THE INSPIRATION FOR Politico Pro, the premium service of the politics-focused media company Politico, came from studying the needs of its visitors.

“We looked at what the professionals we served were reading and realized there was an information gap,” says chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz. These people—government officials, legislative staffers, corporate executives and others—got their basic political news from free sites like Politico. But when it came to news about niche topics such as healthcare, technology and energy, they had to hire staffers or high-priced consultants to keep up.

“We believed there were many professionals, in Washington and beyond, who were hungering for real-time information and would pay a premium for it,” says Pro editorial director Martin Kady II.

 The result was Politico Pro. Launched in 2011, the site serves up a daily barrage of in-depth stories about rule-making, legislation, amendments, and more—“information that could make or break your business or lobbying effort,” as Kady puts it.

At inception, Pro had 30 editorial staffers covering three verticals. Now there are 100 content people watching 14 verticals, plus 60 sales and business people to serve the 1,800 institutional subscribers who pay up to $300,000-plus a year for the service.

Financially, Pro has been a huge success—it now generates half of all revenue. But the experience has also taught Politico a lot about how to size up potential new content areas. “Typically, it takes you three years to saturate a particular vertical, but your investment is all at the front end,” says Schwartz. That early investment is critical, though, in order to bring in subs. “Our renewal rate is 93 percent,” he says, “so the sooner we sign people up, the higher their lifetime value.” 

Now the company is cloning the same model in other markets, expanding internationally with Politico Europe, launched in April, and domestically with state-level sites (New York Politico launched in 2013; New Jersey and Florida will launch later this year). All either have, or will have, their own versions of Pro, Schwartz says.

Both Schwartz and Kady attribute Pro’s success to instant delivery of important, actionable information. “If a reporter gets a document or a tip from a member of Congress, he looks at it, interprets it, and taps out a 250-word e-mail alert—often on a mobile phone—so the news reaches subscribers in minutes,” Kady says.

“We’ve had Congressmen reading our alerts out loud from the dias of a hearing while the reporter is still in the room. That’s a real affirmation of the business model.”