TRB Audience Summit is in the books and was a success. We’ll have videos and podcasts of the main stage sessions over the next couple weeks as well as reports from the private salons.
We will be doing TRB Audience Summit London in February. For more information on partnership opportunities, contact Richard Jamieson: [email protected].
Today:
What the Muse interface shift means
On The Rebooting Show: A conversation with The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson
On PvA: AI power politics
Shrink your list. Grow your impact.
Two publishing leaders cut their lists and boosted engagement, deliverability—and even advertiser value. This guide shows you how.
For years, we chased bigger lists. But bloated databases don’t drive clicks—they kill deliverability, inflate metrics, and mask real audience insights.
This guide dives into:
Two publishers who strategically shrank their email lists
How smarter segmentation boosted engagement and advertiser ROI
How to get internal buy-in and make the shift stick
If you’re questioning the value of your current list strategy, this is your playbook.
The web’s agentic pivot
The attention economy was a disaster for publishers. It was impossible to compete in an algorithmically driven attention game, not against the entire world. Add in AI driving the cost of creation to zero. There’s no future in trying to reverse engineer algorithms to get people on webpages to show them display advertising.
What’s emerging instead is what former Industry Dive CEO Sean Griffey calls the connection economy. The connection economy is a barbell. Some publishers will play on either end, many will do both. On the human end of the connection economy barbell is the craft business of connecting people to each other through communities and in-person and virtual events. On the end is an API-driven connection economy driven by AI where an emerging set of aggregators will develop to serve as agentic concierges to their humans.
Like many, I started using Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse. It’s growing faster than ChatGPT and destined to be the first consumer AI product with 1 billion users. Meta has done a great job of putting together an AI assistant that abstracts the dorkery of AI agents – normal people are not setting up an Open Claw instance – to the point where my 89-year-old father now has a Muse assistant named Tom. Give Mark Zuckerberg credit for his relentlessness.
Using Muse for a few days, I wanted it to have more context. I wanted it to access more sources of information. It is creating a daily briefing for me of my newsletters and links shared in PvA Field Notes. I want to validate my subscriptions to have it access more context. I expect more time will be spent inside these environments than in specific apps or websites.
This will be a further acceleration of deterioration. Fewer visitors, fewer display ad impressions and clicks, fewer opportunities to use interface for brand distinction.
It’s a pipe dream for publishers to follow the lead of Amazon and block Muse (and presumably other agents). Consumer expectations will shift, just the same as how Amazon made next-day delivery a default expectation. People will expect their agents to collect and process information and take actions on their behalf.
Yet, this is exciting. I always find the infrastructure phase of these buildouts to be boring. It’s when the applications are built that things get interesting. Meta sees enough traction with Muse – it is the top app in the App Store and is trending ahead of ChatGPT – that it is backing it with a big marketing push. Meta has the playbook for getting massive distribution. I expect it will do the same now.
Muse is focused on helping people do things. It should concern many publishers that one of its early use cases is canceling all the subscriptions people have but don’t use. That’s an issue for publishers reliant on sleepers. Publishers will need to provide value as an outcome, not just get a credit card on file to quietly hit.
Publishers will increasingly publish text content for bots. But in this case, publishers will act as connectors. Humans will identify a brand as a trusted source for its assistant to use to create daily briefings and alert them to new content that will appeal to them.
“Our website may become something that is more of a service to agentic audiences rather than where you have the majority of human traffic,” The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson told me in our keynote discussion. That means reengineering products to “give people entitlements to Guardian experiences within other products.”
Skift CEO Rafat Ali said the publisher would reposition Skift as a “decision intelligence company for the travel industry” that has as its mission “helping people make decisions.” It wants to move from “I read Skift to I use Skift.”
In another keynote conversation we’ll publish next week, The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson walked through his hypotheses for The Atlantic in 2031. They are all dependent on the direction AI goes and whether it has a maximalist outcome or behaves like a significant but familiar technology platform shift. The basic strategy of The Atlantic is to build a moat around its journalism by making sure it is not replicable by AI. That means telling incredible journalistic stories like George Packer’s recent essay on his relationship with his mother through writing.
But on the other end of scenarios, AI is far more disruptive, requiring far bigger changes because “the world gets fundamentally turned upside down.” In that scenario, The Atlantic does more live events, publishes more magazines and multimedia, and tries to get as many people to build a direct connection with the brand.
“The way people consume information will be completely different,” Nick told me of this scenario, which he ranks as more plausible than the business-as-usual outcome. “They won’t be reading it on the web because the web won’t really exist because they’ll be getting information [pushed to them].”
“You try to figure out who will control the agentic economy and how you can make money from them,” he said.
The last part is obviously key, yet I don’t think publishers will have a choice but to integrate with those controlling the commanding heights of the information economy.
Rally Rd. is a marketplace where investors buy shares in rare collectible assets. Inside the app, compliance rules limit what they can say. So the real selling happens in their newsletter, Shiny Things, a weekly long-form essay that runs on beehiiv and never actually asks readers to open the app.
The strategy, when paired with beehiiv’s all-in-one growth platform, is clearly working: newsletter subscribers convert at 3X the rate of standard users, with a 20%+ lift in investment behavior and stronger portfolio retention.
And between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, two major institutional partnerships opened tens of millions of dollars in tier-one supply, both attributed directly to the newsletter.
Owned audience, built right, doesn’t just drive engagement. It drives businesses to new levels of success.
The Guardian in 2031
The Guardian is preparing for a publishing business where humans use its apps and AI agents crawl its website. At TRB Audience Summit, CEO Anna Bateson described a strategy built around direct audience relationships, more audio and video, and getting paid when Guardian journalism shows up in someone else’s interface. Its U.S. business now generates $80 million in revenue, with more than 500,000 recurring supporters, helped by a clear progressive identity as competitors reposition themselves. Bateson expects the U.S. to become its biggest market by 2031, with reader revenue supplemented by advertising and an emerging licensing business whose economics remain unsettled. The practical priority is building an organization that can adapt, since a five-year plan is of limited use when even the people building the technology can’t tell you what’s coming next.
The AI story is moving into the world of power politics, with shifting alliances, personal grudges and everyone claiming to speak for the public. Troy and I unpacked the cast of characters, from Dario Amodei’s balancing act to Sam Altman’s dealmaking and Elon Musk’s inability to share the stage. The debate over who controls AI is arriving before most people have a clear explanation of what the risks actually are. Plus: the SaaS ripoff economy, publishers rebuilding television, and turning podcasts into mixtapes.
Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply. For sponsorship information, contact Richard Jamieson at [email protected].