Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…Just to validate the point real quick—and David, this might push back on there being an alternative history where Stratechery could have been ad driven—for anybody who doesn't read Daring Fireball and doesn't know who John Gruber is that we're talking about, quick lesson. When Ben says that he invented the infeed advertisement, you go to daringfireball.net, yes.net, and you see the same exact website that's been there for 10, close to 20 years at this point. Most of it links out to other things. Some of it is long form, well-thought-through pieces, and some of it is sponsored posts. I consumed, just like many other people, the entire feed in an RSS reader. The sponsored posts would show up just like any other posts in an RSS reader. Now, I think the set of people who are likely to use an RSS reader and who are likely to go directly to daringfireball.net as the place where they're intentionally typing in the URL or clicking the bookmarks bar and going to it, that set of Apple nerds is far more likely to do that behavior than anybody else in the world. The world is shifting away from going directly to pages. A lot of your readers are like, I'm just getting my news from Twitter and wherever else at this point, and I'm not doing the RSS thing. I think the more niche you are, interestingly enough, that does pay off in subscriptions. It can also work well for advertising. I think Gruber was at the right place, the right time for Apple, for sure, not just in terms of Apple's growth, but also the explosion of the App Store. There was a period where you'd have lots of apps as a feature thing, so it works great for him. Again, I did have sponsored posts a little bit when I did go independent, because I figured I'd have multiple revenue streams. I didn't remember that. How long did you do that for?…

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