To­day, End­points News is one year old. Like any thriv­ing in­fant, we’ve been grow­ing at a fast pace, out­grow­ing a hasti­ly craft­ed chris­ten­ing gar­ment.

Start­ing from scratch, with just so­cial me­dia and a lot of word of mouth to re­ly on, web traf­fic to End­points was less than 14,000 vis­its per week. To­day we notch 14,000 per day, with a to­tal of 139,000 unique read­ers com­ing to the web­site in May.

Email sub­scrip­tions — the most im­por­tant met­ric we track — grew from zilch to 16,000 dai­ly bio­phar­ma sub­scribers drawn to our in­de­pen­dent style of jour­nal­ism. This was a re­sult of or­gan­ic, word-of-mouth ad­vo­ca­cy from our biggest fans. End­points’ “open rate”, the per­cent­age of read­ers who ac­tu­al­ly open and read the email re­ports, has nev­er fall­en be­low 40% — far above in­dus­try av­er­ages and more than dou­ble the rate you see at sim­i­lar pub­li­ca­tions.

I’ve writ­ten — this is a rough ball­park fig­ure — more than 650,000 words on R&D over the past 12 months. And we con­tin­ue to grow our traf­fic month­ly at a dou­ble-dig­it rate.

I am es­sen­tial­ly at about 60% of the read­er­ship I had be­fore I de­cid­ed to do a boot­strap start­up pub­li­ca­tion for bio­phar­ma R&D. And be­lieve me, it’s the best 60%, as I’ve found dur­ing events we’ve host­ed along the way of our maid­en voy­age in San Fran­cis­co and Boston and Eu­rope. The rest will come along, and we’ll be ready to shoot past old mark­ers and fo­cus on achiev­ing big­ger goals in the year ahead.

So where do we go from here?

Com­mit­ment to open-ac­cess and high ex­pec­ta­tions for free con­tent

My part­ner, Ar­salan Arif, and I grew up in this on­line busi­ness me­dia world. We be­lieve that to get a big au­di­ence you need to con­cen­trate on an open-ac­cess mod­el.

In plain Eng­lish, the news must re­main free.

That hasn’t changed and it’s not go­ing to. But we are look­ing to grow the team here at End­points, adding con­tent as we ex­pand read­er­ship fur­ther. And that’s go­ing to take new rev­enue, on top of the ad­ver­tis­ing we’ve built up and con­tin­ue to grow.

A few weeks ago, we ran a read­er sur­vey ask­ing you whether you would con­sid­er pay­ing $200 a year for a sub­scrip­tion. Most said there wasn’t a chance. You have high ex­pec­ta­tions for free con­tent and you weren’t about to change. Some said they’d pay, but the fig­ure sound­ed high. And you were fine with the email blasts from ad­ver­tis­ers.

To all of you, we say thank you for spend­ing part of your work day with us. We’ll work for you every day of the week.

But about 20% of you felt that you would glad­ly pay that, ei­ther to sup­port the work we’re do­ing here or to pay for di­rect ac­cess to the re­port with­out any email blasts from ad­ver­tis­ers.

It was, in fact, about 50/50 on that score.

An­nounc­ing End­points In­sid­er

On Ju­ly 10, we’ll roll out End­points In­sid­er, our paid sub­scrip­tion mod­el. If you’d like to sup­port our work here — or sim­ply want all the con­tent with­out the ad­ver­tis­ing — please sign up here. The cost is $200/year (no pay­ment de­tails re­quired to­day).

End­points In­sid­er pre-reg­is­tra­tion
No pay­ment de­tails re­quired to­day

In ad­di­tion to sup­port­ing us and en­joy­ing an ad-free ex­pe­ri­ence, I’ll be mov­ing my opin­ion pieces be­hind the pay­wall, of­fer­ing eas­i­er ac­cess to the ed­i­to­r­i­al team for any queries you may have, and In­sid­ers can in­stant­ly down­load print-ready PDF ver­sions of all ar­ti­cles so you can print or share in­ter­nal­ly on your terms. Lat­er we’ll add a few oth­er sub­scriber-on­ly pieces, but all of the dai­ly bio­phar­ma news we pub­lish will re­main free and eas­i­ly ac­cessed to those of you who like things as they are. That is not go­ing to change and you don’t have to do any­thing to keep re­ceiv­ing End­points News and mes­sages from our ad­ver­tis­ers.

I’d like to thank you all for the lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of mes­sages of sup­port we’ve re­ceived along the way. When you start up your own in­de­pen­dent busi­ness in an in­dus­try like this, you find lots of sup­port for the en­tre­pre­neur­ial at­ti­tude we’ve adopt­ed. And if you would like to add your sub­scrip­tion to help sup­port that, we’d ap­pre­ci­ate that as well.

One way or the oth­er, we’ll keep work­ing 24/7 on your be­half. It’s been quite a ride, and we’re just get­ting start­ed putting can­dles on that cake. But with­out you, this all means noth­ing. — John Car­roll

The FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence has been a bright spot within the agency in terms of speeding new treatments to patients. That flexibility was on full display this morning as FDA released new draft guidance spelling out exactly how oncology drug developers can fulfill both the accelerated and full approval’s requirements with just a single randomized controlled trial.

While Congress recently passed legislation that will allow FDA to require confirmatory trials to be recruiting and ongoing prior to granting an accelerated approval, the agency is now making clear that the initial trial used to win the AA, if designed appropriately, can also serve as the trial for converting the accelerated approval into a full approval.

Digital therapeutics company Better Therapeutics announced on Thursday that it’s cutting 35% of its staff as it awaits FDA clearance for its first product.

The company, which launched eight years ago, is one of a growing group of companies seeking a digital alternative to traditional medicine. The space saw a record $7.5 billion in investments in 2021, according to Chris Dokomajilar at DealForma, with uses spanning ADHD, PTSD and other indications. However, private insurers have been slow to hop on board.