An Update

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We are coming up on the half way point in our annual Prime membership drive. And as I have been telling you with mounting urgency over the last week, we were pushing hard to meet our goal for the month of June, which was to reach a total of 22,000 total members. 

I confess I thought we would get close to that milestone but not quite make it, probably come up as little as a few tens of sign-ups short. On June 19th I said we had 514 sign-ups to go. That meant an average of almost 50 new members a day for ten days, which is basically the highest we’ve ever gotten on any sustained basis. But we kept close and that’s what made it so tantalizing. If we obviously weren’t going to get there, I could go low energy and not focus on it so much. But we were really, really close.

And hey, we got there. In fact we blew right past the milestone, finishing the month at 22, 108 Prime members. It was largely on the basis of a late surge, almost 300 sign ups in just the last three days. We had 70 on Wednesday, 113 on Thursday and 116 on Friday.

In any case, there is obviously a certain arbitrariness about milestones and particular numbers by particular dates. But the big picture isn’t arbitrary at all. It’s critical to what we are trying to build here at TPM: a better, more vital and more robust version of the site. Obviously, every publication needs a functioning business model to stay afloat. And my sine qua non job here at TPM, in addition to writing, is to make sure that remains the case. But there’s something more than necessity at work here. On my part there’s a lot of excitement too. I get to see the inner workings of what we do, on the editorial and business side, and see how we are beginning to be able to do things we’ve simply never done before. You’ve seen some signs of it with recent hiring announcements and we’ll have more to come. It is transformative. Thanks and if you haven’t joined us yet, please take a moment to sign up right now. Click here.

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