The Great Inversion

We are trying something new. On Monday, Nov 9 at 3pm ET, we’ll hold a live recording of The Rebooting Show. I’ll host an interactive discussion with Paul Miller, CEO of Forge, the company formed this year by combining Emerald and Questex. Forge is interesting because it is bringing together a collection of B2B trade shows and trade media to develop an always-on connection with high-value B2B audiences backed by the superior business model of trade shows and events. This way, Forge can sell connections throughout the year rather than one-off activations. We will talk about how to avoid bolting on media to events businesses, getting a unified view of the audience across media and events, and what AI changes in B2B marketing. We will weave in your questions and comments throughout. Sign up and we'll send you the link to join.

Thanks to Omeda for sponsoring this live edition of The Rebooting Show.

Today:

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People Inc CEO Neil Vogel likes to say “the math doesn’t math.” And right now, the math isn’t mathing for page-based models. The answer: inversion.

People Inc’s latest quarterly results show how far the digital publishing industry has come in leaving behind the traffic era, which for all its flaws had the benefits of fairly predictable math. You generated more pageviews and you’d make more money in programmatic ad markets. Now, publishers are facing the new math of what People calls its inversion strategy.

People Inc.'s Q3 2026 results show the pageview model breaking down. Core sessions fell 26% year over year to 1.6 billion as AI Overviews reduced referral traffic from Google. This deterioration is accelerating: the quarter marked the biggest single-quarter decline the company has seen. Google search referrals are down 70% over two years, dropping 22% in the quarter after a 40% drop in the second quarter. AI Overviews now sit atop 90% of Google searches tied to People's content.

The predictable math of the traffic era cuts both ways. Total digital ads revenue fell 8%, which management attributed directly to the session decline, and digital revenue growth slowed to 2% from 6% the prior quarter. Higher premium ad rates on programmatic and direct-sold inventory kept session-based revenue to a 6% decline. People Inc laid off 195 more employees, or 6% of its workforce, in its latest series of cuts, most of which it said were in its print and legacy web operations.

Publishers will continue to streamline their legacy operations, which now include both print and traffic-based models. The two-step is building the new model, which People chairman Barry Diller calls inversion. This means shifting from a scale-based digital business model that meant a single playbook run across many brands to taking each property and its intellectual capital and using them to create new products and services that People owns directly. Unlike a typical marketer, publishers have their own distribution that they don’t need to buy. Diller says it covers 19 initiatives with nothing to do with standard advertising or subscription revenue.

The heart of an inversion strategy is inverting the scale model. It focuses on what Viafoura CEO Mark Zohar calls a brand’s superuser. Many digital markets are run on superusers, or whales. The traffic era had many flaws. And one was treating an audience as a monolith. Gaming companies, gambling apps and OnlyFans know a secret: Whales drive digital economics. This is the industrial version of the 1,000 true fans creator model.

This isn’t too different from what many in B2B have long done. Promoting an event you own was often better economics than advertising. This is powered by high lifetime value of business segments. It’s more challenging to do in consumer categories, as this strategy has been done in pieces over the years. Hearst used to make and sell yoga mats, for instance. Diller wondered why People Inc shouldn’t have made White Lotus out of Travel & Leisure or produced Casamigos out of Food & Wine.

This is tough to pull off. I lived through the platisher phase, when publishers thought they could pretend to be tech companies by licensing their homegrown content management systems. The reality is getting into these categories required a level of investment publishers weren’t able to make, not while trying to prop up their challenged core businesses.

“Usually the business of saving media gets in the way,” Troy Young said on Field Notes. “Selling tea or tequila takes IP and lots of expertise and capital that are absent from media business. There is a line between licensing and ownership which puts the media co on the cap table. This is more pragmatic.”

The lessons for publishers of inversion are:

Events are the engine that drive B2B media, as reflected in the fact that events account for about 50% of Adweek’s revenue and about 35% of Skift’s business. B2B media also pulls from an established ecosystem that has operated in this way for decades – no company is asked to break the wheel to draw in sponsors for their events.

The prospect of getting consumer brands such as McDonald’s or Nike to sponsor events, however, is a different proposition.

Front Office Sports sits between B2B and consumer media. The media company focuses on the business of sports, covering the partnerships, finances and deals struck by leagues, teams, players, investors and anyone else involved on the money side of sports. Similar to entertainment outlets such as The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, FOS’s coverage of sports also draws interest from regular consumers – and the brands seeking to reach them by appearing alongside popular sports coverage.

In an effort to diversify its own revenue streams, FOS has embraced producing and hosting events, convening sports business professionals and creating an environment where they can not only network but also talk deals.