Subscription Media

The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.

A few reasons NFTs make for better content subscriptions than web2 🧵:

The New York Times is using bundling better than any subscription product I can think of. The reason their bundle is so powerful is because they minimize SuperFan overlap, and maximize CasualFan overlap. Not sure what that means? Here's a breakdown on bundling strategy 🧵

A theme over the past 12 months was that media companies like NYT were dead because Substack would steal all the best people. Now people are shutting down their Substacks to become employees at The New York Times? It's almost like brand matters.

1/ Thread: Newsletter TAM Today I polled on twitter how many investment professionals pay for newsletter/research blog/substack subscription. Almost half responded: Zero. The other half who pays for subscription, more than half of them pays for only one newsletter.

The past generation of social apps won the market through a playbook: - building big networks with feeds for discovery - creating a followers/status competition for engagement - bringing together creators and audiences - monetizing with ads - supporting photo, text, video

Web2 content pricing is so broken: a subscription to 70 million songs costs the same amount as a subscription to one newsletter.

4/ Software subscription businesses: 1. Activation rate: The percentage of free/trial users who hit a valuable milestone in the first X days after signing up (e.g. meditate, watch a show, listen to a song, find a match, sync a folder, etc.) 2. Intensity of engagement: L7/L30

There should be a way to pay for individual articles without a monthly subscription.

a fascinating distinction between subscriptions (legacy media) & membership (creators) happening in real time— subscriptions: best content is paywalled because content is the only value membership: best content is free because the creator and the community is the value.