Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…I think about that element a lot. I also think about every piece of content you create is a churn opportunity. David and I regularly look at each other mid episode, and we're like, okay, is this of Acquired quality or is it actually net negative for us to release this episode, because we've now reduced the average quality of a thing that someone comes to expect from us? Thanks for putting the pressure on me right up there. I better make sure this is interesting. It's interesting because I would push back against that a little bit. This is why the consistency part is important. There's an ongoing discussion. I think there's that new social network post, news, or something. I just saw a thing on Twitter. I'd actually follow through, but they want to do micro payments for articles, which I think are terrible. There's a tendency and a lot of things to get overly indexed on the consumer, which sounds wrong. Why wouldn't you want to give the consumer exactly what they want? Just to take the most obvious example, if a creator is not making money, the consumer may get what they want, which is free content, but they're not going to get it for very long. There is a short-term perspective versus a long-term perspective, which by charging for this, I can do this over the long run. But from a micro transaction perspective, I think one of the issues is that creating the piece of content is very time-consuming. Obviously, you get the free distribution in the back end. You have zero marginal cost on the back end, but the problem is you have a timing mismatch with microtransactions between when the payment is made and when the investment is made. You want to put a lot of time into an article and then hope it gets traction. I can not just make money, but also repay what I'm doing from there. I think that the way to think about publishing online is, what are you selling? I think we do get in the trap of thinking you're selling a single episode or selling a single article, that's actually getting the incentives wrong. What I'm selling to my subscribers is consistency and, yes, certainly a quality bar. When I write something that I'm not happy with, I'm miserable for the next 24 hours. Or if it's the end of the week, I have to wait till next week, and that really sucks, because I certainly have the drive and compulsion to make sure that what I put out is high quality. At the same time, there's an aspect of what I'm actually selling to my subscribers. This is more of an implicit promise, but I think it's the reality, is the consistency, the regularity, and the knowing that if something happens, you're going to be able to get my take on it. I think that's where subscription pricing does make much more sense for content production, because in this case, you're actually getting the money up front. The money is funding the work as opposed to the work being a speculative bid for the money. One thing that I've pushed over time, and I'm very happy about, is trying to get people to annual subscriptions. I think my audience at this point is 70% annual subscriptions. At $150 a year, is that right?…

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