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A Journey Through Five Years
Today is a special day for AMO because it’s officially five years old. When I think about five years, so much has changed. But my belief in the media industry’s incredible future hasn’t. On our fifth birthday, I want to take a few minutes to talk about our journey, current status, and future. It may be a bit self-indulgent, but here we go.
I had been considering a content project talking about media for a while. At an industry event with a friend that spring, I talked about doing a podcast. But ultimately, on August 9th, 2019, I decided on a whim to write instead. Over about two hours, I went from not having a newsletter to writing my first piece.
I launched on Substack because everyone did, announced it on social media, and as you would expect, there were crickets. I told a few friends who signed up, but by and large, getting subscribers was hard. But it didn’t really matter to me because I didn’t consider this a business. I wanted to build a publication about the business of space. AMO was going to be my personal blog and a way to meet people—if anyone subscribed.
Fortunately, someone important subscribed. On September 10th, I wrote about Falfurrias Capital buying Industry Dive. At 8:47am that day, I got a DM on Twitter from Industry Dive’s CEO, Sean Griffey. “Nice write-up of the Industry Dive deal in your newsletter. You got more right than anyone else who covered it. That is hard to do from the outside.” That, alone, remains imprinted in my brain. And it was Sean’s tweet four days later that suddenly gave AMO a big push.
The Evolution of AMO
I wish I had a screenshot of my Substack analytics, but there was a big spike in subscribers that day. After that, more people signed up and I’d get positive replies from other operators. But it wasn’t a business. I still had that space pub on my mind.
Fast forward to January 2020, my boss at the time, the CEO, informed me about hiring a President to oversee the commercial side of CoinDesk and that I would report to him. Well, I had tacit permission from the CEO to do AMO before it made money. I didn’t want to explain to my new boss why I had a side hustle, so about a week before he started, I turned on paid subscriptions. Everyone else was making money from subscriptions; why shouldn’t I?
Well, people paid. Not a ton, but more than expected. The very first person to subscribe was Rameez from Antenna. Having someone pay $100 to read what I had to say was incredible. Nothing feels quite the same.
The Future Outlook
AMO has changed a lot since I first introduced the $200 per year subscription in 2020. Initially, it was just a weekly newsletter. Now? Subscribers receive multiple pieces a week—we’ve published four financial analyses this week, for example—from myself and freelancers. There’s also a Slack where members can chat with each other. We’ve started to build basic databases like the private equity tracker.
But there’s a lot I need to do to make the subscription business successful. It’s the true measure of AMO’s success. A person’s willingness to spend money—both from an effort and financial perspective—speaks volumes. And so, in my mind, the fact that subscriptions remain a small part of AMO’s revenue is problematic.
The Road Ahead for AMO
I want to take a moment to talk about the long-term vision for A Media Operator. One thing I’ve noticed while covering this space is that there are three types of businesses that can stand on their own, but also blend together quite a bit.
The first is media, which is what AMO covers today. Ad sales, subscriptions, lead generation, etc. The content is the business. We hire journalists or content creators. AMO is a media business.
The second is events. Some companies are pure-play events companies. They may claim to have media, but let’s be real: it’s all about big shows and conferences.
The third category is information services. They involve high-priced subscriptions, multi-year licenses, and can be content or data.
Long-term, I want AMO to grow into a publication serving the intersection of media, events, and information services. There are events we can build for each of these categories. There are new business models we haven’t introduced. You can imagine reporters covering these beats. It’s not a 2024 objective by any means. But over time, AMO will become the publication that serves all three categories. When I think about this, I get fired up. How we get there remains to be seen. But I think there’s real opportunity here.
