STH Q3 2025 Letter from the Editor Trifecta Challenges

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 marked some big changes at STH.

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 – Q4
• STH 2025: Q1 – Q2

It is amazing how time flies.

STH Q3 2025 Letter Trifecta Challenges

Q3 has been fun, but quite challenging. Perhaps because this is the third quarter, I wanted to cover the trifecta challenge we have at STH and also some of the cool things we are working on. By far the coolest was doing the MikroTik Latvia video.

If you have been reading these letters for the last year or two, you have probably noticed a struggle. STH is no longer just a website. We have six properties doing over 100,000 views/ month with the main website and YouTube doing many times that. In the industry, that has led to more than a bit of chaos.

Inside of companies, generally there are major relations functions. Press relations (PR), Analyst Relations (AR), Investor Relations (IR), and Influener Relations (we will just call this “Influencer” since IR is usually for Investor Relations.) Each of these functions usually has an individual responsible for that specific track. That generally works well. If a company is trying to get an interview in USA Today, that is PR. If it is trying to get a whitepaper done, often that is coordinated through AR. If the company is reporting financial results, then that goes through IR. If the company wants to get a TikTok or YouTube program, then that is through the Influencer function.

The challenge we are facing is that we do a bit of three of these. We publish some news, for example covering a new chip launch before there is hardware that we can test. That would generally fall into PR. We do hands-on content and give opinions, which often falls into AR, and especially with the STH and Axautik Group Substack, that is firmly in the AR realm versus the PR realm. On the Influencer side, we have a million subscriber YouTube channel that we have built over almost six years.

We absolutely suck at PR. Generally, the expectation here is for interviews and reposting press releases. Press releases are perhaps best understood as walls of text that companies produce, through great effort, that very few people actually read. They are now mostly just to formally mark when an event has occurred. Interviews seem great, but I am not great at them so we tend to do very few of them.

In terms of why we have been pushing away from the PR side, I think it is fairly obvious. For years, re-posting a press release was an activity one would do in competition with many bots. The value add was to write a few thoughts around a press release. I remember when I found out that other sites in 2020 were spending $15-25 per news story written in this way. With the rise of LLMs, that cost is approaching $0. On the interview side, sometimes CEO interviews are interesting, but oftentimes the interviews offered are going over points in a press release because the interviewee is not authorized to make new disclosures. From these two factors, it is really hard to get excited about creating this type of contnet.

On the analyst side, we are really doing a lot. On the Substack side, we have a bit more around business content. Still, there is something really strange that happens in the inside the industry. Companies pay large sums to analysts to create whitepapers. Those whitepapers often have some hands-on component and are put behind the e-mail lead generation tools. To give you some sense, often those are lucky if they can generate 70-150 lifetime real downloads (there are firms that inflate these figures by several times using automated means.) To me, that is a model ripe for disruption. At STH, our goal is to get 1000x that figure on each piece of hands-on content. Instead of doing 1-2 whitepapers a month, we aim to do many hands-on pieces a week. What we can bring is both volume and readership. What our model lacks is the monetization component that the whitepaper firms have. I call this written content without distribution.

There are also talking head videos that realistically get 100-600 real views before these firms inflate those figures. It is pretty easy to spot those since they are usually poor quality content. Again, I call those video creation without distribution. That is also a major analyst offering.

To be fair, there are some analyst firms doing great work. If you look at network testing, for example, we have been using iperf3 on STH, which stinks. A high-end analyst firm in the networking space might be The Tolly Group which does really cool testing. Our new 1.6Tbps load generation tool (soon to be 3.2Tbps once some new cables come in) is probably going to bridge the gap considerably because I just thought that the gap was too big. The challenge is that to get there, you have to invest months and six or seven figures and then continue to invest as Ethernet speeds double every 18 months or so. There are other options from companies like IDC and the Dell’Oro Group that do a lot of forecasts and counting that I just do not think we will ever do.

On the influencer side, I have been reluctant to think of STH as an “Influencer”. At the same time, I recently said something along those lines only to be greeted with an “OK but a million subscriber YouTube channel is certainly an influencer.” This is probably one where we created something that would fit well but without intending to do so.

Perhaps the challenge that we have is that we could easily fit into PR, AR, and Influencer contacts at companies. What folks externally may not realize is that we often do events where all three groups are brought together, but the roles and internal company contact points will be different.

Taking the alternative view, if you are the head of communications at a company, how do you interface with me? I run the largest server, storage, and networking review site. I have a Substack that is continuing to grow and am often asked to advise folks on technology. I have a healthy YouTube following. Perhaps the issue is that in this trifecta, this is all “I” interfacing. As much as we have been trying to fix that, in 2026 it is just going to have to happen. Perhaps that is easier said than done, but I have a high-level plan on fixing that.

This is also something I have recently learned I do not get to dictate. A multi-trillion dollar company is in the process of transitioning us from Press to Analyst and that is having ripple effects even before we have formally made that transition. My suggestion was that instead of having one point of contact, we have three, but that is not happening. It also is a painful process since as our interface points change, that often means we are no longer the responsibility of the folks we have been working with for many years.

I will say it leads to some funny discussions. For example, this week we were at Equinix Analyst Day and folks were surprised that STH had something up almost real-time. Personally, it is strange to be sitting in a room where the other analysts are saying “you are 100% an analyst” and at the same time turning to those same folks and asking “so what does an analyst do exactly?” or “can you explain the analyst model?” In some ways, it reminds me a lot more of what I did at PwC doing management consulting.

Talk about a strange place to be. It is something I have had a lot of time to ponder, and I have also been talking to our team about. With 85 flights completed this year, and a path to surpass 100, there is ample time to sit and think on planes.

The STH YouTube Update

This quarter, we FINALLY hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

Thank you to all of you who have joined us on this journey. Our Gold Play Button arrived on Monday. We were filming in the studio, and I left, took a quick picture, and then rushed to the airport parking only 11 minutes before boarding. Time is tight these days.

The Axautik Group Update and Substack

In Q1 2025, we rolled out our new analyst arm, the Axautik Group. This is the “Analyst” part of our Analyst-Influencer-Other model. We had quite a few popular pieces this quarter.

The Axautik Group will produce content designed more for the financial and executive 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 2024. That Substack has been growing really well and is becoming an important revenue source in 2025. It is now runing at a clip of over 100K views/ month this quarter which is not bad.

If you can subscribe at work, this will be a bigger focus in 2025 and into 2026. I am hoping we can hire someone full-time to work on this in 2026.

STH Labs: The Shorts Channel Update

As a 2024 project, we have the new STH Labs shorts channel here. That has been in a slow growth mode for the last few quarters.

As a team, we have been talking about this a lot more as a growth vehicle. Perhaps we focus on this and grow it to 100,000 subscribers since that seems doable given the size of the main channel.

Subscribe to the STH’s Newsletter and YouTube

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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

Thank you to all of our readers, Substack subscribers, clients, the STH team, and our advertisers for making everything possible.

These posts are a time for me to reflect, but at the same time as I meet people travelling and at events, the number of folks that comment on these is astounding. Just last week I had someone quote the Q1 2025 letter to me. Hopefully folks appreciate this look behind-the-scenes because it simply does not happen enough in our industry.