At our latest edition of TRB Private Table, where we gather media executives for candid conversations, one area of agreement was the central role email is playing. One publisher reported seeing email account for 15% of traffic as search has become unreliable. Email is a great transactional tool, another exec said. And most agreed that email is central to their owned audience strategies.
Join us for a virtual event next week to discuss the central role email is playing in sustainable media strategies. I’ll be joined by Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk to discuss finding from the email strategies research report we are releasing next week.The event is on March 18 at noonET.
Today, why “fandoms, not randoms” is the pithy phrase that sums up the essential challenge for publishers now, and in The Argument John McDermott fleshes out his case for The Cut for men.
Fandoms, not randoms
On Tuesday, in partnership with Raptive, we gathered a group of publishing executives at Cove in New York City for a discussion of durable revenue strategies. The conversation, held under the Chatham House Rule, reflected my ongoing observation that the essential challenge for publishing is focusing their organizations on a set of new opportunities while continuing to extract value from declining legacy businesses.
That goes beyond simple “more with less” mantras. One publishing executive used the evocative phrase “fandoms, not randoms” to describe the shift from a scale approach to engagement. Many are thinking smaller and more utility based. The days of talk of “owning” an audience have given way to more sensible approaches of how to add value to everyday lives, whether through a homeowner tool or small-scale local meetups.
“Media has to turn into a collection of small businesses and stop trying to chase a large business,” said one.
What’s working: subscriptions powered by smarter paywalls, events bundled with digital as the B2B growth engine, email for engagement and identity, and AI for backend work.
What's under pressure: Google Discover traffic is declining for most. Meta's publisher monetization has dropped sharply from what it was a year ago. AI adoption hits internal culture issues.
The case for The Cut for men
In this latest installment of The Argument, John McDermott follows up on his exegesis of the Clavicularization of media with his pitch for “The Cut for men.”
One of the general truisms of internet publishing is that you can’t predict, let alone engineer, virality. I’ve written deeply reported, meticulously crafted feature stories that failed to cause the faintest ripple, and I’ve had 250-word blog posts I riffed out in under an hour get read by millions.
I was reminded of this two weeks ago when a snippet of our back-and-forth about the men’s content ecosystem — about how there’s no male equivalent of The Cut — went viral and elicited a week’s worth of discourse.
After my tweet went viral, I discovered that several contemporaries of mine have been circling the same idea. Harry Cheadle, who used to edit me for Vice, had, unbeknownst to me, pitched a “Cut for men” two months prior on his Substack. (Great minds think alike.) Magdalene Taylor, my former colleague at MEL Magazine, posted on X that she is trying to strike that centrist, male-focused balance in her new role as senior editor at Playboy.
With so much interest in this idea, and with so many pre-existing men’s publications, why then, doesn’t this idea already exist? (Katie Notopolous, correspondent for Business Insider and perhaps the best chronicler of internet culture for the past 15 years, wondered this aloud on X.)
The overwhelming majority of responses were along this same line of thinking — that a male version of The Cut, a publication that explores the inner lives of men and the myriad cultural, professional and health issues they face, but without resorting to Leftist male feminism or reactionary, chauvinistic conservatism, is exactly what the world needs. Here’s my argument…
Thanks for reading. I’m trying new formats. Let me know what you think: [email protected].