A New Context For African Journalism: Introducing The New WT
The race for page views, exclusivity and clickbait titles has been driving the media in Africa for far too long and is one of the key reasons for the downfall of many legacy brands. Advertisement-led media platforms are prone to crumble under pressure, and their narratives get weaker. In the age of consumer-driven content, we (at WT) are making yet another move to embrace what our readers prefer.
Many of our readers reach out to us to share how much they value our content, journalism, and also what they like, dislike or disagree with. The ability to be able to connect with thousands of our readers on a personal level gave us a strong belief that people care about African business journalism. It also made us believe that if done right, there is a real market for quality content, reader first approach, and one revenue stream – Subscriptions. No advertisements, no events. Just subscriptions.
A new chapter
Starting as a small media company with no editorial & hierarchical blockages, we scaled from 1,000 users a week to a 5000-user-a-day platform in less than 20 months..In the last two years, we received quite a few lawsuits that demanded us to take down an article or a particular paragraph, but we have always stood up for what is right.
Today, we give a new direction to WT content and unveil WT Premium- our membership programme which will help us build an even closer relationship with you.
Changes were coming since April. If you are an avid reader of WT (WeeTracker), you must have noticed that we launched a new UI a couple of weeks back. The idea was to give our readers a taste of what’s coming. A simplistic, no-frills, no sliders UI that is intuitive and simple enough for our user to focus only on the content we write, nothing else.
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Starting September 7th (Monday), we switch off what we were internally calling an “alpha” or “beta” mode (designed to give our readers a sense of our new offering). Our members would be able to access our premium articles from tomorrow.
To give you a quick understanding of what is the new WT Premium, let me write this in as few words as possible.
We will publish 2-3 original stories a week on African Business, Technology, Startups, & Economy.
Half of WT’s content will be free-to-read. The rest 50% will be subscription-driven as quality content takes a lot of efforts.
Should you Pay for African Journalism?
Sound and Quality Journalism is still missing in Africa. One of the primary reasons is that global media companies are trying to cover the African scene from a distance. The only way to solve it is by understanding the context at the ground level.
We have tried to do it for the last 20 months, and it works. For us, the proof is the testimonies from our readers, our consistent user growth and a few of the lawsuits 😉
Creating good, insightful and need-to-have content requires a lot of effort and resources. We believe that people should pay for good journalism. On the other hand, charging a premium for our content makes us accountable to our subscribers—for the quality and value they get.
What Do You Pay For WT?
We are launching the new WT Premium with two subscription plans, monthly and quarterly.
The introductory offer price for our monthly subscription is $6. The monthly plan will give you access to WT Premium along with the whole archive, including all the new stories published during your subscription period.
The introductory offer price for our quarterly subscription is $15. The quarterly plan will give you access to our archive + ~60 stories that’d be published during your subscription period.
There’s another subscription option. Pay for what you read. In this plan, the user has the flexibility for paying for an article only. This is our version of Pay-as-you-go!
Last but not the least – we want to make our content available to fresh graduates and management students as we support curious minds. If you are a student at any African University currently, please drop in a quick note at [email protected], and we will be in touch to get you started.
Should you experience any trouble while creating your account or subscribing to our membership option, please send us an email at [email protected].
Note: We prefer to write the subscription prices in African currencies, but since we have more than 50, it is easier to use USD 😉
Holler, as we build WT into Africa’s most trusted subscription-based digital journalism platform, we are looking to expand our editorial team. If you think you fit the bill, write to us at [email protected]
