Find your superusers

The fall of Jensen Huang has been mindbogglingly fast for a person of this much power. It was only on Oct 9 that The New York Times published an article headlined “A Mystery CEO and Billions in Sales: Is China Buying Banned Nvidia Chips?” Huang’s forced resignation is not the end of the story, it’s just the end of this chapter. More on the fallout from this, and implications for the entire AI project, on tomorrow’s edition of People vs Algorithms. Plus: Political commentator Chris Cillizza joins us to give the Washington view of the scandal and make his case for dismantling the Pulitzer Prize. Get PvA..

The post-scale media business is not just about niches. It’s about whales.

Many digital markets, from gaming to OnlyFans to gambling, operate on whale models. A small number of customers account for a lion’s share of the revenue. Media has long taken a different approach, focused on attracting a broad audience and monetizing across the breadth of it. The new model: Focus on your superusers, even if the numbers are smaller.

“Superusers are accounting for 80% of the revenue, both ad revenue and subscription revenue, for many of these publishers,” Mark Zohar, CEO of Viafoura, told me on a Spotlight episode of The Rebooting Show.

That means fixing an original sin of digital publishing: scrambling for short term revenue from fly-by audience to monetize thinly but broadly. That left publishers without a direct relationship to users that they’re now trying to fix. It was notable that even a traffic behemoth like Reddit is moving to force users to log in.

For news publishers, a further shift is needed to emphasize more than just information delivery, which is at high risk of AI replacement Instead, what superusers pay for is usually not more information – offering people an extra newsletter edition is more like a threat – but around “people, peers, relationships and recognition.”

The Portland Press Herald, for instance, offered hard-core birders – they exist, trust me – an exclusive Q&A with an expert birder. The Philadelphia Inquirer set up Gameday Central where the sickos who are still watching Eagles games have a safe space to commiserate.

“It’s hard work,” Mark said. “You have to change your mindset around volume to value and you know, shallowness to depth.”

Listen to my conversation with Mark. Thanks to Viafoura for its sponsorship of TRB’s Media 2031 project.

Yesterday, we hosted our latest roundtable discussion. These are by-invitation small group discussions of what’s working in the media business. This one focused on email as infrastructure, sponsored by Beehiiv. Key takeaways from the conversation, which was held under the Chatham House Rule:

1. Keep newsletters out of the CRM's unengaged rules. A reader who opts in, goes on vacation for two weeks and doesn't open gets marked unengaged and automatically suppressed. Two publishers now split editorial sends from marketing for exactly this reason. The same rule hides your best people: one team counts a single event attendance as outweighing 30 days without an open, and is testing a score that gives 5 points for an event and 2 for a newsletter signup. The core lesson: Email metrics are fuzzier than ever.

2. Judge by time on site and suppression, not opens. Understanding what’s working in email is harder than ever thanks to faulty open and click stats, thanks to security and safety protocols that auto-open and click links. One team checks time on site after a newsletter click: one second is a bot, a minute and a half is a person. For newsletters that are the product, another watches how many readers its suppression logic removes over time. Ad hoc special editions around big tentpole releases keep the marketing list contactable, bots and all, though the person running them called it a house of cards and expects advertisers to start asking which numbers are human.

3. Build around interests, not markets. One publisher with more than 1,000 newsletters across 300 markets plans to cut that to well under 600 and rebuild around known interests, so an Eagles fan gets Eagles coverage wherever they live. Its AI-personalized test of the daily briefing is showing early gains in click-through. Others use what readers say at registration, like the sports they do, to shape welcome series, plus "mousetrap flows" that move flagship readers into a niche title once they hit an interest threshold.

4. People pay to support. At one publisher, about 90% of premium upgrades are to support the work, and plain emails from the founder asking people to join beat paywalled articles. Its last two weeks were its best ever for membership, mostly from people who had sat in the free funnel for over a year.

5. Give readers a reason to read to the bottom. Personality-driven newsletters get readers replying to editors like friends. Games sit at the bottom of the email (guess where a photo was taken, a Friday news quiz), and event signup links go to newsletter readers first. Subscriber-only newsletters had the highest opens across more than 80 titles and are being used to cut churn, and a note from an editor sells subscriptions. If you're migrating, ramp volume slowly to protect your domain reputation and expect it to take months.

Next week, we are holding another roundtable discussion on the practical application of AI in media businesses, supported by WordpressVIP. For more information on sponsorship of The Rebooting’s roundtable series in 2027, contact Richard Jamieson [email protected].

We’d like to hear your provocations about Media 2031. Send us yours in 100 words or less. If we run yours, you’ll get an invitation to our Media 2031 gathering on Dec 8 in New York.

OVERVIEW

COMPANY
Skift

THE CHALLENGE
Sponsors who judge events by leads and cost-per-lead

THE CHANGE
Skipping hosted-buyer events for travel brands on stage, paid tickets and stage sponsorships

THE TAKEAWAY
Staying premium keeps vendors few, and a lot of the business happens in the green room

Access and proximity are the lynchpins of what makes events successful, especially for B2B media companies. Sponsors pay a B2B media company such as Adweek or Skift, which focuses on the travel industry, to put them in the right rooms with the right people.