How Payments Work
Direct support — how journalists & contributors get paid today
Advertisers, friends, family, and readers fund the journalists who cover their communities. When someone backs a specific journalist or publication by name, 90% goes directly to them and 10% keeps the platform running.
The 90% lands in the creator's connected payout account — most connect Stripe, which splits each payment automatically and pays out to their bank on its standard schedule; where Stripe isn't available, PayPal. Creators connect once, as part of setup.
Full Ad
Headline, copy, image or video, click-through link — in the feed and on the content people open.
From $49/month local · $199 state · $499 national · $899 global
Minimal Ad
A clean credit line — "Supported by Main Street Coffee" — with an optional link.
From $33/month local · $133 state · $333 national · $599 global
Profile Support
No ad in the feed. The supporter's name appears on the journalist's profile.
From $20/month
Every tier can be one-time or monthly recurring — predictable income for the journalist, predictable cost for the supporter.
A worked example (an illustration, not a forecast)
Aunt Sue backs her niece with $50/month Profile Support.
- • Sue pays $50 + Stripe processing fee (about $1.75)
- • Niece receives $45/month directly into her account
- • Platform receives $5/month
- • That's $540/year from one supporter — twelve like her would be roughly $6,500/year
This shows how the split works — what a journalist makes depends on how many people choose to back them.
Reader subscriptions
Journalists and publications can put their editorial work — stories, broadcasts, and long-form videos — behind a monthly subscription. Readers see a preview and a subscribe button; subscribing opens everything. Community content like events and classifieds stays free to read.
The split is the same as direct support: 90% of each payment goes to the journalist or publication, 10% to the platform. It's turned on in Payment Settings once a payout account is connected.
What we're building: shared revenue
We're working to establish an advertising program where businesses — local, regional, national — pay to advertise across My Local Press. That revenue gets shared with the journalists & publications who meet the program's thresholds. Platforms like YouTube have proven the model; we're building the local-journalism version.
The exact thresholds are still being set, but the shape looks like this:
- • A body of published work — on the order of a hundred pieces
- • A real readership — on the order of a hundred readers subscribed to their feed or publication
- • Their own supporters — people already seriously contributing to their livelihood, on the order of a thousand dollars of support through their work here
- • The craft that makes journalism worth funding — respect earned on their content, sources cited, credit given & more, weighed by our evolving algorithm
Illustrative targets while the program is being built — the finalized thresholds will be published before the first payout.
We're building this platform so larger advertisers — and, as it evolves, the enterprise supporters who get it — can easily and readily support the mom-&-pop paper in a small town, without the big advertising networks in between taking their cut and trading everyone's data. The arrangement here is simpler: advertising dollars go to the journalists doing the work and to the platform that carries it, and advertisers get the reach and the metrics they're paying for. Shared revenue is the pipe that makes it move.
A local car dealership backs a hometown journalist by name; Coca-Cola picks places: a town, a state, a country, the world. Only a network can offer that. The thresholds above are the other half — the professionalism and quality of work that attract that kind of support. It's a business model that works for everyone: the small-town newspaper gets to be profitable — and so do we.
That's also why a journalist is better off here than out on their own. Alone, their support ends at the edge of town — and in a small town, that's usually not enough to live on. On a network, it doesn't have to.
Questions & answers
Why can't I pay in the mobile app?
App stores take 10–30% of every in-app transaction — money that would otherwise reach journalists. Web payments via Stripe keep the only fee the actual cost of moving money: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Visit mylocalpress.com from any browser to back a journalist or publication; we may add in-app purchasing as a convenience down the road.
Can I get a refund?
Support payments aren't refundable — the journalist's share has already been transferred. For exceptional circumstances, reach out through our feedback form.
How do I cancel a recurring subscription?
From your settings, on the same page where you'd manage any other subscription. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period.
More questions? Reach us through our feedback form.
We ship updates all the time, so a page here and there can fall behind. See something off? Have a question? Let us know and we'll address it.