Reasons for optimism

Today’s newsletter finds the many reasons for optimism about the media business. First up: new data from The Rebooting’s latest research project about how the decline in search referrals is accelerating shifts in publisher business strategies, and a conversation with Essentially Sports’ Suryansh Tibarewal on how it is navigating distribution challenges and diversifying revenue.

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The more-with-less era has arrived for publishers. The SEO gravy train has derailed, if stabilized. I recorded a podcast with Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips yesterday, and she told me Forbes has seen declines of 30-40%. Ouch.

That’s forcing publishers to accelerate their overhaul of business models to emphasize more durable relationships with the audience. In The Rebooting’s latest research report, done in collaboration with Piano, we surveyed revenue leaders and found 41% of publishers have seen search declines of 10% or more. In response, 59% are implementing first-party data strategies. 

“Let’s start from a place of loyalty, James Denis, CRO at Sherwood News, told us. “That becomes our foundation. If we can maintain a strong subscriber base and high open rates, the platform changes matter a lot less.” 

Added Michael Silberman, evp of media strategy at Piano: “The publishers that have pivoted away from a mass-attention model toward a deeper engagement strategy are going to be more resilient. Engagement, rather than raw reach, is the key to sustainable growth.

Thanks to Piano for its support in creating this research report. Piano’s Digital Revenue Optimization solution helps digital services grow revenue by better understanding and influencing their customers’ behavior. Piano unifies analytics, segmentation, and commercial personalization in one AI-driven application, enabling sites and apps to efficiently maximize the value of every user visit. For more information, visit piano.io.

This week, I spoke to essentially sports cofounder Suryansh Tibarewal about how it is adapting its strategies in a time of traffic flux. Essentially sports is a high volume web publisher, one i’d consider as a classic pageview publisher. Suryansh and I discuss how essentially has continued to benefit from Google Discover, shifting its business model to focus more on direct sold revenue rather than programmatic and how its fan perspective is a differentiator in a crowded category. 

In our latest episode of People vs Algorithms, Troy took a step back and gave a slew of reasons to have optimism about the future direction of the media industry, notwithstanding the many cases of decline of once storied brands that have reached what Troy calls “the harvesting stage.” (I prefer hospice care, which has replaced the SEO glue factory.)

Both are, of course, true. Depending on the room you’re in, there’s either tremendous energy and growth or grim gallows humor about riding out yet another existential crisis – and whether this is the one that will truly be the big one. I find this bifurcation fascinating. 

There’s no single thread that connects  the models that are working – and crucially have energy – but commonalities fall in the boring but hard category:  strong audience ties, diverse business models that rarely depend on standardized digital ads, narrow and deep focus areas, wealthy audiences, content beyond the webpage, and human approaches that stand as a counterpoint to synthetic slop. More than anything, media continues to attract talented individuals that supply it with the needed energy to create a better Information Space

The big guys are fine. The New York Times, Bloomberg Media, The Wall Street Journal and  The Financial Times are not on the cusp of extinction. In fact, many are thriving. The New York Times is under attack by an activist investor mostly because it hasn’t capitalized enough on its many advantages. It’s subscriber base has topped 11 million as its bundle strategy has succeeded. It might not have Netflix-like ceiling but there’s no evidence its expansion will stall. Business publishers are benefiting from AI in the form of ad spending. The Wall Street Journal has a renewed energy in its coverage. 

Publishers are becoming talent managers. The energy in media is with individual creators, without a doubt, but institutional publishers are no longer seeing this as a threat. Vox Media is a prime example of a publisher that is marrying talent with its infrastructure and deep brand relationships. The Wall Street Journal is building a “talent lab.” ESPN and Fox are implementing talent-focused strategies. NYT-owned sports brand The Athletic has a distribution deal with independent YouTube star Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre Finds Out.

Niche brands are thriving. The renewed energy in niche magazine brands is a signal that as AI floods feeds with synthetic content – even the human-created content on X feels synthetic to me, with its manufactured outrages that have created a cesspool – the biggest opportunity is not to try to out-AI AI but offer more human alternatives. These brands are smaller and often serve a different economic purpose with events and activations at their core. Synthetic content will be like fast food: satisfying in the moment but unhealthy in the long term. I continue to believe that constant consumption of AI slop will never be seen as cool, and tech people always underrate the impact of culture because their engineering brains don’t make room for it. 

Micromedia is expanding. Anonymous Banker hates the term micromedia, but I don’t see micro as a pejorative in media. In fact, quite the opposite. The elimination of scarcity has been a disaster for institutional media. Individual brands have built in scarcity. They also have both a ceiling for growth and a high risk of burnout. Individual brands like Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me are bringing on other voices and maturing into slimmer brands but real brands that are beyond the terrible term Substacker. Mehdi Hassan is growing Zeteo into a full-fledged news brand. Staying as small as possible for as long as possible is the new path. That doesn’t mean forever.

YouTube brands are emerging. The YouTube ecosystem is incredibly vast and deep. The power of the algorithm means a lot of distressing growth hacks like the “surprised guy face” thumbnails that are humiliating. (I understand the need to respond to incentives, but you must balance that with self-respect.) Troy cited the early successes of Nich Carlson’s Dynamo, a lean brand he’s creating that explains the world through the lens of business. I’m continually impressed by what Pablo Torre is building by creating a new form of investigative journalism that is simply far more engaging than a multi-part article. 

AI is hitting a wall. The smart money is on two inevitabilities: China will win and AI will take over. The question is timing. On AI, the timeline for AGI – the obsession of the tech elite that will signal they’ve created their Frankenstein’s monster – is getting predictably fudged. I’ve learned to take Silicon Valley’s prophets seriously but not literally because it is a cult driven by blind belief as much as it is a hard-headed engineering culture. GPT-5 showed that humans have enough time to figure all this out. Companies are struggling to find success in implementing AI into workflows. This buys media time to retool. What’s more, the outlines of a grand bargain with AI companies is coming into focus. Some version of the Spotify model feels inevitable, particularly as AI engines exhaust the available supply of high quality data – and fresh data becomes more valuable. As the cost of compute inevitably falls, these companies will need to set up an economic mechanism for the creation of new content. (I’ll have a conversation about this with Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen in October.)

Local is energized. I’ve long believed the hardest of the hard problems in media is finding a sustainable model for local news. There’s no silver bullet. I compare the end state something like the U.S. health care system: a crazy quite of patchwork solutions that imperfectly sorta works. I’m encouraged that people like Joshi Hermman are providing a blueprint for how to do the hard yards of building sustainable models across UK cities with Mill Media. He recently brought on Washington Post veteran Cameron Barr to add to the ambition. I have a series of conversations coming up with those on the local level who are developing sustainable models that aren’t like the good old days but work nonetheless. 

Events are a signal. Semafor CEO Justin Smith told Adweek’s Mark Stenberg the company has crossed over the line to being majority events from a revenue standpoint. What Semafor is doing, however, is taking a big swing at events. The biggest events – Money 2020, Shoptalk, Davos – are very large businesses. And they’re not run by classic media companies. Events have long been seen as a contiguous media business, often relegated to an also-ran at media companies. That’s changed. The ability to congregate people is a testament to a brand – and will have increased value in a synthetic world. After seeing a guy at the pool wearing a VR headset, I’m convinced tech’s antisocial metaverse fantasies will strengthen human-to-human interaction – in business and beyond.

Experts-led communities are strong. For all the problems of the Information Space, the access to expert media is an amazing gift. We underappreciate the unfettered and unmediated access to experts. Media has gone from a distinct business to a layer that is part of most areas. Most companies will be part-media operation, and the best pathway here is in leaning on their expertise. Some of the most vibrant media brands being created are when an expert practitioner establishes a community. My friend CJ Gustafson is building a great brand with Mostly Metrics because he is a CFO writing for CFOs. This is the Lenny Rachitsky model that will be repeated in most areas. Even woodworking has its own Lenny.

TV has decentralized. The demise of gatekeeping is a mixed scorecard. There are undeniably downsides when we have comedians and amateur historians “just asking questions” about who the good guys were in World War II. But the strength of YouTube as a quasi-replacement for TV is leading to an explosion of programming. This has started with new versions of talk shows because that’s the most readily available opportunity. It won’t stop with talk shows, particularly as AI tools drive down the cost of production. This will create a bifurcation with big tentpole shows on Netflix, HBO Max et al and an explosion of niche programming on YouTube. Axios originally bet on an HBO show, but it is now turning to YouTube. It bears repeating: For all the understandable issues of the media business, it’s hard to say we suffer from a lack of choices. Crafting a healthy media diet is mostly a matter of will power to resist the siren call of feeds and, undeniably, some measure of spending power. But if history is any guide, we will see the cost of access come down. That will require a reformed advertising ecosystem, but that’s for a future newsletter. 

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