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if you look at a company like Netflix or Apple or HBO they pay up for the best people then they keep the best people and they continue year after year to produce the best content in the world.
the things they said were very very consistent number one there's so much content out there right if you're a team you know if your team is the Yankees you can find a thousand stories a day on the internet and what we'd always say is like have you read these stories have you clicked on any of them and if you do they're mostly aggregated versions of like two people actually doing the reporting right you have two people who are the actual beat reporters who show up for six games
you have to be different we at my previous time at Strava we're learned how to build a subscription business we also bought a lot of ads and you know if you buy ads you realize pretty quickly you're not gonna buy ads on a local newspaper website yeah and so friction is ridiculous and you could literally get a hundred thousand times the reach for half the price with a better tool like Google or Facebook exactly right and so we felt that there was these these changes happening they were out they w
we launched in Chicago in 2016 great sports now a great sports town generally under covered yeah I'm weird yeah and that's actually a real opportunity cuz they're kind of a major market that under report on yeah they're not on a coast and so we launched in Chicago in early 2016 little did we know that they would break their 108 year curse that year and I would say like our thesis was pretty simple hire really great people think about you know the things where you can be different as a subscripti
we felt that there was this opportunity to cover those teams in a in a way that places like 538 or Grantland used to or the ringer or ESPN cover the big teams right so many people cover the Warriors but how many people cover the Reds right so many people cover the Yankees how many people cover the Astra as well right so you had a thesis hey instead of going for the big markets let's go for the underserviced markets first
New York Times has done a wonderful job they did actually
we are very high up on the list of digital subscription businesses in the world were amongst companies like New York Times Washington Post which are are no single millions then they are on average the companies above us are a hundred and forty-two years old on average
you could literally get a hundred thousand times the reach for half the price with a better tool like Google or Facebook exactly right and so we felt that there was these these changes happening they were out they weren't that controversial that changes around advertising and digital media and felt that hey if there was ever a time to do something stupid and see if subscription worked it would be in 2016