What is Community Revenue?

The last generation built businesses around attention.
The next generation will build businesses around belonging.

For decades, attracting attention was one of the most valuable things an organization could do.

Publish great content, build an audience, grow your reach. The more people who watched, listened, clicked, or subscribed, the more opportunities you had to generate revenue through advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, or tickets.

That model created countless successful businesses.

It's also becoming much harder to sustain.

Today, we're producing more content than ever before. New technologies have made publishing faster, cheaper, and easier, while AI is accelerating that trend even further. As content becomes increasingly abundant, attention becomes increasingly scarce.

Community Revenue offers a different path forward.

Instead of creating value primarily through content, Community Revenue creates value by bringing people together around a shared mission and creating the conditions where members participate, build relationships, cultivate belonging, and create value for one another.

Community Revenue is a business model that generates sustainable revenue by creating spaces where people cultivate belonging. It may be monetized through memberships, events, sponsorships, education, donations, or similar models. What distinguishes Community Revenue from other business models is that members create value for one another, rather than simply consuming value created by the organization.

Unlike traditional business models, organizations don't create all of the value themselves.

Notice what's missing from that definition: It doesn't mention a Facebook Group, a membership site, or an online platform. It isn't a marketing tactic you add to an existing business or a monetization tactic you layer on top of your content.

Community Revenue is a business model; it changes where value comes from.

In a traditional Content Revenue business, content creates value by attracting attention, and that attention is ultimately converted into revenue.

In a Community Revenue business, content still matters—but its role changes. Content helps people discover you; community gives them a reason to participate, build relationships, cultivate belonging, and create value for one another. Those relationships create value for members, which in turn creates opportunities for the organization to generate revenue.

That doesn't mean you have to choose one model or the other. In fact, most organizations should use both.

Content attracts attention.

Community creates value through member-to-member relationships.

So what changed?

Why has attracting attention become so much harder than it used to be?

To answer that question, we need to look at how the economics of content have changed—and why a different business model is beginning to emerge.

 

 

Why Has Community Revenue Emerged Now?

 

Community Revenue didn't emerge because people suddenly discovered community. Communities have existed for centuries. Religious organizations, trade associations, alumni groups, country clubs, civic organizations, and countless other institutions have long understood the value of bringing people together around a shared purpose.

What changed wasn't community; what changed was content.

 

When Content Was Scarce

 

For most of history, creating and distributing content required significant resources. Newspapers needed printing presses. Radio stations needed broadcast licenses and transmitters. Television networks needed production studios. Publishers controlled access to bookstores.

Economists call anything that makes it difficult for new competitors to enter a market a Barrier to Entry. For decades, those barriers limited the supply of content and protected the organizations that could afford to produce it.

 

The Golden Age of Content Revenue

 

Then the internet changed everything. Blogs, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and social media dramatically reduced the cost of publishing and gave millions of people the opportunity to reach an audience without asking anyone's permission. For the first time, independent creators could build businesses around content.

That shift created extraordinary opportunities. As digital publishing opened up new ways to reach audiences, creators and organizations found opportunities to build businesses around content that hadn't existed before. Companies like BuzzFeed, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, and Vox proved that digital-first publishers could build enormous businesses around content.

Many people built thriving businesses simply by publishing valuable content consistently, and the strategies they used became the conventional wisdom of digital marketing.

This was the golden age of Content Revenue.

 

When Opportunity Became Competition

 

But the barrier to entry kept falling. New platforms emerged, publishing became easier, and distribution became cheaper. More creators entered the market, and generative AI accelerated the trend by making content faster and less expensive to produce.

Eventually, the market reached a tipping point. As barriers to entry continued to fall, more content was produced than people had the attention to consume. This created Content Oversupply: the economic condition in which more content is produced than people have the attention to consume. The same forces that had created extraordinary opportunities for creators also transformed the competitive landscape.

In 2014, marketing author Mark Schaefer anticipated this problem with his concept of Content Shock. He argued that as the supply of content grew beyond people's capacity to consume it, organizations would find it increasingly difficult and expensive to compete for attention.

As competition for attention increased, creators and organizations responded by producing more content, improving it, optimizing it, distributing it across more platforms, and increasingly automating its production. This is ContentMaxxing: the practice of continually creating, improving, optimizing, distributing, or automating content in pursuit of more attention.
ContentMaxxing can work for an individual organization. But when everyone does it, it creates a Content Arms Race. Each competitor produces more and better content to keep up with everyone else, adding even more content to an already oversupplied market.

 

Content Became a Commodity

 

When content was relatively scarce, creating it gave you a meaningful competitive advantage. As content became abundant, that advantage steadily eroded. Content no longer differentiated organizations the way it once had.

This is Content Commoditization: the process by which content becomes increasingly abundant and interchangeable, making it harder for any individual piece of content to stand out or command a premium. As barriers to entry collapse and supply increases, content becomes less valuable as a scarce competitive asset.

 

Belonging Became the Competitive Advantage

 

That's why Community Revenue is emerging now. Instead of relying primarily on content to create value, organizations can create value through participation, relationships, and a shared sense of belonging.

Content became a commodity. Belonging didn't.

 

Community Revenue vs. Content Revenue

 

Two Different Business Models

 

Most organizations are already familiar with Content Revenue, even if they've never used that term before.

Content Revenue is a business model that creates value through content. It may be monetized through advertising, sponsorships, subscriptions, ticket sales, purchases, licensing, or similar models. Its success depends on attracting and sustaining an audience's attention.

For decades, Content Revenue has been the dominant business model for creators on the internet. Publishers, broadcasters, creators, educators, and businesses all learned the same basic lesson: create valuable content, attract attention, and convert that attention into revenue.

Community Revenue is a different business model. Rather than creating value primarily through content, it creates value by bringing people together around a shared mission where members build relationships, foster belonging, and help one another.

At first glance, the two definitions look remarkably similar. Both describe business models; both create value; both generate revenue through a variety of monetization models.

 

The Difference Is How They Create Value

 

Although both business models rely on attention, they use it differently.

Content Revenue depends on attracting attention. The defining relationship is between the creator and the audience. The larger the audience, the more revenue can be generated.

Community Revenue creates value through member-to-member relationships. These are the defining relationships, not the creator-to-audience relationship. As members build relationships with one another and develop a sense of belonging, they create value for each other and for the organization. That value can then be monetized through memberships, events, education, sponsorships, donations, and other revenue models.

This changes the emphasis with regard to attention.

Content Revenue emphasizes the quantity of attention. More attention creates more opportunities to generate revenue.

Community Revenue emphasizes the quality of attention. Rather than simply attracting a larger audience, it creates deeper relationships that generate more value for each member. That allows organizations to generate more revenue from a smaller group of highly engaged members.

 

Content and Community Work Better Together

 

Content Revenue and Community Revenue are complementary business models. Organizations don't have to choose one or the other.

Content can introduce people to an organization. It answers questions, teaches new skills, entertains an audience, and builds trust. Community builds on that foundation by giving people opportunities to participate, build relationships, and cultivate belonging.

The two business models reinforce one another. Content attracts new people into the ecosystem, while community gives them a reason to keep coming back. As the community grows stronger, it creates more opportunities to develop content worth sharing.

In short, content helps people discover you; community gives them a reason to return.

 

Why Content Revenue Currently Dominates

 

If Community Revenue is such a powerful business model, why do most organizations still build their businesses around content?

 

Content Revenue Has a Mature Playbook

 

Organizations know how to create content, optimize it for search, distribute it across multiple platforms, and measure its performance. They know how to track pageviews, downloads, subscribers, and followers. The process is familiar, the tools are well established, and the results are relatively predictable.

That didn't happen overnight.

For more than two decades, the internet became dramatically better at helping one person publish to many people. Publishing tools became cheaper, easier, and more powerful, while the playbook for creating, distributing, and measuring content matured alongside them. Today, every content-based organization understands how to build a Content Revenue model.

Community Revenue is different.

While the technology for building communities has improved dramatically in recent years, few content-based organizations have learned how to build a community as a business model. They understand how to attract an audience, but not how to help members build relationships with one another. They know how to measure attention, but not how to build belonging.

Community Revenue isn't less effective. It's simply a newer way of thinking about where value comes from.

 

Most Organizations Treat Community as a Tactic

 

There's another reason Community Revenue isn't more common. When organizations invest in community, they often treat it as a way to strengthen an existing business. A software company builds a customer community to improve retention; a nonprofit creates a community to encourage donations; a media company launches a Facebook Group to increase engagement.

In every case, the community supports another business model.

Community Revenue starts from a different premise. Instead of asking how community can support an existing business, it asks how community itself can create new organizational value through belonging. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking.

So what does it actually take to build a Community Revenue business?

Every Community Revenue Business Has Three Ingredients

 

If Community Revenue creates value through member-to-member relationships, what does it actually take to build a community?

Many people assume the answer is software. They launch a Facebook Group, create a Discord server, or pay for a platform like Circle or Mighty Networks. Then they wait for community to organically happen.

It rarely does.

It helps to ask a more fundamental one: What actually is a community?

A community is a group of people who develop belonging through participation in pursuit of a shared mission.

That definition points to the three essential ingredients found in every Community Revenue business:


1. Shared Mission: Why people come together.
2. Community Space: Where people come together.
3. Participation: What people do when they come together.

Together, these three ingredients create the conditions where members can help one another.

Notice what's not on this list. There isn't a platform, a paid membership, or an online forum. Those are implementation choices. Every successful community contains these three ingredients, regardless of how or where it exists.

 

1. Shared Mission: Why People Come Together

 

A Shared Mission is the common purpose that brings a community together and gives members a reason to participate. It defines who belongs, why they gather, and what they hope to accomplish together.

Every thriving community has an answer to the question, 'Why are we here?' A shared mission isn't simply a topic people discuss; it's something members pursue together.

That mission doesn't have to be grand. A neighborhood garden club, a local running group, and a professional association all have different missions. What matters is that members care about the same goal and believe they'll make more progress together than they would alone.

Without a shared mission, people may consume the same content, but they have little reason to build relationships with one another.

 

2. Community Space: Where People Come Together

 

A Community Space is the environment intentionally designed to enable participation around a community's shared mission. It may exist online, in person, or as a combination of both.

Community Spaces can be Digital or Physical, and they can be Persistent or Time-Bound. Digital spaces include online groups and virtual events, while Physical spaces include community centers and in-person gatherings. Persistent spaces provide an ongoing place for members to interact, while Time-Bound spaces bring people together for a defined period, such as a workshop or conference. A community may use multiple types of spaces, depending on how and where its members come together.

A Community Space might be a monthly meetup, an annual conference, a neighborhood coffee shop, a Discord server, a Mighty Networks community, or a Facebook Group. The specific platform matters far less than whether it enables people to participate with one another.

Too many organizations obsess over choosing the perfect platform before they've given people a compelling reason to gather. It’s important to first discover and validate the Shared Mission before building the Community Space. The Community Space is simply the place where community happens. It creates opportunities for participation, but it isn't the community itself.

 

3. Participation: What People Do Together

 

Joining a group creates access; participation creates opportunities for relationships and belonging to develop.

Participation consists of the actions community members take that create value for themselves, other members, or the organization. Without participation, communities can't create sustainable value—or sustainable revenue. Participation is what allows members to help one another.

Participation might involve asking questions, attending events, solving problems together, celebrating milestones, mentoring new members, volunteering, or creating something together. Every act of participation creates opportunities for relationships to grow, and those relationships are what ultimately lead to belonging.

Organizations that struggle to build community usually don't have a platform problem; they have a participation problem. Software can make participation easier, but it can't make it happen.

 

Community Building

 

Community Building is the ongoing practice of creating and maintaining a Community Space where people with a shared mission can participate, build relationships, and experience belonging.

Unlike community outreach or community engagement, which take place in communities that already exist, community building focuses on creating and stewarding a Community Space where a new community can emerge.

Community builders don't create belonging directly. They create the conditions that make belonging possible by establishing a shared mission, stewarding a Community Space, and continually creating opportunities for meaningful participation.

 

How Communities Create Value

 

Communities create value by enabling members to help one another progress toward a Shared Mission. They may do this by answering questions, sharing experiences, offering encouragement, making introductions, celebrating milestones, and helping one another overcome obstacles.

The organization's role is not to create all of the value. It's to create the conditions where members help one another.

As members help one another, they build relationships. Those relationships create a sense of belonging. Members who feel they belong are more likely to participate, contribute, and help others succeed, making the community more valuable for everyone involved over time.
Community designers use two complementary frameworks to understand and design this process:

• The Personal Journey describes the progress members make toward the community's Shared Mission.
• The Member Journey describes how a person's relationship with the community deepens over time, from joining to becoming a Community Champion.

Together, these frameworks help organizations intentionally design communities where members create increasing value for themselves, one another, and the organization.

This is what makes Community Revenue different from Content Revenue. Content delivers value directly from creators to consumers. Community Revenue enables members to help one another.

The next question is how organizations capture that value as sustainable revenue.

 

How Communities Generate Revenue

 

If members help one another, where does the revenue come from?
Broadly speaking, there are two potential sources of Community Revenue: members and sponsors. They pay for different reasons.

 

1. Members

 

Members share in the community's Shared Mission. They pay because pursuing that mission with other members is valuable for them. That payment may take the form of membership dues, event registrations, subscriptions, tuition, or any number of other models. The specific mechanism varies from one community to another, but the principle is the same: members are paying for value created through participation in the community.

People join communities for many different reasons. Some are looking for information, education, or access to a product or service. Others join because they want relationships with people who share their interests, challenges, or goals.

Whatever brings people through the door, healthy communities often become more valuable over time as members build relationships with one another.

Consider a swim club. Someone may initially join because they want access to a pool, coaching, or structured workouts. Over time, they get to know the other swimmers. They find training partners, celebrate milestones together, and become part of a community. The pool may have initially attracted the member; the relationships are what make members return.

 

2. Sponsors

 

Sponsors can also find tremendous value in communities, whether or not they share in the community's Shared Mission.

Consider an industry conference. Attendees pay for tickets because they want to learn, meet peers, and build professional relationships. At the same time, sponsors pay for exhibit booths, speaking opportunities, and other ways to engage with those attendees.

The attendees and sponsors are paying for different things. Members value pursuing the Shared Mission with other members. Sponsors value opportunities created by access to the people who are pursuing the Shared Mission even if the sponsors do not share that mission.

For sponsors, that value goes beyond reach. If a sponsor simply wanted to put a message in front of a particular audience, it could buy advertising. A community offers something different: access to a Community Space where members already gather, participate, and build relationships. That gives sponsors an opportunity to engage with members in a trusted context.

 

Community as a Competitive Advantage

 

Competitors can copy your products; they can imitate your services; they can even build a similar website or use the same community platform. What they can't easily copy are the relationships your members have built with one another.

As they deepen over time, the community becomes increasingly valuable to its members and increasingly difficult for competitors to replace. That's why community creates a barrier to entry. The strongest communities aren't protected by technology or intellectual property.

They're protected by the relationships their members have built together.

 

Community Revenue as a Business Model vs. Community as a Strategy

 

Many organizations already invest in community.
Software companies create customer communities to improve retention; nonprofits bring supporters together to encourage donations and volunteerism; brands build communities to strengthen customer loyalty; professional associations create networking opportunities for their members.


In each of these examples, the community exists to support another business model. The organization makes its revenue through the sale of some other product or service, and the community supports those sales.

Community Revenue starts from a different premise. Instead of asking, "How can community strengthen my existing revenue streams?" it asks, "How can community create its own revenue stream?"

For some organizations, Community Revenue becomes the primary business model. For others, it complements an existing business by creating an additional source of value—and an additional source of revenue.

 

Two Ways to Use Community

 

The distinction isn't what the community does; it’s what the organization is trying to accomplish.

A software company may build a customer community to improve onboarding, reduce support costs, and increase customer retention. The software remains the primary product, while the community helps customers succeed. This approach is often called Community-Led Growth.

Community becomes a strategic asset that strengthens another business model.

A professional association is different. Members join because they value participating in the community itself. Sponsors pay because they value opportunities to engage with those members. Participating in the community is what people are paying for.

This is the Community Revenue model. While it employs the same community-building principles, its focus is different. It recognizes that community isn't just a way to improve another business; it can also create its own revenue stream.

 

Who Can Use Community Revenue?

 

Many organizations assume they don't have a community because they don't have a membership site, a Discord server, or a Facebook Group. But those aren't communities; they’re Community Spaces.

Community begins with people who share a mission and benefit from helping one another. The Community Space simply gives those people a place to participate. If your organization brings together people who have something in common and can help one another make progress, you already have the foundation for a community. The question isn't whether you have a community today; it's whether you have the ingredients to build one.

That's why Community Revenue can work for organizations as different as commercial businesses, professional associations, media organizations, educational institutions, nonprofits, and local governments. The industries may be different, but the underlying opportunity is the same.

 

Start with Relationships, Not Reach

 

Many organizations begin by asking, "How do we grow our reach?" Community Revenue focuses on a different question:

Who already has a reason to help one another?

Those people might share a profession, a hobby, a life stage, a geographic location, an identity, or a common goal. Whatever brings them together, the opportunity isn't simply to give them more content. It's to create a Community Space where they can participate, build relationships, and help one another make progress toward a shared mission.

You don't need the largest audience; you need the right group of people creating value for one another.

 

Why Community Revenue Is Easier to Measure

 

One of the most common objections to investing in community is that it's difficult to measure. How do you measure relationships? Belonging? Trust?

Those things are undeniably important, but they're also difficult to quantify. As a result, many organizations struggle to justify investing in community because they can't clearly demonstrate its return on investment.

The reason Community Revenue is easier to measure is surprisingly simple: the community isn't supporting the product; the community is the product.

 

Traditional Community Measures Indirect Value

 

When organizations use community as a strategy, they typically use it to strengthen another business model. A software company hopes its customer community improves retention. A nonprofit hopes its community increases donations. A media company hopes its community drives engagement and loyalty.

In every case, the community contributes to organizational success, but it doesn't directly generate most of the organization's revenue. That makes measurement difficult. If customer retention improves, was it because of the community, a better product, a pricing change, or a new marketing campaign? The community may have played an important role, but it's rarely the only factor.

 

Community Revenue Measures Revenue Directly

 

Because the community itself creates value, the ultimate measure of success isn't engagement, posts, or comments; it's revenue.

This eliminates the need to infer value from indirect indicators. Instead of asking whether community contributed to another business outcome, Community Revenue measures the value the community creates directly.

Consider the swim club from the previous section: some members swim every day, while others only visit the pool twice a month. If you measured engagement alone, you might conclude that the members who visit less frequently value the community less.

But that's not necessarily true. If both members happily pay their monthly dues, they've both demonstrated that they value the community at its asking price. One member may participate more often than the other, but both have decided the community is worth paying for. Revenue reveals something that engagement alone cannot.

 

Common Misconceptions About Community Revenue

 

Whenever a new idea emerges, people naturally try to understand it by comparing it to something they already know.

That's why Community Revenue is often mistaken for memberships, community building, Community-Led Growth, or online communities. While it shares characteristics with each of these, none of them fully capture what makes Community Revenue different.

 

Community Revenue Isn't the Same as Memberships

 

Memberships and communities often overlap, but they aren't the same thing. Many memberships simply provide access to content, products, services, or exclusive benefits, and members may never interact with one another or develop relationships.

Likewise, Community Revenue doesn't require a membership model. Many organizations generate Community Revenue through events, sponsorships, education, donations, recruiting, consulting, or other offerings without ever charging membership dues. Memberships are one way to monetize a community, but they aren't what defines Community Revenue. Not every membership is a community, and not every Community Revenue business has memberships.

 

Community Revenue Isn't the Same as Community Building

 

Community building is the practice of creating and stewarding a community. Community Revenue is the business model built on that practice.

Every Community Revenue business requires community building, but not every community-building effort uses a Community Revenue business model.

 

Community Revenue Doesn't Begin with a Platform

 

Many organizations assume the first step is deciding between Circle, Mighty Networks, Discord, Slack, or Facebook Groups. It isn't. The first step is identifying a group of people with a shared mission and designing meaningful opportunities for participation. Once you've done that, choosing a platform becomes much easier.

Software can support a community, but it can't create one.

 

Community Revenue Isn't the Same as Community-Led Growth

 

Community-Led Growth asks how community can strengthen a business; Community Revenue asks how community can become the business.

Both approaches use the same principles of community building, but they're trying to accomplish different things. Community-Led Growth uses community to increase the value of another product or service, while Community Revenue recognizes that the community itself creates value that can be monetized.

 

The Bottom Line

 

For decades, organizations built businesses by attracting attention. That approach created extraordinary opportunities, but as content has become abundant, attention has become increasingly difficult to earn and monetize.

Community Revenue offers a different path forward. Instead of creating value primarily through content, it creates value by bringing people together around a shared mission where members build relationships and develop a sense of belonging.

It isn't a new marketing tactic; it’s a different business model.

The last generation built businesses around attention. The next generation will build businesses around belonging.

 

What's Next?

 

If Community Revenue creates value through belonging, the obvious next question is:
How do you monetize a community?

There isn't just one answer. Communities can generate revenue through memberships, events, education, sponsorships, donations, recruiting, and many other models. The right approach depends on your organization, your members, and the value your community creates.