Trip Adler

And since we already had an audience, we were able to market the service.

So we just put up a simple freemium model that offered some freemium features, and that quickly became the most dominant business model for us.

So that was kind of the indication that subscription was working.

The big moment for subscription was that when we decided to go partner with all the publishers to put their content in.

The idea of a book subscription service was pretty crazy.

Most people couldn't even envision that.

We talked to all the publishers about including their books in our subscription.

They pretty much all said no unanimously, but we were able to get some small ones on, and those led to bigger ones.

And over time, it started to lead to a tipping point.

We were able to now get up to a million books in our service.

Um, so it actually all happened very, uh, very iteratively.

And, you know, the, the way we've been able to solve this chicken egg problem over time is just, just each step leads to the next.

And as long as we keep kind of inching forward in, in various directions, both on the content side and on the consumer side and the business model side, it all kind of came together over time.

So we reach about 100 million non-paying users a month.

And then we have, the last number we announced is 500,000 paying subscribers.

Um, the, yeah, we've grown.

We, we just haven't announced the, the new traffic numbers.

Um, the same time though, the, the non-paying audience hasn't grown as much over the years just cause it's very SEO driven.

Um, and we've kind of like plateaued in terms of the non-paying audience.

Well, we have this library of 70 million documents that are uploaded by users, and basically we have over 100 million people a month who come to visit that library of content.