Ben Thompson | |
|---|---|
 Thompson in 2016 | |
| Occupation | Business, technology, and media analyst |
| Alma mater | |
Ben Thompson is an American business, technology, and media analyst who lives in Taipei, where he founded Stratechery, a subscription-based newsletter/podcast featuring commentary on tech and media news. [1] , and cohosts tech podcasts Exponent with James Allworth and Dithering with John Gruber, respectively. [2]
Thompson's undergraduate education was at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his graduate education at Northwestern University, where he received an Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School as well as an Master of Engineering Management from the McCormick School of Engineering. [3]
Thompson's career includes stints at Apple, where he interned at Apple University; [4] Microsoft, where he worked on its Windows Apps team; [5] and at WordPress developer Automattic as a growth engineer. [6]
Thompson launched Stratechery as a blog while still a Microsoft employee, and in April 2014 devoted himself to the site full-time, operating on a "freemium" subscription model. [7] He has stated his primary inspiration was John Gruber, author of the site Daring Fireball. [8]
As of April 2015, Thompson had more than 2,000 paying subscribers. [9] By 2017, Recode described Stratechery as having pioneered the paid newsletter business model. [10] The founders of Substack, a newsletter platform launched in 2018, called Thompson a major inspiration for their project. [10]
Thompson is a proponent of aggregation theory, which describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators such as Google and Facebook) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregators have all three of the following characteristics: 1. direct relationship with users; 2. zero marginal costs for serving users; 3. and demand-driven multi-sided networks with decreasing acquisition costs. [11]
Pandora is a subscription-based music streaming service owned by the broadcasting corporation Sirius XM Holdings that is presently based in Oakland, California inside of the United States. The service carries a focus on recommendations based on the "Music Genome Project", which is a means of classifying individual songs by musical traits such as genres and shared instrumentation. The service originally launched in the consumer market as an internet radio service that would generate personalized channels based on these traits as well as specific tracks liked by the user; this service is available in an advertising-supported tier and additionally a subscription-based version. In 2017, the service launched Pandora Premium, which is an on-demand version of the service more in line with contemporary competitors.
John Gruber is a technology blogger, UI designer, and co-creator of the Markdown markup language. Gruber authors the Apple enthusiast blog Daring Fireball and produces its accompanying podcast, The Talk Show.
Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium", is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (offline) goods that expand the functionality of the free version of the software. This business model has been used in the software industry since the 1980s. A subset of this model used by the video game industry is called free-to-play.
Gigaom is a technology focused analyst firm and media company. The company evolved from a blog which offered news, analysis, and opinions on startup companies, emerging technologies, and other technology related topics. It was started by Om Malik in San Francisco, California and after running out of money and shutting down, was acquired by Knowingly Corp. in 2015.
Scribd Inc. provides access to millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, documents and more across three unique platforms:
The App Store is an app marketplace developed and maintained by Apple, for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS SDK. Apps can be downloaded on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and some can be transferred to the Apple Watch smartwatch or 4th-generation or newer Apple TVs as extensions of iPhone apps.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 615 million monthly active users, including 239 million paying subscribers, as of March 2024. Spotify is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts.
Flipboard is a news aggregator and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver, and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. It aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites, and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to "flip" through the articles, images, and videos being shared. Readers can also save stories into Flipboard magazines. As of March 2016 the company claims there have been 28 million magazines created by users on Flipboard. The service can be accessed via web browser, or by a Flipboard application for Microsoft Windows and macOS, and via mobile apps for iOS and Android. The client software is available at no charge and is localized in 21 languages.
The Verge is an American technology news website headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, consumer electronics news, and podcasts.
Vox Media, Inc. is an American mass media company founded in Washington, D.C. with operational headquarters in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The company was established in November 2011 by CEO Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass SB Nation and The Verge. Bankoff had been the CEO for SB Nation since 2009.
Recode was a technology news website that focused on the business of Silicon Valley. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher founded it in January 2014, after they left Dow Jones and the similar website they had previously co-founded, All Things Digital. Vox Media acquired Recode in May 2015 and, in May 2019, the Recode website was integrated into Vox. On March 6th, 2023, Vox media announced that in order to make the various Vox sub brands less confusing to its readers, it is retiring Recode brand but it will continue its mission to explain complex issues around technology to its readers under the unified Vox brand.
Line Music is a subscription-based music streaming service by Line Corporation that combines existing Line Messenger app with the entertainment system that users not only can stream the music on-demand, but users can share the music directly to Line Messenger. The chairman for the Line Music division is Lim-Suk Jun. The Line Music app is an alternative version of Naver VIBE in South Korea. It is considered as the biggest listening app in the country.
Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, public speaker, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur.
The Information, legally the Lessin Media Company, is an American technology industry–focused business publication headquartered in San Francisco. Founded in 2013 by journalist Jessica Lessin, the publication publishes content behind a paywall that allows subscribers access to the site and access to global networking events. Lessin has stated that she aims to "build the next Wall Street Journal over the next 50 years" with the publication.
Apple Podcasts is an audio streaming service and media player application developed by Apple Inc. for playing podcasts. Apple began supporting podcasts with iTunes 4.9 released in June 2005 and launched its first standalone mobile app in 2012. The app was later pre-installed with iOS beginning October 2014. The Apple Podcasts directory features more than two million shows. Apple Podcasts is available on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, CarPlay, Microsoft Windows operating systems, and on Amazon Alexa devices.
Matt Levine is a columnist for Bloomberg News covering finance and business. Levine has previously been a lawyer, investment banker, law clerk, and has written for a number of newspapers and financial sites. His newsletter, Money Stuff, is one of the most popular on Wall Street with over 150,000 subscribers as of October 2020.
Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name Microsoft Office, enterprise products and services associated with these products such as Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Viva Engage. It also covers subscription plans encompassing these products, including those that include subscription-based licenses to desktop and mobile software, and hosted email and intranet services.
Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco.
Casey Newton is an American technology journalist, a former senior editor at The Verge, and the founder of, and writer for, the Platformer newsletter.