When MS NOW — known until last year as MSNBC — celebrated its 30th anniversary last month, Status reported that the focus was “as much about the future as the past.” Natalie Korach described early conversations about the network’s planned subscription product, which she wrote would be “centered around community, giving them access to their favorite hosts, subscriber discussions, and interactive content, rather than a traditional streaming service.”
An MS NOW memo reported by Semafor offers new details on the subscription offering.
On Sept. 9, the network plans to launch a paid membership program “aimed at engaging its existing ‘super fans,’ and offering ways to reach and monetize new audiences that are not everyday cable news viewers,” Semafor’s Max Tani reported on Wednesday. MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler framed the membership program as the first in a suite of planned direct-to-consumer offerings.
MS NOW was renamed after NBCUniversal split off the progressive network and other cable networks into a separate company called Versant. Now, it joins networks from CNN to Fox News to its former sibling NBC News in making digital audiences and monetization a priority as audiences and revenue from TV steadily decline. In 2024, two years after launching and shuttering its streaming platform, CNN put up a paywall ($3.99 a month or $29.99 a year for “basic,” and $6.99/month or $69.99/year for “all access”). NBC News has done the same ($5.99 a month, or $59.99 a year), while Fox News offers subscriptions to its streaming platform Fox Nation for $8.99/month or $71.49/year. CNBC, a part of Versant, is also rolling out its own premium consumer product.
The MS NOW membership will be priced at $7.99 a month, or $79.99 per year, and will “offer perks like members-only content verticals, opportunities for subscribers to interact with the network’s personalities, community features for members to engage with each other, and a 24/7 network feed,” Tani wrote. He added that MS NOW “is leaning more into the parasocial relationship its fans feel with its journalists,” including with live events.
The membership program is based on online survey responses and interviews with 18,000 network viewers, according to Tani. MS NOW told him they found “the network’s fans felt the news media ecosystem was too fragmented, and wanted to get news in one place.” They also found target audiences “wanted online spaces to interact with people they agreed with” and “expressed excitement at the possibility of interacting with the platform’s journalists and personalities.” Kutler noted that the network sees little overlap between its TV viewership and the current audience for its free online content.
Read more in Semafor here.
