Business Models

One thing that might surprise you about dominance is how companies get it. You might think it comes from rapacious win-at-all costs business practices, or from raising large amounts of money to snuff out competition. But we’ve found that the primary source for a company’s dominance is whether it designs its product and business model to be... See more

I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with attention instead of money. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and at first, it was!

It was like having a big party sponsored by Mazda, and all that meant was having the Mazda logo on the Solo... See more

I wanted to make a product and sell it directly to people who’d care about its quality. There’s an incredible connection possible when you align your financial motivations with the service of your users. It’s an entirely different category of work than if you’re simply trying to capture eyeballs and sell their attention, privacy, and dignity in... See more

We earn trust by stating our business model upfront – instead of ads, we monetize by charging directly. Directly charging creates high expectations from our members, and in aspiring to meet those expectations, we are held accountable to creating something you love and use.

Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

We don’t track time on site on Sublime. We also don’t track passive consumption. We only track people actively building and curating their library (which itself is not a perfect metric - because we don’t want to incentivize collecting. we want to incentivize creating with your knowledge) but is better than time on platform.

If a platform enables

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