TRB Audience Summit is on Sept 17 in NYC. Our private salons that will dig into the mechanics of the media business with conversational case studies led by top audience, product and revenue executives from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, People Inc, The Associated Press, The Daily Beast, the BBC, McClatchy, Morning Brew, Skift, The Free Press, Front Office Sports, KCRW, USA Today Co and more.
TRB Audience Summit salons will focus on a variety of topics, including:
Post-traffic audience acquisition and engagement
The new pivot to video
AI product development
For sponsorship information, please contact Richard Jamieson, who recently joined TRB to lead commercial partnerships. Richard is the former publisher of Press-Gazette. Reach out at [email protected].
Unlock your audience data with Omeda
Most publishers have plenty of audience data. The problem is they haven’t turned it into something a sales team can actually sell. This new report from Omeda shows how publishers are packaging engagement data into repeatable ad products that give advertisers a clearer reason to buy. Learn more.
Content marketing 2.0
Media is always about managing the tension between the needs of the audience and the needs to pay the bills. Go with ads, you’re misaligned with audience needs because you focus on a different customer. Subscriptions means 95% won’t pay. For a time, commerce provided a third path, only for its potential to be curtailed as a high-intent search traffic made growth far harder.
Content marketing has gone from a supporting to a main character. Silicon Valley is hooked on content marketing. VCs spend as much of their time creating it. The Go Direct playbook has been rebranded New Media, as Big Tech looks to first principles. The best way around conflicts is to turn them into an advantage.
The underlying economics of content marketing are superior to modern media’s rickety options for monetization. Media is best as a side hustle. The quality of content marketing 2.0 often rivals or exceeds traditional/independent media business models because they’re funded from marketing budgets for products with big gross margins. Content marketing side hustles have gone from “cute to a real thing,” Troy noted on PvA.
It was TBPN’s “marketing instincts” that got it a reported $200 million valuation from OpenAI. TBPN’s European copycat, ETN, closed a $1.6 million funding round recently. If tech media is anything to go by, content marketing will become more powerful than independent media. Which has more influence: All-In or TechCrunch?
Consider that exit against what Daily Beast will fetch in the market. The publication has a rich pedigree and shown signs of success under Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood but has never found a reliable business model, bouncing between programmatic ads and subscriptions. It’s current approach is a bit of an all-of-the-above strategy combined with cost cutting. The go-to model at most publishers now is a variation of a PE playbook. In that environment, content marketing 2.0 is a far more palatable alternative.
From a first principles approach, media business models are a hopeless set of contradictions. You wouldn’t lose control of your distribution or outsource your monetization. Ads have always been friction, with their needs for attention acting as a UX tax. The open web experience is often a horror show.
HubSpot has built a stable of its owned media, with a focus on YouTube shows, that powers a lead-gen content marketing operation. Watch an episode of My First Million with ad legend Rory Sutherland, then download the $1 million attention guide.
It’s hard to say this is a worse model for all concerned than 14 ad placements on a Scott Galloway podcast.
Content marketing 2.0 eliminates ad friction by entwining marketing with the content. TBPN continues as the same show it used to be. It was always a supporter of startups and the advancement of the tech industry.
The big difference is OpenAI’s comms are far better. Sam Altman presented far more compellingly on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best. Sounds simple and not worth $250 million, only then Altman tweets about using ChatGPT as a substitute for talking to your kids. OpenAI got a steal.
Content marketing has always been underpriced in the media market. Publishers spun up content studios as yet another side hustle. BuzzFeed was the rare example of a publisher who embedded it as core to their DNA, only to pivot to programmatic once it found the agency business is the second worst business to publishing.
Publishers will adopt content marketing business models. Shane Smith is adopting a content marketing model in his reboot of Vice News. The strongest media business models use the upside of media to gain leverage in markets with better economics. Bloomberg Media is content marketing for the Terminal.
The reality of a high octane events business like Semafor’s or Time’s is you are in the content marketing business. Events themselves are powered by content marketing. Few keep the chocolate and peanut butter apart. At an early Digiday event, I was told a sponsored session sucked. We then started a content studio to help clients improve — my hypothesis: nobody gets up in the morning wanting to suck — and open a new revenue line while improving the product.
The problem with content studios is they were seen as a backwater. You shuffled off underperformers to them, and the pay was better because the social status was lower. New-style content marketing is not a side thing, it’s the main thing.
TBPN as an ads business alone doesn’t get $250 million, no matter its F1 team approach to sponsorship. Semafor’s $330 million valuation isn’t from its newsletter ad business.
Creators are often turning to content marketing as a better way to monetize trust and distribution. Selling a product is almost always a better answer than selling ads. The best models in the Information Space are around individuals like Alex Hormozi that use content to sell information products.
The business information market is flooded with new-style content marketing from every manner of tech company. Corgi, an AI insurance startup, is opening cafes. This is another form of content marketing. When tech and even ideas commoditize, distribution and brand differentiation become more valuable.
This creates its own set of conflicts. No media business model is pure. The job is to manage those tensions. Maybe it’s a more honest model. I know full well TBPN’s conflicts and even those of all the VC talking heads. I don’t believe I’m getting a straight take from All-In. Practitioner Media embraces a no conflict, no interest ethos. Meanwhile Semafor gets grief for having corporate advisory boards. Read the room.
Media is more valuable than ever, even if the old monetization methods are broken.
Meet Linda
PvA Field Notes is a community where we connect the dots to understand the second-order impacts of the tech, economic and cultural forces that are shaping the future of the media business. We have a new participant: Linda, an AI agent who acts like an in-house Grok to provide context on demand. The latest topics:
Leopold Aschenbrenner, head of AI hedge fund Situational Awareness, emerges as a new Main Character with a compelling backstory – and the good sense to run conference-style panels at his wedding.
AI continuing to blur roles inside organizations and erode middle management
Influencers feeling the pinch. Welcome to media.
Why TIME’s email engagement is soaring
TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
Funding investigative journalism is a unique challenge. On The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Scott Stedman, an independent investigative journalist who is using a coffee subscription service as a business model to fund his open-source investigations at The Newsground. He’s attempting to recreate the news subsidy that was lost with the unbundling of media. Scott and I discuss his career, why he doesn’t believe in the business model of journalism companies and why accountability journalism will find innovative models.
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