Autonomy

Today’s conversations: In the second round of our TRB Conversations powered by EX.CO, I spoke to EX.CO CEO Tom Pachys about why the open web’s definition is shifting to become anything that isn’t a walled garden. Tom explained how streaming advertising, while a massive opportunity, has more messiness than online advertising. Plus: Uber’s Manas Mittal on mobility ads and Vayner’s Andrea Sullivan on launching a professional development network.

Listen to the conversations on The Rebooting Show

In today’s newsletter: Established media companies have a clear opportunity to build shared services models for independent creators but will struggle to make the work. This is a piece for TRB Pro members.

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Bridging the institutional-individual divide in media is a major need and opportunity.

The Substack model of abstracting the media model down to subscriptions has a ceiling. It doesn’t require an MBA to understand that operating with one revenue stream, and not making money from 95% of your audience, is a losing proposition long term. What’s more, those who achieve content-market fit inevitably need to be multimodal, whether that’s a newsletter adding a podcast or a YouTube channel adding a newsletter. And everyone needs events.

Tools have emerged for creators on the tech side. TRB partner Beehiiv is building an all-in-one platform – and they will need to be complemented with a services infrastructure because, I’m sorry to say, I don’t see the media business being automated anytime soon. Try to automate client service and succeed as a media business. 

I’ve had several conversations over the last few months with executives who are attempting to come up with a model that creates a shared infrastructure for “creators” to tap into so they do not make the mistake of rebuilding inefficient models of the past. The reality of publishing is that a majority of the company does not work on the content. Those people are important, and AI isn’t going to sell ads anytime soon, although AI tools create many efficiency opportunities in coordination and administrative tasks.

At the same time, I talk to many independent solo publishers who have achieved success, only they’re struggling to expand because covering off on all the business operations while publishing is not for the faint of heart. It’s like having multiple full-time part-time jobs. Many do not come from business backgrounds, and while none of this is rocket science, it can easily overwhelm your time and energy. 

On paper, this is a big opportunity for established media companies. Vox Media has had success with pulling off a version of this with its talent-first franchise strategy. (Listen to my conversation with Vox CRO Geoff Schiller on this topic.) Much is rightly made of the loss of audience and frankly relevance of many institutional media companies, but they still have the infrastructure to operate a professional media operation, from sales and client service to marketing and growth to product and events. The simple answer is treat this like Amazon does AWS.

But it gets stickier when it comes to the economics, autonomy and culture. For those reasons, I don’t see established media companies being able to build their own networks of independent creators. Here’s why.