STH Q4 2024 Letter from the Editor Re-aligning

Every quarter, I like to do a small update to give our readers a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening. Often, there is a big difference between what folks see publicly and the inner workings of STH, so I like to peel that back. This quarter was a big lift on the growth side, and we had to make some tough decisions.

Previous Updates

If you want to check out how this series has evolved, here are the links to the previous ones:

• STH 2019: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2020: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2021: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2022: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2023: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
• STH 2024: Q1 – Q2 – Q3

We now have been doing this for almost six years. It is amazing how time flies.

STH Q4 2024 Letter from the Editor Re-aligning

In Q4 I started re-aligning STH and the messaging around the site. First, let me get to the “what” before getting to what is happening. Just to give some sense of what STH is now doing:

• STH Main Site – This is where we publish our main content
• STH Forums – This is the discussion section for STHers. We constantly get offers to advertise in the fourms, but I tend to like keeping that as a more of just a discussion space for STHers
• STH YouTube – This is our main video platform
• STH Labs – This is our shorts video platform that passed 10K subs this quarter
• STH Weekly Newsletter – This is our free newsletter for those who want STH delivered to their inbox every weekend. I pick my top 5 pieces and often hint at some of the coverage for the week
• Axautik Group Analyst Consultations – These are generally with folks in the financial community who want to learn more about data center infrastructure and are more focused on the business implications of technology
• Axautik Group Reports – Generally we package up come of our content that comes up frequently in consultations
• Axautik Group Substack – This is a paid newsletter where we have some content that often does not warrant a report, but is often based on the financial community consultations

I know we need to grow, but at the same time, this has been a lot to add, especially with the little guy becoming more active! Frankly, I have become the bottleneck, and I know it.

This year, we took on some much larger projects. Just in the last two quarters, the Olympics and the xAI Colossus videos were massive pieces and ate up 5-10x the average time per article/ video.

Perhaps folks have noticed this, but I really like doing pieces where we go out in the world and show cool technology. We also have been reviewing much larger systems like the Aivres KR6288 NVIDIA HGX H200 and ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200 NVIDIA HGX H200 AI Server this month, and we had a third H200 system that we reviewed, but will publish in January. Those systems are really neat since they are so big. They also take much longer for the entire process. Even physically moving the servers in and out of their shipping crates takes much longer. Our big challenge at the moment is that we do not have the capacity to do these regularly without sacrificing our more standard content. Even less so as we expand the types and audiences for our content.

Right now the challenge is that there is a pull for me to do bigger projects, but at the same time I do not want to skip doing a lot of the more standard reviews that we do.

Another option is to drop the goal of publishing every single day. That is a slippery slope though. It is challenging to set the bar that every piece of content on the STH main site or the YouTube channel should average at least 100,000 views. For some context, many other sites are happy to get 1,000-10,000 views per piece (and often they are driving 10x our revenue per piece which is another challenge.) Just putting out that volume and setting the standard that every day there will be new content is a grind. Would 30 articles/ day be enough even if some days had two pieces of content? Personally, I think that if you are doing a job that has a grind you have to have discipline.

My big hope is that in 2025 we can continue to bring bigger pieces to the STH community, while at the same time elevating our average on the main site, and also creating more content for the new audiences and formats. Perhaps that is trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once, but it sounds like a fun challenge for 2025.

With that said, we need help.

Hiring in Scottsdale

It is time to scale the team a bit. In Q2, we Welcomed the Newest STH Team Member, but he is taking time. My goal is to find someone who can become a #2 over time for STH. We also have some roles that we will be hiring for where the primary workplace will be in the STH studio.

If you live in the Phoenix/ Scottsdale area, or you know someone at ASU who would like to learn and get a job, even if it is part time, please let us know.

Also, if you have a topic you are passionate about, and really want to take it up, much like Rohit has done with the 2.5GbE switch series, then I am happy to discuss that part time as well. Our big challenge here is that many folks want to do this, but it is hard to find folks that will actually follow-through over a longer-term timeframe.

We just need to scale.

The STH YouTube Update

This quarter, the growth of the STH YouTube channel again slowed a bit, but we reached 800K subscribers. Instead of doing a piece for every 100,000 (e.g. the 500,000 one) I think we are just going to wait until 1 million.

My best guess is that we will crest 1,000,000 sometime in the second half of 2025 if the growth rate does not slow too much. At the same time, that means we are thinking about evolving the channel for a 1M+ subscriber audience. I still have a vision for what I want to do, and we are slowly moving in that direction.

We are hoping in Q1 2025 to add a new set and tune set #2 (the standing set.) Perhaps the bigger push is that I want to do content outside of the studio more often. We already have two videos that we were on the road to film in December that should go live in the first half of Q1.

The Axautik Group Update and Substack

In Q1, we rolled out our new analyst arm, the Axautik Group. This is the “Analyst” part of our Analyst-Influencer-Other model. Our first PCIe Gen6 and CXL retimer research short was more popular than I expected.

The Axautik Group will produce content designed more for the financial communities. Some folks will be upset that AG content will be priced more for those communities. This is not a replacement for STH in any way. Instead, it will be designed to take much of what we learn by doing STH and turn it into formats we can monetize.

There is a question of whether this will be more of a subscription model or selling one-off reports. We started doing a Substack in August. That Substack has been growing really well and will become an important revenue source in 2025.

If you can subscribe at work, we have a cool set of content coming in 2025. 2024 was trying and tuning the model. 2025 will be growth-mode since it is already generating a nice amount of revenue.

STH Labs: The Shorts Channel Update

As a 2024 project, we have the new STH Labs shorts channel here.

While growth and posting frequency have been slower this quarter, we still managed to see the STH Labs shorts continue to grow. Realistically, it is still much smaller than the main channel, and we need to increase the volume of content here. In the Q2 2024 letter I said I hope this crests 10K subscribers in early Q4 and we hit that.

Subscribe to the STH’s Newsletter and YouTube

Did you know STH has a free weekly newsletter that comes out on Saturday with curated “Top 5” pieces from the week? We know you cannot visit every day, so we can deliver our picks for weekend reading directly to your inbox. Subscribing to the newsletter is easy. Here is the form.

We are not selling your e-mail addresses and MailChimp is managing everything at this point so you can subscribe and unsubscribe from the list as you want.

We are not promoting the newsletter via overlays and pop-ups. Those are very effective, but they are bad for readers. I do not like them, so as long as I have a say, we are not going to have newsletter signup overlays. I run STH as something I would want to visit daily even if I did not work on it.

Finally, subscribe to our YouTube and check it out here. Since that is a big focus at this point.

Subscribing to STH’s newsletter helps you see my favorite pieces of each week and a preview of the next week. Subscribing to the STH YouTube channel also helps us demonstrate our reach beyond just the website. Sometimes, doing things like showing power consumption or fan noise is easier than writing about it. This has also been something important for STH over the past few months. We have to demonstrate reach, and simple things like subscriber counts help explain reach.

Final Words

Again, thank you to all of our readers, Substack subscribers, clients, the STH team, and our advertisers for making everything possible. 2024 felt like trying to expand while also having new personal time commitments with the baby and I am very tired. I have been specifically trying to take a little time off only working 6-8 hours some days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s to recharge. It is helping. Several times a month, I hear the comment “you have the best job” and I do. Part of making it the best job is pushing really hard between 4:30AM and 11:30PM every day. Even with the best job, there are some days that are more difficult than others.

The good news is, we are pushing very hard in 2025.