Vox Media is now asking people to help cover the high cost of making videos with a $4.99-a-month membership program

Ezra Klein Vox

Vox Media has launched a video subscription program for its news audience.
The Vox Video Lab, as the program is called, has two tiers, costing $4.99 and $9.99 a month, and is funded with help from Google.
The company is pitching the program as a way to defray the high cost of making videos.

Vox Media has started to ask viewers to pay up for a video membership program called Vox Video Lab as the media company hunts for new sources of revenue outside advertising.

For $4.99 a month, subscribers will get access to extras like behind-the-scenes footage, Q&As, livestreams, and extended interviews that didn’t make it in a video; and a monthly recommendations of the best online videos. For $9.99 a month, members also get to join a video advisory board that lets them weigh in on the process.

The venture-funded media company is early on in developing a consumer revenue stream as it, like many digital media companies, has struggled to reach profitability from online advertising alone. Vox Media earlier this year reportedly was on track to miss its revenue goal for the year. The company has said it would evaluate partnerships with other media companies next year amid a “turbulent” media landscape.

Vanity Fair reported this month that Vox Media was in the process of figuring out how to charge for some of its sites.

Vox Video Lab was announced via a 3-minute video on the YouTube channel of Vox.com, Vox Media’s news site. On the video, staffers discuss the work and expense that go into making news videos.

‘That process of ours, it’s not cheap,” one staffer says.

‘To keep making more and better work, we could really use your support,” another says.

Other online news publishers like BuzzFeed, Daily Beast, and HuffPost have started or plan to tap their audiences for direct financial support.

People have become more willing to pay for news in recent years, but as the number of publishers passing the hat increases, the question on many people’s minds is just how much content consumers will be willing to pay for.

When BuzzFeed first started seeking reader revenue with an online tip jar, some critics considered the pitch tone-deaf, considering all the venture capital BuzzFeed had raised. Vox Media similarly has raised more than $300 million in VC funding.

Plus, the lab got funding support from the Google News Initiative, which announced recently it was funding a batch of publisher video initiatives.

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