Axate’s story: Part 2

In our last blog post, I wrote about how I came up with the idea for Axate and how it’s developed to the point we’re at now. This post will focus on part 2: Axate’s future and development.

Where we’re going

Axate isn’t just for news, of course, nor is it just about simple payments. When I started Axate, wearing my strategic hat, I thought a lot about the incentives driving what was happening in the market. It seemed to me that there was something very wrong when the incentives are driving publishers to one of two dominant business models, advertising and subscription, neither of which work particularly well for the bulk of their customers. 

Axate is designed to align incentives around a single force: consumer engagement. If more people reading more stuff generate more revenue opportunity, it can unlock new ideas and new approaches to delighting people with products they love and want to return to.  Equally, if every customer can access every publication, the media can take advantage of its greatest hidden asset – its network. The network the news industry reaches (even without video, audio, music etc) is gigantic and engaged, so why does it generate such anaemic revenues? 

Axate’s whole approach, business model and commercial terms are all designed to activate that network and deliver incentives to drive long term growth and investment. Better products, more widely consumed, can make more money. New products, well launched, can instantly access a large and low friction audience ready to pay. There is no in-built upper limit to that market.  

Once you take Axate’s logic and apply it to other areas you can see it works just as well. We have huge potential in streaming media like video and podcasts, where a few pence will be spontaneously and willingly spent for content which people know will be great (and, perhaps, then won’t be interrupted by irritating and un-skippable ads).  

Axate is a network, fundamentally built around the needs of the creative industries and their audiences. It can act as one of the backbones of a “media layer” of the internet. Here, much of the high value and useful content and products generated by creatives and media companies can exist in a networked relationship with each other, powered by a rational economic model with shared incentives and driven by user demand and response. 

Given that network already reaches everyone online, it’s an exciting prospect.