re: The New York Times buying The Athletic for $550 million.

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They’ll ruin it within a year.

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Technically it’s already “ruined” as a business given how much money it’s losing.

Inevitably they will come in and want it to turn a profit so they will begin cutting salaries and increasing subscription cost while cutting off the specials and deals on subscriptions. Which will feel dumb as the consumer and likely end the business momentum it has (and maybe the business entirely) but it will still be a perfectly rational business decision When you look at the bottom line

It’s kind of like MoviePass. They were operating on such a loss for so long just to keep getting more subscribers and more funding that it created an imbalance where the only way to change the direction of the company is to betray the value you used to gain those customers in the first place