Today’s issue:
Blockworks’ secret to sending 7 daily newsletters
When Blockworks pivoted to a newsletter-first strategy, they needed an email platform built for scale. Today, they run seven daily newsletters, each powered by beehiiv. With centralized analytics, automated segmentation, and an integrated ad network, their team moves faster, monetizes smarter, and never worries about de-platforming. What used to require multiple tools now happens in one intuitive dashboard, saving their team hours every day. From design to deliverability, beehiiv gives Blockworks the control to grow across audiences, formats, and revenue streams without ever slowing down.
The Economist adapts to an individualistic era
The Economist has long been a journalistic outlier in running unbylined pieces. That’s an awkward fit for a world of creators and personal brands.
The brand is beginning to lift the veil with a new streaming show, The Insider, a twice weekly show with The Economist’s editors and outside experts launched a month. On a recent episode, Steve Bannon told The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes that Donald Trump would run for a third term.
The Economist president Luke Bradley-Jones will join me tomorrow on an episode of TRB Live to discuss how the publication evolves its product, tone, and audience strategy while preserving what makes it distinctive. We’ll discuss the tradeoffs between accessibility and authority, experimentation and restraint, and how legacy institutions can remain relevant in a post-platform world.
How Axios segments its audience
Most publishers have gotten the message that they need to be audience focused, even if they’re still operating the traffic model in order to make the shift. But being audience focused is not enough for many, particularly after years of stretching their brands to fit whatever the algorithm preferred.
Instead, publishers need to understand not just their overall audience but the segments within it that their products serve. The best publications will either be niche or a collection of niches with specific audience types in mind. In many ways, it’s the triumph of B2B, which typically operates around specific job titles as audience proxies.
This is most clear in the brands that operate in the nexus of B2C and B2B, with brands that are well known to many while focused on specific professionals in business, governing or other areas of influence. Axios is one of the stalwarts of this area, started nearly nine years ago – I’m getting old – with the familiar concept that “the news is broken” and the more novel idea that articles should be shorter. Axios expanded beyond the Politico roots of its founders by including areas like finance, business, media and local. It’s made its missteps like a foray into sports.
Jacquelyn Cameron, Axios’s CRO, told me on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show that Axios slices its audience into five core segments:
Influencers. These are the people who shape policy and power in Washington and beyond. Axios’s “no opinion” rule is designed to get credibility on both sides. This is the core of Axios’s corporate affairs business.
C-suite and C-1 Executives. Top decision-makers and their immediate deputies – CEOs, CFOs, COOs, general managers – who control budgets and the direction of these enterprises. Axios builds products and events aimed at helping them make faster, smarter decisions.
Dealmakers and Investors. This group includes corporate development leaders, private equity and venture capital investors, and others involved in deal flow. ProRata is a critical Axios franchise for this group, expanding in Tk to ProDeals, its high-priced, B2B subscription focused on transactions.
Media and Communicators. With Sara Fischer-led Axios Media Trends and Eleanor Hawkins-led Axios Communicators, Axios has identified what Jacquelyn calls a “rising economic buyer” in corporate chief communications officers. In a world increasingly shaped by narrative, media is arguably undervalued, only because its monetization systems are broken.
Smart Local Professionals. Axios continues to expand into the local level. Its take on this is to focus on national brands that want to spread economic or civic messaging as opposed to selling to the local pizza shop. This is a twist on the local model that is focused on localizing campaigns for national or at least regional brands.
Underpinning all of this is an internal group called Axios Intelligence that brings to bear all the information Axios has about these influential audience segments.
“We're sitting on a pile of priceless information when it comes to how these critical profiles consume editorial content,” Jacquelyn said. “I now have the ability to understand that and create much more performative recommendations for our clients through the use of AI within our Axios Intelligence team.”
Other topics we discussed:
Government and business are more entwined than in recent memory. The mercantilist era of Trump may use anti-government rhetoric, but the the government is highly involved in the economy and specific businesses.
Events as the "physical manifestation of the newsroom.” Axios approaches its events from a live journalism perspective, with a focus on getting the most influential people in the room.
AI for sales. Axios uses a custom GPT to arm its sales team with priority prospecting lists based on news trends and other data. “I want every human to become superhuman,” Jacquelyn said. “AI is helping us remove as much rote work as possible so people can run faster.”
Thanks to Beehiiv for sponsoring The Rebooting Show. See how it powers the email operations of leading publishers like Blockworks.
On PvA, Alex and I discuss how media companies risk losing their ability to make good products mostly because the marketplace had other incentives. Now, with these companies scrambling to shift to audience-focused models, the test will be whether they can keep up with product-driven tech organizations. Other topics we covered along with an Anonymous Banker cameo:
Why business models often work against good media products, handicapping the prospects for CNN All-Access, Brian Chesky as product CEO, media companies are run by financializers like David Zaslav, the myth of AI-driven layoffs versus the reality of managerial bloat, managerial capitalism and performative work, the AI productivity mirage and the absence of measurable gains, Covid-era overhiring and the slow unwinding of tech’s headcount bloat, AI as rhetorical cover for cost-cutting, the cultural swing back toward confrontation and competition, OpenAI’s 100-gigawatt plan and trillion-dollar infrastructure bubble, the AI hype cycle and real-world product stagnation, delivery robots stranded on sidewalks and the uneven arrival of the Jetsons future, Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation and the absurd inflation of tech market caps, Satya Nadella showing up on TBPN as trade media 2.0, podcasts as the new CNBC built on personality and boosterism, Tim Wu’s “The Age of Extraction” and the rentier economy, Travis Kelce as an activist investor and the dubious value of celebrity investors, AOL’s sale to Italian private equity and call-center capitalism, ad tech’s gray area between extractive and additive systems, TRB collaborator Daniel Kolitz’s viral “Goon Squad” and the survival of craft journalism, Isaac Chotiner’s viral KJP interview car crash and the Q&A as literary combat.
Introducing the Audience Revenue Lab
The Audience Revenue Lab is a collaboration between The Rebooting and House of Kaizen. The Audience Revenue Lab will work directly with publishers as an extension of their teams to assist them in implementing to audience-focused strategies.
We’re combining The Rebooting’s insights into where audience behaviors are shifting and what best practices have emerged from industry leaders with House of Kaizen’s wo decades optimizing subscription growth across industries.
For sponsorship information, see how The Rebooting works with partners.