Idiosyncratic media

Reminder: The Rebooting’s next Online Forum is a deep dive into how Forbes has unified its audience data. Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould will join me and BlueConic’s Matt Jarman to walk through how Forbes has wrestled its disparate sources of audience data into a unified view. Nina will provide examples of how Forbes is using this unified view to create personalized experiences.

Join us on July 30 at 1pmET for this live interactive discussion. If you cannot make it, registrants will get a link to the replay and a guide to the takeaways. 

Today, a TRB Pro members piece on idiosyncrasy as a strategy and the emerging and messy contours of our post-text, post-webpage world, as seen in the shifts to livestreaming, Substack's big new funding round, Google Discover as the next shoe to drop, Anonymous Banker on the folly of publishers building their own AI products and why AI browsers are yet another Very Big Deal.

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At one of The Rebooting’s private dinners last week, I asked a publishing executive how he expects his company’s output to change as media slips fully into an AI age. The publisher focuses on newsletters and a “faces” strategy of high-leverage individuals complementing the brand. This executive expects more idiosyncratic approaches. 

While much of the focus of the AI-and-media discussion has focused on the important issues of getting paid for training data and driving efficiencies in a more-with-less era, comparatively less has been placed on the essential question of how publishers can win loyalty in a world mediated by AI.

That's led many to lean on idiosyncrasy, both in terms of the brands they create and business models they pursue. In the Traffic Apocalpyse™, nobody knows what their businesses will look like in three years, so you might as well just do things. That will lead to messy brands and messy strategies.

The best media brands traditionally have institutional voices. Say what you want about The Economist, it is certainly consistent. Humans are by their nature messier than the artificial construct of a brand identity. Humans tend to be contradictory. Media brands themselves will need to become more like big-tent political parties with enough room for dissenting voices and side quests.

A brand like Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me is a case in point. It’s very idiosyncratic because, as Emily likes to say, it’s a product of her experience in the world. That makes it a difficult brand to pigeonhole. The organizing construct, to me, is around what it’s like to be a striver in New York. The flattening of global culture means that audience is worldwide, not just literally in New York City. Brands like Feed Me cut across categories in ways typical media brands do not. 

Fresh Hell is a good example of the type of idiosyncratic publication that will do just fine in a world of AI slop. Tina Brown is a great writer. Her writing has pace. You can feel the momentum, and she knows when to drop in little one-liners that can even elicit an audible chuckle. This is the kind of writing that isn’t optimized to get the attention of algorithms or AI agents. 

These brands are smaller. Feed Me gets outsized media attention as some kind of Gen Z Whisperer because it is today’s version of Gawker, only optimized to a vastly different NYC where al fresco dining sometimes happens in St Mark’s, wearing around yoga outfits is as acceptable in the West Village as in Houston, and TikTok trends like Labubu and Dubai chocolate have as much resonance. For all the New York or Nowhere merch, NYC is as much like anywhere else as it has ever been. The best restaurants end up having outposts elsewhere. You can go to Lucali in Carroll Gardens or in Miami Beach.

Feed Me and Fresh Hell are both Substacks as well. Substack’s $100 million funding round is testament to how it's managed to become a consumer brand – I tense when mislabeled as a Substacker although I've come around to B2B influencer, if for a lack of more palatable options – and also a sign of how text has its limits. Substack’s bet is it can create an everything app that’s beyond newsletters. For instance, Substack-hosted publisher The Free Press has seen success in its livestreams as a conversion tool.

Text content is an area many are fleeing, or at least rapidly diversifying away from. Felix Salmon was ahead of his time a decade ago when he declared himself “post-text.” The Information’s oddly named TITIV is a sendup to TBPN, the VC-friendly counterweight to the independent media tech companies tend to dislike. TBPN showed the pathway to using livestreaming and insider access to build a brand, even if most of the engagement on TBPN is not actually live. It’s all about the clips that go far and wide. Cycling in many guests means more clips, and more clips means more distribution. People love seeing themselves on video.

The Information's TBPN homage was glitchy on the first day when I tuned in. You gotta take your lumps It felt too produced. The best livestreams tend to be from people’s kitchens. And a lot of TBPN’s success comes from the host dynamic. That’s hard to cast. Idiosyncratic media needs to present as organic.

I applaud The Information for making the bet. I’m working on a something along these lines for TRB, in large part because I want to save the reputation of the webinar. What is a webinar if not interactive digital video programming? The live angle, to me, is only of use if you make the program interactive, otherwise it’s just a schtick. This is a good time for met to remind you to attend our next online forum. It’s on July 30, featuring a deep dive into how Forbes has unified its audience data. Sign up.

Publishers are at risk of making too many small bets at a time of uncertainty. Those reliant on text content can see the trend lines and they’re not great. Publishers are fighting rearguard battles to get paid for their text content, but it’s going to be difficult to make this sustainable. Text is just too easily reconfigured and summarized. A news article is quickly regurgitated on Reddit and elsewhere.

One question that swirled is a kind of naive media question: Do the tech overlords care if they drive so many out of business? The sensible response was absolutely not, they run businesses and generally billionaires become billionaires by being fairly ruthless. There’s PR, sure, but Mark Zuckerberg will come around to never being particularly popular no matter what kind of haircut he gets. 

This isn’t new. The aggregation economy provided incentives to aggregation publishers to draft off the original work of others. Why go through the hassle and expense of an investigation when you can aggregate it in a slideshow and bank more traffic? The modern version of this is podcasting and newsletters. 

Substack is making traction convincing major publishers to dip a toe into its ecosystem as one of dozens of hedges against the Traffic Apocalypse. And it is finally getting over its aversion to advertising and following the typical Silicon Valley path of hating advertising until they run the numbers.