Today’s conversation: Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman spoke with me about how experiential is a rising part of its business. On PvA: The trust crisis is coming to algorithms and AI.
I’m in New Orleans for the BIMS conference, where later today I’ll be speaking about how the decentralization of the Information Space will affect B2B publishers.
I find B2B media gatherings refreshing, since the compression that’s beset most of consumer publishing isn’t nearly as pronounced in B2B media, which has always focused on direct connections with the audience and clients and leaned on events. More than anytime in my career, the conversations that consumer publishers are having are similar to the ones B2B publishers have long had.
It’s also a reminder that for all the AI galaxy-brain agentic talk, there’s a real economy that needs brands with convening power. I learned yesterday that The Farm Journal has rolled out The Avocado Conference. The U.S. avocado market alone is $4 billion, which is shocking to me because I don’t think I saw an avocado in my entire childhood.
Newsweek is making the move to beehiiv
Why is an industry leader like Newsweek migrating their newsletter program to beehiiv? Let’s get it straight from the source: "We needed to be able to run newsletters as its own business within Newsweek, and a platform like beehiiv gives us more capabilities and opportunities to monetize those newsletters," said Bharat Krish, Chief Product Officer at Newsweek.
beehiiv’s ecosystem of tools is core to their ambitious growth plans, as they look to scale their flagship Bulletin newsletter while launching new subscriptions. Krish added, "I'm excited about partnering with a team that's tech-first and has an entrepreneurial mindset." Keep an eye out for Newsweek’s partnership with beehiiv launching in mid-December, and learn more about working with beehiiv here.
Content and community
When publishers would talk to me about their commerce operations, I would mentally replace commerce with affiliate, and then I’d replace affiliate with SEO. For most publishers, commerce offered a better method of monetization of high-intent traffic, often via Google, compared to programmatic ads.
The decline of the commerce model at most publishers came with the sharp declines in search traffic. Without those high intent signals, there was little left to arbitrage. There are outliers to this trend. Forbes, People Inc and others still have robust commerce operations. Yet the commerce pile-on of the late 2010s and early 2020s has mostly ended.
Recurrent rode this wave. The rollup of niche media brands in auto, military and home, has seen affiliate revenues drop from 30% of revenue to about 10% over the past few years. This is a common story at publishers. Affiliate at most publishers was a form of search arbitrage, and no arbitrage lasts forever.
“What we’re really talking about is the way that the Google search results are laid out,” Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman told me on The Rebooting Show. “We have to almost use a wayback machine of our own minds and think about what Google looked like a couple of years ago, where it was a couple of sponsored links and then you’d have the organic results. Now you’ve got an AI overlay, you’ve got a shopping overlay, if you’re looking at travel you’ve got a travel overlay, then you’ve got the sponsored results, and then you’ve got the organic results. Google has gobbled up the affiliate results because it’s sitting right under the search bar when you’re looking for products.”
This is a familiar story at publishers. Google is simply sending less traffic, and the arrival of generative AI and agentic AI points to a complete breakdown of traffic economy. Publishers need to do triage to that part of their business while building the replacement. For many publishers, that answer is events.
Events have become a key part of publishing models. Semafor is building its business model around them. A distressed brand like Business Insider points to events as a critical part of its growth strategy. People Inc, which operated a very successful traffic model, is hosting an “events showcase” to promote its experiential offerings. I’d say events are named as a strategic priority 10x more often at The Rebooting’s gatherings than programmatic or affiliate.
The media environment is vastly different from when Andrew co-founded Recurrent in 2018 with the acquisition of The Drive. The Blackstone-backed rollup went through rocky times, with Andrew rejoining the business in 2022 and assuming the CEO role in 2023.
Five years ago, Recurrent’s experiential revenue was “essentially zero,” Andrew said. Now, it’s 12% of the business and growing. Recurrent is aimed at creating scalable franchises in its key niches, particularly military and auto. Case in point is the Military Influencer Conference, which Recurrent acquired in 2020 and is on track to have 4,000 attendees next year. It had 400 when Recurrent bought it.
That event acts like a “reunion,” Andrew said, making the case that these type of events can become recurring. Events overall get a bad rap from some for being not scalable.
Recurrent also has events in auto under its Donut Media. Its HiLow series, where two teams modify the same car with different budgets, attracted 6,000 attendees to a drag strip in Arizona. The event feeds into the media, creating the connection that sometimes can go missing when media companies scramble into experiential.
Donut did eight events last year, testing different formats. Recurrent aims to do its events at a 30% profit margin. About 70% of experiential revenue is from sponsorships, with the rest coming from ticket sales.
“When you get to a certain level of scale, you actually are approaching the margins that we see in digital media,” he said. “It’s something that’s very profitable.”
Other topics we discussed:
Pivoting to video. While text remains part of the mix, Andrew sees video, particularly distributed via YouTube, as the primary growth engine, both because distribution barriers have fallen and because audiences form stronger personal connections with personalities.
The FAST opportunity. Recurrent is packaging its back catalog into FAST channels, starting with Donut, as a way to extract more value from its content library.
Balancing centralization and specialization. Multi-brand portfolios always run into the question of how much to centralize. Recurrent operates shared services for back office functions, but events, video, and sponsorship execution largely sit inside individual verticals like auto and military, reflecting the view that domain expertise matters more than central efficiency.
The trust crisis is often treated as an issue for legacy media, but it is a systemic feature of the Information Space. The debut of Clawdbot, an open source project that allows an AI agent to take control of a computer and execute tasks, has shown that the next phase of AI’s development will be agentic. The question underpinning this will again come down to trust. We are already seeing signs of distrust in black boxes. As Troy points out in our latest episode of PvA, we don’t trust men in masks. TikTok is finding this out as its new ownership has caused distrust in its algorithm. The lengths OpenAI went to emphasize that ChatGPT would not be biased by its adoption of advertising is a sign that algorithms and AI won’t be immune to the trust crisis.
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