From time to time I’ve enjoyed studying media businesses. They have a number of qualities which can make them high quality. The monopoly newspaper is a particular historical fascination of mine. Media and technology converged over my adolescence and young adulthood, and this phenomenon has been fascinating.
You’ll forgive me for peering into a couple of private businesses - but one can only resist the temptation of self indulgence for so long.
As the internet, and by extension the media, has centralised over time the successful media-esque businesses that have emerged have more or less been of two varieties. On one hand there are the ultra-scaled centralising platforms and social media companies. The Meta Platforms family of apps, as well as the ever present properties of Google and YouTube predominate. On the other hand, there have been a variety of one-man-bands who have had significant cultural and financial success (can I say the name… Mr Beast) by leveraging these centralising properties. Those who straddled the middle ground (*cough* traditional print and news media *cough*) have largely gone by the wayside, with important exceptions.
The smaller, personal brands are fascinating business cases, not only because of the reach that a solopreneur can have, but also because the economics of some of these businesses are nothing short of outstanding. The big daddy of the modern premium newsletter is of course Ben Thompson’s Stratechery.
Stratechery pioneered what would later become Substack’s entire business model. At the core there is a written regular newsletter circulated via email. The written content is also available via a web portal/website. There’s a playful yellow hue to the site, and a definitive logo that follows you across platforms. Underpinning the stylistic elements and logistics of distributing the content is, of course, insightful analysis - the hardest part of all:
This is a point I've made about writing in general. Anyone can come up with one really good post or one really good podcast. I don't mean to say that dismissively. I think there are a lot of people out there with very smart insights. I think it's a very distinct skill and capability to come up with interesting things consistently.
The sooner you can demonstrate that to someone, the sooner they are going to take advantage of whatever means you have to follow, to subscribe, or whatever it might be, because it's not just a promise of consistency, but it's evidence of that. I think that's really important to online businesses in general.
Ben Thompson, Acquired FM
Thompson produces about 4 pieces of written content per week (about 2000 words in length each excluding quotations), with one of those being free. Since its launch in 2014, Thompson has branched in (and out) of a number of accompanying podcasts, and has recently added a podcast series in which he doesn’t personally appear.
The subject matter is broadly the strategy of technology. With the ever growing dominance of the large tech players, and importantly the substantial gains these companies have made for investors (your truly included), this subject matter has found almost no end in interested readers. Strikingly, this is all delivered for the price of $12 USD a month or $120 USD a year:
I think that the way to think about publishing online is, what are you selling? I think we do get in the trap of thinking you're selling a single episode or selling a single article, that's actually getting the incentives wrong. What I'm selling to my subscribers is consistency and, yes, certainly a quality bar.
Further to this point:
At the same time, there's an aspect of what I'm actually selling to my subscribers. This is more of an implicit promise, but I think it's the reality, is the consistency, the regularity, and the knowing that if something happens, you're going to be able to get my take on it.
I think that's where subscription pricing does make much more sense for content production, because in this case, you're actually getting the money up front. The money is funding the work as opposed to the work being a speculative bid for the money. One thing that I've pushed over time, and I'm very happy about, is trying to get people to annual subscriptions. I think my audience at this point is 70% annual subscriptions.
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