The old journalism model most news publishing and broadcasting companies still use today gives a lot of room for inefficiencies.

The old journalism model most news publishing and broadcasting companies still use today gives a lot of room for inefficiencies.

The current state of business journalism.

Most forward-looking companies such as Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times are already experimenting and even implementing new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence in some parts of their operations—mostly in automating content creation for data-heavy content like a company’s earnings reports.

Although they are effective in integrating next-generation technologies in automating some of their data-heavy content, it doesn’t address two main problems in the industry today:

• High Overhead Costs
• Ineffective Business Model

The reason why these issues are not being addressed is because they still rely on old journalism models that require thousands of journalists and hundreds of news bureaus around the world. This results in expensive subscription fees—mostly between $119 to $415 annually—and the continued reliance of these companies on bombarding their content with annoying and intrusive 3rd-party advertisements.

Because of the high-cost barriers of getting access to this content, many simply choose to find ways to bypass their paywalls that gives these companies the following results despite their effort to integrate advanced technologies in some parts of the old journalism model:

• In 2019, Bloomberg said they have "tens of thousands" of paying subscribers since launching their paywall in 2018.
• In February 2020, WSJ said they reached "2 million digital subscriptions" for the first time after launching their paywall in 1997.
• In April 2019, the Financial Times reached a "record paying readership of one million", an all-time high and a key strategic goal according to the publication.

TFT’s Tech-Enabled Journalism & Business Model

This is where we excel at—creating and implementing highly efficient journalism and business models. This brings down the cost of our world-class journalism while maintaining a healthy gross margin.

By doing so, we have the advantage of implementing blitzscaling strategies that will enable us to attract more audiences fast while being aggressive in our pricing strategy and creative in our revenue models.

Through our AI-centric journalism model, we eliminated inefficiencies in every part of our operations while adding more focus on our business model and creating strong network effects that will enable us to compete against the incumbents:

• Newsgathering: Instead of relying on thousands of journalists and opening hundreds of news bureaus in major parts of the world, we utilized the resources, reach, and integrity of the world’s leading news agencies.
  
  We have successfully secured content rights deals with Agence France-Presse and Reuters while we are still in talks with the Associated Press. This gives us the right to use their content on an “as is” basis or use them as sources for our own news content.
• News Production: We integrated existing advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence that enable us to automate our news publishing and broadcasting efforts without the need for thousands of journalists or a full-blown broadcasting studio. We are one of the first companies to fully utilize AI-powered news anchors on our daily and nightly news shows since day one.
  
  We are currently working with a number of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Generation companies so we can improve how we automate our text, audio, and video content through next-generation technologies.
• News Distribution: While most of our competitors still produce content in print, we decided to focus solely on producing digital content through our news portal, social media, and upcoming iOS and Android mobile applications. This gives us more control over how we track our performance and deliver our content to our audiences.
• Business Model: Our tech-enabled journalism model gives us the ability to focus more on creating an effective business model that removes barriers for our subscribers and makes our content easily accessible to most business newsreaders and viewers.
• Network Effects: Since both our journalism and business models have the capacity to attract more audiences quickly and efficiently, we have the opportunity to build a strong 2-sided marketplace. The more free visitors and paid subscribers we have, the more we become valuable in the eyes of advertisers and sponsors. The key is to attract and onboard visitors and subscribers fast.

Our Competitive Edge

Our goal is to completely eliminate most of the inefficiencies of the old journalism model while giving more focus on building an effective business model and strong network effects by putting Artificial Intelligence and automation at the center of our operations.

“Your margin is my opportunity.”
—Jeff Bezos

Since we are very successful in eliminating inefficiencies in each part of our own journalism model, we have the ability to compete by:

• Producing world-class business journalism through our world-class news agency and technology partners.
• Heavily underpricing the competitors which will attract more paying subscribers and make it harder for these companies with inefficient journalism and business models to do the same.
• Be selective and integrate minimal, non-intrusive 3rd-party advertisements to avoid annoying our own audiences.
• Attracting more free visitors and paying subscribers that will make our company more valuable for advertisers and sponsors.

We understand that the average gross profit margin for digital media companies, including our direct competitors, is around 40% with an average operating profit margin at 23%.

We see this as a great opportunity since our journalism and business model can support a 70% to 90% gross profit margin that we can leverage by heavily underpricing our competitors without sacrificing our own margin.

How we generate revenue.

We chose to build a diverse revenue model that focuses on a combination of 3rd-party advertisements, native sponsorships, and subscription fees:

• 3rd-Party Advertisements: We already have Google AdSense set up on our news portal and will be implementing 3rd-party ads on our upcoming mobile applications as well.
• Native Sponsorships: We also have native sponsorships set up that will enable us to promote the brands that wish to access our audience base to deliver their messages in a native, non-intrusive manner on our text, audio, and video content.
• Subscription Fee: We also offer a $4.99 annual subscription fee that will give our subscribers unlimited access to our premium content. Our competitors offer the same for an annual subscription fee between $119 to $415.

As we grow and mature as a company, we will also produce series-based shows that we will include in our premium plan. We will also license this content to other platforms that wish to carry our upcoming shows.

TFT is founded by an experienced founder.

The Financial Today was founded by Alfred Cardenas, an experienced founder who built multiple companies from the past including a $1 million dollar Singapore-based fintech startup backed by notable investors like the former global CEO of DHL.

He previously worked for and partnered with Silicon Valley greats like DoorDash, Kettle & Fire, and Shopify.

He got his education in investment and financial management at the University of Geneva and had his journalism education at Michigan State University.

We progressed impressively in our first four months.

In our first four months of operations as a news publishing and broadcasting startup, we’ve made some impressive progress with a small, bootstrapping team:

• Onboarded 23,000+ registered subscribers.
• Engaged audience base with 11+ daily pageviews per visitor, 40+ minutes of daily time spent on site per visitor, with only 26% of bounce rate as of December 28, 2020, as per Alexa.
• Partnered with the world’s leading news agencies and technology companies like Agence France-Presse and Reuters to name a few.
• Onboarded brands like eToro and Firstbase as our affiliate brand sponsors for our daily and night shows that we will use as a stepping stone to onboard bigger sponsors in the near future.

Current Phase & Next Milestone

Although we generated a good amount of traction in our first four months of operations as a news & media startup, we are still in the traction mode and currently aiming for more traction and early-stage monetization goals:

• Onboard 500,000+ registered subscribers.
• Convert 30% to 60% as paying subscribers.
• Develop and launch our iOS & Android mobile applications.
• Produce more video and audio shows.
• Onboard our first paying native sponsor accounts that are not affiliate-based.

Use of Funds

We are raising $107,000 that will give us at least 18 months of runway:

• 70% towards operations
• 20% towards marketing
• 3% towards other unforeseen expenses
• 7% towards Wefunder fees