Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…But advertising, you can have an ad sales department. As your circulation goes up amongst attractive demographics for advertisers—like a growing, expanding, middle class with lots of new disposable income—you're going to do very, very well with no marginal cost on the advertising side. The other crazy thing about the physical paper business is, today we think about like, well, you can be a free website that has ads, or you can be a paid website that has no ads. Obviously, it's oversimplifying and there's lots of ways to do both. But there's nobody that's reading the paper for free. Everyone is either buying it on a newsstand or paying to have it delivered to their home or business. It is an era of having your cake and eating it, too, where you both have every single person who's reading paying, maybe some people who were reading at a restaurant or something, and you're able to sell ads in every single one. On top of that—here’s the like magic thing that Ochs figured out that would later be taken by The Wall Street Journal—was it became the business newspaper of record. Ochs made a really big bet on whether we should be producing more business content and people will be willing to pay more for it because it is either actually a business expense or it inspires them that they could do more with their business. They were the first big American newspaper to target businessmen at that time—business people now as the demographic—which is just fascinating reading that and be like, wait, that's that's The Journal strategy. Totally. When I was working at The Journal—this was before The Times implemented their now very, very successful paywall—we were the only upscale newspaper, news organization in the US that had a paywall digital content. It was all because most of the paid subscriptions were on expense accounts. This was a super cool gem that I got from the research. It's actually the famous John Wanamaker quote about “50% of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I still don’t know which 50%”? That was actually stolen from Ochs.…

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