Chris Best

He said, well, I have to do it because that's how the business works.

So I'll do it somewhere else.

And so we kind of, we got pulled along by the people who were doing it.

It's like, oh, it like actually the, you know, the free part is a very important part of the business, even for people who are focused on paid, you know, you have to have a web version, you have to have these other features.

We found that,

the percentage that you can expect varies quite widely.

In those early days, we often saw kind of like five to 10% of people converting depending on sort of where your audience was coming from and what sort of preexisting relationship they had with you.

Sometimes it'd be much higher, but it was, maybe the common theme was it was often much higher than people had expected.

And I would say even to this day, people,

probably slightly overrate the ads business that they could have.

And then they dramatically underrate the subscription business they could have.

So the traditional press, the business model was already kind of like feeling this pinch where the internet changes had swept through.

It was sort of in this structural decline.

And then for me as a reader, what I felt was there was sort of like a narrowing of...

perspective and a narrowing of thought where a lot of the things you would read were very predictable and came from the same place.

And I felt like that was unsustainable and you couldn't sort of sustain a healthy intellectual culture that way.

Yeah, it's been a time of immense change.

I mean, we sort of went through a period, I would say around 2020, where some of those forces kind of came to a head.

And there were a bunch of instances where...

The people who I felt were the most interesting people were often sort of defenestrated from their traditional thrown out, pushed out, like fired, chased out by mobs of people who disagreed with some element of what they were saying.