I’m always a bit ambivalent about sharing or publicizing this information. Because on its face it sounds like, “Damn, those guys are swimming in money or growing like gangbusters!” Well, not exactly. But when you see all these sites closing down or sold for parts or where ...
2/ the new boss calls everyone together and says they’re all fired it’s because the site’s business model collapsed. Or just as often it’s because the investors who were floating the operation belatedly realized that scale and ads were never going to generate the ...
3/ kinds of returns they were investing against. So they pulled the plug. Well, our business model collapsed too. In fact, probably more dramatically since we lacked scale and access to capital and synergies with other brands to leverage against the decline.
4/ But we had two big advantages. One was that we started building a new business model very, very early - all the way back in 2012 when we launched Prime. The other was more organic to the site itself. In the scale and ads era a sustained and dedicated relationship with an ...
5/ audience mattered with very little in business terms. Great in other ways but basically an irrelevancy for business. In the subscriptions era though it turned out to be golden. Because absent any kind of walls and moats soft monopoly power, without that, subscriptions ...
6/ are all but impossible for all but a handful of national pubs. But that was something TPM always had in spades. So when you see these numbers please don’t think wow, I doubt they need my subscription they’re doing so great. Those dramatic numbers are simply ...
7/ what have kept us here and in one piece. But we’ve built it far enough that we’re here and I am confident we will stay here and even grow long into the future.
