The Athletic and the New News Bundle
Of sports, subscriptions, scale, and startup strategy
For the uninitiated, The Athletic is one of those rare success stories at the intersection of local news and subscriptions, as described by Bloomberg:
The Athletic… is an ad-free, online-only network for local sports coverage. Subscriptions cost $10 a month or $60 a year, though many customers have signed up at lower promotional rates. The site’s average annual revenue per subscriber is roughly $64, [cofounder and CEO Alex] Mather said [and] it has reached more than 500,000 subscribers and expects to nearly double that total by year-end.
That computes to less than $32M in annual revenue, which is not sufficient to cover The Athletic’s operating costs — not even its 400 highly-paid staff writers alone. So, funding from the capital markets has filled-the-holes thus far, which, to be clear, is perfectly okay, and growth has certainly made it worth its investors’ while. To wit, from BuzzFeed:
[The Athletic] wants to dominate the British football market [and] has made a series of high-profile new signings, including an award-winning Guardian football…
