Ben Thompson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, you're engaging with 0.2% of your audience. Right, that's a fixed number. Meanwhile, I have a feedback mechanism, which is my subscriber number which is going up, which means I know there's a huge number of people that like, appreciate, and are sharing, and it's all dark matter. I don't know who they are. I don't know where they are, but they like what I'm doing, and I need to anchor on that without worrying about what the loudmouths on Twitter are saying. Subscriptions give this feedback mechanism. It's a feedback mechanism for people that will never email you, that will never contact you, but they will pull out their credit card and they'll give you money. I think that's so valuable and so positive from an incentive structure. Now, there's a downside where subscriptions are niche. I do think you tend up. If they dislike you, they can stop paying. There is a worry and a challenge that you're not pandering to your audience or whatever it might be. I think I'm lucky because I was so early, because I was the only person in this space doing this stuff. I got to a large-enough audience size where I could not care. If someone wants to cancel the subscription, I don't care. In fact, if someone comes back and if they are just over the top rude, disrespectful, or insinuating things about me, I will not just cancel their subscription, I will refund them their entire purchase and say, please just never come back. Isn't that the nice thing about the approachable price point? Actually, your dollars are insignificant to me because my number of subscribers is so much larger. It's very different from if Apple decides to stop advertising on Twitter. It's like, oh, crap. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Come back.…

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