Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Alejandro Prescott-Cornejo, Mongabay’s senior marketing associate, recently interviewed me about my journey with Mongabay. Here’s my response to his question about pivoting our business model.
The transition in 2012 was a turning point. At the time, the advertising model was still working, but I had ideas that went beyond what ads could support. Based on my experience reporting in Indonesia, I thought launching an Indonesian-language news service could have a real impact.
Much of the environmental degradation in Indonesia then was driven by corruption and mismanagement in the natural resources sector, and there was little environmental coverage that spanned the archipelago. I believed journalism itself could be an intervention — one that increased transparency and accountability. It reminded me of Brazil in the mid-2000s, when the country achieved major reductions in deforestation even as its economy grew, challenging the notion that protecting forests and improving livelihoods were incompatible.
Mongabay Indonesia took off, and I saw the potential for the rest of Mongabay to follow that model. But I wasn’t sure it would work. My only management experience at that point was overseeing a handful of employees at a tropical fish store (as pets, not to eat) as a teenager. I had no background in fundraising, no experience running a nonprofit, no philanthropic network, and no connections to wealth. So the decision wasn’t without risk. Still, advertising was strong enough that it didn’t feel reckless.
I fundamentally believed that credible, fact-based journalism was a public good, and that there were people and institutions willing to support it. That hunch proved right. Eventually, I donated all the news articles to the nonprofit and dropped advertising from the site entirely.
The nonprofit model required a different mindset. Advertising rewards traffic, not impact. It pushes you to chase clicks rather than dig into complex stories that might reach fewer readers but matter more.
The new model let Mongabay focus on impact over pageviews and collaboration over competition. We began releasing stories under Creative Commons so other outlets could republish them freely, which helped our journalism reach policymakers, community leaders and audiences we’d never have reached otherwise. It allowed Mongabay to scale globally while staying true to its values.
Read the full interview here.
Banner image of Butler in Ecuador in 2023 by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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