The Dispatch’s Plan to Double Revenue in 2025

The Dispatch, a conservative subscription-based media platform, has done pretty well over the past six years given a very informal company structure—today, it has 600,000 free subscribers and 45,000 paying members.

A year ago Mike Rothman joined as president of the company. They had a team of 27, all but a couple were in editorial. There was no business team, no social media strategy, no access to a top of funnel audience. The Dispatch had zero retention marketing capabilities. Any paid media was on Meta and that was pretty much on autopilot.

“The opportunity was they were growing so quickly without any generally accepted business best practices around funnel marketing, around partnership marketing,” Rothman told AMO. “There’s a bunch of strategic work that needed to be clarified and the time just seemed to be really ripe. I realized, oh, even if 50% of these best practices are remotely helpful, this can be an incredibly big business, and we can also fulfill the original mission of providing more clarity and calm to a chaotic political and media environment.”

Rothman, who earlier founded Fatherly, a digital media brand for dads, had previously advised the company starting in 2019. Moving forward, The Dispatch expects to expand into four to five new verticals, such as conservationism and faith, with a focus on getting professionals as well as consumers reading their work. Revenue was $5 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $10 million for 2025, with 85% coming from memberships, 10% from sponsorships and the remainder from new membership products and licensing.

The Dispatch has 32 different investors, and no one owns more than a single digit percentage of the preferred shares and as a result, the editorial team doesn’t have to deal with phone calls coming from investors. Or if there’s a phone call, they’ll never hear about it, Rothman said.

Compelling Idea

The Dispatch was created in 2019 by Steve Hayes, formerly of The Weekly Standard, and Jonah Goldberg, previously of National Review. The goal was to create “conservative, fact-based news and commentary that doesn’t come either through the filter of the mainstream media or the increasingly boosterish media on the right.”

Rothman thought the idea of The Dispatch was compelling.

“There really is only Fox News and a bunch of crazy town on the right, and I knew that Steve and Jonah, just in my conversations with them, were approaching this opportunity with a lot of integrity. They really cared deeply about this product and what it represented, and its impact on national discourse,” Rothman said.

The Dispatch is aiming not just for people on the center right, but for self-described independent thinkers, people on the center left who are looking for opposing viewpoints and disaffected Democrats or Republicans—not people who just want their existing views echoed back to them.

Demographics currently cut across the country geographically. About 85% of the audience includes Main Street CEO types or people growing small businesses—a lot of who might traditionally have been considered center right Republicans, Rothman said. The rest are from the Acela corridor, media, advocacy groups, legislative officials and more. That last one is a category The Dispatch intends on courting further.

Growth

In the next 12 months, Rothman expects the company to add three to four new verticals with different tiers of membership for professionals and consumers. The company knows it needs to show up more on social media, though avoiding the hysterical sensationalism of obviously partisan media. The Dispatch also wants to bring in more personalities.

They are “looking at The Dispatch as a platform for talent and looking at it more almost like a Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Rothman said. “How do you find other personalities that have real domain expertise in national security, in economic policy, in conservationism. That’s part of the growth strategy, [finding existing voices and bringing] their audiences onto the platform.”

Should no single personality be available on a given topic, The Dispatch is open to rotating authors with different viewpoints that intersect, for example calling in a rabbi and a pastor to talk culture and faith.

“It’s bringing out existing talent, cross pollinating talent, and then launching new verticals that represent blue sky territory for a lot of media properties, and then building audience that way, in addition to just getting better at basic like upper funnel marketing best practices,” Rothman said.

The new talent will also help create new audio products. The Dispatch’s personalities are often featured on television shows, and there’s a desire to bring that in-house and create their own video assets. And mindful of how animated some comment sections can be, The Dispatch is already in talks with a number of vendors to facilitate hosting online communities. 

The comments section is already fairly spirited, Rothman said.

“In the members comment section for The Dispatch, because you have lawyers or military, an admiral, all weighing in on one story around, say, national security, bringing in their various degrees of expertise in ways that are actually much more animated and group safe than what I find in the Wall Street Journal, which tends to be a lot of cranky people yelling at clouds,” Rothman said.

Last year, The Dispatch held its first event for 300 people at about $500 a pop featuring former Vice President Mike Pence giving his first public comments after the second election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

“People were just completely riveted,” Rothman said, recounting that the halls were completely empty during panels. “We did a social hour, and you get to see these people who recognize each other from the comment section, engaging in real life and it’s great.”

Regional events of maybe 120 people are also on the docket.

“Media is not just media anymore. You can’t just publish something, and then that’s it. It’s becoming much bigger than that. It’s a bigger ecosystem than it used to be,” Rothman said.