David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we were a video podcast, it would make it worse, because we're right at the limit right now. We have all the benefits of when we drop an episode, it really matters to the people that we care about it mattering to, and we don't get recognized on the street. The episode with Ben was about Stratechery, obviously. We didn't really talk about this, but I kept thinking about him wanting to explore more, and we should do here. Our business model is very different from Ben's. Growth, again, nice to have for us. It comes with some set of trade-offs. There are some downsides to it, some upsides. I don't know. You could argue. Maybe you think it's slightly negative to growth. Maybe I think it's slightly positive. It's in the neutral zone. But because of our business model and everything we were talking about, the deepening of the engagement with the right people and the right sponsors, that's what drives our excitement about the business and the business itself in a way that for Ben, it's different, because he actually does need to grow his business to keep growing the number of consumers, because some percentage of them will convert to paying. You're saying for his revenue to grow, he must grow the number of subscribers, which means if subscribers are always a fixed fraction of the set of people who are reading anything on Stratechery, he must grow the top line. Whereas what you're saying for us is, the revenue is not necessarily directly connected to audience size.…

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