Gen Z Loves Instagram; RocaNews Nails Engagement

RocaNews says its engagement on Instagram is five to 10 times that of its legacy news peers, even as it has a fraction of the number of followers.

It helps that the founders built their news product on the platform, which they chose to do because everyone they knew was on Instagram—especially in 2020, when they started the business.

“Most legacy news outlets still don’t take Instagram seriously. For selfish reasons, we hope it stays that way,” RocaNews said in a LinkedIn post in March.

The Brazilian Connection

The founders started RocaNews—so named for the Pororoca biannual wave that sweeps the Amazon River, which attracts surfers from around the world, bringing people together (Carney made the suggestion, he’s half-Brazilian)—out of a desire to become entrepreneurs and to lure Gen Z back to news. They saw the divisiveness of news around Covid-19 in 2020, and also read a Reuters report noting that the majority of young people (under 30) did not engage with the news. They saw an opportunity to create a news product that would reach their peers and be engaging, entertaining and nonpartisan—and by covering interesting global stories that traditional media often overlooks.

“Our goal is to be the biggest, one of the best sources of information for Gen Z,” Carney told AMO. “Our biggest goal over the coming years is really re-engaging the younger generation with current events.”

Roca initially raised around $500,000 from associates through their Notre Dame network, where Carney studied, after showing some early traction. In early 2022, they raised a seed funding round of $4.5 million from venture capital and other investors. The founders maintain majority control of Roca.

The company focuses on covering just a few stories a day with brief and colorful storytelling and trying to do so without bias or spin—something others have been trying to do over the past years amid perceptions of legacy journalism taking sides.

“For a daily news product, we think less is more—people are overinundated with information,” Carney said. “For deep dives/videos, we think there are so many more interesting stories out there than what news companies normally cover. World news has pretty much vanished over the past decade in favor of 24/7 Washington DC food fight coverage.”

Going Newsletter

Roca uses Instagram largely as a top of funnel growth mechanism for their own app, co-founder Billy Carney told AMO.

“The majority of people who have downloaded the app and use the app and go to our news or use our newsletters, were from Instagram originally,” Carney said. “We try to do things with referrals and stuff to grow that there. We have done a bit of advertising, but [it] pales in comparison to what we’ve done from Instagram.”

Roca hit 1 million Instagram followers in its first year. The three founders—Carney, Max Towey and Max Frost—spurred that growth working into the wee hours. It was a mix of organic growth and what they call partnerships—working with meme pages where younger people are generally engaged.

It worked, but wasn’t sustainable. And they saw Morning Brew making money with their newsletters and decided to go that route, starting out with a freebie. They also built the aforementioned dedicated app that’s “gamified,” akin to doing Duolingo for news.

‘We started off growing very quickly—from that we were able to do a few other things,” Carney said. “The focus shifted to the newsletter and building the app and the stuff that’s going to make more revenue.”

That slowed growth on Instagram for a while. The company turned profitable in October and hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue in November. With that success, they are refocusing more resources on Instagram, as well as pushing their premium newsletter ($5.99 a month or $59.99 a year) and video products. The paid newsletter kicked off this year, and within a month had 1,000 paying subscribers. They don’t share exact current numbers but have “thousands of paying subscribers on both the premium newsletter and the app,” Carney said.

“My biggest regret as a news company founder is not launching paid subscription offerings earlier,” Carney said.

YouTube

Their YouTube channel has seen quick growth since the second half of 2024 when they went to swing states asking voters who they were going to vote for; it was Donald Trump by a long shot. Those videos prompted the dormant Roca YouTube channel to quickly swell to 30,000 active subscribers. It now has 139,000 subscribers.

“Our first trip after that was going to Appalachia,” Carney said. They thought, “Let’s go, let’s meet people that generally don’t get the media spotlight. Just shine a light on them… One of the videos from Appalachia has 5 million views now, so we’re like, this is a thing.”

They’ve since gone to the “ghettos of East Cleveland” and Native American reservations in New Mexico. Most recently, Max Frost just returned from Pakistan.

They still don’t have a grasp of how the YouTube algorithm works and could help them, but they’re keeping their heads down, doing the dirty work and hoping it works out. They are currently hiring a second videographer to add to their handful of employees.

“Our single biggest goal right now is to make more money every subsequent month,” Carney said. “We want to do this so that we can expand all of our operations, with a bit of favoritism towards growing video operations and, separately, developing an Android app (we’re iOS only right now).”

Instagram remains their best “jumping off point” for driving audience as they can easily reach followers and put links in stories, Carney said. That said, they’re aware of the risk that Instagram could change algorithms or policies that could hurt their reach.

“Our biggest fear of algorithms/social media risk are cagey algorithm changes. Naturally, you can figure it out over time, but sudden unexpected algorithm changes can be difficult to deal with,” Carney said. “Adam Mosseri [the head of Instagram] has been sharing more information recently about how the algorithm works on his own Instagram (like talking about their 3-second view metric for reels) but it’s still mostly a black box.”