May 21, 2019
For a few years, Ben Cohen was living the dream. His political opinion site, The Daily Banter, was growing in leaps and bounds, generating enough traffic and ad revenue to support several full-time writers. At its height, the site was getting upwards of 6 million unique visitors a month, fueled in large part by readers sharing his content on Facebook.
But you probably know what happened next. In January 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was pivoting away from news, and that publishers would see a decline in exposure in the Newsfeed. Virtually overnight, Cohen saw his Facebook traffic drop by 90%.
He tried to hold out as long as he could, but eventually Cohen reached a point where he either had to radically change his business model or shut down the website completely. In the end, he did both. He shut down his website and launched a newsletter. Sign up, and you received two free newsletters a week. Pay a little extra, and you got two additional newsletters.
I recently interviewed Cohen about what went into his decision to pivot and how his readership responded to the announcement.