One Year Anniversary Subscriber Bonanza

0:00Hey there, it's Joseph. So we've just finished recording our one year anniversary subscriber bonanza, as Jason called it when I was looking for a headline. This is an extra long podcast where we really opened up to our 404 Media paying subscribers about how the business is going, what we learned over the past year, what we're going to be doing in the future as well. I also just wanted to put a short trailer onto the main podcast feed so if you listen to this you're interested in hearing more go become a paid 404 media subscriber you will get an email via a podcast platform called Transistor and that will give you a link to the premium podcast feed where you can listen to the rest of this chat I hope you enjoy bunch of like work stuff like you say you gave this talk and we're doing more of those right like we give talks to various conferences or festivals telling them about what it's like to run a media company today and all that sort of thing we've just been super super busy but i'm really really glad that we can talk to subscribers now um the tldr i mean you could stop listening but please don't at this point, but I'll say things are good.

1:22I think things are stable. And I think we're doing what we set out to do, which is make a sustainable business so we can publish investigative journalism. I mean, am I right? I think it's okay. Are things okay? Things are okay. According to CJR, we are sustainable as of, what was it, like nine or something yes um yeah which is a funny headline to get um yeah in over the past year we have published something like 781 or 782 because literally before we started recording i just published that telegram confirmed it gave uh us data to you use the data to law enforcement slight caveat on that in that that also counts posts that we email uh in different ways so jason what do you think the real figure is something like i think probably at least 500 yeah something like around 500 articles in a little bit over a month a little over a year uh from you know four people and then jules had a couple and then there's been a couple freelancers so for the most part like probably 500 articles by the four of us which is pretty wild well you and emmanuel managed motherboard basically emmanuel is that a lot of articles for four people it is for four normal people it's not for present company yeah i mean it's true i mean we have a high metabolism it's like everyone at motherboard was pretty productive um we've probably said this a million times but we're all of a generation of blogging where uh quantity was a type of quality and we've all done various shifts in the content minds i've been to up to 10 blogs a day when i was starting out um which were very bad blogs obviously and we're not working at that rate but when it comes to covering the news and getting a story out um we're very good at it and i think jason and i have talked about how that has been like a big portion of what we've been talking about when we've been talking to journalists which has just been like hey try publishing articles that usually works yeah that's and yeah you say publish articles and that works and that's kind of wanted to bring up which is like a lot of people or more people are moving into launching their own media outlets or maybe their individual newsletter or something like that i guess it would be slightly different for a newsletter but the advice i just keep giving people is that you just need to publish original stories and i mean look maybe it's different in that some outlets could work by okay you don't really publish anything for, I don't know, a month, two months, three months, and you come out with an absolutely massive investigation or something.

4:28And, you know, maybe that works for them. But have we found that we publish a lot, and that seems to help us, right? At least that's the way I see it. Yeah, I mean, as Emmanuel mentioned, like, so a recent talk that I gave was in Norway at the Norwegian Society of Journalists, which was a really awesome experience for me to go over there and talk to journalists about reporting on cybercrime and just like our philosophy of reporting on big tech and things like that. And I know that Emmanuel gave a similar talk before, but I think the biggest problem with many startup news websites is that they announced that they are going to launch.

5:13And then there's like months of time pass while they all sort of work on their big story for launch. And then they launch, and they publish these great stories. And it's cool for the first couple days, but then there's no plan for how they're going to keep the website filled with articles to make it a daily or hourly or daily or even weekly visit for people. and so I just don't think that that's a sustainable model for publishing unless you have a really big staff or unless you are really well funded or unless every article you do is amazing and I think that what we do and we talked about this before but