I’ve long worried that heavy reliance on display advertising for revenue makes online news startups vulnerable if that source falters.

It’s happening. Consider ad blockers and shifts to consumption of content on mobile devices – where display ads don’t always play well – not to mention falling ad rates. It’s easy to envision a future with a lot less display advertising or at least a lot less revenue from it.

So I’m always looking for startups that are experimenting with different sources of revenue and several recently came to my attention.

One is Brick City Bucks, the brainchild of Andaiye Taylor, a news entrepreneur with experience in both journalism and advertising. Taylor operates Brick City Live, a small local news site that covers events and businesses in downtown Newark, N.J. 

In Brick City Bucks, site users receive a free membership card that entitles them to specials and discounts offered by site advertisers.

Taylor recently completed a pilot of Brick City Bucks, working with eight advertisers and distributing 500 membership cards in just a few weeks.

Now Taylor is moving to develop a mobile app. “The idea was to go mobile from the get-go,” Taylor said. But she decided to test with the “analog” version before investing in the app.

The mobile app will enable different features, according to Taylor, including push notifications and deals based on loyalty – the number of times a customer comes in.

Taylor said she wants to keep the basic rates relatively low (in the range of $89-$149 a month) in order to build up a good pool of advertisers. She hopes to have 30 in a year. In addition to the flat rate, Taylor said she plans to charge additional fees for special add-on such as featured display. By contrast, her display rate is $150 for three months.

Taylor said she came up with the idea through her reporting on local businesses and getting beyond consumer awareness to “actually getting people to walk through the door of these businesses.”

“This is a solution that actually solved the problem,” she said. “It totally resonates” with businesses.

Taylor also believes the app will help attract more downtown workers, which in turn will generate more users of her site.

A second experiment was a successful crowd funding campaign by The Lo-Down, a neighborhood news site in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The site raised nearly $28,000 in contributions from community members and businesses to fund a yearlong reporting project focused on challenges and solutions for long-term survival of local small businesses in the diverse but gentrifying neighborhood.

Editor Ed Litvak he believes the campaign succeeded because the topic resonated in the community and because the site has developed a profile as a neighborhood asset. “If we had not been around for six years, building a lot of relationships and a lot of capital, it wouldn’t have worked. People were responsive to us.”

Litvak isn’t sure how often his site might go the crowd sourcing well. But the effort has got him thinking about a potential membership model to generate revenue for the site. “If we are going to survive, our advertising model is going to have to be supplemented with community support.”

The two sites are among six partner sites of the Geraldine R. Dodge’s Foundation’s Local News Lab. The project is working with the sites on revenue models and engagement strategies.

Meanwhile, a California site, Berkeleyside, has parlayed an engaged audience into a promising membership model. As Matt DeRienzo of LION Publishers reported, Berkleyside co-founder Tracey Taylor said donations from members now account for about 20 percent of revenue for the site. 

The site has offers T-shirts and tote bags as well as event discounts. But Taylor told a recent gathering at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism that the main benefit is being part of a community. “The value of being a Berkleyside member is you become part of this club,” Taylor said.

For those waiting for the magic lightning bolt to break open the mystery vault of sustainability for local news, these may seem like small steps. 

But they contain an important lesson: They rest on the ability of the sites to engage loyal users in their local communities, rather than on attracting large audiences, which is unlikely to be possible for most. 

They reflect the ability – and the necessity - of close-to-the-ground news entrepreneurs to tap into community needs and to recognize the value of small, incremental streams as they develop business models that are not so dependent on traditional display advertising.