The Athletic keeps growing .......

I'm in the same boat. My media consumption has been all messed up and down overall while working from home. Less time in the car means I'm way behind on podcasts and no lunches out means no scrolling through The Athletic or other sites. Reading a book last month felt like an impressive feat.

 

It's current subscribers.

Hansmann had projected that 1 million subscribers a year ago, so this is really a miss of sorts. And they have been giving away a lot of subscriptions -- they gave a year for free to T-Mobile customers and bundled 6-month trials with Bloomberg's All-Access subscription.

It's a lot of readers, and people seeing the product isn't a bad thing, but what I'd like to know is what their cash flow situation looks like. If those incremental readers simply represent an expense, in the present they are a financial drain. ... and it means they are heavily counting on being able to convert people who weren't paying for it into paying customers. Will they be able to? And then there is the same question they have always faced, which is even at the full subscription price, how profitable can they be?

 

Wonder how much traveling, if any, their baseball writers did and what the football writers will be doing. Obviously the hockey and basketball writers were parked except for a couple in the NBA bubble. That could be a not-insignificant amount of travel money saved.

 

I'd guess the thing that eats away at the money they have raised the most is. ... salaries. So I can't imagine the shutdown was a good thing for them, even if some marginal expenses decreased as a result and they did some layoffs.

To some extent, it's not the really operative thing for them.

They have raised a lot of money, so unless they have been spending it stupidly, they should have something of a cushion. The thing that concerns me most about the company. ... is the valuations at which it raised that money. It puts pressure on them to grow very aggressively to justify those valuations and it means that their investors are likely going to be patient only up until a point.

Which makes me a bit sad. Because by all accounts, they have something for which there has been decent consumer demand. It's not as sexy, and it takes longer, but if they had done this the way businesses had to do it before the era of cheap money, it would have been interesting to see if they could grow organically, proving their concept along the way and using any excess cash they generated (if they succeed) to fund each next leg of growth. Moving into new markets when they were generating enough excess cash where they already were to fund it. If they were in that position, who knows how they would have fared during the shutdown, but assuming they would have been able to borrow their way through it somehow, they wouldn't be feeling the same pressure to grow unrealistically right now that I am guessing is their reality.