In 2012, Rhett Ayers Butler faced a choice that most founders avoid: his business was working fine, but he couldn't shake the feeling it wasn't working enough.
Mongabay's advertising model was generating revenue and keeping the lights on. But Butler had been reporting in Indonesia and kept bumping against the same wall: environmental degradation there was being driven by corruption and mismanagement in the natural resources sector, yet there was almost no environmental coverage that actually spanned the archipelago. He began to wonder if journalism itself could be an intervention — if transparency and accountability could be reported into existence.
"Much of the environmental degradation in Indonesia then was driven by corruption and mismanagement in the natural resources sector, and there was little environmental coverage that spanned the archipelago. I believed journalism itself could be an intervention — one that increased transparency and accountability."
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Start Your News DetoxThe risk was real. Butler had no fundraising background, no nonprofit management experience, and no inherited wealth to fall back on. But he launched Mongabay Indonesia anyway, testing whether this model could actually work. It did. That success became the permission slip he needed.
The pivot that changed the mission
What makes this decision unusual isn't just that Butler abandoned a working revenue stream — it's that he did it precisely because it was working. An advertising model that's struggling forces you to change. One that's stable lets you avoid the hard work. Butler chose the harder path.
The shift meant Mongabay could stop optimizing for what advertisers wanted to fund and start optimizing for what the environment actually needed. It meant turning down lucrative partnerships that didn't align with the mission. It meant building relationships with foundations and individual donors who cared about environmental accountability, not audience reach metrics.
Today, that 2012 pivot looks prescient. Environmental journalism funded by ads faces constant pressure to sensationalize, to chase clicks, to cover what drives engagement rather than what drives change. Mongabay's model — sustained by mission-aligned funding — allowed the organization to do the slower, harder work of investigation and accountability.
The organization now operates in multiple languages and regions, each one built on the same principle: that journalism can be a tool for transparency in places where it's most needed. That's not something an advertising model easily protects.
