Sari Azout: Future of content monetization

Sari started her career in finance after graduating from Brown University, and eventually transitioned to tech. She talked to us about the idea of psychological freedom, or lack of thereof, resulting from the attention-based revenue generation models in social media. Sari discusses new, innovative ways of monetizing writing, and how phenomenons like crowdfunding or NFTs could positively impact content and creators.

Sari also talks about the untapped potential of newsletters and writing on the internet, and shares examples of how she successfully monetizes her newsletter. Greg and Sari also discuss the regulatory side of the advertising driven content distribution model, and how it can evolve in the upcoming years.

Sari sums up her perfect startup employee as someone who can wear many hats, be autonomous with alignment and put the company and the team ahead of their own ego.

Greg Miaskiewicz: Do you think that there's the potential that there will be backlash against this kind of information overload? Like I personally sometimes feel like I need to turn off all media. Like I went on vacation, and I deleted every app from my phone other than slack, which I needed to check for work, occasionally.

Sari Azout:

I mean, no question. Something that I think about a lot is this idea of psychological freedom. And I think that we don't really have that psychological freedom. And I think it's a function of the interfaces, because if you think about Twitter, if you don't check Twitter for two days, chances are when you log on three days from now, you've kind of missed what you've missed. But if we had interfaces that allow you to resurface things as you needed.

The framework for me is shifting from information that demands your attention to information on demand. If you woke up one day and you had some sort of problem or thing that you were thinking about, and you had a way to access insights, you were thinking about, I don't know, maybe you're doing diligence on a company in the design tool space, at that point, it might make sense to see, all right, what have interesting people written about the future of collaborative design on the internet? So for me, it's about shifting from these kinds of FOMO inducing interfaces to interfaces that make search and serendipity the core of the experience, as opposed to just like infinite feeds, which I think prey on our human vulnerabilities.

Greg:

Yeah. I think there's, within the feed personalization algorithms, there are deleterious effects on society because they're really optimizing for reactions, and there is a lot of content that you're not going to have a strong, positive or negative reaction to that you may want to see and is informative.

Sari: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Now that we're shifting from this ad-based ecosystem to a subscription economy, I think that we are over-indexing on that and there's a ceiling on people's finances and attention, as you mentioned. And so my hope is that as we learn and understand these new business models, we'll settle on something that is a little bit more multiplayer. And what I mean by that is, like who has money or time to consume a hundred Substacks a month? That leads to redundancy. Lack of coordination.

And so I'm more excited about creators coming together and reimagining organizations like a newspaper, for example, but using things like maybe Dows or collectives or groups of creators, because I think we went from this top-down control, centralized, to now giving a lot of power to these atomized creators. But that doesn't solve the issue for the consumer, which is ultimately like people are overwhelmed and exhausted. And so hopefully I think the pendulum will shift and we'll see more of that interdependence in the form of collectives and whatnot.