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Read & Trust: Charging for Quality Content

Read & Trust got its start as an online writer directory in late 2010. “I decided that people who were new to the search for quality content didn’t need to go through all the trial and error, and years of curation, to discover new writers,” says R&T founder Aaron Mahnke. “They just needed to ask the question, ‘Who does my favorite writer read and trust?’” In early 2011, Mahnke turned R&T into a paid email newsletter.

He rounded up his favorite active scribes with personal blogs. The writers included a link to R&T on their homepages, while creating exclusive, theme-based content for the R&T newsletter. For $5 a month, readers were treated to four articles they couldn’t find anywhere else. It grew organically from there. “When someone who has been reading [Instapaper creator] Marco Arment’s posts for a while starts to wonder what other great writers might be out there to read regularly, they just need to click on the R&T link in his sidebar,” Mahnke says.

Because the newsletter is paid and exclusive, developing readership has been Mahnke’s biggest challenge so far. But through R&T’s Twitter feed and the “natural and non-salesman-like” promotion of its writers, the newsletter is growing at a pace that suits Mahnke. “[The paid model is] a great way to build value and reward people for creating quality content,” he says. “I’m able to pass cash to these writers that’s above and beyond what a lot of them earn from writing on their own. It’s a great feeling helping fantastic writers earn money for doing what they love.”