Here's the model, plainly: your own feed is yours, free. Post about your business there all day — your story, your products, your people. Content becomes advertisement the moment you direct it at someone else's audience — a journalist's or a publication's feed.
The three ways to reach a journalism audience
- Full ad — your content with images and media, placed on a journalism feed.
- Minimal ad — text only, no images or media. Lighter presence, lighter cost.
- Profile support — closer to a donation: you back a journalist's or publication's profile itself rather than placing a piece of content.
Whichever you choose, the money overwhelmingly goes to the journalism you're supporting — 90% of direct support goes to the journalist or publication. That's the design: local businesses funding local journalism, and being seen doing it. (The split's full story, including payouts, lives in the subscriptions-and-payouts guide — the one home for those numbers as the model evolves.)
Placing vs. receiving
Placing any of these is open to everyone — an account is all it takes. Receiving is the other side of the transaction: a journalist or publication takes direct support on a Premium membership, once their payouts and tax form are set up. That's why some people you follow can be supported and others can't yet — if there's no way to back someone, they haven't opened that door.
What this gets a business
Reach with meaning. Your bakery's ad on the local paper's feed reaches the people who actually read local news — and every one of them can see you're the reason that journalism gets paid for. You can also support My Local Press generally, which backs local journalism across the platform.
For current pricing, see the options on the advertisement form itself and the membership page — we don't quote numbers here because they belong on those screens.
Buying from one paper in particular
A publication can publish its own rates — the spots it sells, how long each runs, what each costs — on its Advertise page. Where a paper does, you pick a spot, write the ad, pay, and it's live, without a phone call. Where it doesn't, the request form is still there and reaches the same place. Either way the publication keeps 90%. Booking an ad with a publication walks through it; publishers set their own rates in selling ads on your publication.
Self-promotion and links in content
The profile is the home for off-platform presence — a website, a newsletter, the other places someone publishes all belong there, linked for anyone who visits.
Content is different. Community feeds carry local content of every kind, but they aren't a place to solicit. Content whose main purpose is promotion — a subscription pitch, a donation ask, traffic to another site — stays visible to its author's own readers but isn't distributed to community feeds or promoted by the platform. That kind of reach is what advertisements are for. Want promotional content in front of the community? Promote it.
Personal payment and donation links (PayPal, Venmo, tip jars, and the like) aren't allowed — not in content and not on a profile. Creator earnings run through the platform's payment system. Payment details that are part of a story someone is covering — a charity drive, a venue selling tickets — are fine. Whether something is a story or a promotion is determined by My Local Press, and that determination is final.