Honestly, I'm not into sports at all (except Formula 1, a sport that The Athletic does not cover), but because I'm interested in online publishing, I've been watching the rapid growth of The...
For now, Mather and his co-founder Adam Hansmann — who met when they worked at Strava, a subscription app for serious cyclists and other athletes — get to argue that they’re successful because they’ve cracked the subscription business code: Make really good stuff and people will pay for it.
Honestly, I'm not into sports at all (except Formula 1, a sport that The Athletic does not cover), but because I'm interested in online publishing, I've been watching the rapid growth of The Athletic for the past few years.
From what I can tell, an element of their Make really good stuff and people will pay for it comes from them only taking risks on acquiring well-known writers with huge followings. At the very least, it's what contributes strongly to their fast growth—I see friends retweet all the time that their favorite writers are jumping to the athletic. But, if everything The Athletic puts out is paywalled, how do they develop new writing talent to help that further grows their audience?
It's also rather annoying to me that the basis of their site/etc. is simple—it's no more complex than some carefully configured/customized WordPress. (Except it's got some sports data feeds going on.) At a time where Vox/WaPo/etc are going all-in on stratospheric multi-faceted CMS'es with garbage bins full of advertising-focused features, The Athletic is rather comfortable with carefully categorized content, some images, and carefully categorized content.
Honestly, I'm not into sports at all (except Formula 1, a sport that The Athletic does not cover), but because I'm interested in online publishing, I've been watching the rapid growth of The Athletic for the past few years.
From what I can tell, an element of their
Make really good stuff and people will pay for itcomes from them only taking risks on acquiring well-known writers with huge followings. At the very least, it's what contributes strongly to their fast growth—I see friends retweet all the time that their favorite writers are jumping to the athletic. But, if everything The Athletic puts out is paywalled, how do they develop new writing talent to help that further grows their audience?It's also rather annoying to me that the basis of their site/etc. is simple—it's no more complex than some carefully configured/customized WordPress. (Except it's got some sports data feeds going on.) At a time where Vox/WaPo/etc are going all-in on stratospheric multi-faceted CMS'es with garbage bins full of
advertising-focusedfeatures, The Athletic is rather comfortable with carefully categorized content, some images, and carefully categorized content.