The Rebooting Show
Brian Morrissey
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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.
therebooting.substack.com
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5 days ago
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.
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Nov 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.
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Nov 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.
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Nov 9, 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.
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Nov 2, 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.
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Oct 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.
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Oct 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.
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Oct 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.
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Oct 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.
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Oct 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.”
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Oct 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.
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Oct 3, 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.
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Sep 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:
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The shift in publisher incentives to build trust vs build traffic
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Why direct sold advertising is back in vogue
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Whether GDPR’s implementation gives real consumer choice or just the illusion of it
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The surprisingly large carbon footprint of digital ads
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Why the loss of ad targeting signals has become an advertiser problem
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The demise of the long tail in favor of top-tier publishers
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Why the so-called ad tech tax will come down
incre…
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Sep 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.
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Sep 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.
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Sep 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.
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Sep 5, 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
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Aug 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.
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Aug 8, 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.
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Aug 1, 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.
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Jul 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.
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Jul 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 t…
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Jul 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 s…
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Jun 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:
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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
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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
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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
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The journalist entrepreneur: “We are actively recruiti…
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Jun 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.
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Jun 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.
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Jun 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.
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Jun 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]”
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Jun 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:
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It is reporter focused. I believe…
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Jun 6, 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 happe…
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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.
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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.
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* 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 complicat…
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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…
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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:
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The benefits of being a “legacy” brand
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The importance of a brand clearly standing for something
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Why taking down a paywall was right for Time’s strategy
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How Time is building a diversified business strategy
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Why commerce content needs to sit alongside the newsroom, not in it
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Why she believes in an in-office culture
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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 wa…
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May 9, 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:
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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.”
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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.”
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After the streaming wars comes the winnowing: “You’re…
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May 2, 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.
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Apr 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.
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Apr 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.
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Apr 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.
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Apr 4, 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.
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Mar 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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Mar 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.
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Feb 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 _…
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Feb 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.
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Feb 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.
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Feb 7, 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.
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Jan 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.
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Jan 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.
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Jan 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 di…
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Jan 3, 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…
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Dec 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_.
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Dec 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 lo…
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Dec 6, 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.
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Nov 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.
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Nov 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…
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Nov 8, 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 thing…
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Nov 1, 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
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Oct 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.
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Oct 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.
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Oct 4, 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 grindin…
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Sep 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 th…
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Sep 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.
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Sep 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.…
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Sep 6, 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 someth…
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Aug 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.
Tra…
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Aug 9, 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 funne…
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Aug 2, 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 Hu…
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Jul 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. Sea…
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Jul 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…
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Jul 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 busi…
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Jun 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 man…
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Jun 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.
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Jun 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…
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Jun 7, 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. “
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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.
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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 –…
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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.
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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 do…
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May 3, 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 l…
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Apr 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…
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Apr 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…
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Apr 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,…
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Apr 4, 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…
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Mar 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…
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Mar 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 the…
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Mar 14, 2022
How Puck is putting creators at the center of a media brand
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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 publ…
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Mar 7, 2022
The Logic’s David Skok on being a journalist founder
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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 eco…
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Feb 28, 2022
Howard Mittman on 'mission-driven' publishing
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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 H…
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Feb 21, 2022
How Blockworks got to $20m in revenue in 5 years
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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. Bu…
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Feb 14, 2022
How Famous Birthdays built a data business off celebrity searches
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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…
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Feb 7, 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 pre…
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Jan 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…
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Jan 24, 2022
The Grid’s “fuller-picture” approach to news
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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…
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Jan 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 reason…
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Jan 10, 2022
Troy Young on publishing's pivot to individuals
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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…
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Jan 3, 2022
Axios' Sara Fischer on the year ahead in digital media
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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…
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Dec 27, 2021
Rishad Tobaccowala on navigating a changed world
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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…
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Dec 20, 2021
The Slowdown's less frenetic approach to media
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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 h…
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Dec 13, 2021
How Silverblade Partners addresses the media's business's cashflow crunch
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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 bu…
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Dec 6, 2021
Industry Dive’s path to $100m in revenue
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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…
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Nov 29, 2021
The Rebooting Show: Stat wants to be the Politico of health
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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 Medi…
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Nov 22, 2021
The Rebooting Episode 2
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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 build…
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Nov 15, 2021
Introducing The Rebooting Show
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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 uncomfortabl…
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