Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I thought that was a possibility, a potential leg of the stool. But I didn't know that I could do the same format. What works for him very well is because most of his stuff are short snippets and wink out, it's very easy to check in and read everything. I ended up moving more towards longer pieces. I experimented and played around with that format, and it didn't seem right to me. Also, just strategically, you could see where things were going, this idea that users are going to Google, going to social media. That's the best and most obvious place to put advertising because that's where the users are, there's understanding about them, and all those sorts of things. Advertising is an ROI measurement. It's not just what’s your return, but also how much work you have to do to get it? Why would someone want to go to a small blog and put the effort of putting it out there? It didn't seem like a very scalable possibility. Meanwhile, at the same time, there was this new company that was founded called Stripe. It seemed viable to me that if you thought through the idea, if I produced super highly differentiated content, that is something that is not going to appeal to the whole world, but to the people who like it, they'll really like it. If you have that audience, you should maximize your revenue per user. The way to maximize your revenue per user is to charge them a subscription. The tools were then becoming available to do that. 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.…

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