Content to Commerce Only Works One Way

What do Food52, Hodinkee, and MeatEater all have in common? They all sell things to an audience that they built using content. Barstool Sports spent a long time building a gambling obsessed audience before it moved into online gambling. FreightWaves and Blockworks had success with their media businesses long before its SaaS product took off.

For all of these brands, content came first. For years, the focus was on building an audience. And only after reaching a certain scale did they start to see growth in their commerce products—whether that’s selling dish towels, watches, gambling accounts, or SaaS subscriptions.