The Rebooting Show
The Rebooting Show gets into the weeds with those building and operating media businesses, giving an open view into how the smartest people in the media business are building sustainable media businesses. www.therebooting.com
Tue, April 08, 2025
The Daily Upside's niche strategy
Inn this episode, The Daily Upside's Patrick Trousdale explains how niche products like Advisor Upside and ETF Upside are helping the company move up the value chain. We also talk about paid growth, building a newsroom, and why journalism—not just distribution—is the long-term differentiator.
Tue, April 01, 2025
Semafor's Rachel Oppenheim on stakeholder media
Stakeholder media is how a media company can stay influential and build a real business—especially now, when scaled ad models are in a full race to the bottom. Everyone wants to move from passive audiences to active communities. Stakeholder media is a variant. It’s defining features: Elite audiences operating in interconnected, complex ecosystems Focused media, intentionally not for everyone Ability to convene stakeholders with the brand as glue Business model geared to long term relationships vs transactions Rachel Openheim, CRO of Semafor, discussed with me how Semafor is centering its business on stakeholder media, and why that moves events to the center from the periphery.
Tue, March 25, 2025
Inside Dude Perfect’s highly profitable business model
An enduring challenge of the media business is finding leverage in models. This used to be fairly straightforward. Newspapers had leverage as quasi-local monopolies, Magazines had leverage that allowed Vanity Fair to pay a writer nearly $500k for three articles a year – and still be nicely profitable. And so on. It’s increasingly hard to find that kind of leverage beyond a few exceptions to the rule. The closest is likely in lean creator businesses that have created valuable intellectual property that can be monetized in various ways. Dude Perfect is a great example of this. The four dudes from Texas A&M went from viral trick-shot videos on YouTube to building a very profitable media franchise with diverse revenue streams Beyond YouTube ads, Dude Perfect developed business lines in merchandise, licensing and live events. It is a testament to the benefits of bootstrapping. According to an investor deck I saw, Dude Perfect grew to $35 million in revenue with over 50% EBITDA margins. That attracted a $200 million valuation in a funding led by Highmount Capital to expand the business. Andrew Yaffe, the Dude Perfect CEO who joined in October 2024 from the NBA , spoke to me on The Rebooting Show about how to build enduring franchise value in this kind of creator-led media business.
Mon, March 17, 2025
Morning Brew's Robert Dippell on moving into B2B
Morning Brew CEO Robert Dippell joins me to break down the fundamental differences between consumer and B2B media, why so many publishers underestimate the challenge, and how Morning Brew has built a thriving B2B business alongside its flagship newsletter. We also discuss the role of events, the shift to creator-led media, and why some of Morning Brew’s early growth strategies wouldn’t work today. Check out The Rebooting's new audience development research report, in collaboration with Omeda.
Mon, March 10, 2025
Adam Ryan on why newsletters are a channel, not a business model
Adam Ryan, CEO of Workweek, joined me this week to discuss his recent warning that the newsletter sector is overheated. Some points from the conversation: Newsletters are a commodity. The number of newsletters is growing faster than the number of readers. AI tools and cheap platforms like Beehiv have made launching one easy, but most newsletters lack true audience affinity. The inbox is not really a direct connection . It’s a platform like any other, subject to change. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has broken open rates, AI tools like Superhuman summarize newsletters without opening them, and inboxes are being segmented, reducing visibility. Paid growth is a weak foundation. Many newsletters rely on paid acquisition and cross-promotion. The moment that engine turns off, engagement often collapses because there’s no real audience connection. Winners are thinking beyond email. The most successful publishers are building businesses around community, events, and services. Morning Brew, Workweek, and Lenny’s Newsletter all extend beyond just newsletters. Newsletters are a starting point, not a business. They are an MVP—a way to build an audience—but real success comes from expanding into new distribution and monetization channels.
Tue, February 25, 2025
B2B lessons for B2C
Sean Griffey, until recently the CEO of Industry Dive, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the big things Industry Dive, and by extension a lot of B2B, got right. Sean was rarely mentioned in the collection of digital media CEOs of the recent decade. Yet Industry Dive achieved one of the standout exits of the category. He led the B2B publishing company to a $525 million exit to Informa. At the end of 2024, Sean left his role at Informa TechTarget to enjoy “semi-retirement.” I’ve found over the recent years that the worlds of consumer and business publishing are coming together. It used to be they spoke differently and had different priorities. Now, you have publishers like Punchbowl and Puck executing B2B strategies. Semafor relies on events as the bulwark of its revenue model. Publishers are more likely to talk up their newsletters than ComScore numbers. Some of the lesions we discussed: Focus on a specific audience . Industry Dive would turn off ads if it had a story picked up by Reddit that led to a flood of viral traffic. That’s because the people arriving weren’t the “right people.” B2B isn’t about reaching everyone. Know who you’re writing for. A trick of B2B that narrows the focus: Write for a specific job title. Media properties nowadays can be messy, but they need to have a person in mind (and know enough similar people exist). Get receipts . Industry Dive focused its business model on marketing services and lead generation. In B2B, budgets are far greater for demand generation than branding or thought leadership. Do more with less. Industry Dive operated dozens of publications in verticals like wast management, retail, marketing and Tk. But it operated a single platform. That allowed it to quickly move to create new brands, even if it sacrificed unique branding elements. Go direct. Media companies have three core areas: creation, distribution and monetization. Sean criticizes consumer publishers for relinquishing control over distribution by chasing search and social traffic and monetization by relying on programmatic advertising middlemen. B2B media markets have developed differently, allowing companies to avoid those kinds of dependencies.
Mon, February 17, 2025
BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti on where social media went wrong
BuzzFeed has always been a company that plays with the boundaries of media, technology, and internet culture. From its early days mastering viral content to its ill-fated attempt to build a sustainable news division, the company has been in a constant state of reinvention. Now, CEO Jonah Peretti is making perhaps his boldest move yet: transforming BuzzFeed into something more than just a publisher—into a social network. In Jonah's telling, this move springs from a frustration with the direction of social media, as platforms have turned to adversarial algorithms that addict users and prey on human weaknesses. It's a different social media than the heady days of 2012-2015, when BuzzFeed mastered the art and science of creating shareable content. Jonah and I discuss the media landscape and why it's not too late to come up with an alternative social network built around joy.
Mon, February 03, 2025
Ad tech comes to TV
The worlds of TV and internet publishing operated separately. The platforms, the dynamics and even the language used was completely different. Linear TV was brand focused and driven by scarcity dynamics while the internet quickly became a direct marketing machine. Those divisions have nearly erased, thanks in large part to the rise of streaming. Once TV began to be delivered across IP it was inevitable that the digital ad system would be ported over to be married with what was formerly a stodgy world. That’s led to a stampede of the Lumascape to TV, which has always had better ad options than what was on offer on webpages. The promise of streaming with programmatic ad mechanisms is to marry the sight, sound and motion of TV commercials with the targeting and efficiency of programmatic. In this spotlight episode of The Rebooting Show, EX.CO CEO Tom Pachys discusses the transition of the TV ad model that is underway in streaming, the similarities and differences between TV and digital advertising, and why out-of-home is now a fast-growing ad category. Learn more about EX.CO's new CTV product .
Tue, January 28, 2025
The outlook for AI and publishing in 2025
This week, I'm joined by Pete Pachal, a publishing veteran who writes The Media Copilot newsletter that focuses on the intersection of the news business and AI. Pete and I discuss the recent breakthrough with Deepseek, and what it means beyond Silicon Valley and the stock market. We also get into how publishers are adapting to AI, why many of the product use cases are fairly basic to date, and how news consumption is likely to change as agentic AI takes off.
Mon, January 20, 2025
Axios' Sara Fischer on the alternative media's growth
This is set up to be a banner year for alternative media. Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss why institutional media has lost power and influence to an assortment of podcasters, YouTubers and independent creators — and steps it will take to adapt. Three key ones: Embrace curiosity . Much of institutional media feels like a set piece. Cable news shoutfests are obviously performative. Fact checks often come off as assembling facts to back up a preordained conclusion. Some of the most popular and influential independent creators present as curious. Speaking truth to power is not enough. Build around trusted voices . Later this month, Axios will roll out a membership program built around Sara’s Media Trends newsletter. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei has spoken of the need to elevate “stars,” particularly as AI does Smart Brevity by default. The market will drive this as unique talent has more options than ever — and the risk:reward ratio is often scrambled in the Information Space as the solo path is less risky and offers greater potential rewards. Pick a lane. The current news market is geared to ideological publications The Free Press, The Daily Wire, etc – leaving an opening for nonpartisan news, as hard as that is to pull off. Thanks to EX.CO for sponsoring this series.
Mon, January 13, 2025
Big Tech in 2025
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I was joined by Alex Kantrowitz, who writes the Big Technology newsletter and hosts a podcast of the same name, in order to discuss the year ahead in tech platforms. We covered a lot of ground, including: The slightly unseemly kowtowing to the incoming Trump administration OpenAI’s wonky economics Alex’s bet on AI “companions” Why X has proved doomsayers wrong The bright spot of individual creators amid a lot of media industry gloom Check out the Big Technology newsletter and podcast . Learn more about TRB partner EX.CO 's expansion of its award-winning ad server to upgrade programmatic auctions in CTV and digital-out-of-home environments.
Mon, January 06, 2025
The end of affiliate arbitrage
Mike Mallazzo, writer of the reliably excellent Zero Clicks newsletter from Martech Record and a veteran of digital publishing and marketing, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the state of affiliate and what to expect in the category in 2025. The hopeful view: The efforts to stamp out affiliate arbitrage will ultimately reward those who put in the work to create high-quality content that’s actually useful, as opposed to churning out affiliate content to arbitrage their brand’s high ranking in the search results pages. As Mike points out, "Without huge arbitrage opportunities, affiliate is a bad business model... We had a 10-year golden era of arbitrage that made affiliate a great business model.”
Thu, December 12, 2024
How Gannett is adapting for an AI era
In this live podcast, I spoke to Imtiaz Patel, chief consumer officer; Kristin Roberts, chief content officer; Jason Taylor, chief sales officer; and Renn Turiano, chief product officer. We discussed rethinking the article page, the imperative to provide a better user experience, why Google is so frustrating, using AI to drive subscriptions, and how AI answer engines are like Uber.
Mon, December 02, 2024
How Metro increased traffic by publishing less
At Metro, the free London newspaper, the comedown from the traffic era was jarring. At the end of 2022, with Facebook turning off the traffic taps to news and a Google update hitting, overall traffic dropped in half, Metro’s director of audience Sofia Delgado told me in a conversation at WordPress VIP Innovation Showcase in London. “We had a newsroom that came of age in the era of Facebook,” she said. “We had a lot of bad habits and we were used to doing things quickly. Suddenly that wasn't working anymore.” The publisher pulled off a feat: By focusing on what was working, it has managed to increase its traffic by 50% by producing 25% fewer pieces of content.
Tue, November 19, 2024
Mark Penn on the state of the news business
Stagwell CEO Mark Penn is a veteran of politics. In this discussion, he examines how shifting audience behaviors and trust patterns are reshaping where Americans get their news. The conversation delves into the thorny challenges of advertising on news content and why brand safety concerns are usually overblown. Penn outlines how news organizations can build sustainable businesses by adopting lessons from political campaigns, while warning that chasing ideological audiences risks further eroding media's broader cultural influence.
Tue, November 05, 2024
The new search wars
AI-powered search engines have clawed a foothold in the critical search market that controls distribution on the open web. Media management consuling firm Activate estimates 15 million people are using these answer engines rather than Google, which is adding AI summarization to its results. By 2028, Activate expects that to rise to 36 million. The open question is whether publishers can stem this tide. Michael Wolf, the CEO of Activate, sees a fundamental shift in the search market, as generative AI can currently handle about 40% of searches as an open web discovery tool. He expects the rest of searches will follow suit over the next five years as the fundamental nature of the open web changes. This will lead to search becoming the front end to what Wolf calls "gated web discovery" and eventually "discovery-led transactions."
Mon, October 28, 2024
The evolution of Blockworks
Blockworks CEO Jason Yanowitz discusses how Blockworks has evolved the company from an events business to podcast network to news provider to becoming a data and information play with media, events and franchises feeding the core data and research business. This kind of shift is hard to pull off. Among the issues we discuss: Using podcasts for broad reach and affinity News as a credibility driver Pulling back on B2C events to focus on B2B Using media to drive “negative CAC” for information services Implementing a “house of brands” strategy
Tue, October 22, 2024
Defector’s Jasper Wang on slow growth
Defector Media, the sports and culture publication launched four years ago by former Deadspin writers, is an example of the mixed picture for the future of the media business. On the plus side, it is a profitable, employee-owned publication with 42,500 paying subscribers supporting a $4.6 million business. At the same time, the company saw revenue growth drop to 2.2% from 18% last year and 16% in 2022. Defector's Jasper Wang joined me to discuss Defector’s plans to expand its ad revenue, the inevitable challenges of fast decisionmaking in an employee-owned business, the “lean stack” approach of outsourcing as many publishing and corporate functions as possible, and the growth of its Normal Gossip podcast and diversification of Defector’s audience.
Tue, October 15, 2024
Building independent media businesses
I was joined by Reid DeRamus to discuss the strategic and tactical decisions that go into building an independent media business. We discuss everything from choosing a business model, using the leverage of individual reputation, the value of consistency and authenticity, the mistake of over-reliance on optimization techniques, and the challenge of growth as tried-and-true methods wane in efficacy.
Mon, October 07, 2024
AI in the newsroom
In this Spotlight episode, Josh Brandau, CEO of The Rebooting partner Nota, discusses how AI can be a critical tool for newsrooms in a more-with-less era. osh is a publishing veteran having been CRO and CMO at the Los Angeles Times. That informed his decision to create Nota since like other publishers he saw legacy media struggling to adopt technologies that underpin sustainable businesses. We discuss the inefficiencies inherent in a lot of newsrooms that end up taking scarce resources away from the actual news reporting, and how tasks like versioning, content optimization, SEO and tagging can be sped along with an AI assist. We also take a big picture view of where journalism goes in an AI world, licensing as a growing revenue source and how AI could create other new revenue streams as publishers inevitably move beyond efficiency and begin to create new products that improve the customer experience.
Tue, October 01, 2024
Fitt Insider's Anthony Vennare on niche media models
Fitt Insider , a media brand for the fitness and wellness industry, is a good example of the type of media brand that hits on many of the current trends in the industry: Niche. The fitness and broader wellness industry is a growing area that will only expand. B2B. The most robust media models are B2B or targeting influential audiences with similar approaches. Direct. Fitt relies on podcasts for engagement and its 100,000 email subscriber list for audience data and a direct connection. Organic. Too many newsletters are growth hacked. Fitt Insider has traded slower growth for a quality list that has open rates near 75%. Expertise . Fitt Insider’s founders, Anthony and Joe Venare, are fitness industry experts, having owned gyms and invested in the space. Media flywheel. The best media models tend to make most of their money in media-adjacent areas. For Fitt, this is through its recruiting and consulting arms. Anthony Vennare joined me on The Rebooting Show to break down the Fitt Insider model, and how he views media more expansively. That’s led him to forgo the typical ads and marketing heavy approaches to monetization.
Mon, September 23, 2024
How Front Office Sports went from college project to $10m in revenue
This week, I was joined by one of my favorite media entrepreneurs, Adam White. Adam has built Front Office Sports from a college project to the $10 million in revenue mark, with backing from Jeff Zucker's Redbird IMI. Some of the topics we covered: Why investing in creative strategy is critical to break through with big brands. The “faces and franchises” approach. The limits of built-if-sold projects. The decision to put off subscriptions.
Mon, September 16, 2024
Why sports are winning
Adam Mendelsohn operates at the nexus of sports, media, business and culture. Adam is a longtime advisor to LeBron James and his business partner Maverick Carter. He’s a communications advisor to many athletes and companies. And he’s recently rolled out his own sports platform, OffBall, which is something of a throwback to a pre-algorithmic era where Drudge report and other curators reigned supreme. We discussed: The genesis and vision behind OffBall, a new sports media venture The long-term impact of "The Decision" on sports media and athlete communications The shift towards human curation in content discovery The evolving landscape of sports journalism and brand partnerships The rise of women's sports and international leagues in the U.S. market The importance of storytelling and character development in sports media
Mon, September 09, 2024
Google on trial
This week marks an important moment in the history of digital advertising as the U.S. Department of Justice presses its case that Google is a monopolist in ad tech. The seeds of this case were planted in 2007, when Google bought DoubleClick, a critical piece of internet advertising infrastructure that was widely used by advertisers and publishers in running ad campaigns. With DoubleClick in the fold, Google methodically grew to dominate all phases of digital advertising by piecing together a full stack solution for ad tech, supplying the tools used to both buy and sell ads as well as the exchange used for transacting. And Google was the biggest source of demand for the exchange. The go-to comparison of this situation is if Goldman Sachs owned the New York Stock Exchange. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick executive and ad tech veteran who now runs Marketecture. Ari, in addition to being the funniest person in ad tech, knows the history. We go back in time to when the Google-DoubleClick deal took place, just as programmatic advertising was becoming a reality, and get into the weeds about why controlling the plumbing of digital advertising created an unavoidable set of misaligned incentives.
Mon, August 19, 2024
Scott Messer on publishing’s “pivot to everything”
Scott Messer is founder of media advisory firm Messer Media and former svp of media at Leaf Group. Scott is in the weeds on the digital ad ecosystem, and he broke down the current state of play for publishers. We discussed why traffic declines are still the No. 1 challenge for publishers, why publishers are shifting from traditional monetization mechanisms, retail media as potential allies, and why “curation” is the latest hot new trend in ad tech, even if it sounds quite a lot like what ad networks have always done.
Tue, August 13, 2024
Winning at affiliate
In a spotlight episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Affinity Global CEO Lavin Punjabi for his view of how publishers adapt their affiliate operations. Affinity operates NucleusLinks, an affiliate operations platform that serves as something akin to Google Ad Manager for affiliate operations. Some takeaways: Many publishers are playing catch up. Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest internet business models, with its growth turbocharged by the ease and rise of e-commerce. Many legacy publishers were behind in adopting affiliate models, seeing performance ads as scraping the bottom of the barrel compared to impression models. “The biggest publishers in the world are scrambling to compete in this area that they kind of ignored for a generation,” Lavin said. Affiliate stresses silos. The entire idea of affiliate runs contrary to the notion of church and state. At one of The Rebooting’s dinners focused on commerce, I heard a large publisher lament how the editorial team would battle to control personal finance reviews rather than the commerce team. They were basically working against each other internally. "Some publishers it's the main thing, but for a lot of marquee publishers, it's a department, and they have to figure out where it fits because it's not really editorial, but it's not really sales." Dotdash Meredith is an anomaly. Dotdash Meredith is the manifestation of these worlds colliding, with the internet-native Dotdash taking over the legacy Time Inc publications. It’s telling that as publishers sound the alarm over AI, DDDM has weathered this storm and returned to growth. "They came from a commerce first angle, which is operated with CPS for a large degree. And then eventually with Meredith, which was CPM, they tried to find middle ground."
Mon, August 05, 2024
A confusing time for mass brands
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I was joined by Ana Andjelic, a veteran brand executive and writer of the Sociology of Business newsletter. I wanted to try an episode with Ana because we focus on different ends of the media ecosystem. Among the issues we discuss: The internet’s impact on brands. “It forces you to compete on everything other than on brand. You compete on price, convenience, product recognizability, speed of your supply chain." Product-led branding . “It’s starting with that iconic original product, using different wear stories, wear scenarios, different subcultures, to give it identity." Why DTC brands were really performance marketing companies. “A lot of brands, especially in the DTC era when money was free, thought they would build demand by buying Facebook ads, Instagram ads, search and so on." The limits of performance marketing. "Performance marketing is not going to build your demand. There needs to be something else that tells people to search for it or click on the ad.”
Mon, July 29, 2024
How AI will impact publishing
This week, we are wrapping up a series on The Rebooting Show that examines the role of product at a time of distribution and monetization shifts. The twin themes that emerged are that publishers are increasingly focused on direct relationships with audiences and are in a back-to-basics mode of focusing product resources on critical business objectives, which often rely on loyalty. And the looming question: How will AI be used to make these businesses more effective while not losing their distinctiveness in a sea of artificial slop. Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, discussed with me how AI’s impact on publishers’ day-to-day operations will be felt first and foremost on mundane tasks that end up eating up a lot of resources. The early efforts to embed AI within the publishing process were predictably ham-handed. Using ChatGPT to create AI slop is hardly innovative – and unlikely to be very effective. I’m very skeptical of creating much value out of using AI to churn out tons of aggregation newsletters, for instance. The most immediate opportunities in the content process lie in areas like tagging, inserting links to related articles, testing headlines and the like. As Brian warns, there’s no point in using AI in a way that eliminates the competitive advantage of having a distinct voice. Some highlights from our conversation: On the site as a requisite for an independent path: "If you want to be around in five years, I think so. Don't you like why would you has nobody ever learned that building up and like no offense to any of these, you know, what I call bastard gatekeepers that take your audience away from you." On where AI’s impact will be felt: "People probably overestimate the amount of things that AI is going to help them automate of what they do today. They underestimate how many things they're just not doing because it's so hard that AI is going to let them do." On AI’s use within the content creation process rather than creating content: "Some parts of that [process] can absolutely be handled by modern generative chat, GPT-style, LLM AI." On distinctiveness in an AI era: "Be remarkable, No. 1. That's how you'll stand out from a sea of junk." On being product-minded vs a tech company: Publishers “should be product minded. They are creating a product for people to consume. They should have product talent. If you are the New York Times, you have a thousand product people. If you are somebody else, you have 10. But no, they shouldn't be a technology company."
Mon, July 22, 2024
Post-platform product development
At the Media Product Forum earlier this month, I spoke with Gannett head of product Renn Turiano, Hearst Newspapers chief commercial officer Bridget Williams and Millie Tran, chief digital content officer at the Council on Foreign Relations. The conversation revolved around the shifting product priorities at publishers at a time when the weight of most publishing businesses is shifting from catering to the whims of platforms to a more independent path. That requires a change in focus to satisfy user needs, as well as the need to identify and serve various audience segments. We spoke about how all three organizations are tackling this. Thanks to WordPress VIP, which partnered with The Rebooting on the Media Product Forum.
Wed, July 17, 2024
How Dotdash Meredith and The Daily Beast approach product
At last week’s Media Product Forum, which The Rebooting held in collaboration with WordPress VIP, I had a discussion with Dotdash Meredith chief product officer Adam McClean and The Daily Beast svp of product Samantha Winkelman about their respective product strategies. While both owned by IAC, the publishers are at vastly different sizes, with The Daily Beast having three people in product to DDM’s 75. The connective tissue of both: A focus on audience needs.
Tue, July 16, 2024
Bloomberg Media’s audience-focused approach to product
In a session recorded at The Media Product Forum in NYC, Bloomberg Media global head of product Marissa Zanetti-Crume shares how the media organization takes an audience-focused approach to building products. Marissa highlights the importance of understanding user behavior, particularly the shift towards personalized, relevant content delivered efficiently. She shares insights on Bloomberg's recent homepage redesign, the role of AI in enhancing user experience, and the strategic decisions driving their product development.
Thu, July 11, 2024
The God metric for audience value
In a discussion held in Cannes, I sat down with Jason White, chief product and technology officer at The Arena Group, and Johanna Bergqvist, general manager of the managers at The Rebooting partner EX.CO. A part of the conversation that resonated was how White has zeroed in on revenue per session as what he calls the “God metric” that prioritizes session depth over raw page views. This is a recognition that traditionally digital media publishers have focused on eyeballs without understanding the intrinsic value of user engagement. "The days of not knowing the value of your audience and your content are kind of gone,” Jason said. “Marketers forever have had CRM experts; they know their audiences, they know the value of their users, the value of their products, their margins, etc. We've played an eyeball game for the past 30 years in digital media." The benefits: Organizational alignment. As highlighted in The Rebooting and WordPress VIP’s recent research, internal misalignment bedevils publishers. Different groups pursue different goals. The horror show of many webpages is a sign of internal misalignment and “shipping the org chart.” True personalization. There’s no personalization without understanding the person. RPS allows The Arena Group to figure out not just how best to serve visitors – “Is this a younger audience that wants to consume video?” Johanna said. “Let’s take them down more of a video path." – but how best to make money from them. Publishing is increasingly a game of finding the high value audiences within a mass of impressions. Resource allocation. The more-with-less era is a reality. It requires making hard choices about where to spend and where to cut. Having alignment on a KPI makes these choices somewhat easier, if no less painful.
Tue, July 02, 2024
Inside Hearst's New Data Play
In a session recorded at the Cannes Lions, Hearst Magazines CRO Lisa Ryan and Jen Dorre join the show to discuss how the publisher is responding to the shifts in advertising to performance-focused channels, including retail media and platforms. Skip to topic: 00:00 Introduction 01:36 Realism in Publishing and Growth Strategies 04:45 Focus on Audience and Data Utilization 07:33 Innovative Ad Products and Consumer Engagement 13:03 Challenges and Opportunities in Attribution 14:26 The Role of Brand Storytelling 16:37 Hearst's Commerce Business 18:53 Understanding Consumer Behavior with AI 20:39 The Future of Programmatic Advertising 24:04 Premium Ad Strategies for Publishers
Tue, June 25, 2024
The Math is Mathing
In this episode recorded at the Dotdash Meredith villa in Cannes, Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel and Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer discuss the impact AI is set to have on the publishing business. Skip to topic: 00:00 Introduction 03:04 Challenges and Opportunities in Publishing 05:44 The Role of Algorithms in Media 13:02 AI Deals and Legal Considerations 22:47 AI's Impact on Business: Myth vs. Reality 25:38 The Future of Print and Digital Media 31:36 The Role of Credibility and Relevancy in Content 37:41 Adapting to the Digital Advertising Ecosystem 40:43 The Challenge of Intermediation in Publishing 42:58 Embracing Change and Enjoying the Chaos
Mon, June 17, 2024
Can ads support news?
This episode from Cannes of The Rebooting Show, presented by Outbrain, features David Kostman (CEO of Outbrain), Kate Scott-Dawkins (Global President for Business Intelligence at GroupM), and Johanna Mayer-Jones (chief advertising officer of the Washington Post). They discuss the ad market's growth contrasted with the decline in ad revenue for news publishers. Emphasizing the value of trusted journalism, they explore the importance of advanced audience targeting and AI in creating brand-safe environments. The conversation highlights the need for new strategies and better communication to showcase the value of news audiences to advertisers. Skip to topic: 00:00 Introduction 01:43 Panel Introduction and Discussion Overview 02:07 Ad Challenges in the News Business 06:31 Impact of Keyword Block Lists 08:19 Brand Suitability and Safety 23:23 Performance Marketing Trends
Tue, June 11, 2024
Semafor’s Ben Smith on Newsroom Wars
Semafor editor in chief Ben Smith sees a fragmenting media landscape and impatient owners running headlong into the peculiarities of newsroom culture, where bosses have never had an easy time. Enter the hard-charing Brits. Also: check out Ben’s new podcast, Mixed Signals, in which Ben and co-host Nayeema Raza unpack the real conspiracies of modern media . Skip to topic: 00:54 Introducing Ben Smith and Mixed Signals 04:14 Podcasting and Media Expertise 09:09 Challenges in Modern Newsrooms 20:11 Unionization and Media Management 23:40 The Washington Post's Third Newsroom 26:19 Semaphore's Journey and Business Insights 28:37 BuzzFeed News: Reflections and Lessons 35:28 AI in Journalism: Opportunities and Challenges 41:55 Starting from Scratch: Advantages and Strategies 43:22 The Role of Journalists in Modern Media
Tue, June 04, 2024
The Washington Post’s Turnaround Plan
In the wake of Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post in 2013 and the heady “Democracy Dies in Darkness” days following the 2016 election, The Washington Post was considered a credible rival to The New York Times. That’s no longer the case. New CEO Will Lewis is embarking on a turnaround at the Post, which lost $77 million last year. As Lewis put it, “We are in a hole, and we have been for some time.” On this week’s episode, Matt Cronin, founding partner of House of Kaizen, joins to discuss the Post’s strategy as laid out by Lewis. Skip to topic: 00:00 Introduction and Breaking News 01:00 Challenges Facing the Washington Post 02:20 Industry-Wide Transitions 03:51 Engagement and Product Strategy 05:49 Podcast Introduction and Format 06:12 Will Lewis's Turnaround Plan 09:29 Subscription Models and Audience Segmentation 22:13 Historical Context and Missed Opportunities 28:06 Peak Subscription Debate 31:47 The Paradox of Choice in Consumer Behavior 35:52 Volume vs. Value in Subscription Models 42:09 Challenges of Subscription Tiers 46:40 B2B Opportunities for News Organizations 51:59 Microtransactions in Media
Tue, May 21, 2024
The Depth Era
Publishing is shifting from prioritizing breadth to rewarding depth. That starts with understanding the audience — and its segments — more granularly in order to create a more sustainable and varied business foundation. Cory Munchbach, CEO of BlueConic, shares her view of the next chapter. Skip to topic: 00:00 Introduction and Media Challenges 01:02 Welcome to The Rebooting Show 01:44 Discussion on Audience vs. Consumer 03:38 Key Takeaways from the New Growth Agenda 07:22 Challenges in Media Transformation 09:37 The Role of Technology and Organizational Structure 13:01 Existential Threats and Industry Nostalgia 18:22 Adapting to a Consumer-First Strategy 25:59 Navigating Data Collection and Audience Insights 30:16 The Role of AI in Audience Understanding 36:00 The Future of Personalization and Content Delivery 38:55 Transparency, Privacy, and Value Exchange 44:47 The Future of Advertising and Publishing
Mon, May 20, 2024
Audio in the AI Age
Scott Porch, founder of Big IP, which operates the business side of several popular lifestyle podcasts like The John Campea Show, Happy Sad Confused, Star Wars Explained, discusses that state of podcasting, and how it is morphing. He acts as something of a talent manager in expanding these podcasts into more well rounded media companies, with revenue coming from memberships and events. The growth of these businesses will not be driven by ads necessarily. "Podcasters are influencers in a lot of respects and they monetize like an influencer in a lot of respects,” Scott noted. Skip to topic: 00:00 Navigating the Complex World of Podcasting and Monetization 01:25 Introducing Scott Porch: The Podcasting Pro 02:31 The Intricacies of Podcast Production and Distribution 07:33 Exploring the Podcast Landscape: Growth, Challenges, and Opportunities 15:25 The Evolution of Podcasting: From Audio to Multi-Platform Engagement 19:30 The Future of Podcasting: Diversification and Creator Economy 26:25 Understanding Podcast Subscriptions and Membership Models 35:06 The Realities of Podcast Touring 37:52 Monetization Strategies in Podcasting 42:14 AI's Impact on Podcasting and Content Creation 48:36 The Debate Over Long-Form Podcasts 53:23 Challenges and Strategies in Podcast Distribution 58:50 Sponsorship and Monetization in the Podcast Industry
Tue, May 07, 2024
Chaos in the SERP
Detailed.com's Glen Allsop breaks down the massive Google update roiling the publishing world as Google attempts to gain control of spammy results. Glenn breaks down the winners and losers, why big publishers have come to depend on SEO and often push the envelope with sub-standard content and brand arbitrage.
Tue, April 30, 2024
The Wall Street Journal's Emma Tucker on audience-first publishing
Emma Tucker was named the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal (and Dow Jones Newswires) in early 2023. She was brought in with a mandate to shake up the Journal in a media market that Emma describes as changed “beyond recognition.” The Journal itself has its own challenges: an aging subscriber base that’s pushing 60, a stodgy internal culture and often convoluted editing process that’s exacting yet hard to square in the current realities of publishing. Like other publishers (and companies), it also has a restive workforce . Emma and I discuss the changes she’s instituted since joining, from the small bore like doing away with honorifics (RIP, messrs) and putting a cat on a front page to the more substantial changes in top personnel and overhauling the WSJ’s DC bureau . Her moves even led to a New York piece that wondered, “ Who is going to get Tucked next? ” (Her deputy is apparently known as an “angel of death,” which is a catchy LinkedIn endorsement.) Some key takeaways from our conversation: Transitioning from a “print ethos.” Print still gives publications heft, and I suspect that will become more valuable in a world filled with synthetic content, much of it utter crap. But that role is more of being a “shop window,” Emma told me the Journal needs a “definitive move away from print” to serving digital audiences rather than seeing the newspaper as a central distribution channel. Adopting an audience-first mindset. It sounds obvious, but the challenge for many publishers is adopting audience-first strategies rather than trying to be all things to all people (and all algorithms). That was the main takeaway from a content review Emma commissioned soon after taking on the top role. Those exercises are usually preludes to organizational change. The main theme highlighted in the review: being an “audience-first pu
Tue, April 23, 2024
NYU's Jay Rosen on the economics of news
Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU, discusses the diminished state of the industry, promising nonprofit models and new funding models that subsidize public service journalism since the economic foundations supporting it have crumbled, and The New York Times has strayed farther into progressivism since Trump’s ride down that escalator. Get 25% off a TRB Pro membership for access to all of The Rebooting's content and exclusive events.
Tue, April 16, 2024
The pivot to intentional audiences
I’m joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which works with publishers and other companies with recurring revenue businesses to align their business goals with audience needs through customer experience frameworks. Some highlights of our conversation: Shift to audience-centric approaches: There's a significant shift towards understanding and directly engaging audiences rather than relying on platforms for traffic, which involves a fundamental transition to being audience-centric. A key part of that: Realizing an audience is not a monolith but different groups with different needs. The importance of intentional audiences : Publishing became a (big) numbers game. That’s changed, as every publisher now much compete for “intentional audiences.” These are people you have a real tie to, who subscribe to a newsletter, follow a podcast, visit your site directly. This is what Business Insider is after with its shift to focus on “digital go-getters.” Looking beyond efficiency with AI: Synthetic content is about to overwhelm the internet. Many publishers are focused now on the efficiency gains of AI, as all businesses are and need to be, but stopping there is a mistake. AI needs to be harnessed to – you guessed it – provide added value to audiences.
Tue, March 26, 2024
Investigating the influencers
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to writer John McDermott about his recent expose of self-help guru Jay Shetty and what it says about the chaotic Information Space. We delve into the paradox of influencer culture, where authenticity is a currency, even if the influencers themselves are as flawed as the general population. There’s often a blurry line between fake-it-’til-you-make-it and fraud.
Tue, March 19, 2024
The bootstrapped path
Stephanie Kaplan Lewis founded Her Campus in 2009 with Annie Wang, and Windsor Western as college undergraduates. They saw a need for college women to have a publication made for them by other college women. Her Campus has grown since then as a profitable, growing media business with 85 employees. Stephanie says Her Campus expanded revenue by 50% last year – and did it with an entirely ad-focused business model. Stephanie credits the growth in large part to building a long-term business that works in any environment rather than a specific environment, such as the easy-money era that’s now in the rear-view mirror. The twist is that Her Campus is part agency, part publisher, with campaigns leaning on experiential and influencer marketing. This is a path many publishing models will go, as the economics of relying on putting ads on webpages or newsletters grow more difficult. Stephanie and I discuss: The forced discipline of a bootstrapped model. Her Campus has been profitable for all 15 years of its existence. Imagine. Not aging up with the audience. Her Campus turns its audience over by design, as it stays focused on college women. When it started, Her Campus was for millennials, and now it’s for Gen Z. Being part agency, part publisher. Her Campus ends up with other media companies as customers. Doing the basics well. In the media business, strategy is overrated. Execution tends to play a bigger role in separating winners and losers. That means doing the boring things well: Setting achievable sales goals and hitting them, excelling at client service, collecting receivables and such.
Tue, March 12, 2024
Audience-first publishing
Matt Cronin is a founding partner at House of Kaizen , a consultancy that works with publishers and other companies on recurring revenue growth. House of Kaizen, which is a sponsoring partner of The Rebooting, uses research-backed experiments to foster audience-first engagement. This allows clients to turn total reader revenue into cumulative gains. We discuss how publishers can become truly audience centric, what publishers can learn from other consumer companies and more
Tue, February 27, 2024
Mosheh Oinounou on elitist bias in news
Mosheh Oinounou, a broadcast news veteran, started posting summaries of the news of the day during the early days of the pandemic. He found they were resonating, and over the past few years, Mo News has amassed 440,000 followers on Instagram for news delivered mostly through Instagram Stories. Mosh has since expanded to a daily podcast, a membership program that’s attracted 6,000 paying subscribers, newsletter and more. We spoke about the prospects of “creator journalists,” why his evenhanded approach resonates with his 85% female audience and the inherent challenges of building a business built around a “personal brand.”
Tue, February 06, 2024
Introducing The Rebooting memberships
The Rebooting is launching paid memberships. All the details are on therebooting.com . In this episode, I speak to my collaborator Reid DeRamus, founder of Caddie Labs, which is working with me on implementing and growing memberships. Rather than discuss the benefits, we talk through the strategic and tactical decisions we made. Among the topic we cover: Why sequencing your business is important – and realizing your “unfair advantages” is critical in that The importance of first-party data in a niche media business Orienting subscriptions for specific audience segments rather than the entire audience Figuring out pricing The challenge of “getting to start”
Tue, January 30, 2024
Life after the pageview
Digital media veteran Scott Messer discusses the structural changes to the publishing business, from the deprecation of the third-party cookie to the critical role search plays in many publishing businesses. Scott is a longtime digital media exec who understands the mechanics of the digital ad industry as well as anyone I know.
Tue, January 23, 2024
The Juggernaut’s bet on subscriptions
This week on The Rebooting Show, I spoke to The Juggernaut’s founder and CEO Snigda Sur. We discussed the need she saw for a publication focused on South Asians, going through Ycombinator as a media company, using subscriptions as a base of a business model and more. Listen on Apple, Spotify and other podcast services.
Tue, January 16, 2024
Tastemade's twist on the cable model
This week, I caught up with Larry Fitzgibbon, the CEO of Tastemade. I think of Tastemade as an original digital video brand, ahead of its time in many ways since it was founded back in 2012, before streaming was even a thing. This was an era when online video was still mostly about webisodes nobody watched and YouTube’s famed dog on a skateboard videos. Tastemade has been at the forefront of many trends, as it is now with its focus on everything from IP to subscriptions with Tastemade+ and recreating the modern version of the cable channel.
Tue, January 09, 2024
The year ahead for the media business with Sara Fischer of Axios
The media business in 2024 To kick off the year on The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer about the main themes of the year ahead. Among the topics we covered: The value of identifying patterns from the torrent of news The unrealistic expectations of the ZIRP/scale era Cyclical challenges vs structural changes The wasteland of general interest publications The existential threat of AI to many publishing businesses AI’s impact on the non-content aspects of the publishing function How debt will accelerate the inevitable consolidation of streaming services
Thu, December 21, 2023
Building lasting subscriptions programs
I spoke to Matt Cronin, founding partner of House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers on their subscription and recurring revenue products. Among the topics we covered: fixing misaligned incentives in publishing whether peak subscription exists subscriptions as a force function to be customer centric what publishers should and shouldn’t learn from the success of The New York Times The struggles of many streaming services what publishers can learn from subscription companies outside media
Tue, December 12, 2023
Podcasting as 'nuance media'
Matt Reustle, CEO of Colossus, a business-focused podcasting network that’s home to Invest Like the Best, Business Breakdowns and Founders, sees podcasting as an antidote to many of the ills of algorithmic media. “To me, it's the highest trust media. I think everything else now lacks nuance. And I actually still care about nuance. There are shorter attention spans, which I completely understand. Where do you actually get time to hear someone talk about opinions that aren't scripted? Is it proper back and forth conversation, not just a bunch of us talking at one another on Twitter and replies aren't really constructive conversation?” We spoke about why podcasts excel at nuance, the business models underpinning the business, and why subscriptions haven’t yet become as widespread in podcasts as other digital media formats.
Tue, December 05, 2023
Big Cabal's Tomiwa Aladekomo on building mobile-first media in Nigeria
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Tomiwa Aladekomo, CEO of Big Cabal, a Nigerian digital media company that’s home to a pair of properties: Tech Cabal, which I describe as similar to TechCrunch but with more memes and Zikoko, a BuzzFeed-like culture publication. Big Cabal has raised $2.3 million in venture capital as it builds an independent digital media company in Africa’s largest economy that's geared to shifting consumption patterns. Tomiwa and I discuss how Big Cabal looks to find white spaces in the market, making hard calls when to pull back on efforts like it recently did with a citizen journalism project , when brands can be pan-African vs market specific, and an on-the ground assessment of the impact of Semafor in its Africa push.
Tue, November 28, 2023
Subscriptions in the age of ARPU
The Rebooting recently wrapped up its second research project in collaboration with BlueConic. Patrick Crane, vp of sales at BlueConic, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the state of subscriptions at publishers and the maturation of the market. “One of the reasons I call it a forever business is to call out the fact that there is going to be ongoing work,” Patrick told me, “but also that it sets you up to play a very sustainable game.” Among the topics covered: The shifting role of steep discounts in subscription programs Why ad avoidance is really more bad UX avoidance The wisdom of making subscription products for specific slices of your audience Check out "The State of Publisher Subscriptions" report .
Tue, November 21, 2023
Hearst's Bridget Williams on a 'thoughtful mercenary' approach to the local news business
Bridget Williams is a veteran of the industry. I first got to know Bridget when she was at Business Insider prior to heading to Food52 before landing at Hearst Newspapers in tk, where she is chief commercial officer. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, we spoke about the progress toward a sustainable business model for Hearst news outlets like The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle and others around the country. All told, Hearst newspaper properties have 400,000 digital subscribers. Bridget and I discuss how a "thoughtful mercenary" approach to local news means looking to non-news products to provide utility to communities to subsidize the critical impact journalism that is disappearing from many places.
Thu, November 16, 2023
The Guardian's Steve Sachs on voluntary contributions as a reader revenue model
The Guardian has used voluntary reader contributions as a bulwark of its unique model that blends philanthropy, advertising and voluntary contributions. In the U.S., The Guardian now generates 57%, or $33 million, of its revenue from voluntary contributions, either one-off or recurring. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Steve Sachs, The Guardian’s U.S. managing director and veteran of non-profit news models, about this approach and how extensible it is for news publishers.
Thu, November 09, 2023
Jeff Selingo on the independent path
Jeff Selingo spent eight years at the Chronicle of Higher Education, serving as editor in chief and editorial director, before setting off on his own path. Jeff and I have traded notes on the independent path over the years, and I wanted to have him on The Rebooting Show to discuss what we’ve both learned on the independent path. We discuss the transition from editorial to sales, why treating “lifestyle business” as a pejorative is strange, and fighting the pull to rebuild what you left behind.
Thu, November 02, 2023
How Blockworks survived the crypto winter
Blockworks , founded as a crypto events company in 2018, has rode these ups and downs. It began in the face of a crypto pullback with the thesis that crypto would become a major asset class and as it grew, institutional investors would need a credible source of information, analysis and research beyond an anonymous Twitter account with a monkey avatar shooting lasers from its eyes. As crypto recovered and headed into a bull run that accelerated during the pandemic into what I’d consider a bubble, Blockworks expanded from events into podcasts and news. With $12 million in VC raised in possibly the hardest time to raise for a crypto media company, Blockworks is building out a research arm. Jason Yanowitz, CEO of Blockworks, discusses the evolution of the company and the benefits of staying focused and being a "mile deep" vs an inch deep.
Thu, October 26, 2023
Defector's Jasper Wang on worker-owned media
Defector is a worker-owned media company that was born out of disillusionment with the tradeoffs the digital media ecosystem often requires (or at least incentivizes). Instead of chasing traffic, Defector relies on a subscription model for a small but sturdy business.
Thu, October 19, 2023
Who or what is Advertising Week?
My former colleague Mike Shields of Next in Media joins me to discuss what to make of Advertising Week, which is mostly a PR vehicle but a useful gauge of the prevailing winds of the media and advertising worlds.
Wed, October 18, 2023
Moving past ZIRP
On a crossover episode of The Rebooting Show and People vs Algorithms, Alex Schleifer and I discuss the end of the zero-interest rate policy era and how it will lead to cascading changes in tech and media.
Tue, October 17, 2023
The cost-benefit analysis of video
Video is viewed paradoxically by publishers. They see budgets shifting to sight, sound and motion. Video ads, formerly known as TV spots, were always valued by advertisers far more than a standard display ad, no matter what efforts were made to gussy them up. Yet for many publishers, the costs associated with video creation are certainly high but the revenue while potentially big is uncertain. Tom Pachys, CEO of online video platform Ex.co, joined to discuss the challenge “The publishers that we work with say that this is their biggest line item when looking at the advertising part of their P&L. That definitely works, but the cost of opening studios, recording videos, taking the risk, And also having that expertise – that's where the challenge is.” Thanks to Ex.co for sponsoring The Rebooting. Check out its recent guide to selecting an online video platform .
Mon, October 16, 2023
Madison and Wall's Brian Wieser on the Mary Meeker slide
Before the Lumascape, there was another go-to conference and pitch deck slide for anyone betting on what was then called web advertising. The slide, updated annually by the financial analyst Mary Meeker, showed twin bar charts of time spent and budget spent by medium. The message was clear: the internet would win, it was just a matter of timing. The time spent gap did close, although a disproportionate amount of gains went to tech platforms rather than web publishers. The chart was always wrong, argues media analyst Brian Wieser. Time is simply one variable in assessing the value of a media impression: “It speaks to an incorrect framework. You look at the historical data, you ask why this happened, and you try to make sure the model mirrors why decisions are made. The common narrative was always that it's time. That's what drives the money. If that were true, radio would be a much bigger business.”
Tue, October 10, 2023
1440's Tim Huelskamp on newsletter moneyball
Five cents. That’s how much general-news newsletter 1440 makes each time one of its 3 million subscribers opens one of its daily emails. Say what you want about scale, but nickels can add up when the multiplier is in the millions. After paying for the expenses of its 14-person team, the profits are then invested back into growing 1440’s subscriber base with paid marketing campaigns through Facebook and Instagram, newsletter ads and other channels. That “flywheel” has enabled 1440 to enter an exclusive club: It generates over $1 million in revenue per employee. 1440 CEO Tim Huelskamp joins the show to discuss taking a unit-economics approach to publishing.
Tue, October 03, 2023
Team Whistle's Joe Caporoso on the publisher/agency model
Founded a decade ago, Team Whistle is a survivor. It sprang to life as a wave of multichannel networks that filled the need of aggregating YouTube properties to make buying easier. The biggest problem of the MCN model is that it takes a difficult business model (advertising) and makes it even more difficult because you’re taking a cut of a cut, after YouTube gets its taste. Most MCNs fizzled. Whistle shifted its focus to building its own properties, producing franchises like “No Days Off,” a series following incredibly focused child athletes. It still reps other properties, like Dude Perfect. It complemented that with an agency business that relies on the distribution and cachet of the original programming. Whistle is part publisher, part agency.
Tue, September 26, 2023
Permutive's Joe Root on ad targeting in transition
The digital advertising system is in the midst of a shift, from an over-reliance on collecting vast amounts of data to crunch to do one-to-one targeting – dog owners getting dog food ads, cat owners get cat food ads – to a new landscape that gives people more say on data collection and pushes advertisers and ad tech companies to operate differently. In this episode, I had a conversation with Joe Root, CEO of Permutive, an audience platform that's used to deliver privacy-safe digital advertising. Among the topic covered: The shift in publisher incentives to build trust vs build traffic Why direct sold advertising is back in vogue Whether GDPR’s implementation gives real consumer choice or just the illusion of it The surprisingly large carbon footprint of digital ads Why the loss of ad targeting signals has become an advertiser problem The demise of the long tail in favor of top-tier publishers Why the so-called ad tech tax will come down increase revenue from first-party data by 46% .
Mon, September 25, 2023
Media's uncanny valley
This is a bonus episode of The Rebooting Show, featuring a conversation I had on the People vs Algorithms podcast. We discuss why the conventions of media are giving way to new formats that dispense with the artifice in favor of something approximating real conversations.
Tue, September 19, 2023
Rich Routman on The Sporting News' embrace of affiliate
Rich Routman is a veteran of the sports media industry. He recalls how if an advertiser discussed a cost-per-action deal with a major sports media company as recently as five years ago, the media executives would "run out of the room." That all changed with the legalization of sports gambling in 33 states and the District of Columbia. A giant industry would need customers, and sports media was there to help. That's led the Sporting News, which Rich joined as CEO last year, to raise a $15 million Series A a mere 137 years after its founding. Rich and I discuss how TSN is generating 40% of its revenue from affiliate and revenue-sharing deals from sportsbooks and other subscription services.
Tue, September 12, 2023
Bustle's Jason Wagenheim on the end of traffic
Bustle was founded a decade ago in a far different media environment, as big digital media companies, flush with VC cash, scrambled to acquire the biggest audiences possible. The supposition that those with the biggest uniques would be handsomely rewarded didn't turn out to be a durable model. Now, Bustle is looking like a different entity, as its CRO says typical ad campaigns are now just 15% of the company's revenue Instead, it is focused on using its stable of brands for bigger efforts more akin to what ad agencies provide. In this formula, traffic is far less important than brand affinity, client relationships and the ability to execute.
Tue, September 05, 2023
Puck’s Jon Kelly on why ads are still a good business
Puck launched two years ago, heralded as Vanity Fair for the Substack era. A big part of the pitch was a subscription model. But like others, such as Punchbowl, Puck has found that its subscription business, with its direct connections, and vertical focus lends itself well to a strong direct-sold ad business. Other topics we cover: What ails legacy publishing models Raising $10 million in a rough funding climate The pendulum shift from institutions to individuals The enduring value of scarcity The benefits of starting small
Tue, August 15, 2023
How CJ Gustafson is building the playbook for CFOs
CJ Gustafson is one of the rare people who is both immersed in his field but does not suffer from the tyranny of knowledge. CJ uses memes and a conversational style with Mostly Metrics to address what those outside corporate finance would consider dry topics. But most importantly, he completely understands the challenges of being a CFO because he’s a CFO. In this episode, we discuss how he built Mostly Metrics, as well as getting into the weeds of why media is often a terrible business and what are the drivers of a sustainable media business.
Tue, August 08, 2023
Literally Media's approach to creator partnerships
Literally Media -- home to Cracked, I Know Your Meme and Cheezburger -- isn't going to fight creators. Instead, it's partnering with them to do everything from launch channels on new platforms, get access to brand partnerships and be part of live events. Literally Media CEO Oren Katzeff explains the approach, along with Literally's emphasis on IP-based video franchises and more.
Tue, August 01, 2023
Hollywood's doom loop
This week, I spoke to Parquor’s Andrew Rosen, a former Vicom exec turned media analyst, to unpack Hollywood’s weird summer of transition. The challenge for media companies is moving from a wholesale model to a retail model. Andrew sees a group of leaders without a clear understanding of how to make that leap.
Tue, July 25, 2023
Bloombeg Media CEO Scott Havens on AI's impact
Bloomberg Media CEO Scott Havens sees AI as both challenge and opportunity for publishers, who at this point are used to rapid changes to how their content is distributed. The challenge is how AI is poised to have the biggest impact on search since Google's rise to be the dominant distributor of internet traffic. The opportunity is to use the AI tools to create better experiences and more resilient business models. "There's no use in crying over spilled milk," Scott advises.
Tue, July 18, 2023
Hearst's David Carey on media's chaotic future
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show , I was joined by Hearst’s David Carey to discuss the resilience of so-called legacy media businesses. David returned to Hearst in 2019 as svp of public affairs and communications after a stint at Harvard, picking up on an eight-year run as president of Hearst Magazines from 2010 to 2018. He was group president at Condé Nast for many years, as well as the founding publisher of Smart Money. Some highlights from our discussion: The broad view of content: Hearst used its media assets to diversify into information services. Fitch Ratings is its largest business, and in 2016 it spent $2 billion on Camp Systems, a software provider for the airline maintenance business . “The company's had a very broad view of what content is, and, boy, is that to the benefit of everyone who works here.” The end of the shiny object era: “There was a lot of chasing whatever the latest thing was, but those businesses turned out not to be sustainable, or they turned out to be gimmicks, or they turned out to be easily replicated by others. It’s chaos in all directions for all media forms. It very much favors companies with real strategies, deep roots.” Media’s always been hard : “Media is much harder to operate than it looks from the outside. That's always been true. It's easy to make a splash and make some noise, but even the latest upstarts are finding it's really hard to build a sustainable business that engages people on a regular basis.” Media businesses need a bigger price curve: “Whenever I meet a [Wall Street] Journal executive, I tell them, you should come up with a $1,000 a year subscription, because I would pay that. It's that important. to how I operate in the world as an executive. Every brand has these concentric circles of diehard fans and next diehard fans and so on. The problem is there hasn't been effective price discrimination.” Print is like a couture fashion show: “What they send down the runway is important but not their biggest business. What happens at Chanel at a couture show, that business is relatively small, but it sets the stage for everything below that. It's the eyewear, the handbags, the accessories. Ultimately they make their money from selling beauty products at Bloomingdale's and in Saks Fifth Avenue. You're starting to see that happen with magazines. They have an opportunity to become multi-tiered businesses. The print piece becomes the standard bearer [to more lucrative businesses like events and data].”
Tue, July 11, 2023
Neil Vogel on why the Dotdash-Meredith deal still makes sense
At Dotdash Meredith, CEO Neil Vogel remembers sitting around with his management team, after $2 million in “incremental” ad revenue appeared, and wondering, “Have we hit peak Dotdash?” “We had a really great formula: make incredible content, make really great sites and experiences, and have fewer ads that work better,” Neil said. Which brings me back to late 2021, because that’s when IAC plunked down $2.7 billion to buy the storied Meredith brands : People, Entertainment Weekly, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle. It was something of a minnow swallowing the whale, and indicative of the prevailing winds of publishing that were moving against glossy brands and toward performance workhorses. “We had this incredible ability to serve users and to make advertisers happy because we had lots of intent,” Neil said. “What we were lacking was brands.” Of course, soon after the deal took place, Jerome Powell decided he’d seen enough with the normalization of $7 coffee and started hiking interest rates. The repricing of markets isn’t fun. And the now re-re-re-rechristened Dotdash Meredith has been no different. As it has integrated the Meredith properties, it has also dealt with a soft ad market it can do little to mitigate. You are not going to sell as many mortgages when interest rates are high. In the first quarter, Dotdash Meredith revenue declined 23% year over year, including 15% in digital advertising. “We bought at the frothiest point in the market,” Neil allowed. “The market is going to go up, the market is going to go down. If you look out at a long time horizon, it doesn’t matter.” Neil and I discussed the deal (“I would do it again in a heartbeat”), the demise of the third-party cookie (“We don’t need cookies to deliver scale and performance”), and WTF AI (the whole market is going to change).
Tue, June 27, 2023
The 'influencer" journalist model
Last week, at The New Attention Economy in Cannes, I discussed the notion of “influencer journalism” with Semafor co-founder and editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Puck co-founder and COO Liz Gough. Some highlights from the session: The creator economy is a long term shift: “Every other media industry, starting with Hollywood 80 years ago, made this transition to a connection with individuals. Journalism, because it is the worst of the media businesses, is the last one to get there.” – Ben The legacy brand challenge: “Any new brand coming into existence, with Puck, Semafor or The Ankler, the balance to the individual needs to be more present. The legacy brands are struggling to figure this out.” – Liz No influencers, please, we’re journalists: “When you’re recruiting a star reporter at The Wall Street Journal, the last thing you want to tell her is you want her to be an influencer.” – Ben The journalist entrepreneur: “We are actively recruiting entrepreneurial journalists. They want to be commercial partners to my team. We spend a lot of time sitting down with our writers talking about commercial strategy, how we grow their subscriber base, how we do events, and how we do more advertising, who we’re going to call on. Our journalists are business partners.” - Liz The Riviera is filled with Dylan Byers doppelgangers: “One in three men here look like Dylan.” – Ben
Fri, June 23, 2023
Bloomberg Media's Christine Cook on navigating change
Christine Cook joined Bloomberg Media in March as global chief revenue officer. We spoke about reasons for media optimism, how AI is an opportunity (and a threat), and how Bloomberg is approaching programmatic as the data landscape changes.
Thu, June 22, 2023
Creativity in an AI age
At The New Attention Economy’s final day in Cannes, we turned the spotlight on AI with a closing session featuring Rei Inamoto, CEO of I&Co, and Myra Nussbaum, chief creative officer and president of Havas, assessed the impact AI will have on creativity. Both aren’t quite ready to proclaim a revolution just yet.
Wed, June 21, 2023
Hearst’s Lisa Howard on why media can’t quit ads
For Hearst global chief revenue officer Lisa Howard, the shift to focus mostly on subscriptions at many publishers obscures the reality that advertising will continue to be the dominant monetization form for most media, including Hearst. Lisa discussed the power of ads and the resilience of legacy media during a live podcast recording at The New Attention Economy on Tuesday.
Tue, June 20, 2023
GroupM's Kirk McDonald on the outlook for digital advertising
In a live recording of The Rebooting Show from Cannes, Kirk McDonald, CEO of GroupM North America, seemed to wonder whether we’ve all talked ourselves into a downturn that wasn’t, "For the first half of this year, we saw behavior that anticipated a crash,” he said, even if we’ve had a “pretty smooth landing.” “The thing we were worried about didn’t happen,” he added. “But I don’t think we’re seeing the kind of fulsome growth [we’ve seen in the past]”
Tue, June 13, 2023
Punchbowl's Anna Palmer on building a new media brand
Anna Palmer is a journalist turned startup CEO. Along with Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan, she founded Punchbowl News in January 2021, just in time for the assault on the Capitol. Punchbowl’s obsessive focus on the Capitol, and business model that combines subscriptions with high-value issue advocacy ads led it to sprint out of the gates with a $10 million first year . Anna is more reticent about its current pace – I tried – but by all measures what Punchbowl is doing is working in a media environment that's shifted to favor narrower brands focused on high-value audience segments, backed by direct connections and diversified business models. “I've been in Washington journalism for almost 20 years, and I always laugh when everyone talks about Substack and the rise of newsletters,” Anna said. “It's the new hot thing. I mean, I've literally been doing newsletters for that entire time.”Some things that stand out to me about Punchbowl: It is reporter focused. I believe journalists who start media businesses create different products. Punchbowl is journalism-driven, relying on the daily grind of uncovering new information vs playing SEO or social traffic games. It has a rich niche. Issues advocacy ads are a lucrative ad category, and one where you not only mostly don’t compete with Google and Facebook, but they’re also your biggest clients. If only more media was like this. It has stayed lean. Punchbowl started with funding from Liontree, and it has grown quickly, but it has also resisted the temptation to expand quickly by, say, springing up operations in state capitols around the country or joining the fray at the White House. Instead it has focused on high-value areas like its expansion in financial services vertical with The Vault. It has managed to be a publication about politics without being a political publication. Many aspire to non-partisan news. Easier said than done. See the Chris Licht experiment at CNN for evidence. Punchbowl has managed to thread the needle for the most part with not being pulled into the inevitable political Rorschach test, mostly because they’re obsessed with the legislative process vs the posturing of politics.
Tue, June 06, 2023
How AI will change advertising
This episode is sponsored by Kerv , which uses artificial intelligence to identify objects within video and match them to databases, enabling for, among other uses, the creation of interactive “shoppable video” that embeds commerce in entertainment Kerv CEO Gary Mittman sees AI leading a sea change to the creative process, allowing for a movie franchise, for instance, to create sequels to the original without starting from scratch. For advertising, the changes are poised to be broader, with AI detecting ads that are not performing and automatically "fixing" them without much in the way of human involvement. “This is another revolution, and we're at a precipice of the creation of something new,” he said. Other highlights: Subscription fatigue. The land rush phase of the streaming wars is over. The pendulum is shifting from subscriptions to advertising. “People are not going to pay for 100 different channels at $5-$10 a month,” Gary said. “ It's just not going to happen.” The “Jennifer Aniston’s sweater” moment. In ancient days – think 2005 – a staple of what were then called internet conferences was the idea that you’d be able to watch “Friends” and tap to buy a Jennifer Anniston sweater set . Much of the tech wasn’t ready, much less the consumer behavior, but that’s changing. “There's a long road of dead bodies to get here,” Gary said. QR codes are changing behaviors. Of all the changes of the pandemic, the comeback of QR codes was among the least likely. Now, it’s the norm to see QR on TV ads, shifting consumer behavior. “The capability of having a one-click transaction off of television with your remote is where we're heading,” Gary said.
Tue, May 30, 2023
The China Project’s pivot to B2B and subscriptions
The Rebooting show is sponsored by Kerv Interactive, an AI-powered video creative technology that creates shoppable and immersive experiences within any video content. Learn more . ..... On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Bob Guterma, CEO of The China Project, to discuss how to maintain credibility while catching flack from many sides, The China Project’s decision to leave Substack, adopting a subscription-first model and its crowdfunding efforts to raise capital from its audience . For seven years, The China Project – called SupChina until July 2022 – has aimed to act as a bridge for the outside world to understand China. “It's literally 5x the number of people in America. In some ways, you could say [China] is more dynamic. Their historical trajectory is so fast that there are simultaneously people living the same as they did 150 years ago, and there are people living in the Jetsons – all in the same country. That task that’s grown more complicated in recent years as tensions have risen between the US and China. That’s ensnared The China Project in political hot water , with a group of hawkish senators saying it is a tool of Chinese influence and the Chinese government banning it. Guterma has described The China Project as “neither pro-China or anti-China” and its mission as “helping the world understand China better, more contextually, and with greater care, so that better decisions can be made.” The China Project moved off Substack, which is oriented more to single writer projects than full-fledged media properties. “There are ways to customize Substack as you go along, but it's really built around this one experience of a paid newsletter. We were already, and just only became more and more as time went on, not just a newsletter.” The China Project has multiple revenue streams, including ads, events and consulting, but it aims to be a subscription-first publisher. The China Project sells subscriptions from $120 for an individual up to $5,000 per year for database products. It made this shift with a changed focus on a B2B audience, which is more likely to pay for subscriptions than regular
Tue, May 23, 2023
Industry Dive's Sean Griffey's guide to sustainable media businesses
Thanks to Kerv for sponsoring this episode. To see Kerv's technology at work, check out Peacock's MustShop TV . If you’ll be on the Cote d’Azur next month. The New Attention Economy, presented by Kerv, will have speakers from the Financial Times, Uber, Paramount, Havas and more. Let’s talk ‘Active Attention’ Economy at Cannes Join us for three days of exclusive thoughtful conversations and cocktails with the industry’s best to discuss the Attention Economy and the future of publishing, streaming, AI & creativity. Register here . Last week, I traveled to Washington DC to record a podcast with Sean Griffey, CEO of Industry Dive. I’ve known Sean and Industry Dive a while, mostly because two of its 33 publications – Marketing Dive and Retail Dive – were in areas in which my previous companies had publications. Sean was also the rare media CEO who would come onto my podcast and not rattle off a bunch of talking points. The big numbers he talked about weren’t Facebook video views of ComScore uniques ginned up through traffic assignment schemes. He spoke about revenue and, imagine, EBITDA . Industry Dive went on to be bought not once but twice. First in a transaction to growth equity firm Falfurrias Capital in 2019 and then last year in a deal to events giant Informa last year that Axios reported put an enterprise value on Industry Dive of $525 million . That would make Industry Dive’s value at over two Vices and five BuzzFeeds. What Industry Dive got right is something I covered after the Informa deal . I was long impressed by Sean and Industry Dive’s management ability to stay focused and disciplined in their business model. It helped that Industry Dive didn’t raise venture capital. Constraints can be good. It meant focusing on what was working, notably <a href="https://www.therebooting.com/p/ind
Thu, May 18, 2023
Time CEO Jessica Sibley on taking down Time's paywall
Last week, I was in Chicago to attend the Omeda OX6 conference, where I recorded a live version of The Rebooting Show podcast. Jessica Sibley, CEO of Time, joined me to discuss her first six months at the 100-year-old publishing brand. Among the issues we discussed: The benefits of being a “legacy” brand The importance of a brand clearly standing for something Why taking down a paywall was right for Time’s strategy How Time is building a diversified business strategy Why commerce content needs to sit alongside the newsroom, not in it Why she believes in an in-office culture
Tue, May 16, 2023
Private Media's Will Hayward on battling Murdoch
Will Hayward, the CEO of Private Media, an independent publishing company in Australia that publishes several titles, including politics-focused Crikey , recently faced the intriguing and likely slightly terrifying experience of being the subject of a defamation lawsuit filed by Lachlan Murdoch over a Crikey opinion column that held the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” of the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol. Murdoch withdrew the lawsuit in the aftermath of Fox settling its case with Dominion, much to Will’s relief. We discussed the case, the decision to stand firm against a powerful and angry individual, and how Crikey made lemonade out of lemons by using the case to rally support for the politics publication through subscriptions. We also touch on the impact of Australia’s news bargaining code that has wrung payments from platforms and is the model for similar laws worldwide, including in the US, as well as lessons learned from the social publishing era, since Will was in the thick of it.
Tue, May 09, 2023
Axios' Sara Fischer and Vox's Peter Kafka on where the. media business goes next
When I sent over topics for the latest episode of The Rebooting show to Axios’s Sara Fischer and Vox’s Peter Kafka, Peter replied with an editorial note: “maybe something deliberately upbeat to counteract a very gloomy pod.” Listeners, we tried, but journalists don’t naturally do upbeat. Some highlights: This is a good time to be niche: “Niche media is thriving in an era where generalist media seems to be declining,” Sara said. “Companies that launch with a little bit of money, but in a targeted way, focusing on one specific thing with authority, tend to build incrementally and more sustainably than companies that try to do it all at once upfront.” The Messenger is coming next week and… counterintuitive: “I don't believe that there is an audience that's salivating out there for straight-down-the-middle news,” Peter said. “Anyone who says that is lying to themselves or to the public.” After the streaming wars comes the winnowing: “You’re going to have fewer of these big subscription services, more of these free ad-supported services, and streaming will continue to dominate more of the time that people spend in terms of consuming television,” Sara said. “No longer is it plausible that everyone can just launch a subscription service and think that they're going to take meaningful market share.” The AI “tsunami of bullshit” is coming: “We're still relying on Google for referral traffic and the idea that people might find our articles there,” Peter said. “Whether or not you use AI, you are going to be swamped by the tsunami of bullshit, whether it's good or not, content made by robots. And even if every publisher and every trade group in America agrees to not do it, it doesn't matter because it'll come from all over the world.”
Tue, May 02, 2023
Kyle Tibbs Jones on The Bitter Southerner's independent path
The Bitter Southerner began as a passion project for a group of natives to the South who were, well, a bit bitter about how it was often caricatured or reduced to its historical legacy as the birthplace of American slavery. That’s a past that is unfortunately still alive and is an indelible part of the American story. The Bitter Southerner confronts such issues head on but while telling a more nuanced and expansive story of this unique and yes complicated part of the world. Kyle Tibbs Jones, a co-founder of The Bitter Southerner, joined me to discuss the decade-long effort to build a sustainable, independent publication.
Tue, April 25, 2023
NYU's Jay Rosen on why news needs subsidies
News on its own is often not a great business. Advertisers want to avoid it, and the humans required to recreate the product every day drive up costs, and subscriptions can only go so far. New York University journalism professor and media analyst Jay Rosen sees the need to discover new sources of subsidies to maintain a healthy news ecosystem. In this discussion, we cover that issue as well as the end of BuzzFeed News, the prospects for The Messenger and Semafor, why Trump hacked conventional political news coverage, promising efforts at building sustainable local journalism models, and Jay’s belief that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization.
Tue, April 18, 2023
Bullish's Brian Hanly on building media businesses from memes
Brian Hanly, CEO of Bullish Studio, is creating media brands from memes, working with a stable of finance meme accounts in particular to build media properties. I got to know Brian over the pandemic, and quickly became fascinated by Bullish’s business. No doubt much of the fintech media segment was helped along by ZIRP and crypto craziness, but the use of memes as the starting point for lightweight media businesses is a good template as we enter into what’s sure to be another crazy cycle for the media business.
Tue, April 11, 2023
Substack’s CEO on ads, bundling and what’s next
Last Thursday, I spoke to Substack CEO Chris Best to get a better understanding of where the company is going. We recorded the interview before Elon Musk threw a temper tantrum over Substack's coming Twitter competitor. Chris and I spoke about a couple of important issues to me: ads and bundling. On ads, Chris explains that Substack is trying to occupy a part of the market on an opposite pole from the attention grabbing part of digital media defined by platforms like Facebook and TikTok. But he allowed that ads could be done in a way that makes sense for the space Substack wants to occupy. On bundling, Substack is opposed to a "subscribe to Substack" option that obviates the direct relationship with individual publishers. Instead, he's more interested in "writer federations" and reader-directed bundles that get the upside of bundle economics but don't tradeoff the direct relationship between the audience and publishers.
Tue, April 04, 2023
Nexstar's Joe Ruffalo on "non-partisan" news
Joe Ruffalo was recently named senior vice president and general manager of Nexstar's NewsNation digital operations and The Hill. At both, Nexstar is looking to occupy a lane of "non-partisan" news outlets, betting on a middle ground that seems to have disappeared from the news landscape, as personality-driven opinion has proven far more lucrative and scalable.
Thu, March 23, 2023
What's the future of Vice?
Claire Atkinson, chief media correspondent at Insider, has long experience covering the ins and outs of the media industry. In this episode, we discuss the state of affairs as different parts of the media business are between eras. What’s next for Vice and the other ailing big digital publishers? The usual answer would be more consolidation, but this time might call an bundling of assets to realize more value. Streaming’s next phase. Disney’s shifts after Bob Iger’s return indicate a new era of sustainability after the free-spending ways of the streaming wars. CNN and Fox News’ identity crises . As what is sure to be a bonkers presidential election campaign nears, the twin poles of the cable news universe are in their own forms of disarray. The sports rights question. Sports programming continues to fetch higher rates as it basically props up many cable broadcasters. Tech platforms continue to tiptoe into this arena, but Claire explains why rights holders are unlikely to cast their lots entirely with subscription streaming platforms.
Thu, March 16, 2023
The Cool Down's Dave Finocchio on building a mainstream climate brand
Dave Finocchio was CEO of Bleacher Report, one of the success stories of the last era of digital publishing. Dave is back in publishing with The Cool Down, which aims to be a mainstream publishing brand for climate conscious consumers. We discuss the lessons from Bleacher, how to strike the right tone to avoid both alarmism and lecturing, and how publishing business models have shifted.
Tue, February 28, 2023
The Daily Upside’s growth playbook
Patrick Trousdale started The Daily Upside in 2019 after working in investment banking at Guggenheim. Patrick saw the success Morning Brew and The Hustle had with newsletters that produced business, finance and entrepreneurial news for younger audiences. He started The Daily Upside with the idea there was space for a newsletter that catered more to investors as a lens instead of general business and finance. The Daily Upside is now at the point where it can incrementally expand. It started that in January with the acquisition of a specialist newsletter called Patent Drop that trawls patent registries for updates on what tech companies are filing patents that will expand into a publication focused on “technologies like blockchain and AI, how policy is impacting tech innovation, and conversations with the thought leaders and entrepreneurs building the future.” The Daily Upside will also launch Power Corridor, a publication at the intersection of Wall Street and Washington with longtime Institutional Investor journalist Leah Goodman . The opportunity Patrick sees is applying The Daily Upside growth playbook to these new properties – and using them to move beyond aggregation. Making the shift from aggregation to original content is a time-honored and tricky path in digital publishing. I can remember when Business Insider was mostly aggregating the reporting of others.
Tue, February 21, 2023
Informed's twist on a subscription news bundle
Axel Bard Bringéus is co-founder of Informed , a Berlin-based company with $5.3 million in backing that’s building a service for subscribers to pay for access to paywalled content from top tier publishers like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Financial Times and more. Informed is focused on people in non-English speaking countries who graze on English-language news content yet not enough to consider a subscription. This is a smart approach. Publishers always struggle to make money from international audiences. Most advertisers do not sell globally. And international visitors, in my experience, are far less likely to convert to paid. Axel and I discuss the Informed approach, and how his experience as a Spotify exec informs how he sees the news market.
Tue, February 14, 2023
Darren Samuelsohn on taking the solo path as a journalist
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Darren Samuelsohn, a longtime politician reporter who was most recently head of Insider’s ill-fated DC bureau. Darren and I spoke about his new newsletter devoted to journalism , the decision to take an independent path, and the topsy-turvy career that’s journalism.
Wed, February 08, 2023
Sinocism's Bill Bishop on building a solo publishing business
Bill Bishop likes to make clear he’s not a journalist. Instead, he’s a China analyst who brings his deep understanding of the country to an English-speaking language through his newsletter, Sinocism . In 2017, Bill became the “original Substacker” after teaming up with Substack’s co-founders to be the first newsletter on the platform. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Bill and I discuss his independent path, and how a subscription model has created different dynamics as opposed to his experiences in the dot-com era as a co-founder of Marketwatch. What’s telling to me is that Bill is also now considering advertising. The Substack model of “only ads” doesn’t make much sense long term for most writers. Even if they convert 10% of their audience, they’re making no money from 90%. Most businesses don’t operate that way.
Tue, January 31, 2023
The Dispatch nears 40k paid subscribers
The Dispatch is a three-year-old publication focused on bringing fact-based politics news and analysis from a center-right perspective. Steve Hayes, CEO of The Dispatch, joined the podcast to discuss how it's managed to climb to near 40,000 paying subscribers with a healthy 17 percent conversion rate from its free email list. Steve discusses the importance of aligning the editorial mission and business model, occupying the middle ground between the institutional media brands and the so-called creator economy, and its approach to introducing ads to The Dispatch.
Tue, January 24, 2023
GroupM's Krystal Olivieri on advertiser support for journalism
I had a conversation with Krystal Olivieri, global chief innovation officer at GroupM, about whether advertisers would conveniently forget all those promises they made during flush times to support local news. The takeaway: Advertisers will cut here and there, and that’s outside of the control of publishers, but news publishers can help themselves by having better ways of showing the value they’re creating for advertisers. Check out the full conversation on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, followed by a discussion of the year ahead with Outbrain co-CEO David Kostman. Thanks again to Oubrain for the support. Appreciate it.
Tue, January 10, 2023
Substack's Reid DeRamus on newsletter growth mechanics
Substack’s Reid DeRamus talks about growing newsletter audiences. Reid and I have spoken for the past two years on this topic, going back to before Substack bought his company Yem, which was focused on building a growth engine for newsletter writers. The thing about growth, at least I’ve found, is it takes a long time for most people. It’s taken me over two years to get 12,700 subscribers. I always tell people to take with a grain of salt the overnight success stories of newsletters that amass 250,000 subscribers in less than a year. They are remarkable because they are unusual, and the people running them are likely experts in marketing while most of us writing are not. Recommendations is Substack’s No. 1 feature it has rolled out. It needed to provide that distribution function to publishers. Otherwise it would just be a newsletter CMS with Stripe integration. Recommendations are now responsible for 40% of new free subscriptions to Substack-hosted publications. Reid and I discussed that dynamic and other features Substack is rolling out to increase the number of people who covert to paid subscribers.
Tue, January 03, 2023
How Local News Now puts community first
Scott Brodbeck got into local news a dozen years ago, after working in local broadcast news in Washington DC. “I looked at the direction of the industry and didn't love where local was going and ended up leaving and just on a total impulse to start my own site,” he said. “it was like a one day thing.” After this prototypical shower inspiration, Scott launched a local site to cover Arlington, Virginia. Since then, Scott has built Local News Now into a clutch of local news sites for the Virginia suburbs near Washington, including ARLNow (Arlington), FFXNow (Fairfax) and ALXNow (Alexandria). The opportunity Scott saw was to make local news products that were different from the typical local news efforts from those coming from the newspaper industry. “The local news outlets that were focused on Arlington were meant for people middle aged and up, living in single -family homes and the more affluent parts of Arlington, Scott said of the time when he was in his 20s. “I wanted to launch something that was gonna speak to people my age.”
Tue, December 20, 2022
The Big Bend Sentinel's community approach to local news
In 2016, Max Kabat and Maise Crow moved to Marfa, a small arts town in west Texas, and a couple years later made a bold call. They bought the local newspaper, The Big Bend Sentinel. Ever since, they've been building out their take on a sustainable local news model by pairing the weekly newspaper with a cafe and events space. Max and I discuss the model, the challenges of operating entwined but separate businesses, and whether this could be a blueprint that could work in towns with similar characteristics as Marfa, a tourist town that attracts a flood of visitors every year. After all, most towns in America aren’t featured in Vogue .
Tue, December 13, 2022
Should the government "fix" local news?
There’s the understandable urge to “do something” to fix the difficult situation the news business finds itself in. Government intervention in markets has historically been less common in the U.S., but we’re in a time of aggressive industrial policy becoming the norm with measures like the Chips Act and the climate bill. Enter the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill that was attached to the defense bill winding its way through Congress . The JCPA would force big tech platforms to pay local news publishers for the privilege of sending traffic to these publishers. The measure, which at the moment has been removed from the defense bill although it could always get added back in upcoming the back-and-forth, has proponents who claim that it is a “lifeline” to local publishers by sweeping aside antitrust restrictions to allow them to collectively negotiate terms with big tech platforms like Google and Facebook parent company Meta. Detractors see a cash grab by local news chains that are often run by deep pocketed private equity firms. For its part, Meta has threatened to exit exit news altogether if the measure passes. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Chris Krewson, executive director of the Local Independent Online News publishers group, to understand the possible unintended consequences to the bill, which Chris sees as mostly benefiting incumbents, many of which continue to cut journalists as a result of bad business decisions. It doesn’t help that many legacy chains are owned by private equity firms that probably shouldn’t need government assistance.
Tue, December 06, 2022
The Mill's Joshi Herrmann on building profitable local news
Joshi Herrmann is the founder of The Mill , a newsletter focused on Manchester – England, not New Hampshire, for those who call it “soccer” – as well as sister publications in Sheffield and Liverpool . Joshi started The Mill in June 2020, and across the three newsletters, the company has 45,000 email subscribers and has converted over 7% to paid subscribers. The Sheffield Post has 12,000 email subscribers and has managed to convert an impressive 950 to paid, according to Joshi. The company is near profitability with a small full-time staff augmented with freelancers. The common knock on the newsletter model applied to local journalism is that it can’t scratch much beyond the surface, and it tends to be mostly aggregation of original reporting still done by local newspapers, however depleted they are. The Mill and its sister titles are leaning on original reporting and in-depth features as opposed to just aggregation or fluff about local events.
Tue, November 29, 2022
Sebastian Tomich on The Athletic's pivot to ads
The Athletic started in 2015 with a simple proposition: It would produce the highest quality sports journalism with a subscription model that would align incentives with producing quality work vs chasing traffic. The approach wasn't without its flaws -- The Athletic consistently lost money -- but it did produce a differentiated, high quality product. In January, The New York Times bought The Athletic for $550 million. Nine months later, the Times, which has proven that advertising can co-exist in a subscription-first model, introduced advertising on The Athletic. Sebastian Tomich, chief commercial officer at The Athletic and a Times veteran, joined me to discuss the advantages of building an ad model from scratch and how The Athletic is seeking to align brands with sports affinity.
Tue, November 15, 2022
Ari Paparo on what's next for ad tech
Ari Paparo is a longtime ad tech veteran, not to mention holding the disputed title as Funniest Person in Ad Tech. Some highlights from our conversation: Innovation requires fragmentation. Ad tech’s complexity is a longtime talking point. And it is undeniably a convoluted supply chain that’s given the veneer of plausible deniability to all kinds of corner cutting, at least in my experience as an observer for many years. But Ari points out that “innovation requires fragmentation,” and besides, many of those pushing an anti-complexity narrative just happen to have “anti-complexity solutions” to sell. Go figure. Small publishers can opt out. Google is the simple ad tech solution. Most small advertisers can just default to Google and Facebook. But larger enterprises gravitate to more complexity simply because they have more complex businesses. Apple overturned the industry. Cynical or not, Apple’s use of privacy to restrict data flows has upended how the industry operates and will operate going forward. It’s of course no coincidence that these privacy restrictions hurt their rivals in Meta and Google. “There's no love lost between those companies, so hitting them in the kneecaps was kind of fun,” Ari said.
Tue, November 08, 2022
Tangle's Isaac Saul on non-partisan news
Isaac Saul saw knee-jerk distrust in media firsthand as a political journalist at outlets like Huffington Post, where what he wrote would end up being distrusted based on the place it appeared rather than the substance. Three years ago, Isaac started Tangle with the idea that presenting both sides to news stories would appeal to a wide group of people. And that’s proven true. Today Tangle has 8,000 paying subscribers and nearly 50,000 free email subscribers – a 16% conversion rate is amazing. It is launching a new ad program to complement the $30,000 a month in recurring revenue it takes in. Like Semafor, Tangle has its own spin on deconstructing the atomic unit of news, aka the news article. Tangle separates out the factual presentation of the issue, before presenting the view from the left, the view from the left, and then Isaac’s viewpoint. This is hard to pull off, particularly with issues like affirmative action , Covid-era school closures , and, of course, all things Trump . “I am pretty politically incongruent. I try to go and understand, as a politics reporter, what's happening in the world. In order to get a balanced view of any single story, I would have to read 10 publications that have clear, diametrically opposed political leaning. I can't just read the New York Times. I have to read the New York Times news section and then go read the Wall Street Journal if I really want to get this full picture. And so I was like, there have to be other people like me out there. I figured if I could put all that stuff in one place, a lot of sort of politically open-minded people would read it.”
Tue, November 01, 2022
Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz on where tech goes next
Alex Kantrowitz is the founder of Big Technology, an independent publication focused on he immense impact of tech companies on business, politics and society. A reporter covering tech for BuzzFeed News, he wrote a book on the tech industry called “ Always Day One ” and became one of the early trailblazers to decamp to Substack in 2020. Since then, Big Technology has amassed nearly 100,000 subscribers. We spoke about his independent journey – and plans to start a paid tier to his newsletter – as well as the state of the tech industry at this pivotal time. Some highlights: Why a lot of the meltdown in tech valuations is a function of the Federal Reserve How Apple got away with kneecapping tech rivals under the guise of privacy Mark Zuckerberg’s ballsy bet on the metaverse Generative AI as a legitimate contender for the New New Thing Betting on yourself after seeing journalism businesses struggle Producer: Jay Sparks of PodHelp.us
Tue, October 18, 2022
Semfor's Justin Smith on the need for a new global news brand
Semafor, backed by $25 million in private investment, has (finally) launched, marking possibly the most ambitious attempt in recent years to build a new global news brand. At the heart of the effort is an attempt to restore trust in media by rethinking the journalistic product. Despite the long history of failed attempts to "reinvent the article," Justin sees a glaring need to unbundle the article to clearly delineate factual news from analysis and opinion, while providing the context of the news along with countervailing views.
Tue, October 11, 2022
6am City's Ryan Heafy on building a sustainable local news model
6am City is turning to the newsletter to build out a network of 25 local news publications it says have 1 million cumulative subscribers and an open rate around 50%. After starting in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2016, 6am has expanded to markets like Madison, Wisconsin; Austin; Portland; and Indianapolis. The 6am formula is to keep new publications’ costs under $250,000, staff them with two-or three editorial staffers and four total employees, mostly making money from ads, both local and regional. It looks for markets based on a criteria developed, including income and education levels, inflows and outflows of residents, charitable giving and retail activity. It aims to get to profitability (and healthy 50% profit margins) in a market in two to three years. Thanks to Jay Sparks from PodHelp.us for producing the episode.
Tue, October 04, 2022
TMB's Bonnie Kintzer on turnarounds
In 2014, Bonnie Kintzer was named CEO of Readers Digest Association, becoming its fourth CEO in three years as it emerged months earlier from its second bankruptcy. After renaming the company Trusted Media Brands, recently shortened to TMB, Bonnie set out to decisively shift the company to a digital model while diversifying its focus to include its other lifestyle brands, such as Taste of Home and the Family Handyman. TMB added Jukin Media, bringing its streaming and video capabilities as well as brands like FailArmy and The Pet Collective. “I had multiple steps that I shared with the entire company. Did we have the right people? Did we have the right culture? Did we have the right assets? Were there assets that we should bring into the company? What did we need to stop doing? Because I think when you're doing a turnaround, you have to really have an incredible amount of focus.” Here’s Bonnie’s three principles for a turnaround: Enjoy the process. Turnarounds can be grinding affairs, filled with their fair share of downs along with the ups. “You have to be a certain kind of person to like turnarounds, and you have to surround yourself with those kinds of people,” Bonnie said.” Be decisive. Tough decisions are inevitable. Putting them off isn’t going to make them any easier. Over-communicate. Change is hard and understandably unsettles people. “When I first got back, people didn't believe that we could do it,” she said. “It was about constant communication and proof points that all of a sudden people [believe] we can do it.” The Rebooting Show is produced by Jay Sparks at Pod Help Us .
Tue, September 27, 2022
Platformer's Casey Newton on going solo
Casey Newton, a former writer at The Verge, started Platformer to cover the societal impact of the most powerful tech platforms. He’s used a subscription model, charging $100 a year. With 75,000 free subscribers and what he’ll only call “thousands” of paid subscribers – Platformer is the No. 2 most popular paid newsletter in tech on Substack – Casey has built a successful solo business that’s he’s expanding by bringing on Zoe Schiffer as Platformer’s managing editor. (He’s also got a new podcast coming out in partnership with The New York Times.) Going direct. “The one thing I've learned from covering these social networks is you've got to stop yourself from having a middleman in between you and the audience. I’ve got to go get that direct connection. And there is no more direct connection than having your own business and selling a product for money.” Subscriptions make the solo path easier . “It's ridiculously plug and play. It’s amazing to think that just by adding a subscription component to a blogging platform, you can enable hundreds, maybe thousands, of people to start their own successful businesses.” Newsletters are more nimble : “The thing I love about new newsletters, in particular, is that they can evolve so quickly. If you go back to the five years that I've been writing a daily newsletter, now there are whole sections that used to be there that just aren't there anymore. And it's totally fine. Whereas like you work for a website, if you want to redesign it, give yourself two years. My newsletter can just evolve.” The indie path is niche . “My hope was that two years on so many more people were going to do this. I spent that first year that I was independent talking to so many boldface name reporters at The New York times, The Atlantic, you name it, because they were all thinking about doing the exact same thing. I was trying to encourage them to do it because I was having so much fun with it and it was succeeding, but so very few people pulled that trigger. I think individually, they all had good reasons. But I have been shocked at how few people, relatively speaking, have followed. Most people have really wanted the comfort, the stability of that standard media job.”
Tue, September 20, 2022
Introducing the People vs Algorithms podcast
This is a preview of a new weekly podcast I’m doing with Troy Young. The People vs Algorithms podcast will focus on patterns in media, business and culture. Each episode will revolve around themes. This week, we tackled the theme of whether media is better now than in the past, along with an exploration of the type of media that’s winning in this kind of environment. It’s narrower, more focused, more niche . Subscribe to People vs Algorithms on Apple or Spotify .
Tue, September 13, 2022
Flying's Preston Holland on using media to build a real estate development business
Flying , a 95-year-old magazine publisher focused on amateur pilots, is on this path. Craig Fuller, CEO of Freightwaves, bought Flying in July 2021 and a key part of the growth plan he and COO Preston Holland have begun is a massive bet on so-called air parks, basically resort communities with ample space to park your plane at your home. The Fields is a 1,500-acre development in Tennessee’s Sequatchie Valley that’s due to open next year. Plans call for 800 homes, 180 “vacation villas,” a runway and many private hangars for people to park their aircraft. The Fields is billed as “a luxury fly-in community for pilots, by pilots.” The approach is somewhat akin to how Freightwaves uses its media arm in order lower the acquisition costs of its data business. Done right, this allows for taking a longer view of the value of different content products. For instance, Flying’s new management decided to keep the print edition and double the production cost to improve the quality. “Marrying [editorial] with some other monetization strategy allows for you to make some decisions on the media side that you wouldn't necessarily make if you're trying to make all your contribution [margin] on the media side," Preston said.
Tue, September 06, 2022
The Future playbook for sustainable publishing
Future is a collection of over 200 specialist titles that range from gaming and tech (Tech Radar) to homes (Homes & Garden) to beauty and fashion (Who What Wear) to B2B (SmartBrief), Future has established itself as one of the UK’s most successful publishers. (Its current market capitalization puts it at 8x the value of BuzzFeed.) But for its future growth, Future is betting heavily on the U.S. market, which CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne noted to me is five times the size of the UK. The U.S. already represents 35% of Future’s audience as well as 38% of its revenue. Byng-Thorne is something of a newcomer to the media business. An accountant by training, she joined Future in 2014 as its interim CFO and soon was appointed CEO, tasked with turning around a magazine publisher that, like its peers, was struggling to make a transition from print to digital. Her turnaround plan – she initially cut 40% of employees as the company was recording a £35 million loss in 2014 – has become something of legend, setting the stage for a remarkable financial turnaround as Future became an early adopter of using its niche focus in high-intent categories to drive transactions. The shift to commerce – it is now 34% percent of Future’s revenue – was informed by her previous time at Auto Trader, which made the leap from car magazine to marketplace. Zillah recounted how her first year at Future, which was on what she describes as a decade-long decline, the key question to answer was: “What’s our right to exist?” Her conclusion: Put the company on firmer financial footing, double down on the expertise embedded in the brands. Future was struggling with the transition from print to digital when Byng-Thorne took over. Beyond that, the diversification needed to be done on the digital side as well since many publishers were overly reliant on digital advertising. Commerce was a way to make money from audiences without the ups and downs inherent to the ad business. Future’s revenue is now roughly split in thirds among advertising, commerce and direct revenue from the audience. Having an acquisitions playbook. Future has spent over £1 billion on acquiring companies since Byng-Thorne took charge. In the past year alone, it has acquired four companies, including Who What Wear and Dennis Publishing and MarieClaire.com. “We integrate fully. I know some of our competitors don't all integrate fully, but for us, it was really important that it's one Future, one tech system, one sales team, one way of working.” This episode was produced by Jay Sparks from Pod Help Us . If you have podcast production needs, get in touch with Jay .
Tue, August 16, 2022
Trapital's Dan Runcie on building a brand at the intersection of business and hip hop
The business of hip hop is often overlooked, even though it's a massive business with outsized cultural influence. Dan Runcie saw this as an opportunity, starting Trapital in 2018. I wanted to talk to Dan about his approach to building an independent media brand. He’s already established himself and Trapital as an authority on the hip hop business. Trapital now has over 16,000 subscribers, with the publication supported almost entirely through sponsorships. Dan had earlier done a paid model, but pivoted to free when realizing he could reach far more people without the friction of a paywall – and a value proposition that appeals to sponsors like Moonpay, Convertkit and Alts.. Some takeaways from our conversation: Hip hop punches above its weight. There’s a school of thought that niche business publications are best in “unsexy” areas, as Industry Dive showed in its focus on big nuts-and-bolts business sectors. But cultural industries have influence beyond their size. Trapital isn’t about news. Dan has made a point of saying what he does is not journalism but business analysis. Part of that is to be clear the product isn’t a tool for keeping up to date on the ins and outs of the industry. Instead of the play-by-play, Trapital focuses on the context with Stratchery-like essays on topics like “ how The Weeknd mastered his brand ” and “ Beyonce’s streaming strategy, explained .” The pivot from subscriptions. For the past couple years, all roads have led to subscriptions in publishing as the travails of the big digital publishers have cast a pall on the ad model. But as Industry Dive, Axios and others have shown, advertising can be the great focal point of a publishing business model – if the audience is a group that’s hard to reach and valuable. In 2018, Trapital scrapped its initial paid model. Often subscriptions are painted as a set-it-and-forget-it option, but making money is hard no matter the model, and subscriptions require constant selling and marketing. Dan saw as a one-person operation this was cutting into his focus. Instead, Trapital focused on an “influence” model that initially treated the newsletter and podcast as lead gen for consulting, while adding in advertising and moving into investing. Going beyond solo. Trapital is working as a one–person business, but Dan wants to expand beyond just himself. The challenge is how to do this without losing the personal touch since Trapital’s brand is very tied into Dan’s perspective.
Tue, August 09, 2022
How Litquidity memed his way to a $2m media business
Begun as a meme account in 2017, Litquidity has amassed 1 million social media followers across Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok, specializing in the dark arts of “dank memes” that poke fun at the weird world of finance. The account, run pseudonymously by a former trader who goes by Lit, has spawned a daily news summary email ( Exec Sum ) with 160,000 subscribers, podcast ( Big Swinging Decks ), investment fund, merch and more, as part of a $2 million business. Some key takeaways: Find underserved audiences. The world is not short on finance news. But what Lit found as a young investment analyst is that little of the coverage captured the experience of being in the (well-compensated) rank and file of finance. “One thing that I felt was lacking was real insider baseball-type humor,” Lit said. “You look at CNBC or Bloomberg, it's probably people who aren't insiders that are reporting on the news or talking about the stock markets.” Memes are top of the funnel. Litquidity began as a meme account, attracting advertisers as its revenue source. But Lit felt that could only go so far – “I don't think they're like the highest value monetization paths to go through because you'll saturate your audience with ads, and people hate ads” – so he spun off Exec Sum, a newsletter that pithily summarizes the days finance and markets news. And more importantly, provides valuable surface area for high-value ads. “I really thought of how can I provide value to my audience in a way that would also make sense monetarily.” Publishing and investing mesh . Like Packy McCormick and Anthony Pompliano , Lit sees the opportunity to use his publishing reach as a way to expand his investmenting by raising a fund. Eventually, he sees Liquidity as more of an investment fund with a publishing arm rather than vice versa. “That's how I want that to be viewed going forward as I continue to build out the credibility and the track record.” Expanding beyond a personal brand is hard . Recently, Litquidity lost its “only employee” – there are a handful of part-timers – when Mark Moran split
Tue, August 02, 2022
The Hustle's Jordan DiPietro on being a publisher inside a software company
In February 2021, marketing software company HubSpot bought popular business newsletter The Hustle. Jordan DiPietro, a veteran of The Motley Fool, joined HubSpot to run The Hustle just after the acquisition, after having spent time advising the company. The Hustle now claims 2 million subscribers to its daily email, which gives a meme-friendly dive into business news topics. DiPietro said being part of the marketing operation of a brand helps The Hustle take the long view. “Being in the publishing game, when you're focused on ad dollars, that is a grind. The Hustle had [subscription service] Trends and, and certainly our plan was to accelerate the growth of Trends, but still a lot of our revenue came from advertising and that's just a different beast. Once it was acquired by HubSpot, the pressure to sell external ads was off, but instead to focus on being our own media buyer was attractive, especially knowing the business model behind HubSpot and the capital and the resources that HubSpot had.” Thanks to Bombora for supporting The Rebooting and sponsoring this episode.
Tue, July 26, 2022
Money's Greg Powel on intent media
One of the most solid areas of digital publishing is what’s become known as intent media. In the old days, we called this “SEO.” The basics are taking service content and applying it to algorithmic distribution (usually Google) and marrying it with performance advertising models like affiliate marketing programs that pay for sales leads. Ad Practitioners is another intent-based publisher in expansion mode.In late 2019, Ad Practitioners bought Money.com from Meredith with the plan to run its intent playbook with the personal finance brand. That means more lists of the best credit cards , best savings accounts and, yes, the best pet insurance companies . The entire company, which is based in Dorado, Puerto Rico, is 160 people and generates over $100 million in annual revenue. Some takeaways from Ad Practitioner CEO Greg Powel: Arbitrage works. Paid acquisition is an important part of the Ad Practitioners model – it has spent about $500 million on Google ads in its history. Search for “best credit cards 2022,” and you’ll see why. This kind of high-value intent traffic is very valuable – credit card leads can fetch $100 – that it makes sense. Bad sites are a business model problem. Publishers with terrible websites do not have a tech problem; they have a business model problem. The attention-based ad model for general audiences is hard to make work without adopting, well, adversarial tactics. The performance ad model of intent media aligns incentives better since the publisher wants people to get the information they need rather than hijack their attention elsewhere. Algorithm dependence is a manageable risk. To put it mildly, there’s a checkered history of publishers relying on algorithms for the overwhelming majority of their distribution. Ad Practitioners look to mitigate that dependence with its paid acquisition as well as licensing deals with the likes of MSN and others. While new channels like TikTok could catch on to eat into Google’s search share, Greg sees the biggest threat of disruption coming from Apple, since its devices are the originator of a big chunk of Google searches.
Tue, July 19, 2022
Workweek's Adam Ryan on why B2B shouldn't be boring
Adam Ryan, former president of The Hustle and cofounder of Workweek , wants to rethink the B2B model. Workweek is banking on finding individuals – creators, if you will – to build audiences around. The bet is that individuals, particularly but not exclusively those who are practitioners in the field, can build deeper connections with audiences while benefiting from the infrastructure, services and halo effect of a parent media brand. Some highlights from our discussion: Don’t raise too much money. Adam spent part of his career at Spiceworks, a professional network for IT professionals. The company identified an underserved community and executed on the opportunity, only to have an unsatisfying outcome. “It was a great company, bad cap table,” Adam said. “They actually made a ton of money. They didn't need to raise that much money. And then because they did, they made terrible decisions, long term.” You can be professional and have personality. Workweek is leaning on its network of 19 creators to be front and center. It doesn’t have an editor-in-chief and instead relies on its newsletter writers to chart their own path that hews closely to what motivates them. Nicole Casperson, for instance, writes WTFintech and focuses often on diversity and inclusion issues that are important to her personally. Sector expertise is critical. Not all Workweek creators worked in the fields they cover, but many do. Workweek writer Nik Sharma, for instance, is a DTC marketer . This hands-on familiarity with the issues in these fields in invaluable, so long as it is also married with the ability to clearly communicate and consistently produce valuable pieces. “The reason why [B2B content] is kind of boring is because you have a lot of people that have never done those jobs,” he said . “They're just like listening and regurgitating. They're not like coming from a point of action.” Paid acquisition is more than a shortcut. Publishers used to have an aversion to admitting to buying traffic. I can remember BuzzFeed making sure to point out it only bought ads for its sponsor content, not editorial. But Adam saw how an effective paid audience development strategy can accelerate growth. For instance, Workweek’s The Marketing Millennials property grew by 7,000 newsletter subscribers organically in seven weeks while paid acquisition added 20,000. So long as a company is confident in its cost per subscriber number, and is focused on quality of acquired subscribers, paid ac
Tue, July 12, 2022
Human Ventures' Joe Marchese in defense of the bundle
The pendulum always swings. Media regularly oscillates between periods of bundling and periods of unbundling. Bundles tend to rub people the wrong way because they feel they pay for stuff they don’t want. The downside is unbundling can be a complete hassle and the supposed savings quickly evaporate. Just look at what you’re paying now for various streaming services (themselves mini-bundles) instead of cable service. Inevitably, whether it’s the proliferation of newsletters or the many streaming products, we’ll see rebundling take off. “The bundle was the absolute worst form of entertainment delivery, except for every other one,” said Human Ventures executive chairman Joe Marchese. “Consumers are looking for a rebundle and these streamers are gonna have some sort of rebundle coming. News and Substack has some sort of rebundle coming. Everything that's old is gonna be new again over the next couple of months.” Other topics: Media is often a terrible standalone business but is good support for other businesses. The TV business is now dominated by tech companies, a trend likely to continue. That isn’t particularly new. “Media has historically been owned by non-media businesses,” Joe notes, going back to early radio and then cable systems owning TV networks. “The business of media has outsized influence but undersized monetization.” The result: “I don’t know the media business works at scale without alternative models.” The "permission to curate" is powerful. In a world of near-infinite media choices, people need some way to make sense of what’s good and what’s bad. That’s where trust comes into play. People can turn to algorithms like Google’s or Facebook’s to make sense of what’s important to them, or they can turn to publishing brands and individual brands. “Brands matter for the curation of goods and services so that people don't have the paralysis of infinite choice,” Joe said. Not everything is performance advertising. With ample data, sophisticated targeting and analytics, it can sometimes seem that brand advertising is an anachronism as the media world shifts firmly to “performance advertising,” or what used to be known as direct response. “In a world where we have dynamic targeting and we know what each household is watching, the advertising experience is actually worse,” Joe said. “How did we get worse at advertising in a CTV advertising environment than broadcast television 40 years ago?”
Tue, June 28, 2022
Neil Vogel on Dotdash Meredith's best, fastest, fewest strategy
Everyone loves a comeback, but few companies get them in the consumer internet business. ( Most companies have peaked and then set course on inevitable decline, with new owners either milking the asset on the way down or floundering unsuccessfully to reinvigorate the asset. That’s why it’s noteworthy what IAC has done with Internet 1.0 stalwart About.com. It was a company long past its peak in the first phase of digital publishing, having begun all the way back in 1994 as a place to find “expert” answers. Some takeaways from our conversation: Having a good user experience doesn’t have to come at the expense of the business. Media is hard. I always mention how difficult it is to satisfy different constituencies: audience, advertisers, algorithms. Dotdash has proven that you can have fewer ads, faster sites and better content and still make more money. Print still has an important role. Everyone likes to call things dead, and print isn’t going to be the driver of many media businesses going forward. But it still plays a role . I think it’s a good sign that someone like Neil is bullish on print, run efficiently, doing the job of being a statement of the brand. Driving transactions is critical, but maybe not building products. There’s lots of talk of commerce media here in Cannes. Publishers have seen their commerce businesses as bright spots. Dotdash has a large chunk of their business in driving transactions. Still, Neil strikes a note of caution when discussing turning that into actually making products versus passing on customer to product companies. These are often different businesses.
Tue, June 21, 2022
Tortoise Media's Katie Vanneck-Smith on slow news
Katie Vanneck-Smith, formerly president of Dow Jones, co-founded Tortoise Media , a UK-based publisher dedicated to “slow news.” The problem she and her co-founders diagnosed: “The problem isn’t just fake news or junk news, because there’s a lot that’s good – it’s just that there’s so much of it, and so much of it is the same. In a hurry, partial and confusing. Too many newsrooms chasing the news, but missing the story.” The slow approach means that Tortoise confines itself to producing one podcast episode a day, one daily newsletter (in email and audio), one multi-part series per month and one book a quarter. Katie discussed the Tortoise approach in an on-stage conversation at the FIPP World Congress in Cascais, Portugal.
Tue, June 14, 2022
Outsider CEO Deirdre Lester on building a lifestyle brand
Outsider is a media and commerce brand focused on a particular view of “the American lifestyle” that, to me, takes its cues from the South, emphasizing college football, hunting, fishing, wraparound sunglasses and the like. Recently, Deirdre Lester moved from CRO of Barstool Sports to become the CEO of Outsider. The goal is similar to Barstool: Use personality-driven publishing – former NFL QB Jay Cutler is chief design officer at Outsider – to build a deep connection with a like-minded community, then complement the media with commerce operations. Some key takeaways from our conversation: Finding the sweet spot between individuals and institutions is a big opportunity. The unbundling of publishing has put the focus on individual creators, but there are only so many Mr. Beasts in the world. The more tangible opportunity is the Goldilocks approach with institutional brands that can tap into the power of individuals to establish tight ties with an audience. Outsider is doing that with Cutler and popular podcaster Marty Smith. Lifestyle publishing brands are more about AOV than CPM. Publishing has been stuck in a default mindset that the audience either pays with data and attention to ads or with money through subscriptions. Commerce – real commerce, not just affiliate links – offers a third way to build product companies with media used for efficient distribution and, ideally, premium pricing power based on the credibility established with customers. Doing both media and products is hard. These are different businesses with different dynamics. The rough patch hit by Food52 , a prime example of publishers pivoting to product, shows how difficult it is to manage both publishing and products. Publishing is all about managing conflicts, and that can get even messier when publishing is in the service of moving products.
Tue, June 07, 2022
Time's Keith Grossman on why Web3 is here to stay
The crypto winter has pitched the giddy excitement over the endless possibilities of Web3. The drumbeat of negativity hasn’t shaken Time president Keith Grossman’s confidence in Web3 providing a new path to sustainable business models. Time, now under the ownership of billionaires Marc and Linda Benioff, has become the most aggressive large publishing brand in exploring the possibilities of Web3. To date, Time has: Minted iconic covers as NFTs and generated nearly $500,000 in proceeds Collaborated with artists to reinterpret Time covers as part of the Timepieces Web3 community Dipped its foot in the metaverse with a Galaxy Digital deal to create a metaverse newsletter and a metaverse category of the Time 100. “I started to see collaboration. I started to see Web 2.0 is about the audience, but Web3 is really about community,” Keith told me on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “I started to see a different way in which brands could evolve. “
Tue, May 31, 2022
Morning Brew's Austin Rief on the creator economy
Morning Brew is a breakout success in digital media, turning an email newsletter of business news delivered with a witty tone, into a robust digital media business that now has over 4 million email subscribers, with another 1 million to its growing stable of vertical industry email newsletters .Now, Morning Brew is focused beyond its original product, the daily Morning Brew publication, by building a roster of five B2B offshoots, with two more in the works, in addition to podcasts and video shows. A key growth area: individual creators. The bet: Morning Brew can use its infrastructure – editing, production and, crucially, monetization – to partner with creators who don’t want to do it all on their own.
Tue, May 24, 2022
Permutive's Joe Root on the pivot to privacy
Since its founding eight years ago, Permutive has bet on privacy being a key consideration in the future of ad tech. Permutive CEO Joe Root delves into what privacy-conscious advertising looks like – and if it’s possible. Highlights: The GDPR was a harbinger. Most U.S. companies didn’t understand how far-reaching the General Data Protection Regulation would be to them. The landmark move to rein in the collection and use of user data without consent is not without its critics, but it set in motion a focus on privacy that led to Apple’s move to crack down on data collection and the ultimate end of the third-party cookie. U.S. dominance in digital markets is ending. The tech industry has been mostly an American creation, dominated by U.S. platforms and largely operating along the extreme free market proclivities that are a hallmark of American capitalism. But Europe remains a regulatory superpower, and it is determined to use those powers to shape digital markets. Consent – real consent – is inevitable. Clicking out of endless cookie consent pop-ups is a wonder of traveling in Europe, on par with being able to take a train to the airport. The GDPR led to these consent requests as ad tech’s response to the regulation, giving the appearance of consent but not really. That’s going to change. Context is having a moment. The original targeting signal for advertising was context. Someone reading Field & Stream is likely into the outdoors if you’re selling fly-fishing gear. Digital advertising shifted to taking all kinds of signals in order to target ads to individuals. With the collection and application of other signals growing more difficult and expensive, the pendulum is shifting back to contextual signals. Big publishers stand to benefit. The new era of digital advertising will have winners and losers, with many still to be determined. One divide that will likely open is between the biggest publishers that have enough user data of their own to be compelling to advertisers who can’t simply rely on the cookie targeting and the long tail of sites that will likely find competing for ad dollars far more difficult.
Tue, May 17, 2022
Forbes COO Jessica Sibley on "the brand that stands for success"
Forbes is a unique brand that has global cultural cachet that’s managed the transition from being a magazine business to a mostly digital business, with an emphasis on building its direct revenue as well as its brand extensions. Now, it's looking to plot a future business in which consumer revenue take a far larger role.
Thu, May 12, 2022
Why The Dispatch is leaving Substack
Why The Dispatch outgrew Substack Many would assume the most popular political publications on Substack are culture war agitators like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. In fact, the top two slots are much milder publications: Letters from an American and The Dispatch . Taibbi and Greenwald will be moving up a slot soon, since The Dispatch is leaving Substack. Steve Hayes, one of the founders of The Dispatch in 2019, said the conservative news and commentary publication has outgrown the tools that Substack provides. Part of this is ideological – not in the political sense – in that Substack has squarely cast its lot with individual creators, doesn’t believe in advertising, and wants to be a platform rather than a backend tool. “There was a certain point when they were seeing the success that they were having by focusing on individual content creators, and said, we need to do more of this. And there came a point, when their growth, which was just monumental and what they were doing to get that growth, didn't work for us as much as it had in the past.” Businesses are all about making choices. And ultimately you can’t please everyone all the time. That said, I think Substack is at risk of losing many of its initial wave of successful publishers, particularly as upfront deals end and the pinch of paying 10% of revenue. (The Dispatch had a “handshake agreement” with Substack and didn’t get a special deal, according to Steve.) The shift to individuals from institutions has been a major catalyst of publishing’s unbundling, but I believe we’ll see more confederations between individuals, sometimes just a gussied-up regular company and other times in new collectives. That’s because working with others tends to be more enjoyable for most people. What’s more, being part of a group means you can have someone to cover up for your inefficiencies or allow you to take a vacation. There’s still strength in numbers. What’s more, bundles are often better for customers. Steve and I discussed how The Dispatch plans to expand beyond its 30,000 paying subscribers by adding in advertising and events. We also discussed building a center-right political publication at a time of extremes, and I tried but mostly failed to get him to give an optimistic view of what’s to come in U.S. politics. Check out the full podcast on Apple or Spotify . Thanks to House of Kaizen for its support as prese
Tue, May 10, 2022
Why The Dispatch is leaving Substack
Steve Hayes, CEO of The Dispatch, explains why the conservative news outlet is switching from Substack, where it was the No. 2 most popular paid politics newsletter.
Tue, May 03, 2022
Publishing as a sales tool
Quick request: Please take this 10-question audience survey that will help me better understand the makeup of The Rebooting’s readership in order to grow it as a sustainable business. I’ve already gotten many useful insights from the first wave of responses. Thanks to all who took the time. This week, I spoke to Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights , about how it uses its popular email newsletter as a customer acquisition tool for a software business. Also: Where Quartz went astray and how access is a subscriptions driver. More companies than ever are intrigued by building their own publishing arms , seeing an opportunity to lower customer acquisition and marketing costs. After all, in an age of “going direct,” why should companies not build media arms ? As was once said to me about communism, great on paper, messy in reality. Time and again, companies have talked a big game about building their own media arms only for the initiatives to peter out, flame out or just languish. The latest cautionary tale comes from Netflix, which drastically cut staff last week at its ambitious (relatively speaking) publishing site, Tudum , which only debuted in December 2021 . The cuts come six weeks after Netflix CMO Bozoma St. John departed the company – and at a time when Netflix is shockingly talking about reining in spending as subscriber growth hits a wall and goes in reverse. But in truth, Tudum was likely doomed from the start, despite hiring top-flight talent and promising them editorial freedom with tech company pay. One media exec responded
Tue, April 26, 2022
Human ad products
I decided to mix up the days for this newsletter and the format. You’ll now get The Rebooting twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday. The Tuesday email will continue with a new format that is a mix of topics, along with highlights from the podcast. I think this is a better approach than my original podcast-centric approach. But let me know your thoughts: bmorrissey@gmail.com . Human ad products Building a good media product is endlessly difficult, particularly when it comes to advertising. Math gives way to physics when ad products are built, as the complexities get ramped up, trying to satisfy financial goals, performance, audience needs, the overall brand mission, not to mention the challenge of balancing unique ad products with repeatable (and high-margin) ad products. Too often, that’s resulted in an adversarial approach to monetization that seems to operate in a parallel universe to the the stated ethos of the brand. If you’re going to claim to be high end, it’s hard to then turn to bottom-of-the-barrel monetization methods. The shift to primary-engagement media is an opportunity to rethink monetization products. The success of newsletters and podcasts ad products has mostly been due to ignoring the typical monetization methods of other digital media. Running banner ads in email newsletters doesn’t work as well as hand-crafted ads in the voice of the publication, particularly if delivered by an individual. The same holds true for a personal publishing medium like podcasting, which has long relied on host reads. These are more human ad products, playing into the “casualness” that’s eating the world . Litquidity, which is aiming to more than triple the $1 million in revenue it reached last year, has rolled out an interesting new product in which it will co-host earnings calls for companies on Twitter spaces. Litquidity began as a popular finance meme account, and has since expanded into a daily email newsletter with more than 120,000 subscribers, a podcast, mech operation and investment portfolio. Litquidity has signed up RCI Hospitality, operator of dozens of nightclubs and strip clubs, to host RCI’s investor call on Twitter Spaces. For RCI, this is an opportunity to reach a new class of retail investor and younger finance pros who aren’t the type to dial into the normally dull invest
Mon, April 18, 2022
The future of work
The future of work is one of the most fertile topic areas out there. The pandemic caused a reset, when combined with the labor shortage coming out of Covid, and it’s not going back to normal. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson cited statistics that show basically every industry halted by Covid – from restaurants to cruises – has more or less returned to normal, except ones like movie theaters and offices . I’ve long thought the boss class is kidding themselves about strongarming people back to dreary commutes, fights over who left a coffee mug in the sink, pointless meetings and presenteeism. Work is changing, even if bosses don’t trust people with their cameras off . That’s why I find the scramble to own the future-of-work category fascinating. Jay Lauf, a cofounder of Charter, a new brand exploring the transformation of work , joined me to discuss how this bootstrapped media company is taking a different path than his previous executive roles at Quartz, The Atlantic and Condé Nast. “We've run these workplaces,” Jay told on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “We've thought about these workplaces, and we've served different roles within these workplaces. We've been our own test lab in some ways, both prior in our careers and currently, trying to build this out.” Some takeaways: Start with an idea. Jay talks about how he and co-founders Kevin Delaney and Erin Grau all felt like they were “scratching an itch.” Media born from a legitimate interest tends to be more valuable than engineered media that looks for an arbitrage opportunity. Find a high-value area of need. The upending of the work routine during the pandemic was unprecedented. Human resources issues have gone from the sideline to a central organizational challenge. Embed in a community. Charter is both covering the future of work but also living it as they build their own workplace. Being both a participant and observer is a powerful combination. Ads and subs aren’t an either-or proposition. Charter wants to develop a business model mostly reliant on direct payments. But that doesn’t mean it is averse to ads. In fact, ads are the majority of its revenue as it determines the best direct-revenue model. Check out the full episode on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rebooting-show/id1595625177" rel="noopener norefe
Mon, April 11, 2022
Independent media in Ukraine
Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Let me know what you think: bmorrissey@gmail.com . The war in Ukraine is now six weeks old, likely to drag on even longer. It’s important to consider how vital an independent and free media is to a free and independent Ukraine. I visited Kyiv in the fall, and I wrote about how the media operates in a far more complicated context there than in a place like the U.S. This challenge got greater in the wake of an invasion that’s mostly ground the economy to a halt. Andrey Boborykin, executive director of news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda, told me on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show that the independent news media in Ukraine for now must rely mostly on grants from foundations and individual contributions from abroad. ( Ukrayinska Pravda is also now publishing in English .) “We are in a very tough position when we speak about reader revenue, because here we are competing with expenses for food and transport and utilities,” he said. “We don’t have the culture of people paying for content.” We spoke about his own experiences being displaced in Ukraine twice, as well as how Ukrayinska Pravda is continuing its operations. I wanted to have Andrey on to bring attention to the threat to sustainable and independent media in Ukraine. Andrey and Eugene Zaslavsky of the Ukraine-based Media Development Foundation have set up a local news emergency fund to help independent media in the country get over to the other side of this tragedy. The institutional-individual divide The shift from institutions to individuals is happening in many areas of the economy and society. The Economist noted that influencers were “initially dismissed as credulous Gen-Z folk who had mistaken posting selfies for having a job” rather than being the entrepreneurs they are. The same is happening as the media business itself goes through a reorganization that shifts more power to individuals. Dean Baquet’s get-off-Twitter missive to his newsroom can be seen in thi
Mon, April 04, 2022
Water & Music's Cherie Hu on going solo
Welcome to new subscribers. One way to support The Rebooting is by sharing it with colleagues and friends you think would find it valuable. I still view The Rebooting Show, as well as the overall project, as a work in progress, so please let me know guests you’d like to hear and topics covered. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com – or just hit reply to the email. Niche publishing brands are most powerful at intersections. For Cherie Hu, the founder of Water & Music , the intersection is music x technology x business x web3. Water & Music was an accidental brand in many ways. Cherie was a freelance journalist in 2016, relying on writing assignments from established publications like Billboard, Forbes and industry trade publications. Freelancers were the original creator class of journalism, well practiced in juggling the actual writing with figuring out taxes, chasing down invoices and, yes, tending to their personal brands in order to get the next assignment. Cherie created an email newsletter in 2016 to distribute her latest stories and added pieces she wanted to write anyway without waiting for a publication to run them. The newsletter became a creative outlet. It grew enough that Cherie moved it to Patreon, and by early 2019 it had attracted 5,000 free subscribers. Water & Music is now off Patreon and boasts over 2,000 members. It is also pioneering experimentation in web3 models with its own research-oriented decentralized autonomous organization and a $STREAM token. My takeaways from our conversation: Look for signals beyond analytics. Understanding whether you have the publishing equivalent of product-market fit requires looking for signals. Some are simple math: email subscribers, open rates, paying members, ad demand. But some are intangible, like people reaching out to you, asking how they can support your work and seeing people at conferences who are obsessed with the subject matter and want to connect to each other. “I realized that there are a lot of these readers who would have such amazing discussions with each other, but they just did not know each other.” Autonomy is more than money. Water & Music really took shape as a brand when Cherie started treating it as a creative outlet rather than a promotional vehicle. The individual-led brand allowed her the freedom to “have the kind of career that would allow for the kind of work that I wanted to do.” Build a team. One of the false dichotomies is this idea in the unbundling of publishing that you’re either all on your own or buried in a legacy news organization. At some point, everyone needs to build a team, even if the relationships are more flexible than a typical compan
Mon, March 28, 2022
How Skift survived Covid
On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Skift CEO Rafat Ali. What I like about Skift is it goes narrow and deep on the business of travel while situating it within the broader context of the global economy and societal trends. Covid was a reminder that external events are out of your control and the best you can do is adapt to them. Nobody likes the painful decisions you have to make to ensure simple survival. Skift ended up cutting a third of its staff and saw revenue decline 40%. For Skift that meant shrinking its business, letting go and furloughing employees, and preserving cash to weather the storm. Skift used the pandemic to refit its business, casting off the expenses of offices and event venues, and building new high-margin products. Skift is more profitable now than it’s ever been. It has just crossed its employee count from pre-pandemic, even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Covid outbreaks in Asia and a new Covid variant circulating Europe signal even more turbulence ahead. Some takeaways from our discussion: Apply a consumer lens to B2B. Modern B2B is as audience-focused and quality as consumer media. That means investing in design, quality reporting and writing, and outlook. Travel was historically broken into sectors – flights, hotels, cruises, meetings – but that’s not how consumers approached the category, so Skift took the POV of people, not vendors. Media and data make sense together… on paper. In media, the cliche “Uber for X” pitch is the “Bloomberg for X” pitch. Using publishing as a top of the funnel for a high-priced, recurring revenue data business is a business school case study. The problem: These are very different businesses to staff and run. Skift originally cast itself as a “travel intelligence company,” but ended up being a media company. Covid expanded the talent pool. Skift used the pandemic to become a permanently distributed company. As it has hired people back, of the 20 people brought on, only one has been based in New York City. That’s led to a great expansion of its talent pool, not to mention a lower cost base. Covid changed the client base . The travel industry was on mothballs for much of the pandemic, but Skift found that it was buoyed by the windfall realized by large tech platforms. Much of B2B media business models are driven by vendors, but the big tech platforms are where properties want to get for their stability and massive marketing budgets. Balancing the revenue portfolio . The goal for Skift’s revenue profile is to be evenly split among events, advertising and subscriptions. Going into the pandemic, subscriptions were lagging a category like ev
Mon, March 21, 2022
Jarrod Dicker's sane person's guide to crypto
Something about the podcast highlights format wasn’t working for me, so I’m switching up the Monday version to feature highlights from the podcast as well as some thoughts on other matters in sustainable publishing. After all, formats matter. Let me know what you think. This week’s topics: Going down the rabbit hole with TCG’s Jarrod Dicker Censorship fights Individual brands in publishing Well-paid journalists Company teardown pieces The pivot to pragmatism, web3 edition Crypto is polarizing. Talk to a web3 trust believer – I define web3 as encompassing crypto currencies, blockchain, decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations – and you’ll hear we are on the cusp of a blockchain utopia that sounds a lot like a kibbutz designed by Ayn Rand. And if you don’t see that, well, you’re ngmi. The doubters of this “pathetic tech future,” scramble to dismiss the latest crypto craze as a “bust.” Most critiques at their heart are a version of this throwaway line in an otherwise quite interesting Time profile of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin : “Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams.” Well, when you put it that way… I’m too much of a realist for these extremes. I believe crypto is, in some ways, inevitable based on the sheer amount of capital – financial, people and cultural – going into it. Kevin Roose, who has taken a moderate approach to the Crypto Holy Wars, has a very good web3 primer for those with open minds. The trough of disillusionment is a critical part of any adoption cy
Mon, March 14, 2022
How Puck is putting creators at the center of a media brand
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify If you use Apple, please leave a rating and review. Every cycle of unbundling is followed by another period of rebundling. Media is no different – just look at the streaming market. In publishing, the shift of power from institutional brands to individual brands has unfolded over the past few years, and now a period of rebundling will begin. Puck is a seven-month-old media brand built with the institutional-individual brand continuum firmly in mind. The publication has recruited several well-known journalists to focus on American power centers in finance, tech, media, politics and entertainment. “Puck is a media brand with creators at the center,” said Liz Gough, a former Condé Nast exec who is COO of Puck. “We are focused on telling the inside story from some of the most important parts of America: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington DC and Hollywood.” What I’ve liked about Puck is how it’s not recreating the same old publishing model but instead bringing on its contributors – people like Dylan Byers, Julia Ioffe, Teddy Schleifer, Matt Belloni – as partners, giving them a middle ground that has the benefits of both the institutional approach and personal brand approach . (I have a deal with Puck as a contributor to license some of my writing for The Rebooting. I don’t have any financial interest in the company beyond that.) “We saw two ends of the spectrum,” Liz said. “We saw the individual brands of the world and at the other end legacy or institutional brands that a lot of the founding team at Puck came from and have their own amazing benefits but also challenges. We thought the media brand of the future is taking the best of both of those worlds.” In this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Liz and I discuss the idea of journalists as influencers, why subscriptions and ads work well together and power centers as an editorial lens. Journalists as influencers The notion of “per
Mon, March 07, 2022
The Logic's David Skok on being a journalist founder
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify If you use Apple, please leave a rating and review. Journalists in their 40s are under no illusions to the need for sustainable business models in news publishing. Being suddenly laid off is a rite of passage. “Those of us who started in journalism in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, very early on we were awakened to the challenges of the business models,” said David Skok, founder and CEO of The Logic , a four-year-old publisher focused on the growth of the knowledge economy in Canada. “We didn’t have the church and state separation as much as others did in terms of understanding the news industry is as much about product and business strategy as it is your editorial. I’ve always said you could have the best lede or nut graf in the world, but if it didn’t load on your phone in .01 seconds, it was invisible to the reader.” Founded in 2018 and now with 20 employees, The Logic is an independent publication focused on the knowledge economy in Canada as it transitions away from an economy largely dependent on sectors like mining and real estate. David describes The Logic as “a combination of the business model/product of The Information with the editorial focus of The Financial Times.” On this episode of The Rebooting Show, David and I discussed why The Logic doesn’t consider itself a tech publication, differentiating through original reporting and why a subscriptions-based business model isn’t subscriptions-only. Starting from scratch David is a veteran journalist, with roles at the Boston Globe and The Toronto Star. He started The Logic almost four years ago after recognizing the challenges legacy news organizations face in changing their business models provides an opportunity for new entrants with the right focus. “I had been a disruptor from within [large news organizations] and seen a lot of the same mistakes being committed and a lot of the same barriers to innovation. I wasn’t seeing a lot of success in large organizations, not because the effort wasn’t there, but because they’re large organizations and they’re slower moving. There was an opportunity, particularly in the Canadian market, which hadn’t had a lot of innovation in a while, to start something new.” Going beyond tech Technology long moved from a vertical coverage area to a horizontal. There is a tech angle to just about every news story. For The Logic, that means going beyond technology to zero in on the big story of the Cana
Mon, February 28, 2022
Howard Mittman on 'mission-driven' publishing
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Like just about everyone, I’m both horrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in awe of the resistance of the Ukrainian people. Ukraine is an inspiration to the rest of the world. In places like the United States, we fail to appreciate the staggering advantages we have just by dint of where and when we were born. In September, I visited Ukraine to speak at a conference to build sustainable, independent journalism in the region. This is a hard task in a country with complicated politics where publications are often controlled by oligarchs and political parties, and the economy is far smaller. The Ukrainian people I met were all first rate and incredibly generous. They’re also brave. Consider helping by giving to one of these vetted programs , as well as a fundraising for the Kyiv Independent , an independent English-language publication, and this one for other independent media in Ukraine . A couple years ago, then-Bleacher Report CEO Howard Mittman coined a neat phrase for the end of an era of lightweight content produced for algorithms: Need vs Feed. In the next era of digital publishing, you want to be on the Need side. “When I think about publishing, I think about purpose-driven versus mission,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “Purpose-driven publishing is about ad dollars and collecting affiliate revenue. It's about filling a gap that consumers have based off of a Google search or social media. Mission-driven is where I’m interested in now. You see that in areas like the environment and in news.” Howard spent a dozen years at Conde Nast , occupying top business roles for titles like GQ and Wired. I’ve always known him to be thoughtful about where the media business is going, so we had a discussion about the dangers of going overboard on subscriptions, why now just might be the time for new entrants to address local ne
Mon, February 21, 2022
How Blockworks got to $20m in revenue in 5 years
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Over just five years, crypto has exploded from a curiosity to a cultural touchstone, with millions of boosters, Super Bowl commercials and billions of investment in the belief that a new financial system, built for the digital age, is being created. And along the way crypto has become highly divisive. Its most ardent supporters are hardly known for their understatement, giving crypto the whiffs of both libertarianism run amok and a speculative frenzy that’s given cover to all manner of grifters. The Gold Rush mentality isn’t a bad thing, according to Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, a crypto-focused media company that expects to top $20 million in its fifth year . “Bubbles are good,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “They bring in capital, that’s how innovative technologies get built. Railroads went through a massive mania from 1840 to 1870 with all these bubbles . But obviously railroads got built. Bubbles just bring talent and capital.” Jason and I discussed how four-year-old Blockworks has built a $20 million business by positioning itself as the go-to resource for financial institutions to understand the fast-moving world of blockchains and crypto currencies. Believing in crypto’s inevitability As newcomers to crypto in 2017, Jason and co-founder Mike Ippolito saw a nascent industry stuck in boom and bust cycles and with its scruffy edges. But they believed one key thing: crypto would eventually become a very large institutional asset class. “The white space that we saw was around information in the industry. In 2017 there were basically two media sites, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. You had one or two podcasts, and then a bunch of information on things like Twitter and Reddit. We would go to these events, and they were clearly run by a bunch of scammers. And then you'd look online and it seems like a bunch of people pumping different coins. But 1% of this feels real. We've done so much wrong over the last four years, but the one thing that we got right is believing that crypto would eventually become an institutional asset class and that we would need better information, insights, data analysis, news, research, et cetera, for the massive cohort of capit
Mon, February 14, 2022
How Famous Birthdays built a data business off celebrity searches
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Apple users: Please l eave a rating and review . When it comes to business models, software models beat publishing ones. Recurring revenue scales more quickly and at far better margins. For a decade, Famous Birthdays has chronicled the rise of digital culture through its platform for finding out more information about the digital stars from TikTok and YouTube, as well as more traditional pop stars. Famous Birthdays has relied heavily on its internal search data as the “North Star” of its business. The company noticed Charli D’Amelio rising in popularity in 2019 and recorded a video interview with her before the TikTok star exploded in popularity. That formed the basis of the Famous Birthdays Pro product that offers proprietary data on who is rising and falling in popularity. Clients include platforms, influencer agencies and services, and talent representation firms. “We add more clients and it just grows,” said Evan Britton, founder of Famous Birthdays. “If you pivot to video, you have to create that content and you get some margin on top of it. Ad-based businesses aren't as exciting, We could have charged our users a few bucks a month and given them extra functionality. But we went with the enterprise model, which is good because we don't have to gate anything with our users.” Evan and I spoke about the opportunity he saw that led to Famous Birthdays, the opportunity for a data business and why he went all-in on programmatic advertising. Finding opportunity in the shift to mobile Technology shifts create opportunities. Back in 2012, the mobile phone was just starting to usurp the role of desktop in how people found and consumed information. Evan noticed that sites like Wikipedia were comprehensive, but not made for a mobile experience, particularly the small screen size of those early smartphones. “Birthdays are always often the first thing people want to know about a celebrity, but there's other information they want to know. We were a mobile-friendly Wikipedia/IMDB. I'm more about user experience. The user experience on mobile for Wikipedia was not good. You don't want a book report on mobile. You want to get right to it. I saw that as an opportunity as an
Mon, February 07, 2022
Digital advertising's data reset
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Rebooting Show. This week’s episode is a sponsored Spotlight episode, where I feature a conversation with a sponsor of The Rebooting in order to get a better understanding of their approach to solving a challenge of building sustainable media businesses. The way these work is I agree on a general topic with the sponsor – how data plays an important role in building sustainable media businesses, in this case – and then the episodes are like any other. My goal is to make these as valuable and informative as any other episode. Please let me know your feedback – and get in touch if you’d like to sponsor upcoming mini-seasons on the creator economy, newsletters, subscriptions and more. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com . The entire tech industry is going through a broad reckoning over the collection, storage and use of consumer data. Government regulations, Apple’s new data policies, the demise of the third-party cookie and other market pressures are changing how a large chunk of advertising works. Look no further than Facebook’s historic stock price meltdown after disappointing results it blamed, in part, to new obstacles to targeting and measuring ads. “We get a reset that gives the industry an opportunity to rethink a lot of things,” said Jake Abraham, chief commercial officer of Audigent , a data platform that works with publishers to better understand their audiences and turn that understanding into achieving business goals. “While it’s messy in the middle, ultimately we come out with a [situation where] the publisher is the source of truth, more transparency, better privacy and more tools to actually do what both advertisers and publishers want.” Below are highlights of the conversation Jake and I had about how publishers need to think of their audience data as an asset class, the false dichotomy between contextual advertising and addressable advertising, and how Facebook gets small businesses hooked. The negative impact of rampant data collection The only people in the world who use the term “ personalized advertising ” are those who work in ad tech. For the rest of humanity, this is ad targeting or, increasingly, “<a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/02/01/surveillance-data-collection-ads-news-media/" rel="noo
Mon, January 31, 2022
Jake Sherman on Punchbowl's $10m first year
This week I’m continuing a run of discussions with people operating the publications that sit at the nexus of power and politics. Punchbowl has had a successful launch as one of the new crop of publishers. Check out the episode, and if you’re not already, please subscribe on Apple or Spotify. Also, please leave a rating and review if you use Apple . Washington D.C. has long been a company town, only the company in question is the sprawling federal government, its various apparatuses – and those who influence them. It’s no surprise then that the once-sleepy media business around the government has become one of the most vibrant areas of growth in digital publishing. Consider: Axel Springer ponied up $1 billion to acquire Politico last August. Axios has pulled off one of the most successful early runs for a media company in its first five years , with a valuation of $430 million . The Hill was bought by Nexstar Media Group for $131 million last August. Grid News recently raised $10 million in venture funding . Add in Punchbowl, a year-old media startup founded by Politico veterans . Jake Sherman, a co-founder of Punchbowl, wrote Politico's flagship newsletter, Playbook, along with fellow co-founder Anna Palmer. (John Bresnahan, the former Congressional bureau chief for Politico, is the third co-founder.) While some digital media startups go to great pains to hang their differentiation on a new format or approach or business model, Punchbowl’’s model is fairly straightforward. It is going to out-report its competition and be a must-read for those who need to keep up with the ebb and flow of legislation on Capitol Hill. While many outlets wander to focus on the White House, Punchbowl is squarely focu
Mon, January 24, 2022
The Grid's "fuller-picture" approach to news
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify The roaring 20s of publishing has begun with several new brands launching, each with their own twist on dealing with the challenges of audience growth and sustainable business models. What’s notable is most publications are not promising to build massive audiences. Instead, most are focused on high-value audiences that lend themselves to high-priced ads and subscriptions . Grid is one of this crop of newcomers. Laura McGann, a Vox.com editorial director who is running Grid’s editorial side, saw an opportunity to build a news brand premised on a new newsroom model that seeks to tell a more complete picture of news stories through a collaborative approach that taps into different areas of expertise. The end result: a “fuller picture” of the news. “We're trying to create our brand around the idea that we can create additive value where one plus one equals four by putting really smart people together.,” said Brad Bosserman, Grid’s CRO who joined the company following seven years leading brand partnerships at Politico. Brad and I discussed the current boom of publishing startups, journalism-led innovation and building a sustainable business model around targeting influential readers. The new cycle of publishing innovation My view is we’re at the start of a multiyear cycle of innovation in publishing, as legacy publishers look to consolidation and efficiency while a new class of upstarts spring up to move faster to capture new opportunities that inevitably spring up with the macro environment changes. Brad points out that media is a reactive business. “Media companies tend to be born in generations. When you look at that 2005-2007 period, you had all sorts of companies that were born in that same window. And now 15 years later, you're seeing another one of those generations where a new breed of companies is being born. A lot of times media companies are downstream of larger changes in the culture, consumer behaviors, business models and technology platforms. As those things change, media companies react to those [changes]..” The pivot to direct connections During the last period of publishing innovation, platforms were at the heart of most companies’ distribution plans, at a minimum. The idea was simple: Facebook was connecting the world, migh
Mon, January 17, 2022
How Protocol applies the Politico model to tech
Thanks to everyone who has sent notes and left reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcasts . Thanks to Jrdoog, who called the podcast “essential for anyone working in the media industry.” Note for future guests: Jrdoog wants me to keep badgering you for numbers. Be forewarned. This week’s episode with Protocol president Bennett Richardson is brought to you by Audigent. Publishers often struggle to know which partners bring incremental value. And the complexity of programmatic advertising has only exacerbated the problem. Audigent has been focused on demand generation for publishers’ premium data since day one, delivering customized solutions that drive additional direct and indirect revenue. Audigent’s platform is simple to integrate and focuses on a combination of technology, service and unique demand, providing a proven solution for what pubs need most today and into the cookieless future. White-glove service, superior technology and demand generation are three primary reasons why some of publishing’s most-recognizable and innovative brands rely on Audigent. Many publishers want to run the Politico playbook. What Politico managed to do is take politics and cover it like ESPN covers sports , attracting big enough audiences for a robust ad business, while focusing on narrower slices of must-have information on legislative minutiae to power a high-priced subscriptions business. It only makes sense that Politico itself would look to do the same, as it has with the two-year-old Protocol, which is applying the Politico playbook to the sprawling world of tech . Tech has long since matured as a vertical topic, rooted in Silicon Valley, to a horizontal story of power and influence that spans industries, governments and societies. It also happens to have both deep pocketed investors and advertisers.. “The very core of Protocol was an extension of that same thesis, which is, can we use this similar influencer-focused, unbiased model that made Politico successful and made Politico Europe successful?” said Bennett Richardson, a Politico veteran and the recently named president of Protocol. “Could we take that out of politics entirely and bring it to a different power center in a different industry? Unsurprisingly, given everything that media and every other industry are going through, tech was the obvious first place to bring that thesis to.” Protocol is currently 55 employees, with eight newsletters that collectively have 250,000 subscriptions. The site gets about 1.5 mil
Mon, January 10, 2022
Troy Young on publishing's pivot to individuals
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify I’m continuing my look-ahead series of podcast episodes to kick off 2022. Last week, Sara Fischer, media reporter for Axios, laid out her big themes for the year . This week, I spoke to Troy Young, the former president of Hearst Magazines, who over the years I’ve found to be very thoughtful about how the media business is changing. Reminder: If you like the podcast, please share it with others who might also find it valuable – and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts if you’re in the blue bubble brigade . Big thanks to mpm318 for this nice review. If you’re making bets for a Word of the Year in digital media in 2022, identity is a good candidate. The nature of digital advertising is changing as the industry transitions away from the third-party cookie as a key audience identifier. Identity, both on the page and across the ecosystem, is an evolving and complex component to publisher monetization. Audigent’s Hadron ID serves as a cookieless “container” solution, delivering cookieless solutions at scale while being fully interoperable with other ID systems. It is simple to deploy and instantly enables end-to-end cookieless programmatic buying while delivering addressablity. Audigent is transforming how clean first-party data powers the programmatic landscape by putting the control back in the hands of publishers and advertisers. Troy Young has been through the various interactions of digital media going back to the start. During the dot-com boom, he was an executive at early web marketing agency Organic. During Web 2.0, he decamped for video ad network VideoEgg, which turned into Say Media, a hybrid tech platform and vertical publisher, eventually landing at Hearst Magazines, where he was president. Now, he qualifies as officially Web3 curious , if not ready to start his day with “gm” tweet and regularly rely on riddles to explain what’s seemingly inexplicable in crypto. “It's an incredible time to be a curio
Mon, January 03, 2022
Axios' Sara Fischer on the year ahead in digital media
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Hope everyone’s 2022 is off to a good start. I’m kicking off a new mini-season of episodes this month that will focus on what to expect this year in digital media. To start, I spoke with Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, who has chronicled the industry for the past five years with the Axios Media Trends weekly newsletter. As a reminder, please leave a rating and review of The Rebooting Show on Apple Podcasts . The key to sustainable media business models is having a tight relationship with your audience. That means understanding them. Audigent helps leading publishers like Penske Media and Fandom to unlock the power of their audiences with an industry-leading data activation, curation and identity platform that’s supported with best-in-class tools and teams that boost business outcomes. Audigent was founded on the belief that first-party audience data is a critical asset, today and into the cookieless future. The Audigent Platform is a flexible, turnkey solution that improves business for publishers of all sizes. I’ve always thought of the opacity of the digital media system as more of a feature than a bug. As a reporter that means sorting out what success looks like in an industry where smoke and mirrors have long been deployed as a strategy. “The industry is going through sort of a reckoning around measuring success,” said Sara Fischer. “It's hard to quantify progress in the industry, whether it's television or digital. We just don't seem to have a ubiquitous understanding of how to measure success.” Here’s what Sara expects to be major storylines in digital media in 2022. Expect more consolidation, only smaller deals 2022 presented a unique M&A market for the digital media industry. With a booming stock market and ample opportunities for financing, the focus was on big corporate moves like BuzzFeed’s SPAC and Vox Media’s purchase of Group Nine . But the year to come will likely be less splashy as big digital media players do smaller deals. “There's going to be less talk about consolidation happening through SPACs. It's going to be more traditional and tha
Mon, December 27, 2021
Rishad Tobaccowala on navigating a changed world
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Happy holidays. I’m wrapping up the year with a final podcast and then, on Wednesday, I’ll send out the second annual Rebooting Awards. In the meantime, my final podcast of the year is with Rishad Tobaccowala, a longtime advertising executive who is now also publishing his own newsletter, The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past . If you enjoy The Rebooting Show, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts – or share it with others. But first, a message from this week’s sponsor, Mediaocean. Next week many are heading to Vegas for CES, the annual confab of the tech, media and advertising worlds. I know some of you will be skipping the action this year, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out. Mediaocean has set up a livestream of its programming of the Mediaocean Retreat so you can still enjoy the thought leadership the Retreat will feature from an array of top executives, including Twitter chief customer officer Sarah Personette, Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady and S4 Capital CEO Martin Sorrell, not to mention my podcast guest this week, Rishad Tobaccowala. The programming will run Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 from 12pmPST to 4pmPST. Check out the agenda and register now . Be sure to tick the box for virtual and you’ll receive access links. Also, the recordings will be available on demand following the event. Rishad Tobaccowala has long been known in the advertising industry for his sage view of the need to embrace change – “Change sucks. Irrelevance worse.” – often delivered through pithy phrases and neatly numbered lists of points. For the final episode of 2021, I wanted to speak to Rishad to take stock of where we are and where we’re going as we come up on two years into the pandemic era. For Rishad, the pandemic is a marker of a profound shift, part of what he calls the Gre
Mon, December 20, 2021
The Slowdown's less frenetic approach to media
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify What a strange end to the year, with Omicron the march, inflation jitters and more unknowns than seemingly ever before. But there’s not the same amount of panic and anxiety as the spring 2020 — positive Covid tests seem to be the new social media flex. Nearly two years into this pandemic era, we’ve grown resilient, whether we dwell on it or not. We have so many more tools and knowledge now than when this all started, and we are also just better equipped ourselves to deal with the ups and downs and uncertainties. The last two episodes of The Rebooting Show this year are tied to this theme, considering what we have figured out since the pandemic began. This week, I spoke to Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman, co-founders of The Slowdown , a media company focused on making sense of the world around us. When the pandemic hit, they started At a Distance , a podcast in which they shared conversations with an array of influential people about how we should rethink the world. The resulting interviews became fodder for a new book . Thanks to Mediaocean, sponsor of these year-end episodes. Covid was momentous from the start, even if we just called it by the generic coronavirus. Once cities started shutting down, it was clear this wasn’t a passing blip or even a localized shock. It wasn’t 9/11 or the Financial Crisis. The scale was unimaginable. The entire world on pause. For those lucky enough to be forced to isolate — health care and essential workers didn’t have this luxury — the pandemic was a forced period of reflection. Many didn’t like what they saw. For The Slowdown, just a year old as a company, its bet that the frenetic pace of the world was unsustainable turned out to be on the nose. Without being able to host its intimate conversations for Time Sensitive , The Slowdown’s conversation series with influential figures in business, arts and culture, Spencer and Andrew decided to move to Zoom with a new podcast, At a Distance, a podcast that gathered luminaries to use the forced isolation we all dealt with in order to think big thoughts about what comes next. At a Distance has <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/at-a-distance/id1504301339" rel="n
Mon, December 13, 2021
How Silverblade Partners addresses the media's business's cashflow crunch
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify This week, I’m wrapping up the first mini-season of The Rebooting Show. This season was dedicated to modern B2B businesses. If you haven’t already, please check out the first four episodes of the season: Adam White of Front Office Sports discussed the advantages of bootstrapping . Julia Noran Johnston of Business of Home shared how she found an underserved niche in interior designers . Angus Macaulay of Stat explained its Politico-like model for life sciences . Industry Dive’s Sean Griffey spoke about the advantages of finding valuable but overlooked industry segments . To cap off the season, this week’s episode is what I’m calling a Spotlight episode. This is an opportunity for the underwriter of the season to explain how they’re partnering with publishers to build sustainable media businesses. I treat these podcasts like all the others, and I only work with companies addressing real problems in the building of sustainable media businesses. This week’s Spotlight episode is a conversation with Bernard Urban, CEO of Silverblade Partners , a strategic finance partner to publishers agencies and ad tech firms. Thanks to Silverblade for being The Rebooting Show’s launch sponsor. When I started to report on the media business, two things quickly became clear that I found odd: nobody could agree on how to measure audiences, and nobody paid each other on time. Publishers and agencies always complained bitterly about crazy payment terms. The way it usually works is those with the most leverage, ie the most money, force the smaller party to wait for long periods of time, up to 180 days. Of course, the problem is your everyday costs as a business – salaries, rent, tech systems – are constant, creating a cashflow crunch. Stretched payment terms has created a velocity mismatch: The media business moves incredibly fast, only the financial system underpinning it slogs along like molasses. For many publishers, this means running a business with hi
Mon, December 06, 2021
Industry Dive's path to $100m in revenue
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify This week’s episode of The Rebooting Show features a conversation I had with one of my favorite media success stories: Industry Dive, a collection of vertical industry sites. Sean and his team have grown Industry Dive into an example of a sturdy media business, on pace to break the $100 million in revenue mark next year with healthy margins. One request: If you listen to The Rebooting Show on Apple Podcasts, please leave a rating and review. Thanks to Alfred Westcott, who left a very nice review that ranked me “one of the best interviewers in media.” Industry Dive is one of the most successful modern digital media businesses, even if it doesn’t get the attention of splashy consumer titles. Sean Griffey, who founded Industry Dive in 2012 along with Ryan Willumson and Eli Dickenson, doesn’t mind flying under the radar compared to splashy consumer brands while Industry Dive focuses on industry verticals like retail, marketing, utilities and more. “This is a better business. It’s great you’re targeting millennial fashion consumers, but I’m in the electric utilities space and that matters to everyone. The industries we write about touch every person. I leaned into the boring part because I know it’s important. You call it boring, I call it profitable.” It helps that Sean has receipts. 340 employees 2.5 million email subscriptions 25 publications $85 million in revenue this year, $100 million expected next year EBITDA margins above 25% Here are key takeaways from our conversation: Details matter For all the talk of vision, the media business is an execution game. Industry Dive began in 2012 with a handful of publications and the idea that it would differentiate by providing a better user experience, focusing on the right industries, and sticking to what the team knew best. “We thought there would be a chance to use the mobile experience to differentiate ourselves. We wanted to invest heavily in design. In business media it was pretty horrific. We wanted to invest in content. We thought niche media had abandoned that for leads over time.” The power of niche Scale and niche aren’t in opposition as often presented. But many digital media companies born around the time of Industry Dive took a different path. They focused more on general news audiences ins
Mon, November 29, 2021
The Rebooting Show: Stat wants to be the Politico of health
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify For episode 3 of The Rebooting Show’s mini-season focused on modern B2B media, I spoke to Angus Macaulay, COO of Stat , the health-focused site that’s one of my favorite niche media brands. Please send me an email with any feedback. Also, please rate and review the podcast. Thanks to Niceguyappreviewer, who said The Rebooting Show is “such a valuable podcast for media entrepreneurs,” noting the “insightful, actionable and relevant information.” Thank you, Niceguyappreviewer. Politico’s model has long been an aspiration of many niche media companies , even before Axel Springer shelled out $1 billion to buy it. The reason: Politico was able to pull off the “prosumer” model of providing in-depth, insider coverage of a niche (politics) that straddled the line of consumer impact but with the advantages of a B2B business model that typically affords an opportunity for high-priced subscriptions. Stat, born out of the Boston Globe Media in 2015, wants to pull off the Politico model for life sciences. The site, which operates independently and has 70 people, had a breakout moment during the pandemic as the world’s attention by necessity turned to the issues that are squarely in Stat’s wheelhouse. Stat’s monthly traffic peaked at 23 million in March 2020 vs 4.7 million the prior month. The site’s revenue was up 40% in 2021 vs 2020, with subscription revenue up 24% . “Before Covid, when we’d talk to people at conferences or to advertisers, it was either we know Stat and love it or I never heard of it,” said Angus Macaulay, Stat’s COO. “We were still a new brand. There was still an awareness brand. When Covid exploded, people in the healthcare industry were also trying to keep up on all the breakthroughs, and many in the ecosystem relied on us as a source. Our awareness in the healthcare ecosystem went through the roof.” Here are five key takeaways from the conversation: Find a local story with global impact The idea for Stat came out of a dinner Boston Globe Media owner John Henry had with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who noted that while Boston didn’t have the tech scene that Silicon Valley has “you have the life sciences and the entire infrastructure with the academia in Boston as well.”
Mon, November 22, 2021
The Rebooting Episode 2
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Thanks for the notes following the debut of The Rebooting Show. You can subscribe now on both Apple and Spotify. We’re working hard to improve the audio quality, and I’m going to make sure the episodes get shorter. I’m always interested to hear your feedback. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com . One request: If you like the podcast, please rate it and leave a review. This week’s episode features Julia Noran Johnston, founder and president of the Business of Home , a vertical media company focused on the interior design industry. I wanted to speak with Julia for a few reasons. I’m always interested in speaking to former journalists who are now running businesses, since I tend to think they build differently than those who come from the sales or operations side. The other reason is the category. B2B is often knocked as boring, but there are many areas that blend consumer elements. The home is one of those. Julia’s advice for those building new media businesses: “Find your community. There has to be a community to support what you’re doing. Find a place that’s relatively untapped because that gives you the advantage and opportunity for success.” Here are five key takeaways from the conversation: Finding your niche Building a business media brand means finding an underserved audience, ideally one with buying power. In the 2000s, Julia had shifted from journalism to a marketing role at Condé Nast’s Veranda magazine. What she noticed was that many requests for proposals listed interior designers as their target. “They were the volume buyers of the product,” she said. “In some cases, they were 100% of the buying base. I started to realize they were very valuable and what a premium audience that was, and at Veranda we weren’t isolating that audience.” Community > audience The most sustainable media brands focus on communities that share an interest and want to connect with each other. That’s why some of the most successful media brands -- Complex (streetwear), Barstool (bros who gamble), Hodinkee (watch collectors) -- are built around communities. Going to many interior design events in New York, Julia recognized that designers were a real community. “I was hanging out with designers, it was a real community that existed and there wasn’t a publication serving that community at all. I saw the opportunity for the com
Mon, November 15, 2021
Introducing The Rebooting Show
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts — more platforms coming soon. After a year break from podcasting, I’ve finally started anew with The Rebooting Show, a weekly audio and video discussion that goes into the details of building sustainable media businesses with those building them. (The video is still in the works, and it will take a bit of time before the podcast feed is available on Apple and Spotify. Apologies.) The goal for the show is to focus on the mechanics and execution since I believe too much is generally made of “vision” in the media business. There aren’t a ton of secrets; those who succeed tend to simply excel at executing the details. My goal is to get beyond the PR spin that’s, unfortunately, a feature of most business podcasts. I always knew a podcast would likely suck if multiple PR people showed up with the guest. It was nearly guaranteed if the guest then took out a sheet of talking points. You’d be surprised how many big media executives feel uncomfortable simply answering questions about what, in theory, they’re responsible for doing. My plan is to break the podcast into mini-seasons of five episodes focused on a theme. This first season is focused on modern B2B media businesses, a topic near to my own experience. B2B has long been treated as something of a backwater, at best a stepping stone to consumer titles. That’s always sold B2B short. There are many terrible, old school B2B publishers and events companies, but there are a new crop of modern players emerging who are still focused on going deep on the ins and outs of their business areas but do so with a higher focus on in-depth reporting, slick packaging and diverse business models. In many ways, I think consumer media can learn more from B2B than vice versa since B2B has always focused on direct connections (often through email), communities and diverse business models that aren’t reliant on advertising. That’s why I wanted to talk to Adam White, the CEO of FOS, home to Front Office Sports and Sports Section. Adam started Front Office Sports while still a student at the University of Miami in 2014. His cobbled-together Wix site was meant as a foot into a sports marketing career but grew to the point where Adam made the plunge into starting a business out of it. I’ve always liked Front Office Sports and how Adam and his team have thoughtfully built the company and continued to execute. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of Front Office Sports, the white space they saw in the market, their approach to differentiation, and the decision to build off their B2B base with newsletters aimed at a wider consumer audience. Some highlights from our discussion: The importance of talking to your audience </p
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