Media abundance

Thanks for the notes about whether South Tribeca exists. It turns out that most agree it does not, unless you’re in the real estate business, which once tried to rebrand Hell’s Kitchen to Clinton.

In today’s member’s piece, I write about how the media industry like the Democratic Party needs its version of an abundance agenda. Reminder: Upgrade to TRB Pro for full access to The Rebooting’s content.

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My copy of Abundance has arrived. The Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book on a reformed progressive political agenda arrives at the right time. Political parties periodically are forced into the wilderness to reform themselves after a political crisis. Much, although not all, of the Democratic party has moved past the denial phase. The recent poll showing a party approval rate of 27% will do that. 

What’s significant to me about the argument Klein and Thompson make is that they’re acknowledging a reality that also faces the media industry: The need to dispense with a scarcity mindset that is about protecting the past to present a positive and pro-growth agenda built around dynamism. 

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats have become too enamored with regulations and redistribution. Meanwhile, it’s hard to avoid the inconvenient reality that the places where they are most powerful are losing population, often due to a scarcity of affordable housing and quality of life issues, like the need to ring a buzzer to get a tube of toothpaste at CVS. 

This echoes a lot of issues in the media industry, which has been stuck in a mindset of contraction—cutting costs, downsizing ambitions, lamenting past models. Abundance offers a different way forward: invest, experiment, and build. It’s a mindset shift that media companies desperately need if they want to move beyond survival mode or shuffle off to the SEO glue factory. 

And just like the faith in antitrust is hardly a compelling political strategy, so too is faith in some government relief. Maybe Google’s ad tech stranglehold is broken, but it’s hard to see how that is some kind of gamechanger. And it hardly guarantees that what emerges next is any better for publishers.

I was glad to see that Dotdash Meredith has released D/Cipher+ as a standalone product. This offers intent-based targeting on the open web from intent data Dotdash Meredith has collected across its portfolio. It is a publisher-led alternative to the ad tech middlemen publishers complain about nonstop yet fail to present compelling alternatives. Programmatic has been a net disaster for the overall publishing industry. Yet it doesn’t obscure the fact that publishers have failed to present a compelling alternative in a market that has shifted to performance and efficiency. 

That’s when nostalgia creeps in. I can’t say I lived the magazine salad days of the 1990s. Sounds amazing to get paid $166,000 for a single magazine article. Current freelancers read that part with the same look on their face as Rick in White Lotus during Frank’s bonkers monologue. Graydon Carter’s new memoir is an elegy to those bygone days that are not coming back. If it’s not enough, there’s yet another Condé Nast retrospective coming from New York Times media editor Michael Grynbaum. There will be delicious stories of excessive spending, bar carts and the like. The veterans of that era will be like D-Day veterans that would materialize each year in remembrance. 

I’m more impressed by someone like Tina Brown forging her own path on Substack with a terrific newsletter, Fresh Hell. It proves that great media is still in demand, even if you’re not going to get a town car and $5 a word – and you have to hustle up subscriptions yourself. Substack, for all of its flaws, is emblematic of the growth happening outside traditional institutions. Established media should be incubating and investing in these trends, not resisting them.

A scarcity mindset tends to see zero-sum situations. An abundance mindset tends to see opportunities by expanding the pie. Taking a step back from media’s supposed extinction event, the pie has never been bigger. The Information Space is unfathomably large, filled with varying quality that is a tradeoff of the lack of gatekeepers. Spoken or not, this is often seen by the professional media industry as a negative rather than an opportunity. 

I recorded a podcast that will come out next week with Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe. This is a great business. An investor deck I saw showed it achieving 50%+ margins on a business that’s scaling. And that was a bootstrapped business begun with a viral trick shot video on YouTube. It’s a classic overnight success story that took 16 years. They’re now trying to build a billion-dollar media franchise. As we discussed in the conversation, there are dozens of these businesses that will be built out of YouTube alone. 

Part of a media abundance agenda is trading the abundance of pageviews and other vanity metrics for solid business fundamentals. Sarah Personette, CEO of Puck, spoke of a North Star metric of revenue per head. The last era produced businesses with little leverage. New-style media companies will have RPH of $1 million, not $200,000. That’s what is compelling about new models like Punchbowl. There might be fewer Hs, but that’s the inevitable direction of an industry that will decentralize and have fewer conglomerates trying to be all things to all people.

That will require building new versions of franchise value. The franchise value that Vogue and others enjoyed has eroded. The Met Ball as protection racket has a shelf life. The arbitrage models many of these formerly franchise brands are moving to is hardly inspiring, and often risky due to its reliance on platform distribution. It was telling that TheSkimm, which was seemingly building franchise value in the previous era, quietly exited this week to Ziff Davis, which excels at the arb model and has collected the husks of other former high flyers like Mashable and Quartz. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed. TheSkimm raised $30 million, and will be yet another cautionary tale of the VC-funded media era. 

AI has played out in large part as I expected. Publishers would be forced to choose whether to play defense of offense. Defense is lawyering up and appealing for relief again from the government. Offense is seeing AI as an opportunity to create new products and accelerate the shift to audience-centric models. 

Of course, it’s hard. Everything is hard in media. The constant cuts and reorgs are needed. But they need to serve a purpose, just like regulations and government programs. The Wall Street Journal stands out as an example of a news organization making tough decisions to reshape itself. Many in journalism were surprised (and often appalled) by the recent decision by editor-in-chief Emma Tucker to dismantle its San Francisco tech bureau. I suspect this doesn’t signal that the Journal will cover tech less. And the results so far by Tucker to enliven the news report have been impressive. It is undoubtedly a better publication now. 

And it should be added, the Journal’s op-ed page has distinguished itself among the slobbering of regime media like All-In by calling out harebrained Trump policies. Rupert isn’t a dummy about how you get leverage; it isn’t by immediate surrender.

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