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Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Hamburg, Authory is a platform helping journalists become more independent by gaining control over their content and their audience. Whilst Authory has been growing organically till now, it has also received funds (twice) under Google’s Digital News Initiative. WNIP caught up with Eric Hauch, Founder & CEO, to find out more.
What business problem is your company addressing?
Nowadays journalists write for a variety of media outlets during their careers, creating thousands of articles for various publications. And the more fragmented the media landscape becomes, the more this trend will continue: Journalists write more articles across more publications.
This has a major impact on the ability of journalists to keep control of their content as well as their audience. More often than not, leaving a publication to start at a new one means losing access to the content they have created as well as the audience they have personally established with
What is your core product addressing this problem?
In order to give journalists control over their content and audience, Authory offers journalists several services:
- Article backups: Wherever a journalist publishes, Authory automatically creates a personal backup minutes after an article has been published. Journalists never again lose access to the content they have created.
- Turning readers into subscribers: Journalists can use Authory to create a loyal audience that they can take with them wherever they go. Readers subscribe to individual journalists via email and automatically receive an email notification whenever there is a new piece, regardless of where it’s published.
- Tracking social media performance: Authory gives journalists a place where they find details about the social media performance of every article they have ever written. They don’t need to rely on publishers for this kind of information anymore.
- Always up-to-date portfolio: Setting up a portfolio page is the easy part. Keeping it updated in the long run is a lot harder. That’s where Authory helps by giving journalists their own portfolio that’s never out of date.
Can you give some examples of journalists successfully using your solution?
From staff writers covering politics at big nationals to freelancers reviewing whiskey at spirit journals, Authory is used by an incredibly wide variety of successful journalists. We’ve backed up more than 500,000 articles for them, adding many thousands every single day.
David Pogue (authory.com/DavidPogue), a New York Times columnist, is a great example: Working as a Tech Columnist at Yahoo News, he recently moved to the NYT. David has been using Authory for over a year and in this time has built up a substantial email following which increased considerably after readers learned he would be leaving Yahoo News. When David started at the NYT, his readers were automatically in the loop about his new articles. That way David was able to take a large part of his Yahoo News audience with him to the NYT, which is great for him personally but also for his new publisher, increasing their reach.
On top of that, Authory has backed up David’s entire career in journalism stretching back to the 1990s.
Pricing?
Authory has been built from the ground up with journalists and their readers in mind – no PR agencies, no publishers, no brands. In order to make our offering sustainable we charge from $8 per month which includes unlimited articles and 500 email subscribers. It’s our way to make sure that we’ll be able to drive real value for journalists in the future too.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
Authory has got competitors for each of the services it offers, e.g. Mailchimp when it comes to turning readers into personal email subscribers. However, all these competitors have a generalist approach, often targeting a large part of the population and not solely journalists. Our focus, combined with the fact that the services we offer are highly integrated, does set us apart on that front.
How do you view the future?
Authory is the anti-thesis to the idea that digital journalism will become a generic commodity. We believe in strong, unique journalistic voices and perspectives and with our service we encourage exactly that.
With that in mind, we intend to add more services to our offering in the future, all made for journalists and their readers. Besides control over content and audience, we’d also like to enable journalists to monetize these areas better than they currently can.
Thank you.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
