Subscription Media

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.

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

Feel like there's a massive opportunity to buy ad-supported media brands at a discount right now and convert to subs Falling CPMs drops valuation, but if they have brand equity can convert a % to subs. then buy ads at that low CPM (which wouldn't work as a straight arb play)

A week ago, OnlyFans posted that they had paid out $700M to creators lifetime to date. Now the headline image says $725M. At a 20% take rate and with the approx timeline, thats ≈$800m-1.5B GMV run rate and $150-300M revenue run rate. This is a billion dollar media company.

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 🧵

I now pay for 4 @SubstackInc newsletters which is ~4x my annual @nytimes subscription. 2 realizations: 1) the medium (newsletters) is personal, provides discourse & connects creator & consumer. it's an ideal model 2) cost modeling, need for bundling will be tested very soon

1/ I'm worried that the new monetization models we are seeing with both publishers and independent writers will worsen society's polarization into ideological echo chambers. (thread)

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

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.