Is the Vibe Shift Bad for House of Strauss?
A subscriber asks whether the Trump + Elon era hurts formerly subversive Substacks
On the podcast with Freddie, I said I’d respond to this email from Subscriber Marcus:
Hey Ethan,
I've been pondering something recently as I've listened to your pods: Is the vibe shift bad for you and your business? You built your audience by being willing to say things that were in this weird category of "obvious but dangerous." If those ideas are no longer dangerous to say or hard to find, do you think there's risk for your subscribership? Or is the sports media class still in that same world of being unable to say the obvious so you still have that niche? Curious what you think of that in relation to our current national conversation.
Best!
MarcusP.S. one note on the whole NBA/NFL ratings conversation: It's odd to me when folks say "the NBA media is uniquely critical of its own product." I remember from 2015-2018, when basically all of football media was "football is going to die" and covering scandals and issues with the league. This seems to be ignored these days, not sure why.
Man, that P.S. from Marcus is a deep cut and a good point.
Okay, so for me and my business. Forgive my self indulgence, but some of you appreciate this sort of transparency and I personally like when people describe the inner workings of their own jobs. So, per the Marcus email, I think it’s quite possible that the Vibe Shift hurts short term business at House of Strauss LLC, but that’s not my primary focus, and I’ll explain why later on. Also, as I’ve mentioned, we Substackers have already seen our business hurt by not so much the current Vibe Shift, but the Elon Twitter purchase that precipitated it.