Also, their full price cost of $60 per year is $1.15 per week. Cheaper than a paper subscription without all the other nonsense. No ads. No popup videos, fewer idiots in comments (trolls don't like to pay for access), etcBaywave1 wrote:As concerns The Athletic, timing is all. It's a VC funded enterprise raising lots of money and interested in growth. Numbers are private but here is a reasonable example of how it could work this year before it hits maturity when valuations and strategies will change.
Current subscription cost annually is roughly $50 per year. Investors are potentially paying 10x or even 20x for each new subscriber based on assumed valuations. If the latter, that's $1000 per head. You get 200 new subscribers in SELA market (or elsewhere) in the next four weeks who list Tulane as a favorite team, that's a potential $200,000 in accrued value to existing owners and early investors.
For $200,000 you might invest $10,000 to $20,000 or even more in generating original content in the short run. Yes that's equal to gross revenue. But again these folks are in a maximum growth mode and will spend on the margin to get customers so they get stupid valuation numbers like the unicorn startups do.
Sorry to delve into the weeds here and my numbers are admittedly soft, so please take them as such. But the business strategy itself is not. If you people want to see more local informed media covering Tulane with related content, here is your chance. For a while (I can't guess how long), each subscription dollar of yours is actually worth ten or twenty or even more to this business. Ideally when they reach maturity, the Tulane coverage is baked in and we don't have to worry so much about it being cut back dramatically like TP/nola.com has done over the past two decades. I'll worry about that problem when it arises.
Meanwhile you won't need to waste your time emailing/texting the sports editor of nola.com any more, thank god.
So here's an opportunity to have more TU coverage at a relatively low cost.