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• The big unanswered question about Sullivan’s business model is how the economics are going to play out. He seems to have brought in about $100,000 today, from loyal readers — that’s about 4,000 subscribers off the bat. But that $100,000 is going to go fast. Sullivan is coming off a fat contract at NewsBeast, signed when Tina Brown was flush with lots of Barry Diller cash. He almost certainly couldn’t get her to agree to replicate that contract when it came up for renewal, so it’s hard to know how much money he’d receive if he stayed at the Beast. But my guess is that Sullivan wants the staff of seven, including two paid interns, to earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $750,000 a year between them, plus benefits. Add in what Sullivan lumps under “legal, technological and accounting expenses”, and you’re well into seven digits. So while today’s haul is impressive, Sullivan is going to have to keep those subscription revenues coming on a pretty steady basis, and he’s surely targeting a paying subscriber base of at least 50,000 — about 5% of what he calls his “unofficial staff of around a million unpaid obsessives”.

  Felix Salmon on Andrew Sullivan leaving The Daily Beast for a “freemium-based meter model”
  • #Media
  • #Andrew Sullivan
  • #The Daily Beast
  2 Jan 2013