Ben Thompson (analyst)

Education

Thompson's undergraduate education was at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his graduate education at Northwestern University, where he received a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School as well as a Master of Engineering Management from the McCormick School of Engineering.

Career

Thompson's career includes stints at Apple, where he interned at Apple University; Microsoft, where he worked on its Windows Apps team; and at WordPress developer Automattic as a growth engineer.

Thompson launched Stratechery as a blog while still a Microsoft employee, and in April 2014 devoted himself to the site full-time, operating on a "freemium" subscription model. He has stated his primary inspiration was John Gruber, author of the site Daring Fireball.

As of April 2015, Thompson had more than 2,000 paying subscribers. By 2017, Recode described Stratechery as having pioneered the paid newsletter business model. The founders of Substack, a newsletter platform launched in 2018, called Thompson a major inspiration for their project.

Aggregation theory

Thompson is a proponent of aggregation theory, which describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators such as Google and Facebook) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregators have all three of the following characteristics:

1. direct relationship with users;
2. zero marginal costs for serving users;
3. and demand-driven multi-sided networks with decreasing acquisition costs.

Personal life

In August 2025, Ben relocated from Taiwan back to the United States.

References

References

1. Felix Salmon. (February 6, 2015). "The ingredients of a great newsletter". [[Fusion (TV channel).
2. "Sharp Tech".
3. Jordan Novet. (April 3, 2015). "10 tech podcasts you should listen to now". [[VentureBeat]].
4. (June 2014). "Postmodern Computing Summit". Pixxa / [[Asymco]].
5. Josh Horwitz. (April 16, 2014). "Stratechery goes solo: Ben Thompson on Asia, Apple, and the shifting tides of online media". Tech in Asia.
6. Juli Clover. (May 6, 2013). "Jony Ive's iOS 7 Influence Will Be More Than Skin Deep". [[MacRumors]].
7. Jonathan Libov. (October 5, 2013). "Rise of the prosumer analyst: How mobile is driving a new brand of business analysis". [[Gigaom]].
8. Kara Swisher. (April 16, 2014). "Ben Thompson's Stratechery Expands and Goes Freemium". [[Recode]].
9. Matthew Ingram. (April 17, 2014). "Can a little-known blogger turn his site into a business by selling memberships? Ben Thompson is sure going to try". [[Gigaom]].
10. Mathew Ingram. (February 2, 2015). "Ben Thompson: The one-man blog isn't dead, it's better than ever". [[Gigaom]].
11. (16 October 2017). "Meet the startup that wants to help you build a subscription newsletter business overnight". Vox.
12. (2 December 2020). "What does aggregation theory tell us about Google's antitrust case?".
13. (2025-08-19). "A Personal Update and Vacation Break".