I tend to oscillate between the feeling of wonder that we’re living in the future and an Andy Rooney impulse that so many of the heralded tech advances are simply not there.
On a plane late last week, the pilot casually said we’d be in for a treat as a SpaceX rocket would be traveling by on the right side of the plane. That’s Jetsons-type stuff. Then, I see Uber Eats delivery robots regularly lost on a sidewalk or side street, looking traumatized. Each of them has names and two lights that look like eyes. I assume this is to make sure they’re not abused. I saw one named Dwight cautiously making its way through a crosswalk only to nearly be run over by a car that gave Dwight an aggressive honk.
AI is starting to feel that way, as Nvidia passes $5 trillion in market cap and OpenAI talks about spending $1 trillion a year on infrastructure, while the real-life utility of these tools is…. fine. I’m interested in hearing from publishers who have seen measurable productivity gains from the use of AI or, even better, have improved their audience products with AI. I tend to hear not very compelling examples, and I don’t see how that squares with the trillions poured into AI, unless it turns out to bring better ad targeting and new forms of search. Email me with your AI experiences: [email protected].
Today:
An upcoming conversation with The Economist’s president Luke Bradley-Jones
TBPN as the new trade model
Inside TechCrunch’s email modernization
The building blocks of audience-revenue strategies
How The Economist is rethinking institutional authority
The Economist is a brand I’ve long admired for its consistency and rigor. It has managed to keep a mystique by having unbylined pieces for its history. And yet, we live in an age of personalities. The Economist has begun to pull back the veil on its process with its new streaming show, The Insider, which is hosted by editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and features its journalists. The Economist’s also putting its journalists forward in podcasts and newsletters.
The Economist’s president, Luke Bradley-Jones, will join me next week in a TRB Live episode to explore how The Economist is modernizing its model by amplifying its journalists, experimenting with new formats, and using AI to make its journalism more accessible, without compromising the integrity of its collective worldview.
I’ve long been skeptical of access to journalists as a value proposition for subscription programs, but The Economist is a brand that can pull this off.
This interactive discussion is exclusively available to TRB Pro members, but we are making 50 slots available to those who have not yet upgraded to TRB Pro.
TBPN: The new trade model
Silicon Valley is also reinventing the trade publishing model. I’ve been closely tracking how an entire ecosystem has developed of both owned media (A16z, Stripe, et al), podcasters (All-In, Dwarkesh Patel, et al) and even niche magazines (Arena) have become the new trade publications. Add TBPN to the mix.
TBPN is one of the more interesting new media organizations around these days. It is establishing itself as the go-to outlet for tech leaders to have their say with a friendly outlet. A lot of journalists roll their eyes at this, because we are hard-wired to prefer an Isaac Chotiner special perpetrated on Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. As Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg pointed out, it was noteworthy that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella chose TBPN to discuss its critical deal with OpenAI rather than go on CNBC. This is on the heels of having on Mark Zuckerberg and pretty much every tech CEO.
Many people find this curious because TBPN’s actual audience is small. I swung by the Nadella interview and was one of 600 watching it live on YouTube. The audiences for cable news are small, but that’s miniscule. Of course, TBPN is about the clips, with the “live” portion more an organizing principle and the reach mostly asynchronous through the emerging playbook of flooding the zone with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of clips.
I don’t find this all that complicated: Tech companies want to support media that is tech optimist rather than adversarial. TBPN’s Jordi Hays and John Coogan are tech business obsessives that bring enthusiasm to their interviews that is somewhat anathema to capital J journalism. Tech leaders are not waiting for TBPN to have a massive audience, they’re enabling it to grow by lending it credibility to build its distribution.
This isn’t all that different than the typical trade publication, which is usually fairly supportive of the industries it covers.
Tech debt
A recurring theme of The Rebooting’s breakfast and dinner salons is the challenge of operating the old model while building the new one. Legacy publishers — which now include those built around the webpage era — know they need to shift toward direct audience ties, only they’re often left operating the old traffic model to fund the transition.
Underneath the strategic challenge is the reality that many publishers have a tech stack built for that old model. In last week’s TRB Live, Matt Gross, vp of digital initiatives at Regent (the new parent company of TechCrunch), joined me and Beehiiv co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk to discuss how he approached modernizing TechCrunch’s email infrastructure.
“There were a lot of things that had been set up and left in a default state,” Gross said. “The tech debt was so massive that it was easier to move it off onto something where we knew right away how to configure all this stuff to make it work.”
Other takeaways
Define the job of email. Before changing tools or templates, Gross said the first step was clarifying the purpose of each send, whether to drive traffic or deliver a standalone editorial product.
Treat email as its own product. Gross described a cultural shift inside TechCrunch toward seeing newsletters as distinct editorial experiences, not just traffic funnels.
Clean up the foundation. Technical modernization is often about fixing defaults that no one has looked at in years, like its previous ESP auto-unsubscribing users after missing 11 emails in a row.
Building blocks of audience-revenue strategies
Yesterday, I was joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which is partnering with The Rebooting on the Audience Revenue Lab, a consulting service for publishers building direct-revenue business lines. I outlined last week how publishers need to claw back sovereignty in their business models, because I believe that’s the only way to establish truly sustainable models. In our conversation, Matt and I built on that by discussing the building blocks of successful audience revenue strategies.
Do your research. Most companies launch with an offer or funnel tweak before they’ve figured out what people actually want. Matt’s view: “Usually it’s the last things that happen first. We start with the thing that’s easiest to execute rather than the thing that’s most important to understand.”
Value over volume wins in the long run. The focus on acquisition misses the point. The way to grow is to get people using and valuing what you already have. Matt’s view: “The engagement phase is where you actually win. If people are using and valuing the product, you’ll see lift across acquisition and retention without needing to outspend competitors.”
Alignment is Job 1. You can’t silo it inside the audience team. The whole organization has to align around recurring revenue. Matt’s view: “Audience revenue only works when it’s not just the audience team’s job. It has to be embedded in how the whole company defines success.”
For sponsorship information, see how we work with partners.