Welcome back to The Rebooting. Today:
The rise of knowledge creators
The disappearing moat
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Why TIME’s email engagement is soaring. TIME’s newsletters reach millions of readers every week. But until recently, they were stuck with clunky workflows, limited insights, and flat engagement. After migrating 13 newsletters and millions of subscribers to beehiiv (with zero downtime) things changed fast. Open rates on “Inside TIME” jumped 63.8%. Click through rates across their portfolio increased to 11.7%. Editors now publish faster, with better tools and real-time insights. TIME proves that even the most established media brands can evolve and thrive when they own their email strategy.
One of the most vibrant areas of media is knowledge creators: individuals with specific expertise who are also expert content creators. This kind of hybrid is unique. You see it in people like LinkinBio’s Rachel Karten, Mostly Metrics’ CJ Gustafson and the OG of the category, Lenny Rachitsky aka Lenny.
Knowledge creators often face the same challenge as any creator: How to build a business while still maintaining their sector expertise and creating engaging and valuable content. It isn’t easy. Smooth Media launched in 2021 to solve for this by partnering with knowledge creators to handle their business affairs. They’re acting as half sales team and half talent agents. CEO Josh Kaplan joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the knowledge creator business. My takeaways:
Don’t rob the library. Smooth's first model was charging creators retainers for newsletter and consulting services. That’s like Willie Sutton deciding to rob the library. The turning point came about three years ago, when Industry Dive founder Sean Griffey told them they "should own the relationship with the money." Smooth built a brand partnerships team. The model is now a flat 20% commission, no lock-in – and no equity position. “I don’t want to hold anybody hostage,” Josh said.
Knowledge creators are unicorns. I don’t buy the thesis that everybody is a content creator and just needs to mine their old memos. People who know a field and can produce valuable, engaging content about it are unique. Josh’s definition of a knowledge creator is someone who educates and engages at the same time. He picked that up at Morning Brew, where Neal Freyman insisted writers be both funny and smart. "You have to be informative or educational and you have to be engaging if you're gonna play this sport." Smooth bets mostly on video, but Kaplan says the format matters less than whether you "have consistent attention."
Creators are pivoting to events. Ads are not enough. Smooth focuses on brand partnerships because rinse-and-repeat ad systems don’t capture the full value of the audience relationship creators have. Smooth launched an events department to turn audience and sponsor relationships into live gatherings. The guiding rule is that a creator's event "should be events that only that creator could throw." The creator funds the production.
Could you build a video business from scratch without putting your current revenue at risk?
Glance did it with EX.CO. It started with no video content, no player and no way to monetize video. In under a year, player loads grew 540% and video became a seven-figure annual revenue line. No production lift. No risk to existing revenue.
See how they did it, and what other teams can borrow from their playbook.
The moat is gone
Publishing always goes first. Words are the easiest thing to copy, reaggregate and push around, so media got compressed before anyone else. Now it’s software’s turn and pretty much everything else.
Someone recently vibe-coded an open-source replacement for the Adobe suite, with MCP hooks so AI can run it. Adobe spent decades and billions building that software. On People vs Algorithms, Alex Schleifer pointed out that once there’s a baseline, thousands of people can point agents at it and keep going. “The moat is gone and we need to find the moat,” he said.
I now use connectors to Riverside, Beehiiv, Pandadoc, Quickbooks and most other software I rely on to run The Rebooting. I rarely touch the UI of the software. Now, in many cases, this is making the software more valuable to me. I’ve been creating more audience segments and automations in Beehiiv, for example, since using the MCP is far more valuable because Claude has the full context. Agents with that full context will do the operations. I don’t expect to touch the UI.
“For the better part of 20 years, human attention pooled in feeds and apps,” former Facebook exec David Marcus wrote on X. “Now it's going to pool in agents, personal ones working for us and business ones working for companies, and they'll make more and more decisions on our behalf.”
Software is starting to work like writing: anyone can publish. That means a flood of options and decreased pricing power. Apps nobody downloads join the books nobody reads and the songs nobody hears. Alex sees it in his own game studio, and in comedians whose jokes get regenerated with AI faces.
I’m coming around to the notion that every economic actor has to prepare to be headless. The Great Decapitation is when AI replaces the customer interface. That will transform everyone and every service to connectors to these centralized orchestration systems that control the context.
The fastest-growing area of publishing is selling unique datasets to AI models. This data doesn’t look like long news articles, however. It’s specialized industrial information and workflows. Publishers need to understand how their businesses change once they go headless.
The unease sweeping through many sectors is the creeping feeling that very little is defensible. Personality? Taste? Live events?
“You have to get above what has been automated,” Troy counsels.
If software is losing its moat, publishers can build their own. The Daily Beast’s three-person product team built BeastOS, an internal app store where each app uses AI to fix one bottleneck for one team, from RFP responses to syndication.
Read the case study to learn:
The stack CTO Ken Peltzer used to build it largely on his own
The four apps live or in development, and the problem each one solves
Why getting employees to use the apps was harder than building them
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Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply. For sponsorship information, contact Richard Jamieson at [email protected].