millions of followers to make a sustainable living, just a core group of people who care enough to pay.

"A true fan," Kevin wrote, "will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the hardback and paperback and Audible versions of your book." A thousand people paying $100 a year is $100,000 — enough for a decent life, if not to build a fortune.

Matt Kiser, our guest on the podcast earlier this week and creator of the political news digest WTF Just Happened Today? (WTFJHT), brought up Kelly’s essay in our conversation, unprompted. What the essay posits — and what the last few years have confirmed — is that the contribution-based model is not a charity play, but a trust play.

Donations, financial contributions are expressions of a worldview — small financial acts that state your beliefs, what you want to preserve, the type of world you want to inhabit.

Matt and Rachel Meade Smith — another recent Spotlight guest — have both built their newsletter businesses around voluntary contributions. For Matt, it's the only revenue source. For Rachel, it's the primary among a few.

This model works for them because their audiences are defined by shared, prosocial value systems. Their readers are engaged consumers, people who have already decided that how they spend their money says something about who they are and shapes the world they wish to live in.

Rachel's weekly newsletter, Words of Mouth, sees her curate a list of jobs, residencies, and fellowships at mission-driven organizations. It serves to match values-driven people with values-driven work.

"The quality of people…" she carefully describes her audience, "They are good people who want to spend their time and money on things that align with their values." Becoming a Words of Mouth patron is, for many readers, a statement about who they are — creative, civic-minded, working toward something.

Matt's audience is similar in how defined it is by shared values. His readers, he discovered through a Facebook lookalike audience upload — which cross-references emails against user profiles to generate a demographic breakdown — skewed heavily toward liberal women over 50.

Many of them came to his newsletter through 2017 Women's March Facebook groups, where it first went viral and gained a critical mass of subscribers, pushing him to leave his full-time job only three months after sending his first issue.

These subscribers were already organized around shared values before they found Matt’s newsletter. Subscribing to WTFJHT was an extension of an already-articulated identity; paying for it was, too.

This is where the contribution model diverges most sharply from the subscription model:

A 2024 paper in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing introduced the concept of "identity trust" — the idea that a donation decision is motivated not only by an intellectual desire to support a good cause but by personal identities and social networks. Crucially, the research found that "the reason and the amount that someone gives may be determined by who asks them."

The product a subscriber receives for their contribution is not an additional media product; it’s a value affirmation. What the donor is really buying is the experience of being the kind of person who gives, of sustaining something as a service their community depends on, one they can see themselves in. It’s connection to their community.

This helps explain something both Matt and Rachel have noticed: people who have a relationship with them — repeat submitters, longtime readers — give more reliably than people who don't.

Audience trust is a monument to thousands of small, consistent decisions made in public over time, in a direction readers can predict.

Matt has spent 9 years and Rachel 10 years making trust-generating decisions. Looking across their decade-long track records, a three-step framework emerges.

The reader has to know what you stand for before they can decide whether they can support you.

This sounds obvious, but leading with your values takes strategy and intention. Most media products communicate their underlying value systems implicitly — through tone, coverage choices, and what they don't platform.

The distinction between contribution-based models and subscription or ad-supported models is legibility of values.

If values tell readers what you believe, your scope tells them what you will and won't cover — and holds you to that promise over time.

Both have been asked, repeatedly, to expand. Neither has: "I knew what I wanted my role to be," Rachel told us. Matt put it to me more bluntly: if someone wants a version of WTFJHT that covers Brexit, they're welcome to make it.

The constraint is both a guardrail and a promise. And promises, kept consistently over the years, are how trust accumulates. Every issue that lands within scope makes a small deposit; every time a creator holds the line against audience pressure to expand, they signal that the product is built around a specific vision, not around an algorithm, what’s trending, or what performs well.

This shapes and anchors a uniquely curated experience for the reader.

A 2025 study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found direct positive associations between financial transparency, contributor trust, and perceived performance. Transparency signals trustworthiness — and actively produces it, by giving readers something concrete to evaluate.

Matt has built a public infrastructure around this: operating costs published to the cent, every correction logged in a public repository, every edit ever made visible to anyone who looks.

He practices such thorough transparency to make the implicit explicit — to show readers not just what the product is, but how it got that way.

Building the trust required to sustain the contribution-based model is a long game; it rewards longevity and consistency.

Rachel ran Words of Mouth alongside a full-time job for years before the newsletter's income made that unnecessary. Matt had a spouse with a stable income when he quit on day 90 of his 100-day challenge. "I had the privilege of my wife working the boring corporate job," he told us. "That gave me the air cover to take the leap."

The early years, as the foundation builds, are the most precarious and unforgiving.

Research on donor behavior in the nonprofit sector points to the same dynamic: only 19% of first-time contributors return to give again, while previous contributors give again at a 69% rate. The creator economy is not the nonprofit sector, but the underlying logic holds — this model requires patience and tenacity.

Newsletter growth expert (and former Spotlight guest) Matt McGarry describes 2.5% as a “good” free-to-paid newsletter conversion rate. 5% is “world class,” and WTFJHT’s 2% is “ok.”

Paywalled newsletter models have a transactional mechanism — pay or lose access. Contributor-based models have no such lever, but neither Matt nor Rachel is measuring the success of their business based on these metrics.

Media analyst Simon Owens, commenting on Matt’s model, described this as a structural weakness. Simon noted that success stories like Matt’s tend to be outliers — that the conditions to produce these businesses are harder to replicate than they appear. "Even if you can guilt readers into subscribing," he wrote, "those subscriptions often come with high churn."

Matt pushed back. "Transactions buy access, charity supports a cause, and patronage is an investment in something you want to see continue," he wrote. "They're built on different kinds of relationships that reflect different motivations, identities, beliefs."

In Matt’s framing, the 98% of readers who haven’t contributed aren’t a problem to solve; they’re the whole reason to keep creating.