Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…And Passport is the technology infrastructure you've built to enable other people to build Stratechery-like experiences? If they're whitelisted by you, how's that work? No, it's just my stuff for now. Obviously, we would love to make it broadly available. It's not all finished yet. There are customer support issues and things that would entail that, but it's something that I would like to do. One of the things we did with that is I link to myself a lot, which people make fun of and deservedly so, because it's a running joke between me and my readers. But a way I think about Stratechery is that it's a live thing. It's an ongoing journal of my attempt to understand the world, to understand technology. Sometimes I was right about something., and it's always fun to point back and say I was right. Sometimes I was wrong. It's like, why was I wrong? What mistakes did I make? Sometimes there's a trend and it's like, well, this happened back then, and this happened here. Again, I think about it as being a live thing, so linking back to myself as a way to do that, it's also a great way to trigger that second article sensation, where you read an article, and then there's a link right there and you go read another article. That was also really good, and then there's XYZ. One of the things that I wanted to do with Passport was, how can I really leverage email forwarding to accomplish this, especially when I'm linking to paid articles? One of the things we do there is, every link to myself in a Stratechery email is tokenized, and that token goes one link deep. Even if the email is forwarded to you, you can go read old stuff so you get that second article sensation. Now, if you're in that second article, when you click another link, now you're getting a paywall, and then you're going to realize, oh, I have to pay to get this. There are all these little bits and pieces that the subscription all makes possible, which is really leaning into just serving your customers, trying to make it as good of an experience for them as it can be. The other really important thing about subscriptions is there are always debates about, oh, people just write for clicks and blah-blah-blah. Then the publishers or the editors will come back and say, no, we don't even show our writers their click numbers. They don't know. All we want them to do is write content. I think that's so foolish because everyone wants feedback. They want affirmation. They want to know, did I do a good job? If you don't even get access to your click numbers, where do you go? You go to Twitter. What are people saying about me? You will find a way to figure out if you resonated or not.…

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