Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…Right. But Casey, the expectation is that he writes on social media. He's writing about Twitter every single day for like a month, and that's exactly what people want. I'm glad he exists from my perspective. Hey, if you want Twitter coverage every single day, go read Casey. That's a great thing from my perspective. I think that defines this market. I'm really proud that this business model for newsletters exists. I think it should exist for podcasts. I think part of that is just figuring out the mechanics of it. How do you market? How do you grow stuff? I haven't done a good job marketing my paid podcasts, I would say, other than leveraging Stratechery, but that's something we want to work on. Obviously, there should be some video stuff. There should be, what's the ratio of free stuff to clips, to snippets, things on those lines. We're actually experimenting that more with Sharp China and Sharp Tech, where even if you're on the free feed, you're getting more clips and snippets. Also, I think that the technological aspect is important. It's funny. Even free podcasts, it's like, oh, we're going to have a guest on. Go listen to his podcast. Go to your podcast player, search for XYZ, and it's offloading this huge number of steps to the user hoping they follow through and do it. Whereas we've built something where, go to your show notes, click the link, boom, it's in your podcast player. The sharing stuff is really tricky because people don't share podcasts naturally. I want to figure that stuff out. It's gratifying, again, not just because it's fun, new, and different than my day job. But also, that is my passion. My passion is the businesses, the Internet, not just destroying old business models, but making new ones possible. Not just the big guys, but for individuals as well. I'm very grateful and feel very fortunate that I get to do both. I want to switch gears and ask you about Aggregation Theory. There's a multi-pronged question here. The business that you're running is far, far, far superior to, I think that I'm sure you've been asked a zillion times about, why don't you write a book? Do you make $150 a year per subscription or at least that's what I pay for the full bundle, I think.…

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