Building a new revenue stream for Caribbean news

When Vigilante reached out to us in late 2019, they were stuck. Their previous agency was four months past deadline on a promised subscription platform with no end in sight. Other agencies wanted more than double their budget to take it on. What they actually had was a WordPress site: simple, working, and with none of the platform they had been promised anywhere in it.

The challenge was straightforward: they needed a platform where users could subscribe to read their news content. They wanted to reach Curaçaoans living abroad who wanted to stay connected to home, then expand to local users. They also needed to support a coupon system for local readers and, critically, they wanted to integrate live-streaming of events, something no other newspaper on the island was doing.

They were still adding to it five years later.

Starting with what mattered

That WordPress site stayed. Rebuilding it would have been the cleaner engineering story and the bigger piece of work, and it would have thrown away the one part of the situation that was not already four months late.

So the first version shipped with no subscriptions in it. Publishing and reading had to be solid before anything could be sold through them, and the existing site was already doing that part. WooCommerce went on top, because the platform's shape was still going to change and both bend cheaply. The initial build took about three months, from late January to early April 2020. Once Vigilante had the core platform in front of them and could see it working, the subscription and monetization features started going in.

Designing for the actual audience

Analytics said something important early on: Vigilante's readers were primarily on mobile, and skewed older and less technical. That insight shaped everything after it.

Clarity beat complexity every time there was a choice between them. Friction came out wherever it could. The navigation puts what a reader came for where they can reach it without hunting. The goal was to meet those readers where they were, not to ask them to adapt.

Handling scale they didn't expect

The live-streaming feature changed things. Major events drove traffic spikes far beyond anything planned for, nearly 150,000 users during peaks. The server configuration took several passes to tune: not only the concurrent load during an event, but the daily volume of articles, images and video sitting underneath it.

Building the subscription model

With the foundation solid, the revenue engine went in. Multiple subscription tiers (daily, weekly, monthly and yearly), each with different perks. Online payments plus a coupon system for local readers who preferred buying physical vouchers.

Vigilante's business kept growing and the platform kept following it: multi-currency support, automated image watermarking, a soft paywall with integrated checkout to reduce drop-off, and a PDF option for readers who wanted that format.

The results

The platform now serves over 100,000 monthly readers, with peaks approaching 150,000 during major events.

More importantly, Vigilante has a revenue stream that didn't exist before. A direct relationship with readers, independent of traditional advertising. In an industry where business models are under constant pressure, that's not a small thing.

A newspaper on a Caribbean island now owns its relationship with its readers outright, which is not where it started.