Mather: Media companies should pay Facebook and Google, not demand payouts
Alex Mather · 20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic · Jul 10, 2020 · at 27:57
Alex Mather is the founder and CEO of subscription sports outlet The Athletic. He discusses traditional publisher complaints about tech monopolies.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We should be paying Facebook and Google as media companies, not the other way around. If you can't make your business thrive in this world where Facebook and Google exist, that's on you.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Mather
Mather: Paid Facebook acquisition works for subscription media, not ad models
“Frankly, the CAC has been very workable. When you're a subscription business, you know, you're generating revenue off your subscribers. And so it works for us. It may not work if you're an advertising driven business, but absolutely works for us.”
Mather: Social media platforms are an unbelievable negative for news consumption
“I think these platforms are a unbelievable negative for how people consume news for all the obvious reasons”
Mather: Few media categories achieve both scale and margin like sports
“Most categories can't get margin or scale like sports, and so the rebel model, to me, makes a ton of sense.”
Mather: Substack is capturing the opportunity Medium had and missed
“I think if you look at what happened with Substack, to just take a second to look at that business, and it's a wonderful product, a wonderful founding team, and they're much more competitive with, say, Medium. And we don't necessarily look at them as competito…”
Mather: Silicon Valley culture needs pragmatism and nuance over rigid principles
“I'd love to see more pragmatism over principles a little bit, which is like, Thought is becoming too much of a religion right now, and I really love just, we talk to our newsroom about this a lot, like, add nuance. Don't take nuance away, and how can we solve …”