The Atlantic

“And then I actually realized it's good for a business. Cause you know, who's watching these videos? CMOs, right? And they're really important people to reach, and so you go into a meeting with the CMO, and you're like, hey, you know, I think you should adverti…”

“I was like, we'll do that through books at the Atlantic. We'll figure out, we build that. It generates like 7000 dollars a year, right? It doesn't matter.”

“I think we ran 230 tests last year on different variables involving essentially the paywall.”

“And now we're at 1.46, right, and we're making, I can't say exactly how much we're making, but we're making good money.”

“The way we run it is, the way I think of it, not everybody in the organization agrees, is you have to be profitable and you'll do everything to be profitable. And if you're not going to be profitable, then you make hard choices and all that. If you are going t…”

“And you can make a lot of money on Substack, right? And you can make more money there than you can at the Atlantic, right? Where we have bans and what people can be paid.”

“The goal when you have a paywall is if someone's not going to subscribe, you want them to read the article, right? And if someone is going to subscribe, you want them to pay to read the article. And the problem is you can't know. You can't like interview every…”

“And with OpenAI, we said, hey, here we are, let's talk. And they said, great, let's make a deal. We will pay you for the right to license your content and the right to have RAG. We will include you in sort of planning sessions as we figure out the future of se…”

“The economics of the Atlantic were terrible, right? And they'd been reported that they were losing 20, thirty million dollars a year. They laid off 20% of their staff. They shut down the whole live team. They fired the whole video team, right?”

“None of these partners can be trusted, right? Not because they're bad people. They're good people. They're friends of mine, right? They, but they're capitalists, and they're self-interested, and they would rather they make money than you make money, and if you…”

“My view is that as the leader of a media organization, if I'm gonna make a public statement on an issue, there's like a pretty limited range. I should make public statements about AI and scraping. Copyright, freedom of speech, right? Freedom of the press, righ…”