In my experience with Hardbound, Gimlet, Substack, and now the Everything bundle, I’ve come to believe that content can create incredibly strong moats.

The longstanding struggles of digital media businesses drive home the fact that internet-native media requires a fundamentally different business approach. Monetizing content assumes that the value is held in the content itself. Under the physics of infinity – frictionless content creation and distribution – the marginal value of every additional a... See more

The media business has traditionally been built around content. There have been hints of culture driven commerce throughout the years in the NYT blue bag, the New Yorker tote bag, but most of these attempts teetered on the edge of membership and nowhere near the manufacturing of subcultures. We are seeing new media companies begin to work towards t... See more

- A top journalist at a publication creates more value than she can capture, but that changes if he/she has their own audience communication channel (through a website, newsletter, etc.)