
Resources
Splice Beta resources
Session summaries to read, watch, link to, and download
Takeaways
The context
Frontier Myanmar, a news and business publication in Yangon, launched its membership offering just in time for Covid-19, as the pandemic caused advertisers to pull out and ad-backed media companies saw revenues plummet.
CEO Sonny Swe says building a membership product was hard. Myanmar’s economy was already slowing before Covid-19. Frontier Myanmar’s subscriptions aren’t growing at the expected rate, all commercial projects have either been canceled or postponed, and any grants they’ve received or planned to apply for have been delayed. Frontier Myanmar is powering on, and just as Swe spoke on Splice Low-Res, one institutional membership rolled in. “[There’s] no offense, we are playing defense,” said Swe.
Building community
“Keep talking to your audience about what they like,” emphasized Swe. “No one has [the] exact model of memberships, you need to tailor… your own.”
Before launching memberships, Frontier created small focus groups with businesspeople, journalists, and academics to hammer out what they thought the ecosystem needed. These focus groups confirmed their belief that there was a need for tight-knit, focused communities and personalized news, which Frontier is building through multiple newsletters and member-only offline events. Details:
Some tips from Swe about launching subscriptions and building community:
Our mission is to drive radical change by supporting bold, forward-looking media startups in Asia. In order to do this, we report on, teach, transform, and fund newsrooms in Asia.
Our newsletters are read by some of the smartest people in global media.
We’re Alan Soon and Rishad Patel, and there’s more about us here.
All the knowledge from Splice Beta is right here. Learn from this community’s best.
The Splice Beta Fund is a prototyping grant that helps news and media entrepreneurs in Asia to quickly ideate, launch, test, and iterate products and services for audiences and customers. See our six grantees here!
Splice Lights On is our way of supporting the media community financially affected by Covid-19. See the grantees here.
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