Welcome to a new version of The Rebooting. I’ve moved to Beehiiv. Some kinks to iron out, but I wanted to first give you some reasoning behind the move. Plus: A conversation with Keith Pepper, CEO of Rough Draft Atlanta, on why direct mail and local news work well together.
I’m heading to Paris next week for the Piano Academy. On Thursday, Oct 2, I'll give a talk that will focus on "things that won't change" in the AI era. Find out more about the Piano Academy. Hope to connect with some of you there.
Beyond Either-Or: Aiming for total revenue growth
Our recent survey of 65 revenue leaders at top publishers revealed that "alignment among departments is the top barrier to growth." The Post and Courier's success validates this finding through their efforts on driving total revenue growth. PJ Browning, President and Publisher, explains: "By leveraging Piano, we were able to optimize both advertising and subscription revenue streams. Where these sides often competed against each other, this has allowed us to maximize total revenue while growing our audience." Their achievement demonstrates how breaking down departmental silos and fostering collaboration between advertising and subscription teams can unlock significant growth potential for publishers.
Email is still king
I’ve now used three platforms: Substack, Ghost and Beehiiv. My take on all is the best depends on what kind of business you have. What Substack has done is remarkable in building a creator platform that requires pretty much no product work at all. For the first two years of The Rebooting, this was critical as the less time spent on tech meant more time spent on content and figuring out how to make money.
Over time, I tired of being a Substacker and saw a newsletter platform morphing into something closer to a social network. The growth features were nice, but the idea of “owning the relationship” was hard to swallow when Substack would market other newsletters to my subscribers. That’s not control.
Ghost was an in-between solution that I found perfectly fine, only it was made for the web. Like Substack, I found Ghost lacked robust email tools because while Substack was a YouTube-like platform, Ghost was at its heart a web-based CMS for publishing websites that added email as a distribution mechanism. I found both to be overly premised on the idea that media businesses should only monetize through subscriptions, which never in the history of media has been the case.
I found The Rebooting’s business to require email as a central node. I have my doubts about “newsletter businesses” because I believe that most media businesses need to be multimodal. Email remains an ideal base for publishing businesses. In a recent conversation on Puck’s Grill Room podcast, New York Times CEO Meredith Levien kept coming back to establishing direct connections with the audience. It’s a simple but critical mantra for media businesses, and while the Times can build an everything app at the heart of its business, email remains the best tool for direct connections for most publishers.
One of the interesting developments of the post-scale era is I’ve found the kinds of conversations we always had in B2B media are more common with big consumer publishers. Email has always been the workhorse of B2B. You send out an email, people buy thousands of dollars of event tickets. It’s almost too effective. You can post on X all day and not have similar results. Now, even the biggest consumer publishers are speaking a similar language to trade publishers.
For The Rebooting as a B2B publisher, the business is built around the ability to activate valuable segments of the audience. My North Star metric is Audience Activation Rate: The number of subscribers who take commercial actions, either through a paid membership or by engaging in a partner collaborations, such as attending a virtual event, downloading a research report or attending a private dinner, breakfast salon or gathering. In the past year, we’ve had over 4,000 commercial actions taken by the audience. (BTW, get in touch to discuss collaborating.)
That puts a premium on having a deep understanding of the audience with smart segmentation that allows personalized messaging to our core audience segments: product, audience development, subscriptions, revenue, B2B, independent media. The Rebooting’s partnership programs are built around matching audience segments to customer segments. (The upside of media about media is it makes room for a level of transparency that wouldn't make sense otherwise.)
And to do that means being serious about email. And Beehiiv is serious about it. One participant at a private dinner we held in collaboration with Beehiiv last week remarked how they felt like it had been around for far longer than three years. That’s a testament to how it entered into a crowded market and out-executed competitors by constantly shipping new features.
I’ve known Tyler Denk, the founder of Beehiiv, since before he had a product. Tyler impressed me enough at a dinner in Miami in 2021 that I made my first and only angel investment in a company that didn’t yet have a product. Since then, he has built not just a great email platform but also a great team. I’ve always found with software I’ve used over the years that the services layer is invaluable.
In my initial days using the platform, I’ve found the functionality to be far more robust than what I’ve used the past nearly five years. I listen to people far more sophisticated than me in areas like email, and I have constantly heard that Beehiiv is ahead.
Email remains underutilized at many media businesses. I’m excited to partner with Beehiiv to both grow The Rebooting with its tech but also explain its benefits to the audience through a series of virtual programs, dinners, salons and events. I’ll be speaking to Tyler on The Rebooting Show in a couple weeks, and we are putting the finishing touches on a virtual event that will dive into how a modern email platform can drive leverage in a publishing business, whether a “micromedia” outfit or a large-scale enterprise.
More to come. Get in touch if you want an intro to the Beehiiv team. Thanks to Tyler and team for the partnership.
Rough Draft Atlanta’s ‘meaningful, not massive’ approach to local
Keith Pepper is a first-time business owner. That comes with its own learning curve – trust me, I know – and a frequent feeling you should be doing more. I often see splashy announcements and boastful LinkedIn posts and wonder if I’m on the right track. Keith has a handy reminder: a Post-It note on his computer that reads simply “meaningful, not massive.”
That’s the approach Keith has taken with Rough Draft Atlanta, a local news business focused on well-heeled areas of the Atlanta area that Keith has built after buying a clutch of community newspapers in 2020. Keith has mostly worked on the tech side of media his entire career, but he felt the pull to local news for the next phase of his career. On The Rebooting Show, we discuss how Rough Draft relies on direct mail of all things as a critical and reliable distribution channel, why print still far outpaces digital in monetization of local, and making tough choices in the balance of hard news and service journalism that often gets a bad wrap but is critical utility for local news.
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