Tren Griffin Profile picture
Sep 23, 2020 15 tweets 5 min read Read on X
1/ Casey Newton's interview with Sarah Jeong puts the focus on the economics of the *writers*. Too often people talk and write about whether the publication has a business model. What are the economics for the people who do the writing? How do they thrive? onezero.medium.com/casey-newton-o…
2/ Casey Newton: "What we don’t know is if you’re a writer with a following, can you use that to build a sustainable career in journalism?" That includes working for the NYT but also building a business around a platform like Substack or like rolling your own (Stratechery).
3/ Casey: "If you can find 10,000 people to pay you $100 a year, you’re making $1M a year. I’m not going to get to 10,000 subscribers anytime soon, but if I can I’ll be in a position where I can create media jobs." More and more journalists will adopt Casey's approach over time.
4/ Adopting a newsletter model is successful if a writer can discover a community that finds the writing to make their activities more productive/ profitable or an area of intense interest. Finding 10,000+ people who will pay regularly means continuously delivering high value.
5/ The analogy here is to trying to make a reasonable living writing books. This is far harder than people imagine. The people who read this tweet aren't representative of the mass market. Few people buy books and even less people read them. For details google.com/amp/s/25iq.com…
6/ I solved the writing business model problem for myself by going "free for real" instead of "freemium." My income from books goes to charity. My 300 blog posts ( > 1M words) have zero advertising and are free for real. But I've always had another job for support and ideas.
7/ For writers who can discover enough product/market fit for their newsletter to support them financially, what they gain also is job security. Yes, a newsletter is like a startup and must discover product/market fit which isn't permanent (it can be lost).thewrap.com/variety-hollyw…
8/ Yes, there is a TAM limit. US spending on reading declined by 1.8% in 2018. $108 "all in" on reading of all kinds on average, which is pathetic and reality at the same time. The writer must discover a small but passionate community willing to pay. bls.gov/opub/reports/c…
9/ My hope is that journalists like Casey generate enough revenue and job security inside the paywall that they are able to take more content outside the paywall where a win-win can happen: the free content fills the top of the newsletter sales funnel and non-payers benefit too.
10/ Part of what I wrote about here was that what Casey and Ben write can be a public good (non-rival and non-excludable). Markets may not produce enough content to create an informed electorate and productive economy if great content doesn't get produced. 25iq.com/2017/11/18/bus…
11/ “If a competitor can offer a service like yours for free, and they can make enough money to keep the lights on, then you have a problem.” Digital offerings have very strange economics in that they can have close to zero marginal cost...." Bill Gurley 25iq.com/2017/04/07/a-d…
12/ There will be more paid newsletters and some will find product/market fit and some won't. They are a great addition to the mix and an income and job security godsend for the writers who can make it work. As with most content there will be a "success" power law distribution.
13/ This tweetstorm was free as in free beer. You probably need to pay to read this: nytimes.com/2020/09/23/bus… "Writers could make $100,000 a year if they bring in “a couple thousand people” who spend $5 a month on a subscription. 'It’s not easy, but it’s more doable than ever.'”
14/ "Sweat equity freemium" (some content is outside the paywall) is the cash-conserving customer acquisition tool of choice.

NYT: "Substack's competitors include open-source Ghost, TinyLetter and Lede, which combines WordPress, a design agency and the payments service."
15/ Casey looks at this below and asks: "creating a newsletter is worth a swing of the bat."

There were ~88k newsroom employees – reporters, editors, photographers and videographers – in newspapers. radio, broadcast TV, cable and other services in 2019. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020…

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More from @trengriffin

Jan 1
1/ A friend asked me to summarize Charlie Munger's framework with a few of his quotes from after my book was published. "Extra points for a short explanation."

Four categories form a checklist and create the pneumonic "RISE”:

Rationality
Inversion
Self-Regulation
Emulation Image
Rational:

"There's hardly anything more important than being rational or objective. Think of the people who are just utterly brilliant who do some of the dumbest things. You won't have any trouble thinking of examples. It's hard to be rational." Image
Inversion

"The way complex adaptive systems work, and the way mental constructs work, problems frequently become easier to solve through inversion. If you turn problems around into reverse, you often think better."

Be smart by not being stupid Image
Read 5 tweets
Feb 25, 2023
John Malone: "At the moment, there’s a lot of blood flowing down the gutters, of people who are streaming, and some can afford it and some cannot.” hollywoodreporter.com/business/busin…
"With WBD backing out of their RSNs, when combined with the Bally Sports networks, 17 of the league's 30 clubs, or 2/3 of MLB’s total now are on the edge of financial collapse." forbes.com/sites/maurybro…
"The leagues are gonna have to be careful, they don't want to end up with a very high price premium service with no reach because then the kids will stop watching the sport." cnbc.com/amp/2022/11/17…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 25, 2023
Of the 300 poss I wrote on 25iQ the one about Steve Jobs was perhaps the trickiest to write. To make sure that everything I said was accurate I had every word checked by someone who was his direct report for 7 years. Steve Jobs would have been 68 this week.25iq.com/2014/12/28/a-d…
On the August day in 1981 Bill Gates hosted a summit meeting at the Seattle Tennis Club (pictured) on the shores of Lake Washington. Steve Jobs gave a mesmerizing performance. Macintosh would offer exponentially greater value than anything on the market. siliconvalley.com/2014/08/29/199…
One giant advantage of being born in 1955 was the the magic of the microprocessor arrived while you were in high school. This changed the world at just the right time for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. That birth year meant you missed the Vietnam draft and were too old for disco. 🕺
Read 4 tweets
Feb 19, 2023
"Operating loss of $392 million."

"Adjusted Operating Income increased 34% to $137 million"

It's all about the adjustments.

amcnetworks.com/press-releases…
"I’ve never made an investment in the movie business in any way, shape, manner or form. It may be a very good place to make a living as an actor or a writer or something or a musician. But it’s a hard place to make money if you’re an investor."

Charlie Munger this past week.
Warren Buffett: "The nice thing about the mouse is that he doesn't have an agent. You know I mean the mouse is yours and he is not in there renegotiating and you know every every week or every month. [Disney] understands all of that very well."
Read 4 tweets
Jan 7, 2023
1/ What is Roku's customer acquisition cost (CAC)? What is churn? How about ARPU? Gross Margin? Do you understand Roku's unit economics? Can you calculate per customers CLV/CBCV? variety.com/2023/digital/n…
2/ "The YOY compression in platform and player margins resulted in gross profit growth of negative 2% YOY versus the 12% YOY growth in total net revenue. Q3 adjusted EBITDA was negative $34 million and we ended the quarter with >$2 billion of cash." fool.com/earnings/call-…
3/ Is nine months right?

"So churn is job one for 2023. You have to get your churn down because the customer acquisition costs means you have to have a subscriber for like nine months before you get a payback just on your customer acquisition cost. ca.finance.yahoo.com/video/streamin…
Read 10 tweets
Jan 6, 2023
OCT. 10, 1989

This estimate for Excel was across all platforms. Not just OS/2.
upi.com/Archives/1989/…
Steve Ballmer

"IBM was the bear and we were going to ride the back of the bear. You just had to try to stay on the bear's back and the bear would twist and turn and try to buck you and throw you, but darn, we were going to ride the bear."

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1098019…
pbs.org/nerds/part2.ht…

“IBM is proposing to take over the definition of PC desktop operating systems. Thru have a plan to design the operating system so that their hardware Micro Channel architecture and applications are tied in.” Bill Gates PC Week, June 24, 1991
Read 4 tweets

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