The unwinding

We are coming off the Media Product Forum yesterday in New York. We had a great group of publishing product leaders come to the third edition of this event, which is a collaboration with WordPressVIP. 

Couple other things to know about:

Today, I’m turning hopefully for the final time to the end of the pageview era, a story I both find fascinating because I charted its rise and fall but also frustrating because the cleanup underway is inevitable, painful for those caught up in it and somewhat boring. 

I always harbored doubts about these models, as much as I wanted to believe in them. They were grounded in a set of faulty assumptions. And inevitably they faltered for a simple reason: These properties never built strong brands, strong audience connections and were completely at the mercy of distribution chokepoints controlled by Big Tech cabals that time and again proved themselves unreliable. The good news is I don’t know of anyone who is starting a media business now based on these faulty assumptions that have aged as well as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

One Business Insider executive at the Media Product Forum was scrambling to make sense of the news their CEO was leaving. They were busy backchanneling to know more about the new interim CEO, digital media veteran Christian Baesler. The good part of being in this industry for a while is these kinds of things don’t faze you. Layoffs, abrupt leadership changes, Google kneecapping your distribution – it’s just a Wednesday.

BI’s struggles have long been apparent. It was built for a completely different era. And to be fair, it succeeded in that era, particularly in the most important aspect: Knowing when to sell. CEO Barbara Peng’s departure after 2.5 years at the helm featured fits and starts of a new direction.The publication would focus on “digital go-getters,” subscriptions and of course emphasize events. Then it would need to shore up its pageview  business. Working in these businesses is exhausting.

BI’s challenges are shared by many publishers built in the 2000s and 2010s. Their original models are now obsolete – and have been for years. This is a known known that belongs in the no-shit-Sherlock file. The more interesting and urgent task at hand is building the new business while continuing to operate the old one. It’s less building the airplane while flying it of Silicon Valley cliche, more constructing a new platform as the current one you’re standing on is engulfed in flames.

The timeline for pulling that off got moved up on Tuesday, when Google rolled out a new AI search experience that will shift its approach to an agentic experience that will further erode traffic to publishers. The open web has gone from getting its affairs in order to calling for the priest. Give Google some credit: It has stretched this out for a couple years. This announcement was treated in some more credulous quarters as a shock; it was inevitable. A year ago at the Media Product Forum, People Inc CEO Neil Vogel discussed with me why Google Zero had gone from a specter to an expected outcome.

For every People Inc that has been able to manage this transition more or less adroitly – People Inc was one of the most exposed to Google’s rug pull – there are lots of BIs. A BuzzFeed executive at MPF told me of new owner Byron Allen coming to the office and expressed reassurance that his airy talk of taking on YouTube was misinterpreted. He is a comedian, after all.

Vox Media changed hands officially yesterday, as James Murdoch completed the purchase of half of the company. All things considered, this is a good outcome. It left behind a bad bank of sorts of open web assets in SB Nation, The Verge and Eater, in a dryly named Remainco. The value was judged to lie in the podcast network and New York magazine assets. It’s telling that Murdoch made sure Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway were on board. The value of that enterprise would be far less without them, which also says a lot about the state of these brands.

This is the dénouement to the scale era that ended long ago. It feels almost nostalgic now to discuss. The conversations at the Media Product Forum were dominated by new initiatives around AI tooling, finding valuable niches, and building out new business lines that leverage strong brands. Print is even interesting again.

This is where the energy lies in the business. A business like People Inc is instructive. Adam McClean, People Inc’s chief product officer, spoke at the MPF about how the publisher is pursuing an “inversion strategy” for its brands. It is turning its recipe assets into a utility. Better Homes & Gardens has licensing deals with Walmart for branded products. Southern Living is looking to spin out a sweet tea brand. (Ryan, you’d be great for this role.) The entire premise of the company was to have a playbook that ran across many brands; now it’s crafting playbooks unique to each.

Ariscelle Novicio, CTO of The New York Post, walked through the launch of California Post and Pagesix Hollywood, which are aiming to get exposure to the still-lucrative for your consideration awards ads racket. The Onion now has a print circulation that would make it the 13th largest circulation newspaper in the country; it just passed Newsday. Daniele Strle, chief product officer at The Onion, says the print product becomes an “identity object” for hard-core Onion fans, or the Onionati. 

Publishers, and the overall industry, will have more rounds of cleanup of what one publisher derisively called “empty-calorie brands.” That shouldn’t obscure the reality that the focus of the overall business has migrated. It’s gone to audience-focused business models, high value niches, treating publications as real brands, to events and activations. These are more interesting businesses than the rinse-and-repeat scale strategies that have imploded. I’d rather focus there.

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