Dear readers,

We find ourselves surrounded by free stuff. It costs nothing to use Google, Facebook, or play Candy Crush. Much of the content you read is free too.

But nothing is truly free. There are tradeoffs with free content: You get exposed to advertising. Data about you is sold to the highest bidder without you knowing. And much of the stuff you read is crap.

Here’s the reality: Copying-and-pasting press releases costs next to nothing. But every small step up from a press release requires an exponential step up in time, effort, and resources.

We need time and effort to check facts, ask questions, transcribe, structure a piece, and craft narratives.

So why are we charging for content? The answer is simple: A quality publication cannot survive on clicks alone. Cost per impressions is too low because ad inventories are too numerous.

Publications incentivized to maximize clicks have to make a sacrifice: They are forced to churn out articles like a factory. More pieces = more clicks = more money. Writers get demoralized as a result. And then they leave.

Yes, there’s plenty of good and free content out there. But think of how much irrelevant content you’d had to filter before landing on that article.

Which brings me to point of today’s missive: A subscription to Tech in Asia, at a rate of about US$0.55 a day, is well worth your investment.

It costs less than an upsize of your Starbucks cuppa. It’s less than the train or taxi ride you took this morning. And definitely less than the branded bag or coat you may have gotten.

You might raise your hand and ask: But what am I getting out of it?

I’m glad you did.

1. We’re reinvesting our subscription money into in-depth content that goes directly to you.

This month, we’ve so far already assigned US$3,000 worth of in-depth content to journalists whose work we admire. It takes about 30 subscribers to foot the bill for a piece that’s over 1,000 words.

Why so expensive, You may ask? People underestimate the effort needed to craft good content (this goes for most professions really – people ignore the unseen work behind a finished product). A 1,000 to 1,500-word piece takes me one to two days to create. Anything above 2,000 words could take three to five days.

Despite the cost, we’re looking to invest even more (we’re hiring a senior journalist by the way). We believe in improving the quality of our content so that you have even more reasons to subscribe.

2. We’re giving you first dibs on innovation in Asia.

As an investor, you’re keeping tabs on investible startups and founders.

As an entrepreneur, you’re seeking ideas, inspiration, and best practices.

As a rainmaker, you’re looking for potential corporate customers.

Tech in Asia gives you all that and more through reporting that you won’t find in other outlets. Check out our in-depth interview with MobilityX, which has some ambitious plans around reinventing public transport in Singapore and Asia. Read our breakdown of the latest Southeast Asian viral app sensation that’s made in China, or our interview with SendAnywhere, which has amassed 15,000 downloads a day for their file sharing app.

Our lists have proven popular among our subscribers. We recently published a rundown of ten Indonesian startups you should know about, and every week we curate a handful of rising startups in Southeast Asia.

What price is US$0.55 a day if you can make back so much more in terms of deals and returns from our coverage?

3. We break the news first and add value when we can.

Our journalists have our ears on the ground and we strive to bring you information before anyone else.

We were the first to report Shopback’s move to offline cashback, KRAsia’s investment round, One Championship US$50 million bet on esports, Tokopedia’s ditching of its own e-wallet, as well as Heliconia and Singapore Exchange’s investment in ICHX Tech, a blockchain token trading platform.

We kept these news exclusively for subscribers until other media caught up.

We strive to uncover details other news outlets might miss. While other outlets aped the press release in their reporting of the ICHX Tech news, we dug out the size of the investment and the stakes of the investors and pointed out how it might be similar to another startup with a presence in Singapore.

And while other outlets reported on the recent funding of Malaysian startup TribeHired, we went the extra mile and asked them questions about their revenue and profitability.

In summary, we strive to be the most comprehensive and in-depth source of knowledge about Asia’s tech scene – with a focus on startups. We will combine in-depth stories with a wide breadth of news coverage and aggregated content.

And we believe a subscription model will help us get there. In just over a month, hundreds of people – from the likes of Apple, Bain & Co, Facebook, Grab, Google, Harvard University, JPMorgan Chase, Stanford University, Sequoia Capital, Salesforce, Stripe, UBS, and Visa – have invested in better content about Asia’s tech scene.

We hope you’ll join them too.

Best,

Terence Lee
Chief editor
Tech in Asia