The Athletic keeps growing .......

Unless they are asked to do different, better work for a new employer. It's been known to happen.

 

I have no idea what they are thinking.

But I checked the Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago websites. The Athletic has a combined total of 25 staff members in those cities with titles as writers or editors. That is for 13 major league sports in three cities. So if you prorate that you pretty easily get to a staff of a couple hundred when you add in the college reporters being hired and national staff. So it looks like they plan to spend a lot of money hiring people.

 

Good analysis. And this goes to my point above—how are they going to grow subscriptions from 100,000 to 2,300,000? Investing in a few additional college beats doesn’t seem like it’s going to make a big difference. Are they just crossing their fingers that marketing and word of mouth will eventually win out? Is there a large segment of people out there who would subscribe if only they knew about it, or if The Athletic added a certain writer or beat? What does the subscriber growth path look like for other subscription-based entities?

 

I don't claim to know a ton about The Athletic's budget but these numbers feel really, really, really high to me.

1) I'd be extremely surprised if The Athletic staffed every Power 5 school. I think it's much more likely they cover 20-25 plus their national/regional writers.
2) Can't see The Athletic going heavy into either NASCAR or golf. Maybe one national writer for each.
3) There's no way the average travel budget per staffer is 50k. I'd be surprised if it was even 20-25k per staffer. MLB will be expensive but colleges and NFL are relatively inexpensive.
4) There's zero chance they are spending 70 million on suits, servers and promo costs. Chop that number down considerably.

There's no doubt that The Athletic is spending a ton of money and I still have some doubts about its long-term viability but some of the estimates on how much they are spending and how many subscribers they need to break even in this thread are way off.

 

So let's stipulate they only need 1,000,000 subscribers to break even. Does anyone see how they get from here to there?

 

So, major brands with a ton of money gave up on them. But ma and pa sixpack are going to flood their coffers, because, why, the corporate suits didn’t get it? Wishful thinking. Not saying that’s how you’re thinking but...

 

From 100,000 to 1,000,000 ... Yeah, good luck.

 

I’m not saying a subscription mode can’t work. Or that it can’t work at a smaller scale. My specific question is in what scenarios do people think it can work at this scale. The fact no one has offered anything concrete—other than maybe consumer demand will be there ...or maybe it won’t—doesn’t sound like a great sign. (Which is unfortunate, because I’d like to see it succeed.)

 

And I should add: it just seems to me that even with better-than-average content there will still be plenty of free and perfectly adequate substitutes for The Athletic’s product—newspapers, ESPN, team sites, fan blogs, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Not that the last few categories of sites will necessarily do the same reporting, but they can offer analysis.

Netflix, on the other hand, seem a bit less substitutable: other than violating copyright laws (which unfortunately many people have no issues with), your options either also cost money (Cable, Hulu, etc.) or are inferior (YouTube or other free streaming sites, antenna).*

*Setting aside that people could of course substitute their consumption of video for some other form of entertainment altogether.

 

This is basically all startups. It's truly impossible to predict customer demand, particularly in the digital media space, where reader demands change on a whim.

I do think it's folly to think any digital media product is going to get a mass, general audience. I do think The Athletic is going to very nicely fill a niche that The National wanted to fill 25 years ago and that SI never really figured out. The only question is if it can make money faster than it spends money. Its cost structure likely isn't that huge, beyond the writers. The technology to host the sites and the apps is getting cheaper every day, and it doesn't look like they're putting a ton of work into design gadgets. My hope is that the content gets a bit more focused; it's obvious on my local site that there's not a lot of editing going on -- I don't mean typos, I mean focus and clarity. But I'm good to log in for 3 or 4 stories a day, and that combined with a quick jump to the MLB app for box scores and standings is as much time as I was spending with my local sports section when I was a print subscriber.