In the summer of 2024, there was a lot of enthusiasm for a media upstart that set its sights on The Gospel Coalition. Clear Truth Media has came out of the gate wanting to supplant The Gospel Coalition as the dominant online ministry, with it’s early article, “Why It’s Time To Say Goodbye To The Gospel Coalition.” The article was heavily promoted at the time, and the organization would grow large enough to put on conferences.
Yet, a year and a half later The Gospel Coalition still stands. Clear Truth Media does not, as in the link above literally no longer works. The Wayback Machine captured the landing page back in December, and it was apparent the site was largely inactive. Yet, they hosted a conference this month featuring big names like Steve Deace, Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson, Rob McCoy, and Frank Turek.
Yet the allure of these big names and a decent number of sponsors amounted only to an intimate scene. The most publicized image from the conference shows a panel discussion in a small church basement where the speakers can be heard without sound equipment. So, suffice to say that this conference underperformed with a marquis lineup of provocative names.
As someone who operates multiple small businesses, EDW being a competitor to TGC and CTM, and a completely unrelated day job business, I understand what the competitive advantage of The Gospel Coalition was in the first place. It was never quality. It was reach.
The most important asset of The Gospel Coalition is its email list. This is not a ministry that excels on social media presence. Rather they get ratio’d often enough by people like us. Likewise, in my vast research, I would not say that TGC is phenomenal in search engine optimization. Some categories yes, but in general their latest articles are not all that Google-friendly for those of us who do research. Rather, TGC relies on a massive email list for traffic. If they have, for instance, 200k emails and 10000 clicks a day from them (extremely low) they would still crush it on traffic compared to their various competitors.
The second is high-rolling legacy donors. The Gospel Coalition receives massive amounts in grants from various family foundations that fund a variety of prominent ministries. If these people do not know what they are funding by now, where would they yet be struck? I do believe that a competitor can stumble across high status donors, but the hope of peeling away donors for an upstart is unlikely.
Clear Truth Media set out to compete on quality and cost. It’s a small-budget operation, and surpassing The Gospel Coalition in quality was never difficult. But volunteers are not eager to write articles for someone else’s gain. Not paying for content was always going to limit the quantity of articles, but with Clear Truth Media, the content slowed to a crawl and then a halt.
Additionally, Clear Truth Media was being pulled in multiple directions. For instance, their glazing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer showed that the woke tendencies of The Gospel Coalition were also present. Their advisory counsel at one point had men like Michael Foster but also sellouts like Joel Berry. This organization had a battle for its soul at its inception, but ultimately, Steve Whitlow would be the helm of the media upstart.
Steve Whitlow had the connections to launch Clear Truth Media, but he either lacks the time or the talent to make it successful. (If money is the issue, then his inability to solicit donors falls under talent, but it seems like he got sponsors quite easily for the latest conference.) Having friends in high places is not enough to supplant The Gospel Coalition.
Takeaway
Clear Truth Media had Conservative Inc. astroturfing and still failed to capture and retain an audience. Evangelical Dark Web and other believers who aspire to enter the content creation realm should heed this as a cautionary tale. Clear Truth Media, however, is not the only entity that has failed here. Jon Harris launched Truth Script with the same goal and similar results.
The first lesson I would insist on is paying writers. Whether it’s a commission or a nominal amount, keep the morale of team players alive. You can’t rely on volunteer writers for long because they get burned out. I experienced this in my early writing venture, writing for NOQ Report to try to make it in Conservative Inc. Spoiler alert: writing for free was not the path to making it. Both Protestia and Evangelical Dark Web pay writers, but it doesn’t seem like these TGC replacements did, because they were nonprofits.
The second takeaway is how we should view written content. Written content is also the least profitable. Website ads pay less than they used to, search traffic is getting replaced by AI, and it’s higher effort than social media posting which now pays. Videos, podcasts, and social media posting are all more profitable than writing. So the written content needs to be a conduit for the others. This is what Evangelical Dark Web has done. We write articles for videos and use videos to promote the articles, in a cyclical fashion. I write articles that I then adapt into social media posts and adapt social media posts into articles.
Nevertheless, news needs to be documented in writing so that the robots can discover it. This is why Evangelical Dark Web and Protestia have lasting power. We are not writing agreeable or banal opinion pieces.
The Gospel Coalition has an entrenched moat of a large email list that upstarts cannot ethically match. The hardest thing for Evangelical Dark Web is growing an email list for a daily newsletter that publishes controversial material. Thus, we are not looking to compete with Tim Keller’s organization at their game. We instead have play to our strengths and not theirs. Clear Truth Media played to the strengths of The Gospel Coalition thninking they could replicate the results with superior quality and without taking into account what their competitive disadvantage was.
