Keeping the media’s money with the media.

I believe in a media landscape where quality content is valued and paid for. Audiences are treated as customers, with a wide choice of trusted brands. Media companies are paid in line with the value they create, and the people who make the content decide how it is accessed. Independent, commercial journalism is strong enough to hold power to account.

We are a long way from that. For two decades, media companies have handed control of their audiences, and much of their revenue, to technology platforms. Search and social decide who sees what. Advertising pays less every year, and AI is speeding up the decline, answering people’s questions with media companies’ work while sending fewer readers back. A business that depends on someone else’s platform for its traffic depends on someone else for its future.

Direct revenue from audiences is the way out. But the industry has leaned on a single product to deliver it. Subscription works well for the most committed readers, and most media companies reach a natural level of 2 to 5 per cent of their audience. Everyone else is asked for a commitment they don’t want to make, then discounted, chased or turned away. For most media companies, the majority of their audience earns them nothing directly.

I started Axate because I believed casual payments were the missing piece of the jigsaw: removing the demand for commitment lowers the barriers for people wanting your product. Compounding revenue replaces recurring revenue, and scales much better - more customers, spending money more often. But the truth is that micropayments, as the industry has known them, have not worked as a standalone solution.

Early attempts asked people to behave the way publishers wished they would, rather than the way they actually do. Paying online was slow and fiddly. Everyone was fixated on an idea which charged for each article people read - punishing engagement with higher costs instead of rewarding it with better and more satisfying experiences. And most media companies tried casual payment as a bolt-on to products built for advertising, offering a more expensive product without making it better. Few people valued it enough to pay for it. Changing the payment terms without also considering the product you’re offering and the needs of your users doesn’t work.

So Axate has evolved. It is now an audience revenue platform: one account and sign-on through which anyone can pay as they go, subscribe, buy a paid newsletter or contribute. Subscription and casual payment sit together. Full-price subscribers are left alone. People who will never subscribe can still pay for what they read, and subscribers who would otherwise cancel can stay as paying customers. Media companies set every price.

The conviction behind it has not changed. Audiences are customers, and the money the media creates should stay with the media. Axate is building the shared infrastructure to make that possible: infrastructure media companies use together, rather than another platform sitting between them and their audiences.

Dominic Young
Founder and CEO, Axate
November 2026