Speaker: Austin Smith, President of Inside.com / Président d’Inside.com
First, Smith introduced the audience to Gabriel, the prototype of a traditional lector. He showed us how the characteristics of Gabriel have changed since the 19th century. Until the end of the 20th century, Gabriel did not have many solutions if he wanted to read a specific article from a newspaper. He had to buy the whole newspaper, whether he wanted to read the other sections or not. If the newspaper cost 10 dollars, he had to pay 10 dollars to read the article that really interested him.
« In 2018, Gabriel has an unlimited number of news sources… » Austin Smith, president of https://t.co/XZDmPGnAdA #NPDJ pic.twitter.com/bH9dlFrrF7
— Alexandra Sirgant (@a_sirgant) 10 December 2018
However, the Internet totally reinvented the way we read the news and get informed. Now, anyone can pick a specific subject or angle he wants to read. Therefore, everybody can build their perfect combination of news. The concept of traditional journalism does not exist anymore, and new business models are based on buying different parts of a journal. Austin Smith listed a series of successful news startups that made the most of modern technology to produce quality journalism – from Statechery to Kerning Cultures, which The Guardian called « This American Life for the Middle East ». As for Inside, the media he has been working on since 2016, he decided to stray away from the regular media diet of algorithms built and optimized for clicks rather than quality. Instead, he chose to hire a team of passionate journalists to curate and synthesize the top ten stories each day across a variety of topics.
We publish human-curated news roundups 30 different topics via email (subscribe at https://t.co/vjtAV4zhxM if you’re interested!) Each email includes ten updates, like this one from today’s Inside Apple newsletter: pic.twitter.com/tQzO5qNtJH
— Austin Smith (@awwstn) 28 June 2018
Here’s how it’s going:
💰 We’re averaging $73K/mo. in revenue this year, and monthly revenue has grown 20% each month in 2018
📬 We delivered more than 10 million emails last month, which were opened at an industry-leading 38.8%— Austin Smith (@awwstn) 28 June 2018
Crédits photo : Jules Boudier