The Athletic keeps growing .......

Given what we can glean about how much they are spending, 100,000+ subscribers will need to be a start toward many, many more.

It was interesting, a rival editor estimating that “the Athletic offered his employees between 15% and 36% markups on their six-figure salaries to join the company.”

But that just means that they are going to need that many more subscribers to cover the cash burn. They have gotten themselves into a very tough business. I really hope they find a market for it and succeed. They are banking heavily on content, and if they are onto something with the potential to profit, I think that is the right path to success. If not, at least they are playing with other people's money.

 

That's always a risk when you are doing something that isn't really proprietary.

But there is a lot of worth in being first. Someone without money is going to find it difficult to raise the money to try to compete with someone who was there first. And also, a big part of their strategy seems to have been to snatch up talent from a struggling industry. Again, that was a benefit of being first. There is less of that talent left out there for someone trying to duplicate them.

Really, that only leaves an established media player who might feel threatened by what the Athletic is doing. And their choice would be to try to start up something from scratch to compete with them. ... or just buy them. 95 percent of the time it makes more sense to try to do the acquisition, not the least of which is that then you are not left having to try to compete with them.

 

I'm betting on it too, being a subscriber. But one part of that story bothered me:

The Athletic has shown flexibility around its paywall in attempts to hire big-name writers. When it tried to woo National Football League writer Peter King away from Sports Illustrated earlier this year, it offered Mr. King the option of putting his Monday morning column outside the paywall, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. King eventually opted to take a job at Comcast Corp.’s NBC.

I hadn't heard of any paywall flexibility, and I think that should be an absolute no-no. You're wooing Peter King because his column brings big eyeballs, so if you hire him (with a commensurate salary) how on Earth do you just give away his product? The King junkies who have to have the MMQB will pay for it. Sure, not all of them will, but so be it. The whole point of this shebang is to get people to pay for premium content. All the content.

 

I have no idea -- if those beats are "marginal," as you are characterizing them . ... or if those beats are going to boost the bottom line . I am sure they believe they are additive.

 

Yup. It's the $30 million dollar question (for their investors). As a general proposition, I do believe that content is king. It always has been. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are providing the right content, or content for which there is enough demand.