The Road Show Is Going to Shift, Right?

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We avoided the excesses of say Forbes.com for those who remember Forbes, which eventually became unusable. So like the day, the days of like, I blast her and stuff like that. And then we had a, and we had a interstitial like when you come to the front page and you got a full screen interstitial that you could sell for a lot of money in early days. But it really was, you know, and all the arguments about time spent versus sort of allocation of dollars across radio, TV, print, et cetera are true.

Bill Bishop likes to make clear he’s not a journalist. Instead, he’s a China analyst who brings his deep understanding of the country to an English-speaking language through his newsletter, Sinocism. In 2017, Bill became the “original Substacker” after teaming up with Substack’s co-founders to be the first newsletter on the platform.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Bill and I discuss his independent path, and how a subscription model has created different dynamics as opposed to his experiences in the dot-com era as a co-founder of Marketwatch. What’s telling to me is that Bill is also now considering advertising. The Substack model of “only ads” doesn’t make much sense long term for most writers. Even if they convert 10% of their audience, they’re making no money from 90%. Most businesses don’t operate that way.