What's working?

We are holding our NYC version of the TRB Media Mixer on March 19. We had a great group at our first mixer in London last week. Media People could use a mixer. These are invitation-only events. Thanks to Beehiiv for sponsoring this gathering.

Let me know if you’re interested in attending by filling out this form. 

Today, I’m focusing on what’s working in the media business. We are all well aware of what’s not, so I want to take a step back and see what’s moving in the right direction. I plan on highlighting more examples of what’s working, on strategic and tactical levels. To share your successes or ones you’ve noticed, send me a note: [email protected] with the subject line what’s working. 

Earlier this week, I slid into a booth at Pershing Square, an old-school breakfast spot across from Grand Central. I haven’t done a daily commute in six years, so I enjoy the change of pace. The digital media exec I was meeting had the familiar woes that have beset the entire industry. There’s no need to tick them off. I decided a new approach. What’s working, I asked. I got an audible exhale. “For now?”

Something I’ve noticed is the horizons have narrowed for many digital media leaders. They’re practiced in moments of crisis at this point. And few believe the current shifts will leave the publishing landscape unchanged. It’s become a cliche to say “everything is for sale” because just about everything is for sale. There are fewer buyers. 

Instead, most publishers are focused on triage. They’re propping up old businesses that in their heart of hearts they know are in freefall. The experience of landing on a Variety webpage and being bombarded with dueling autoplay video ads, cookie consent banners, an “ad skin,” and a programmatic banner every paragraph or two, and you can’t help to notice what my fellow podcaster Troy Young has called “the whiff of desperation.” There is simply no future in that business, whether it’s in a year or three years. The playbook of arbing search traffic with what polite circles call “high ad density” is going to zero.

That often obscures what is working. My breakfast companion had examples of what’s working, such as commerce and niche brands in their portfolio, even if experience taught him to be wary of declaring victory.

I’m going to focus more in The Rebooting on what’s working. I admit to feeling numb, even bored, by the many structural challenges. Yes, the industry is compressing and will compress more. More layoffs will happen. Once storied brands will be sent off to PE glue factories to be harvested of their value in ways that are often unedifying. 

My request: Send me examples in your own business of what’s working. We will begin featuring some of these. I find a good part of the media industry is an openness to sharing what’s working since the real competition most publishers face is not from other publishers. Email me at [email protected] with what’s working in the subject line. 

Here’s an incomplete list of what I see and hear is working.

Audience-first business models. The structural compression underway is disproportionately affecting the middle and long-tail arbitrageurs. Elite brands like The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Media and The Wall Street Journal are doing fine. They can pull off direct-to-consumer business strategies build around subscriptions. This is the ideal media business model. Overall, I see even those that cannot have subscriptions as the main driver of their businesses succeeding with building more durable ties to the audience. Underneath the doom about steep pageview declines is the reality that those attention declines are not matched 1:1 with revenue declines. The Boston Globe is seeing its search traffic rise – and with it, subscriptions from that traffic. Taboola CEO Adam Singolda mentioned to me that 30-40% search traffic declines will often mean 10-15% revenue drops. Publishers increasingly focus on either the average revenue per user or lifetime value of audience members rather than the standard RPM approach. “The best media companies are connecting with their audiences in multiple ways, in multiple fashions, building a relationship with them,” Omeda CEO James Capo told me on The Rebooting Show.

Being a front for a non-media business. If The New York Times is a gaming company with a newsroom – it’s non-news products are growing fastest – Hearst is a B2B data services business with magazines and newspapers. The company now derives the majority of its profits from its B2B companies like Fitch Ratings and aviation data service Camp. The best media business model is not  having a benevolent billionaire owner – people who become billionaires are rarely Mother Theresa types – but acting as a front for a high margin data business. Beyond news, lifestyle brands Outside is operating a model where media brands feed into recurring revenue utilities like its trail and running route apps. Media does the job of frequency and brand. It is often serving, economically at least, as a content marketing engine for more dynamic businesses.

Pivoting to IRL. I’m plowing through an incredibly dense economic history of capitalism, and I was struck that soon after merchants started getting frisky in the 13th century, tradeshows sprung up. Matching up a buy and a sell side has always been valuable. And convenings of all sorts are more valuable in a digital world that’s inevitably going to be 99% synthetic. People will always want to connect with other humans, even if we will increasingly deal with robots in our daily lives. Semafor’s success with events is a handy example, but lifestyle publishers are increasingly brand activations companies. Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman recently told me it expects experiential to be 12% of the business from “essentially zero” a few years back. Convening is the economic engine of many niche brands. Being able to get people to take actions is the test of a brand. 

Catering to the rich and powerful. Media always pattern matches. There were many knockoffs of BuzzFeed, Morning Brew and Vice. These days the models to imitate are different. There’s TBPN, which charges advertisers $87,000 a month for access to its elite audience of tech influentials and powerbrokers. AppLovin even told investors during its recent earnings call that TBPN branding its gong with the AppLovin logo as an example of its successful marketing. Puck is producing imitators. Former Puck executive Max Tcheyan is reading the launch of Caper, which promises to cover “the people, money, ambition, power and chaos that fuels the food world.” The connective thread in all of these models: They strive to put themselves at the center of elite audience segments. It’s B2B with better design and livelier writing. Small and valuable audiences make for great businesses, so long as you can be essential to them.

Expert creators. The strongest media businesses right now are built around individuals. The creator economy is replacing the mid-and long-tail of publishing, and in some cases competing on the elite tier. Lifestyle influencers are under threat from AI models. I’m more into the growing field of expert creators who have real world experience in their fields rather than follow the typical observer role of journalism. Lenny Ratchitsky for product people. CJ Gustafson’s Mostly Metrics for CFOs. Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio for social media marketers. Yahoo’s creator program is a sign of what’s to come. Publishers will look to strike deals with individuals.

New-style audience arb. SEO arb is getting compressed. The mid-and-long tail of the open web is at risk of extinction as they lack the brands and strong audience ties to make the leap to audience focused models. But arb never dies. Attention arb has moved on to using AI to produce vast amounts of content and play an attention arbitrage game on platforms like YouTube. Anonymous Banker pointed me to Bandar Apna Dost, an Indian YouTube channel racking up billions of views with an AI-generated monkey. The low cost of acquiring this attention makes for a lucrative model when combined with YouTube’s ad system. Compare that to the economics of producing a piece of investigative journalism where much of the value created will be siphoned off by the commentariat. 

Send me a note with what is working for you, big or small: [email protected]