(Photo credit @markuswinkler )
Guess what? I got a dog! Also known as a small horse, Riley is part black lab, part mastiff & a completely huge ball of love. You can check out pics here. We’re still figuring out life together, but I’m glad to have rescued her from a nearby shelter via Petfinder.com. We’re getting in lots of exercise & time outdoors. Totally debating the value of the Barkbox subscription vs simply using Amazon’s Subscribe & Save - any thoughts?
#techtopic
For the first time in forever, a new search engine debuted this week and the tech world has been buzzing. (Check out this link if you want to join Neeva’s waitlist.) Why is Neeva so hyped? One, the founder is a former Google senior exec, who ran their ad business. Two, Neeva will *not* allow ads on its site. (See the about-face?)
Many talk about how the ad-supported business model is dooming us to living in a hyper-segmented, surveilled world and that the ads themselves even change how we see ourselves.
Instead, many companies are continuing to prove out the subscription-based model -- and are finding that while consumers are still mixed on what they will pay for, their appetite for subscriptions is growing. Netflix and Spotify are the companies many point to as the gold standard for the subscription economy (very cool chart showing the increase in paid subscribers), and Medium (for publishing). I mentioned Hey.com last week for email, now Neeva for search. (You can also toss in Amazon because of Prime).
One major concern: that only those consumers with means can afford to make the switch from free (and ad-supported) to paying subscribers, while those without means are relegated to using “free” tools that exploit them even further. Ellevest offered a solution this week with super low-cost subscriptions of $1/month to get access to good financial advice & other perks on their platform. Will that mean other companies/categories will offer these micro-priced subscriptions too, and succeed in a similar way to the Planet Fitness chains? Or is Ellevest doing a ‘robin hood style’ approach & taking profits from the rich to help lift up the less financially stable? Super interesting space to watch.
