Changes to The Optimist Daily Business Model

We’re making some changes to The Optimist Daily’s business model, and you may notice some new looks and new content in the next few weeks.

This year, we’ve hit major milestones.

This includes reaching more than a million site visits month over month, a listener hit of a five day a week podcast – reaching nearly 10k listeners every month, and a social network reaching in excess of another million inspired audience members every single month.

This growth has created meaningful opportunities for change and for our business. 

Since the beginning of our journey as an online magazine, we have avoided accepting ads and worked to build The Optimist Daily as purely a reader-supported movement. As our organization has evolved over these last four years, we have come to the realization that to further grow the company and expand our mission of spreading Optimism, we will need to update our revenue model to also include selective advertising on our different channels.

As such, we will be adding sponsors with like-minded values and similar mission-driven goals to ensure The Optimist Daily continues to flourish.

If you are an Emissary Member and logged into the site, you will not see our sponsored content. We will carefully curate these relationships to stay true to our broader mission of solutions-focused journalism.

For instance, we recently partnered with Teeccino, our first official sponsor! Teeccino is a Santa Barbara-based herbal coffee and tea company, whose ingredients are sustainably sourced from certified traders from around the world, with the demand for some of the herbs providing a new source of income to communities in countries like Guatemala and India. We both adore their product, and also admire the people involved.

While we operate on a very lean business model, we need to achieve monthly revenues of at least $35k to ensure the sustainability of our company, and continue to evolve our Optimist revolution across the globe.

If we can grow beyond break-even in 2022, we will be able to persist, to thrive, to expand. This is our make-or-break moment!  

If you’re the holder of a free Optimist account from The Optimist Daily, please consider becoming an Emissary for an ad-free experience. You’ll also get double the content in your email feed, with five additional good news stories that come with the upgrade. And if you are interested in exploring potential sponsorship opportunities with The Optimist Daily, please reach out to our team!

Thank you for your ongoing support and for being a part of The Optimist Daily family.

You are the reason we do what we do, and our dedicated audience is one of our biggest inspirations.  We look forward to continuing to bring you quality solutions news for a long time to come while helping more and more people across the globe start their days with Optimism…

Let’s do this!