I’m looking forward to tonight's first NYC edition of the TRB Media Mixer. We plan to do these regularly as a way to get together Media People for informal conversation and connection. Thanks to Beehiiv for sponsoring tonight’s gathering. (Get in touch if you’d like to host or sponsor a future Mixer.)
Today, The Rebooting is releasing its latest research project, an examination of the increasingly strategic role email is playing as infrastructure. Plus: A conversation with Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk about why email, not the website, is often playing the hub in a hub-and-spokes strategy.
Do you have an audience strategy?
We learned in our State of Audience Report that 65% of media companies don’t have a formal strategy for growing and developing their audience.
A documented, top-down audience development strategy can mean the difference between revenue and ruin for your brand. So, we reached out to leading media and audience professionals to create a guide and several handy templates for leaders to build and customize a formal audience strategy and plan.
Get the full blueprint you need to identify and prioritize your audience’s needs, execute on your objectives, and help make the business case with senior executives.
Email as infrastructure
In our latest research report, done in partnership with Beehiiv, we surveyed 70 publishers to better understand the role email is playing in their strategies. We found that email has moved from the periphery to a more central role as the weight of these businesses shifts to focused audience strategies and away from broad traffic models.
Three takeaways:
Email is infrastructure. Media often thinks in terms of channels. Email is different. It serves as a connective tissue that unites disparate parts of publisher business models. 84% of the 70 media professionals surveyed call email "mission-critical" or "very important" to their audience strategy, and 53% say it's their primary owned audience channel. Nearly 70% say email is more important to their business than it was two years ago, with only 6% saying it's become less important.
Engagement is the North Star. Email’s flexibility means it can be used for many purposes. Most of our respondents have coalesced around the job to be done for email: audience engagement. 80% of respondents say engagement metrics (opens, clicks) are their primary measure of success — nearly double the share who cite audience growth (44%) and well ahead of revenue (33%). 43% report that engagement has increased over the past year versus just 10% who saw declines, suggesting newsletters are deepening reader relationships even as lists scale.
Email is still growing. Email is now almost Tk years old. Its demise has been predicted annually ever since. Yet email persists, and likely will continue to do even as AI agents are let loose on the world. 63% of respondents saw their email lists grow over the past 12 months, and the dominant acquisition source is direct signups on owned properties (81%). Paid acquisition (23%), social (29%), and search (20%) trail far behind. That said, 24% say they're currently struggling to grow, showing the channel isn't a guaranteed win.
The direct path
The Rebooting x House of Kaizen Audience Revenue Lab helps publishers build direct, durable relationships with audiences and grow sustainable, owned revenue models that don’t depend on platforms. House of Kaizen’s decades of experience growing subscriptions across media and product industries, paired with The Rebooting’s industry intelligence, insights into shifting audience behaviors, and best practices from leading publishers. Learn more
Email as launching pad
A resonant analogy that emerged from our Durable Revenue Strategies dinner last week is that publishers are dealing with a sinking ship by deploying smaller speedboats (or life rafts in some cases). Those speedboats have in common that they’re all smaller and tend to be focused on specific audience segments.
Enter email. The reason email is a strategic asset is that it is one of the most direct connections a publisher can have with its audience – and allows publishers to segment their audience into smaller groups that can then be served with specific products, aka the speedboats.
Yesterday, we held a TRB Expert Session with Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk. We discussed the the strategic role email is playing in modern media strategies. Three takeaways:
Email is a strategic asset. Publishers have to be multi-model to effectively serve their audiences. What email does do is serve as the hub of various spokes, whether podcasts, video, events, community or commerce. Tyler uses the example of Colin and Samir, YouTube creators who cover…. YouTube creators. (I’m not one to judge, to be fair.) They used YouTube as their main channel, but building an email franchise with The Publish Press allowed them to get into events. “It's not just one form of media,” Tyler said. “There's so many different ways to meet your audience where they are and extract value from them and provide value to them."
Creators and publishers aren’t so different. There’s increasingly little difference between so-called creators and enterprise publishers. They are all competing for attention and influence, and more often than not, for the same advertisers. Top talent continues to leave legacy outlets to set up their own shops. The equation is shifting with these journalists maintaining ties to mainstream organizations. Joanna Stern has left The Wall Street Journal to publish through YouTube and Beehiiv, yet she is also the chief tech correspondent for NBC News. "The creator use case and the enterprise use case are going to merge quicker than most people expect,” Tyler said.
Email traffic is higher quality. Publishers still need to operate traffic business models. More are relying on email newsletters as a traffic source. This can’t replace the raw tonnage of search traffic that’s disappeared, but email traffic tends to be far higher quality. Email can pass on identity signals that enriches the ad impression. “Te power of email is that first-party data,” Tyler said. “You are extracting more revenue on your website by driving them through the newsletter."
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