My big feature on what made K.J. Costello

[CardinalSagehen]

As of today The Athletic has 400 writers.  I don't know how much each is paid, but let's for a placeholder say each costs $100k annually.

It was reported in Bloomberg today that the site has hit 600k subs and they pay an average of $64.year.  I'm not sure how true this is, as most people including me are on intro deals for like $3/mo or something like that.  Anyway... using those numbers, the site is grossing about $38.4 million at the current time. If 400 writers get paid $100k  = $40 million writer expenses, plus G&A. They project to have 1M subs by year end.  That seems aggressive, but let's say they do. Now they are at $64M in revenue.  If they don't hire more than 100 more writers, they'll be profitable by year's end.

I don't understand how people are skeptical The Athletic can survive.  It has people paying for its service in great numbers and it has room to grow.  Is the thinking that you can't survive without selling ads?  Is the thinking the site must add video content? I don't get the skepticism.

I think the skepticism may be based on the high-level reality that the journalism industry as a whole has been suffering horrendously.  See the following article, for example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/artic...-recession

Many fantastic writers for The Athletic were recently let go from places like ESPN, which cut all of its PAC-12 and Stanford blogging. (I realize their model was different.)

The Athletic (and you) may be right that the winning model to address deep, narrow, local sports interest is a low-cost stand-alone subscription. Let’s hope so.  

I enjoyed the Costello piece, too, and have always liked David Lombardi’s work.

[CrazedZooChimp]

Hey there,

I'll be back with more Stanford features on The Athletic this year — they were happy with the traction we got with some of my features on the team last year so it looks like I'll be able to write even more this season. 

First one: 3,000 words on K.J. Costello, the people from Orange County who helped mold him into the QB that he is, his position at the controls of an evolving Stanford offense, and more. Can he add to what Andrew Luck and Kevin Hogan helped build?

https://theathletic.com/1139327/2019/08/...ped-build/

Thank you for reading! I hope everyone enjoys the season.

Good stuff David, and glad to hear you're going to be writing more Stanford pieces. But also tell your bosses they need a dedicated Pac-12 football writer (if not Bay Area college football alone). It's really unfortunate how little Pac-12 content there is, and when there is stuff it's mostly from national writers. Wilner still seems like the only person actually covering the Pac-12 in depth anywhere these days.

[stupac2]

As of today The Athletic has 400 writers.  I don't know how much each is paid, but let's for a placeholder say each costs $100k annually.

It was reported in Bloomberg today that the site has hit 600k subs and they pay an average of $64.year.  I'm not sure how true this is, as most people including me are on intro deals for like $3/mo or something like that.  Anyway... using those numbers, the site is grossing about $38.4 million at the current time. If 400 writers get paid $100k  = $40 million writer expenses, plus G&A. They project to have 1M subs by year end.  That seems aggressive, but let's say they do. Now they are at $64M in revenue.  If they don't hire more than 100 more writers, they'll be profitable by year's end.

I don't understand how people are skeptical The Athletic can survive.  It has people paying for its service in great numbers and it has room to grow.  Is the thinking that you can't survive without selling ads?  Is the thinking the site must add video content? I don't get the skepticism.

I think the skepticism may be based on the high-level reality that the journalism industry as a whole has been suffering horrendously.  See the following article, for example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/artic...-recession

Many fantastic writers for The Athletic were recently let go from places like ESPN, which cut all of its PAC-12 and Stanford blogging. (I realize their model was different.)

The Athletic (and you) may be right that the winning model to address deep, narrow, local sports interest is a low-cost stand-alone subscription. Let’s hope so.  

I enjoyed the Costello piece, too, and have always liked David Lombardi’s work.

I think a big part of it is that there are a lot of sports fan out there who are tired of dumb content. Most sports writing is just flat-out bad, terrible, pointless garbage. The Athletic has literally none of that. Even when they do dumb-ish content like QB rankings it's in a smart way by ranking via tiers and getting the input from actual scouts/GMs, instead of just the author's barely informed opinions. There are frequent film breakdowns, all done very well. There are great longform pieces like Lombardi's here that actually inform you about the subject (I realize that the national media does these too, but unless you want to read about the hot new shit it's not likely to be of interest to you).

Anyway, I've certainly found it to be worth the money. The Patriots writing team is awesome. They're not quite at Bill Barnwell's level, but they're beat writers so they're doing different things. Of my 4 favorite Pats writers, 2 are at the Athletic (the others are Mike Reiss at ESPN and Evan Lazar at CLNS). And that's just one sport, if you also follow others (which I don't really) then there's plenty more for you.