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• #Casey newton il free

Given that 24,000 people had been reading me four days a week when I launched - some for three years - I thought that 10 percent would be a slam dunk.

#Casey newton il free

Guidance I had gotten from Substack suggested I might expect 10 percent or so of my free subscribers to go paid. I converted a smaller percentage of subscribers to paid than I thought I would. The good news is that a relatively small percentage of free subscribers ever have to convert to paid subscribers to make this a viable enterprise.

To grow, it has to replace those customers and then find new ones. Platformer loses 3-4 percent of its paid customers per month. Generally speaking, though, most columns don’t move the needle. So will posts that tackle some new frontier yet to be picked up by traditional publications - this month’s story about Dom Hofmann’s blockchain project Loot was a hit, for example. Occasionally, a more analytical post will bring in a range of new signups. The rest of the time, the business is largely static.

Platformer grows when it’s publishing good journalism - particularly journalism that takes you inside companies in crisis. As a result, I’ve never felt more empowered to cover the issues I find most meaningful : the fraught, unpredictable collisions between big tech platforms and the world around them.Īnyway, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in year one. Today, I can really only lose my job if thousands of people decide independently to “fire” me. In the past, to lose my job might require only a bad quarter in the ad market, the loss of an ally in upper management, or the takeover of my company by some indifferent telecom company. The result is a job that feels more durable, and sustainable, than any other employment I’ve had. This was the incentive I hoped that this model of journalism would bring to my reporting: readers would encounter my journalism, like it, and pay me to go do more of it. I wrote the definitive pieces on what happened at Basecamp after its founders sought to eliminate political discussions in the workplace. I explored how Medium’s latest pivot toward journalism ended in disaster for the talented journalists who worked there. I revealed deep tensions within Signal over its plans to incorporate cryptocurrency and new social features into the app, risking a regulatory backlash that could threaten encryption globally. Platformer was the first to report the details of the email that got Timnit Gebru fired from Google, in a piece later cited in a Congressional inquiry. Here are some of the stories I’m proud of: The biggest spikes in both free and paid membership over the past year came after I published the best reporting I did this year. How did it grow that quickly? In short, by publishing journalism. Twelve months later, there are 49,604 people subscribed to Platformer ’s free list, and you regularly open this newsletter at a rate that far exceeds in the industry average. When I started Platformer with the mailing list I accumulated while writing my previous newsletter, there were around 24,000 of you. That support has come on the back of growth that surpassed my highest expectations for year one. I’m hopeful that your continued support will allow me to expand the business soon, in ways I’ll discuss later in this post. It affords me a good salary, covers my health care, and pays for the various expenses that come with running a small business. Platformer is, thanks to your support, the best job I’ve ever had. My hope is that this piece offers some texture to ongoing discussions about how the creator economy and traditional journalism intersect, and proves useful both to journalists considering making a move like this and readers who are curious about whether this model can offer a more sustainable path for journalism than the rocky one we’ve been on lately. Today I wanted to tell you all how it’s going, what I’ve learned, and how I hope the business will evolve in year two. A year ago, I quit the best job I ever had to start Platformer.