Troy Young on publishing's pivot to individuals

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I’m continuing my look-ahead series of podcast episodes to kick off 2022. Last week, Sara Fischer, media reporter for Axios, laid out her big themes for the year. This week, I spoke to Troy Young, the former president of Hearst Magazines, who over the years I’ve found to be very thoughtful about how the media business is changing. Reminder: If you like the podcast, please share it with others who might also find it valuable – and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts if you’re in the blue bubble brigade. Big thanks to mpm318 for this nice review.

If you’re making bets for a Word of the Year in digital media in 2022, identity is a good candidate. The nature of digital advertising is changing as the industry transitions away from the third-party cookie as a key audience identifier. Identity, both on the page and across the ecosystem, is an evolving and complex component to publisher monetization. Audigent’s Hadron ID serves as a cookieless “container” solution, delivering cookieless solutions at scale while being fully interoperable with other ID systems. It is simple to deploy and instantly enables end-to-end cookieless programmatic buying while delivering addressablity. Audigent is transforming how clean first-party data powers the programmatic landscape by putting the control back in the hands of publishers and advertisers.

Troy Young has been through the various interactions of digital media going back to the start. During the dot-com boom, he was an executive at early web marketing agency Organic. During Web 2.0, he decamped for video ad network VideoEgg, which turned into Say Media, a hybrid tech platform and vertical publisher, eventually landing at Hearst Magazines, where he was president. Now, he qualifies as officially Web3 curious, if not ready to start his day with “gm” tweet and regularly rely on riddles to explain what’s seemingly inexplicable in crypto. 

“It's an incredible time to be a curious person,” he said on The Rebooting Show. “There's so much to learn and there's so many people who are not part of what is a sort of classic media ecosystem that are writing about things that there's really an unending source of inspiration.”

What stood out to me from the conversation:

The need for media companies to use Web3 to rethink their relationships with their audience as well as within their organizations 

The promise of Web3 – and yes, we’re mostly talking promise vs reality at this point – is a fairer deal for all involved rather than the benefits and power going to a select few

The opportunities for new brands that are part of communities

Finally, I’m often struck by how few people deeply involved in the development of digital media are particularly pleased with many aspects of how it has turned out.

“Let’s face it, monetization on the open web never really worked that well outside of the datasets and buying interfaces that allowed Facebook and Google to sweep up the long tail of advertisers and take over huge amounts of that ecosystem, including everything f