Former TC’er Paul Carr’s latest venture, called NSFWCorp, has launched into private beta. It’s a weekly news magazine dubbed as the “the Economist as written by ‘The Daily Show’” and will be available for $26 a year or “two bucks a month.” What’s particularly interesting, however, is how the company is offering initial subscriptions using a clever sponsor model.
If you join the waiting list right now, you will be placed onto a waiting list for a free sixth month subscription. Sponsors will pay $5 for each subscriber in tranches of 400 for a minimum $2,000 sponsorship deal. These readers will then be encouraged, in six months, to subscribe officially.
“Not disclosing the exact number of people on the waiting list right now — but the response has been even better than we’d hoped. I guess scarcity is a good motivator. The bigger immediate challenge for us is making sure we have enough sponsors to let all those people in. Right now we have way more people on the list than we have available sponsored subs,” said Carr.
Sponsors include Tony Hsieh’s DowntownProject and Cloudflare. The magazine will exist entirely as a HTML5 app on the web, making it eminently portable.
Quoth Carr:
The idea of a once-monthly (or weekly) collection of topical pictures and words, delivered as a 500mb file, without links or other interactive elements is anathema to the connected consumer. If they want those things, they’ll buy a paper magazine (which increasingly, of course, they won’t). For most people, periodicals are accessed in the browser, usually for free.
You can sign up here and may the beta odds be ever in your favor.