Very interesting
@Patrick to read your thinking arround STH. I'd say based on what I've read over the past 2 years, STH seems like a mix between Gartner and McKinsey/BGC (or O.G. Gartner about 12/15 years ago) with a little Brookings Institution thrown in there for good measure.
You've got the independent analysis which is the core of your business, but instead of charging $500-$2000 for CIOs to get access to each analysis piece, you distribute it publicly and feed off the ad revenue. This is a fine tight rope to walk because if you get too general to increase views, the level of usefulness will fall off a cliff and you risk falling back into that "press" bucket.
Natural evolutions out of that analysis work would create a pipeline for a consulting arm (the PWC background would make that fait accompli), and probably a subscription-based service for more detailed analysis like a performance test results database, detailed product commentary, and detailed implementation and analysis work either from lessons learned through a consulting engagement, or through the research side.
When you removed the non-STH served advertisements, you moved closer to that research and thought leadership model. Ironically, while TinyMiniMicro doesn't directly apply to an enterprise business, it was a unique solution and a very valid solution to creating small, low cost, dense compute clusters for an SMBs, especially startups and probably tee-ed those startups to become clients as they grow larger. I definitely find STH more useful that a Magic Quadrant paper.
I think the struggles around defining STH probably stem with an underlying assumption that "website + reviews = press", though your PWC experience, whether intentional or not, probably centers you closer to a thought leadership and research firm, where individual product reviews that are of value to readers are just an easy win to build a baseline audience arround.
I'm hoping that over time you'll do more solutioning content as well like "We built our own DGX cluster!" or "We ran 50 Virtual Desktops on 1 Server, and IT WORKED!". Both would have significant implications in tech startup sector, and you'd probably get a few consulting engagements to help architect a low-cost AI cluster, or a cost-optimized a VDI deployment.
You can check with Linus, but I get a feeling once they started doing more solutioning/build content for the LTT main channel, their sub count really took off.
Cheers,
Bryan
