After a two-week free trial, Axios Pro costs subscribers $600 USD per year for one newsletter or $1,800 USD for all newsletters. There is no monthly payment option.
“Things are happening in the world of deals and dealmakers. And there’s never enough time to keep up with every company, transaction, announcement, or whatever,” says Pro Rata newsletter author Dan Primack. “We have a new product to help fix that.”
If you’re “a venture capitalist, private equity investor, banker, trader, founder, executive, anyone who cares about deals,” he continues, Axios Pro is ideal for you.
Axios publisher Nick Johnston said the success of Axios’s free Pro Rata newsletter helped move Axios towards this new premium subscription product.
“Pro Rata, remember, those emails come from Dan’s email address and if you hit reply, it goes to Dan,” Axios publisher Nick Johnston said. “We’ve created a really great relationship with our readers and so I think on that personal level, we thought this would be better built at a consumer price point - hundreds of dollars versus thousands of dollars.”
With other subscription products such as Bloomberg Terminal and Politico Pro, “you don’t take out your personal credit card and swipe it to get one of those,” Johnston said. Axios Pro subscribers are likely to be professionals in the tech and retail sectors and Johnston thinks the ease with which people can subscribe will give them an edge over their competitors.
“Across the newsroom, we’ll look at the newsletters that we have that cover topics very broadly and identify places where, if we invested more and went deeper on more specific topics, would become a product that readers would pay for,” Johnston said.
“For journalism, there’s a qualitative element to it. You read the newsletter: Is this good? Is this telling me something I don’t know? You also look at, what are the open rates? What are the reader responses? How is this journalism traveling in the ecosystem of the beats covered?” Johnston said. “For Pro, we’ll have additional datasets. How many people are signing up? How many people are trialing it? How many people are then paying after they trial it - and then renewing a year in? We’ll go through all those things and then look to turn the knob. Is the price point correct? Is the cadence of the newsletter correct? Have we narrowed the coverage areas correctly? Have we built an ecosystem for subscribers around that - for events or additional engagement? I think those are all things we’ll probably spend the next six months to a year figuring out, even as we’re launching new ones.”
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