Sublime

The biggest risk to Substack isn’t that Gmail changes its algorithm or that readers set up automatic forwarding and share accounts. It’s that years from now, each author will have built up so much content that a reader can pay a 1 month subscription, download the archive, and be set on reading material.

The current unbundling phase is unsustainable and the long-term media business could look more like the past newspaper model than expected

In basically every earnings call since, management has raved about how well it’s worked. It’s a lower entry point for readers but also gets them in the habit of paying The Times every month.

Now look at the advertisements in the same magazines. You will see that: O Illustrations are given priority over copy. O The copy is often set in sanserif, which is hard to read; we are accustomed to serifs in books, magazines and newspapers. O The copy is often set in one column of 120 characters or more – too wide to be readable. O Few of the pho

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it always astonishes me that the New York Times feels the need to store a document considerably larger than War and Peace on my phone. It also astonishes me this document only has one subject – how to target online ads to Dan Davies – and that nonetheless, the New York Times isn’t very good at that.

In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible prici... See more

So Dalton created their own SKU numbers and affixed them to each book with a sticker. This extra processing step was expensive, but it enabled real inventory control across the chain. The inventory control stickers allowed Dalton to create the concept of “model stock,” books that would automatically be reordered when they sold. This happened about

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Every PM should save these 2 screenshots to their desktop. @bhorowitz's Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager: (15 years old and still ridiculously relevant.) https://t.co/8EFB1476Wu... See more

Facebook, again, is the extreme example here: the service got started with user-generated content and has continually retrenched over the last few years to have more user-generated content and less professionally produced content; every time they have done so, publishers have cried foul over all of the traffic they were losing. Google, meanwhile, d... See more