What’s working in audience strategies

Hello from Perugia, a hilltop town in Umbria famous for its study-abroad program and that for two decades becomes Silicon Valley VC nightmare: filled with journalists. 

Being here reminds me that journalism is a guild. Journalists are craftspeople who like all guilds protect their craft through in-group dynamics and protectionist measures. The challenge for the craft is it’s an unaccredited profession. Anyone can be a journalist, or can at least adopt the aesthetics and trappings of journalism for self-interested goals rather than the civic good that’s at the heart of journalism. This creates a tension that can sometimes manifest as an anti-market sensibility that I believe holds back the adoption of techniques used by information entrepreneurs who are often running circles around journalism in the Information Space. 

I recorded a live version of The Rebooting Show at the International Journalism Festival earlier today with Peter Erdelyi, director of the Center for Media Sustainability.  

Peter and I had a debate over the utility of public funding of journalism. I take the pro-market stance, since I believe these kinds of interventions are too fraught politically – do we really want to give politicians more leverage over media? – and create a culture of dependency and product stagnation. 

Today, notes from The Rebooting’s Morning Salon: Audience Strategies, which brought together media company leaders to share what’s working in shifting business models from audience quantity to audience value.

Send me your feedback by hitting reply or emailing me at [email protected]. 

Last week, we kicked off our Morning Salon series of monthly private gatherings that bring together 30 publishing executives around the theme of: What’s working.

Our first edition of the TRB Morning Salon focused on audience strategies. We chose this as a starting point because this is simple but fundamental shift that’s happening across the industry. You’re either starting an audience-focused property or you’re retrofitting a legacy model to be audience-focused. We hold these events under The Chatham House Rule to encourage candor. Below are some takeaways from our participants, which run the gamut from large consumer publishers to business titles to niche brands.

Thanks to Omeda for acting as the presenting sponsor of the TRB Morning Salon and to ViaFoura for its supporting sponsorship. 

Our next TRB Morning Salon will be on May 13 in NYC. The discussion topic: What’s working in AI. All of our salons are invitation only based on professional background.

Fill out your interest in attending here. For sponsorship information, send me a note at [email protected]. 

See my takeaways from the morning.

Audience segmentation is the starting point. Publishers do not have an audience. They have several audience segments, which often have different needs. I’m constantly reminded that media products need to deliver specific value to people: Help me make money, make me smarter, get me a promotion, save me money, entertain me, etc. That often takes the form of unbundling the audience to create products for specific segments. That moves segmentation from an ad targeting exercise to a product development prerequisite. The insight from the room was that segmentation is about recognizing you may be serving fundamentally different people with the same product.

Thinking longer term. It’s not a news flash that publishers are under a fair amount of short-term pressure. And yes, they need to feed the traffic machine. But there is a shift internally that’s taken place. One exec described the muscle-memory problem: the whole company — including the CEO — used to start every morning looking at a traffic grid. That’s why there’s such interest in using AI to play a quantity-over-quality game, even if executives know a sustainable model has to be built on firmer ground. Some publishers are even making the tradeoff of lowering programmatic yield in favor of improved user experiences. The challenge: You still have to run the old model while building the new one – and managing both requires tradeoffs.

Embracing talent. Publishers are looking to make their own journalists and content creators into stars. They’re bringing in hair and makeup; they’re training staff up on being good on camera and at events. The Axios model is roughly the direction: Develop stars, build franchises around them and cut them in on the upside. There’s no other choice in the era of earned energy. Audiences have voted: They prefer individuals over institutions; time to adapt. The room was clear on one thing: you don't need to manufacture personalities. You need to find the ones you already have and give them a camera and a budget.

All roads lead to owned audience. Nate Silver has launched a fun holy war against X for how it is a nest of misinformation while it won’t show people updates from institutional media accounts from The New York Times and others. Meanwhile, the Times is a standout success story because its reporting is sought out. Publishers will take the Google Discover traffic while it lasts; I don’t know of any that are building businesses on it. Instead, they’re focused on email, app, SMS and, of course, events. Owned audience moves from being a channel to a flywheel. One publisher's open-access experiment revealed something counterintuitive: giving content away for a limited window didn't cannibalize subscriptions — it actually accelerated them, because loyal subscribers became a word-of-mouth marketing channel.

Community is hot. Many publishers have for years pretended their paywall is actually a community. More now are doing the hard work of building communities, bringing their most loyal audience into decisionmaking. Getting people to take actions in real life is forcing publishers to act like consumer companies after years of catering to the algorithmic gods. KPIs move from reach and impressions to engagement and participation. One exec framed the whole shift as moving from "ease of distribution" to "value of ownership.”  Publishers spent years letting engagement happen on other platforms because it was easy, and now they're pulling it back because they realize the conversations are more valuable than the traffic.Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply.

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