The Rebooting gathered 10 publishing executives on March 10 for the latest edition of TRB Private Table, our dinner series that features candid conversations. The theme of the evening was “durable revenue strategies.” Raptive was our underwriting partner for the gathering.
Table of Contents
The Takeaway
The most successful publishers are converging on the same structural shift: moving from scale-dependent, traffic-driven models toward smaller, deeper audience relationships monetized in a variety of ways. The prevailing metaphor of the evening was operating two businesses simultaneously: the "sinking ship" you're still extracting value from and the "lifeboat" you're building.
"We want fandoms, not randoms."
What’s working
Focusing on loyalists. One newspaper group described them as their primary growth driver, powered by an AI-driven next-best-action paywall that optimizes conversion session by session. A magazine publisher credited print as the driver of 80% annual retention rates. The room broadly agreed that legacy KPIs like sessions and uniques are misleading. One participant's most habitual audience, about 10% of monthly traffic, visits 30 to 40 times a month. "That's where I want to monetize right now. We don't need to add more ad units to the page for single visitors that come through search." On monetization, programmatic marketplace deals are a greater share of indirect ad revenue.
Events as leverage. A magazine publisher described franchise events as their core commercial product. Brands want prestige, access, and influence, and you bundle digital buys on top. "Out of Covid, people want to meet in real life. They want influence. Brands want to be in an influential room so they can drive business." Another is using events as a testing ground for identifying which journalists and editors can carry a stage, building a pipeline from editorial authority to live audience to commercial opportunity.
Owned channels as insurance. A reference publisher sends tens of millions of emails per day across sub-brands, driving both ad revenue and traffic. Email is now 15% of traffic. Another publisher is investing heavily in push notifications and CRM-driven segmentation of app users. Multiple participants described email as the channel they'd prioritized. One noted they're using social platforms purely for acquisition — running ads to capture email addresses — rather than trying to build an audience on rented land.
Acting small. The room converged on a counterintuitive thesis: the path forward isn't scale, it's depth. One publisher is running small scale local events for 300 rather than chasing ComScore audiences. "Media has to turn into a collection of small businesses and stop trying to chase a large business." A newspaper built a low-cost homeowner utility tool that solves for a specific use case. The common thread: stop optimizing for sessions and uniques, start optimizing for the 10,000 people who actually care about you. "You have four key audiences, not an audience," said one. Implicit throughout: the cost of running large media organizations (real estate, legal, HR, union obligations, tech debt) makes the transition to smaller, deeper audience models structurally difficult.
AI for operational gains. A broadcaster built an LLM on top of all their sales materials to generate pitches and will soon auto-respond to RFPs. Another built a "newsroom ERP" that tracks every story from idea to publication and democratized the data to all journalists. "Once you democratize the data, people begin to realize the things need to be done by humans – and they are non-negotiable – and the things can be done by machines.” A newspaper uses AI listeners to monitor government meetings and surface story leads in real time. The consensus: AI for reporting asistance, distribution, sales ops, and packaging — not for writing.
Sign of the apocalypse. One executive described a shift in how people consume long-form content: they listen to audiobooks while watching ambient visuals related to the story. The example was Harry Potter listeners watching scenes of Hogwarts while the narration plays — a kind of passive, atmospheric pairing that's become a growing behavior on YouTube. "It's the new reading." The implication for publishers with deep content libraries is that raw visual assets — nature footage, architectural shots, atmospheric b-roll — may have standalone monetization value as the visual layer for this emerging format.
What’s Under Pressure
Referral traffic is evaporating. Google Discover is declining across most participants, with the hit varying sharply by vertical. Travel and personal finance crushed (in a bad way), news is relatively stable. Bigger, more prominent publishers have done better than smaller ones, although Discover is prioritizing creators. The silver lining: Discover traffic is low yield. "It's cookiel-ess Safari traffic with the lowest yields. A decline in Discover is actually positive from a revenue perspective." Something to watch: Google Discover is increasingly author-driven, not brand-driven.
Meta is pulling the rug. One publisher reported its revenue per engagement on Meta's publisher monetization program has dropped to one-eighth of what it was a year ago as the platform pivots to creators. Multiple participants warned against building it into projections. The broader pattern: Meta tested publisher content, used it to build the platform, and is now opening the door to creators instead. One participant's blunt framing: "Every road, there's a cliff at the end of it. The main goal of publishing is to find the buyer before the cliff."
The open web is in peril. One participant argued the open web is bifurcating into a junk tier — "900 ad calls on ad calls, pop-ups and outbrain and AI slop, owned by an absentee landlord who's just gonna extract the money" — and a quality tier where publishers can break free of the constraints that made everything look the same. "Without SEO hanging over the product and design experience, there will be new entrants to the field that don't have to defend the past. They could just start over. Start with a login experience, AI-driven personalization. Things can look weird again. You don't need a right rail."
The talent problem has no solution. Google Discover favors individual authors over brands. Audiences follow people, not mastheads. This creates a power-law dynamic where top performers have enormous leverage — and every publisher in the room has a war story about losing them. One participant lamented losing a popular YouTube show host who immediately made "a million bucks a year" independently. Talent is harder to manage than employees, one Condé Nast veteran noted, pointing to the drama and implosion at Bon Appétit. Nobody has cracked compensation, IP ownership, or the cultural shift required to operate as a talent business inside a media company.
AI adoption is stalling on culture. One participant described firing three engineers who refused to adopt AI tools. Another described a bare-knuckle fight over 50 AI seat licenses for 400 employees. A third recounted a meeting where someone said "we're preparing our stack for agentic AI environments" and nobody could explain what that meant. The pattern: leadership wants AI adoption, the people who'd have to deploy it are afraid it eliminates their role, so they perform adoption without actually doing it. "They wave their hands and say they're doing it, and they don't really do it. Because to do it, you can't half use AI. You either are using it or you're not." Meanwhile, legacy tech debt compounds the problem. "We're still solving the tech debt from 10 years ago."
The Signal
The publishing business has moved into the small-ball era. Much of consumer digital publishing was about maximizing reach. What's emerging instead is a dozen different small strategies tailored to specific audiences, geographies, and use cases. Grand strategy is less important than relentless execution.
Notable Quotes
"If we were a consumer goods company, and you told Palmolive how we looked at our user base, they would be appalled."
"We're building a bigger rocket ship that is also plummeting to the earth."
"It's not the case that AI is going to take the jobs of journalists. But it is absolutely the case that journalists who use AI will take the jobs of journalists who do not."
"I feel like media has to turn into a collection of small businesses and stop trying to chase a large business."
"We stopped treating the print magazine as a print distribution product. It's become its own profit center."
"[The magazine] is totally AI proof. Sam Altman isn't trying to replicate how to print a magazine."
"Five years ago, programmatic was scale and tonnage. We're seeing more and more buying platforms being smarter about outcomes."
"Do you have an audience or do you have traffic?"
"Traffic is empty calories, for the most part."
"We have to start over. Be weird. Be from Milwaukee, know you're from Milwaukee. Show your face and just be strange. Don't look at the numbers, have a creative spark, and stop copying."