The Rebooting Show

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Skift CEO Rafat Ali. What I like about Skift is it goes narrow and deep on the business of travel while situating it within the broader context of the global economy and societal trends. Covid was a reminder that external events are out of your control and the best you can do is adapt to them. Nobody likes the painful decisions you have to make to ensure simple survival. Skift ended up cutting a third of its staff and saw revenue decline 40%.For Skift that meant shrinking its business, letting go and furloughing employees, and preserving cash to weather the storm. Skift used the pandemic to refit its business, casting off the expenses of offices and event venues, and building new high-margin products. Skift is more profitable now than it’s ever been. It has just crossed its employee count from pre-pandemic, even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Covid outbreaks in Asia and a new Covid variant circulating Europe signal even more turbulence ahead.  Some takeaways from our discussion:Apply a consumer lens to B2B. Modern B2B is as audience-focused and quality as consumer media. That means investing in design, quality reporting and writing, and outlook. Travel was historically broken into sectors – flights, hotels, cruises, meetings – but that’s not how consumers approached the category, so Skift took the POV of people, not vendors. Media and data make sense together… on paper. In media, the cliche “Uber for X” pitch is the “Bloomberg for X” pitch. Using publishing as a top of the funnel for a high-priced, recurring revenue data business is a business school case study. The problem: These are very different businesses to staff and run. Skift originally cast itself as a “travel intelligence company,” but ended up being a media company. Covid expanded the talent pool. Skift used the pandemic to become a permanently distributed company. As it has hired people back, of the 20 people brought on, only one has been based in New York City. That’s led to a great expansion of its talent pool, not to mention a lower cost base.Covid changed the client base. The travel industry was on mothballs for much of the pandemic, but Skift found that it was buoyed by the windfall realized by large tech platforms. Much of B2B media business models are driven by vendors, but the big tech platforms are where properties want to get for their stability and massive marketing budgets. Balancing the revenue portfolio. The goal for Skift’s revenue profile is to be evenly split among events, advertising and subscriptions. Going into the pandemic, subscriptions were lagging a category like events. Now, with advertising on a hot streak and subscriptions coming back, Skift has seen subscriptions rise to 20% of revenue.Check out The Rebooting Show on Apple or Spotify. Also, if you’re an Apple user, please leave a rating and review. Let me know what you think of the episode by hitting reply.Lean mediaA key part of primary-engagement media is getting the cost base right. Publishers often have to do so many things to make money that the expenses in the organization tend to go in many places other than the actual creation of content. Fixing that imbalance is key for building sustainable publishing brands. Manufactured growth vs organic growth

Something about the podcast highlights format wasn’t working for me, so I’m switching up the Monday version to feature highlights from the podcast as well as some thoughts on other matters in sustainable publishing. After all, formats matter. Let me know what you think. This week’s topics:Going down the rabbit hole with TCG’s Jarrod DickerCensorship fightsIndividual brands in publishingWell-paid journalistsCompany teardown piecesThe pivot to pragmatism, web3 editionCrypto is polarizing. Talk to a web3 trust believer – I define web3 as encompassing crypto currencies, blockchain, decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations – and you’ll hear we are on the cusp of a blockchain utopia that sounds a lot like a kibbutz designed by Ayn Rand. And if you don’t see that, well, you’re ngmi. The doubters of this “pathetic tech future,”  scramble to dismiss the latest crypto craze as a “bust.” Most critiques at their heart are a version of this throwaway line in an otherwise quite interesting Time  profile of Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin:“Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams.” Well, when you put it that way…I’m too much of a realist for these extremes. I believe crypto is, in some ways, inevitable based on the sheer amount of capital – financial, people and cultural – going into it. Kevin Roose, who has taken a moderate approach to the Crypto Holy Wars, has a very good web3 primer for those with open minds. The trough of disillusionment is a critical part of any adoption cycle. I’m most interested in web3 through the lens of publishing models. For that, Jarrod Dicker is my web3 shaman, since as a longtime publishing executive at places like The Huffington Post and The Washington Post, he’s got a foot in the Old World of Web 1 and Web 2.0 and now one firmly in the New World as a partner at investment firm TCG.What I like about Jarrod is, despite his affinity for Phish and cryptic tweets, he’s a realist. He knows how early it is for this set of technologies having tangible impact. Some key takeaways from my conversation with Jarrod:NFTs matter. Look beyond the speculative frenzy over ape drawings. The importance of NFTs are when they’re tied to access and community. In media, imagine moving people from a passive audience to active participants to owners.Web3 needs better marketing. Let’s face it, crypto boosters do themselves no favors by coming across as Crazy Eddie on bath salts. The challenge of movi

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify If you use Apple, please leave a rating and review.Every cycle of unbundling is followed by another period of rebundling. Media is no different – just look at the streaming market. In publishing, the shift of power from institutional brands to individual brands has unfolded over the past few years, and now a period of rebundling will begin.Puck is a seven-month-old media brand built with the institutional-individual brand continuum firmly in mind. The publication has recruited several well-known journalists to focus on American power centers in finance, tech, media, politics and entertainment.“Puck is a media brand with creators at the center,” said Liz Gough, a former Condé Nast exec who is COO of Puck. “We are focused on telling the inside story from some of the most important parts of America: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington DC and Hollywood.”What I’ve liked about Puck is how it’s not recreating the same old publishing model but instead bringing on its contributors – people like Dylan Byers, Julia Ioffe, Teddy Schleifer, Matt Belloni – as partners, giving them a middle ground that has the benefits of both the institutional approach and personal brand approach. (I have a deal with Puck as a contributor to license some of my writing for The Rebooting. I don’t have any financial interest in the company beyond that.)“We saw two ends of the spectrum,” Liz said. “We saw the individual brands of the world and at the other end legacy or institutional brands that a lot of the founding team at Puck came from and have their own amazing benefits but also challenges. We thought the media brand of the future is taking the best of both of those worlds.”In this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, Liz and I discuss the idea of journalists as influencers, why subscriptions and ads work well together and power centers as an editorial lens.Journalists as influencersThe notion of “personal brands” in journalism is, to put it mildly, a bit of a lightning rod, but Puck doesn’t shy from the concept. After all, journalists have long built reputations for their work – and looked to make money from those reputations.“Journalists are the one of the most original influencers in American society when you think about it. They were the last untapped group in the direct-to-consumer revolution. We started thinking about how to build a business that places journalists at the center of the revenue model rather than as a cost center. But at the same time, we know brand still matters.”No one size-fits-all-approachI’m not a big fan of false dichotomies. There’s no one way to do anything, or one model for publishing. What I think the unbundling of publishing has done – and I give Substack a lot of credit for opening new options – is to give writers more choices about how they work. The idea that many people don’t all have the same needs and motivations doesn’t strike me as crazy – new option

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify If you use Apple, please leave a rating and review.Journalists in their 40s are under no illusions to the need for sustainable business models in news publishing. Being suddenly laid off is a rite of passage.“Those of us who started in journalism in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, very early on we were awakened to the challenges of the business models,” said David Skok, founder and CEO of The Logic, a four-year-old publisher focused on the growth of the knowledge economy in Canada. “We didn’t have the church and state separation as much as others did in terms of  understanding the news industry is as much about product and business strategy as it is your editorial. I’ve always said you could have the best lede or nut graf in the world, but if it didn’t load on your phone in .01 seconds, it was invisible to the reader.”Founded in 2018 and now with 20 employees, The Logic is an independent publication focused on the knowledge economy in Canada as it transitions away from an economy largely dependent on sectors like mining and real estate. David describes The Logic as “a combination of the business model/product of The Information with the editorial focus of The Financial Times.” On this episode of The Rebooting Show, David and I discussed why The Logic doesn’t consider itself a tech publication, differentiating through original reporting and why a subscriptions-based business model isn’t subscriptions-only. Starting from scratchDavid is a veteran journalist, with roles at the Boston Globe and The Toronto Star. He started The Logic almost four years ago after recognizing the challenges legacy news organizations face in changing their business models provides an opportunity for new entrants with the right focus.“I had been a disruptor from within [large news organizations] and seen a lot of the same mistakes being committed and a lot of the same barriers to innovation. I wasn’t seeing a lot of success in large organizations, not because the effort wasn’t there, but because they’re large organizations and they’re slower moving. There was an opportunity, particularly in the Canadian market, which hadn’t had a lot of innovation in a while, to start something new.”Going beyond techTechnology long moved from a vertical coverage area to a horizontal. There is a tech angle to just about every news story. For The Logic, that means going beyond technology to zero in on the big story of the Canadian economy shifting its focus to industries like crypto and electric vehicles.“You can't cover tech anymore without covering the future of everything. Early on, we branded ourselves as a technology publication because it was a way for people to digest what we were doing, but it was almost a Trojan horse. We’re really about the future of the entire economy, not just tech. What we try to do is cover it through a lens of innovation and forward-thinking.” DifferentiationBeing unique and meaningful are the ways to stand out in crowded markets. For The Logic, that means focusing on in-depth, reported stories as opposed to chasing SEO traffic by rushing up an explainer of “What is SWIFT?”“[The Information’s CEO] Jessica Lessin has talked a lot about this: How do you be 10x better than your competition? You have to make sure you stand out. Do we have unique access to someone or something? Are we telling you something original, breaking original reporting you can’t get anywhere else? All our work is based on original reporting so that we can define the agenda as opposed to fo

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyLike just about everyone, I’m both horrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in awe of the resistance of the Ukrainian people. Ukraine is an inspiration to the rest of the world. In places like the United States, we fail to appreciate the staggering advantages we have just by dint of where and when we were born. In September, I visited Ukraine to speak at a conference to build sustainable, independent journalism in the region. This is a hard task in a country with complicated politics where publications are often controlled by oligarchs and political parties, and the economy is far smaller. The Ukrainian people I met were all first rate and incredibly generous. They’re also brave. Consider helping by giving to one of these vetted programs, as well as a fundraising for the Kyiv Independent, an independent English-language publication, and this one for other independent media in Ukraine. A couple years ago, then-Bleacher Report CEO Howard Mittman coined a neat phrase for the end of an era of lightweight content produced for algorithms: Need vs Feed. In the next era of digital publishing, you want to be on the Need side.“When I think about publishing, I think about purpose-driven versus mission,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “Purpose-driven publishing is about ad dollars and collecting affiliate revenue. It's about filling a gap that consumers have based off of a Google search or social media. Mission-driven is where I’m interested in now. You see that in areas like the environment and in news.” Howard spent a dozen years at Conde Nast, occupying top business roles for titles like GQ and Wired. I’ve always known him to be thoughtful about where the media business is going, so we had a discussion about the dangers of going overboard on subscriptions, why now just might be the time for new entrants to address local news and why the betting gold rush for sports publishers might soon taper off.Hope for local newsIf there’s a sector of publishing that could use a comeback, it’s local news. The industry has been decimated over the past two decades, with big-city newspapers shrunken and news desserts dotting the map. But new entrants are emerging.“We live in a world where all politics are still local, but all news coverage is national. I hope there's a compromise. I suspect we're getting closer to finding it. I don't know that local journalism is always going to be defined in its most traditional form. It may not simply be about local news and information. And maybe local journalism is decreasing the proximity between the content creator and the reader. If you look at the podcast system, how many have evolved into live events? That reduces the friction between the creator and the user. Those direct connections people will pay for in pretty intense ways – if you have the right talent, if you have the right topic matter, the right sort of credibility.”The case for ads The pendulum in the publishing business has swung far away from ads and firmly in t

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Over just five years, crypto has exploded from a curiosity to a cultural touchstone, with millions of boosters, Super Bowl commercials and billions of investment in the belief that a new financial system, built for the digital age, is being created.And along the way crypto has become highly divisive. Its most ardent supporters are hardly known for their understatement, giving crypto the whiffs of both libertarianism run amok and a speculative frenzy that’s given cover to all manner of grifters. The Gold Rush mentality isn’t a bad thing, according to Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, a crypto-focused media company that expects to top $20 million in its fifth year.“Bubbles are good,” he said on this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. “They bring in capital, that’s how innovative technologies get built. Railroads went through a massive mania from 1840 to 1870 with all these bubbles. But obviously railroads got built. Bubbles just bring talent and capital.”Jason and I discussed how four-year-old Blockworks has built a $20 million business by positioning itself as the go-to resource for financial institutions to understand the fast-moving world of blockchains and crypto currencies. Believing in crypto’s inevitabilityAs newcomers to crypto in 2017, Jason and co-founder Mike Ippolito saw a nascent industry stuck in boom and bust cycles and with its scruffy edges. But they believed one key thing: crypto would eventually become a very large institutional asset class.“The white space that we saw was around information in the industry. In 2017 there were basically two media sites, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph. You had one or two podcasts, and then a bunch of information on things like Twitter and Reddit. We would go to these events, and they were clearly run by a bunch of scammers. And then you'd look online and it seems like a bunch of people pumping different coins. But 1% of this feels real. We've done so much wrong over the last four years, but the one thing that we got right is believing that crypto would eventually become an institutional asset class and that we would need better information, insights, data analysis, news, research, et cetera, for the massive cohort of capital markets and people coming into crypto.” Building from eventsBlockworks started out in events, hosting its first one in February 2018. Went into the business full-time in May. Blockworks only then branched into content with a podcast network, including popular crypto podcaster Anthony Pompliano. It was only in January 2021 that Blockworks launched its news site. The advantages of this approach: Blockworks was generating revenue from the start.“We've never had to raise outside venture funding because we started with conferences. We ended up building a community of some of the most valuable people in the world: money managers, hedge fund managers, portfolio managers at endowments, family offices. And that turned out to be a really valuable audience for this institutional bucket of crypto companies that ended up getting built in 2017 to 2010 – Fireblocks, BlockFi, Gemini, Coinbase, all these institutional crypto brands –

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Apple users: Please leave a rating and review. When it comes to business models, software models beat publishing ones. Recurring revenue scales more quickly and at far better margins.For a decade, Famous Birthdays has chronicled the rise of digital culture through its platform for finding out more information about the digital stars from TikTok and YouTube, as well as more traditional pop stars. Famous Birthdays has relied heavily on its internal search data as the “North Star” of its business. The company noticed Charli D’Amelio rising in popularity in 2019 and recorded a video interview with her before the TikTok star exploded in popularity. That formed the basis of the Famous Birthdays Pro product that offers proprietary data on who is rising and falling in popularity. Clients include platforms, influencer agencies and services, and talent representation firms.“We add more clients and it just grows,” said Evan Britton, founder of Famous Birthdays. “If you pivot to video, you have to create that content and you get some margin on top of it. Ad-based businesses aren't as exciting, We could have charged our users a few bucks a month and given them extra functionality. But we went with the enterprise model, which is good because we don't have to gate anything with our users.”Evan and I spoke about the opportunity he saw that led to Famous Birthdays, the opportunity for a data business and why he went all-in on programmatic advertising.Finding opportunity in the shift to mobileTechnology shifts create opportunities. Back in 2012, the mobile phone was just starting to usurp the role of desktop in how people found and consumed information. Evan noticed that sites like Wikipedia were comprehensive, but not made for a mobile experience, particularly the small screen size of those early smartphones.“Birthdays are always often the first thing people want to know about a celebrity, but there's other information they want to know. We were a mobile-friendly Wikipedia/IMDB. I'm more about user experience. The user experience on mobile for Wikipedia was not good. You don't want a book report on mobile. You want to get right to it. I saw that as an opportunity as an entrepreneur.”New class of celebritiesAs digital media has grown, it has created its own set of celebrities, grouped together under the broad term of “creators.” These can range from YouTube stars to Instagram and TikTok performers. What Famous Birthdays saw early on, back to the heyday of short video service Vine, was fans often have greater attachment to these digital stars.“We would have a Vine star with a million followers sending us their headshot and their bio. And then at the same time we had these movie actors that wouldn't respond to us that had 5,000 followers. We saw very early that there was a gap between where culture was, but where the industry was set up. Traditional celebrities, you are a fan of them, but with social stars, you are really a fan. It's different when you see someone in a movie acting as someone else versus watching them brush their teeth every morning. Social just had a deeper level of fandom and we always saw that in our rankings.”Why platforms got creator religionJust about every major tech platform has their own twist on creators. Most have lau

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Rebooting Show. This week’s episode is a sponsored Spotlight episode, where I feature a conversation with a sponsor of The Rebooting in order to get a better understanding of their approach to solving a challenge of building sustainable media businesses. The way these work is I agree on a general topic with the sponsor – how data plays an important role in building sustainable media businesses, in this case – and then the episodes are like any other. My goal is to make these as valuable and informative as any other episode. Please let me know your feedback – and get in touch if you’d like to sponsor upcoming mini-seasons on the creator economy, newsletters, subscriptions and more. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com.The entire tech industry is going through a broad reckoning over the collection, storage and use of consumer data. Government regulations, Apple’s new data policies, the demise of the third-party cookie and other market pressures are changing how a large chunk of advertising works. Look no further than Facebook’s historic stock price meltdown after disappointing results it blamed, in part, to new obstacles to targeting and measuring ads. “We get a reset that gives the industry an opportunity to rethink a lot of things,” said Jake Abraham, chief commercial officer of Audigent, a data platform that works with publishers to better understand their audiences and turn that understanding into achieving business goals. “While it’s messy in the middle, ultimately we come out with a [situation where] the publisher is the source of truth, more transparency, better privacy and more tools to actually do what both advertisers and publishers want.”Below are highlights of the conversation Jake and I had about how publishers need to think of their audience data as an asset class, the false dichotomy between contextual advertising and addressable advertising, and how Facebook gets small businesses hooked.The negative impact of rampant data collectionThe only people in the world who use the term “personalized advertising” are those who work in ad tech. For the rest of humanity, this is ad targeting or, increasingly, “surveillance advertising.” The backlash against the use of data in advertising is somewhat curious since there are seemingly far more worrying data trends, particularly how governments are using data sets, but likely ties back to the chaotic, complicated way digital advertising works in the hopes of getting the right ad in front of the right person. “Publishers are victims often. Their margins are squeezed harder than ever before. As the technology evolves, there's more and more middlemen. It's very hard in this ecosystem to understand the technology, and understand how those middlemen might be using the data and taking a vig on the transaction. Some of the [intermediaries] are super important. But there are plenty of others that, in a pretty unregulated industry, have found a way to insert themselves and arbitrage. And while that may not be illegal, it certainly doesn't provide a lot of value.”Not all middlemen are badIf digital advertising has an original sin, it’s likely the ability to separate the audience impression from the media. This was a nifty tri

This week I’m continuing a run of discussions with people operating the publications that sit at the nexus of power and politics. Punchbowl has had a successful launch as one of the new crop of publishers. Check out the episode, and if you’re not already, please subscribe on Apple or Spotify. Also, please leave a rating and review if you use Apple. Washington D.C. has long been a company town, only the company in question is the sprawling federal government, its various apparatuses – and those who influence them. It’s no surprise then that the once-sleepy media business around the government has become one of the most vibrant areas of growth in digital publishing. Consider:Axel Springer ponied up $1 billion to acquire Politico last August.Axios has pulled off one of the most successful early runs for a media company in its first five years, with a valuation of $430 million.The Hill was bought by Nexstar Media Group for $131 million last August.Grid News recently raised $10 million in venture funding.Add in Punchbowl, a year-old media startup founded by Politico veterans. Jake Sherman, a co-founder of Punchbowl, wrote Politico's flagship newsletter, Playbook, along with fellow co-founder Anna Palmer. (John Bresnahan, the former Congressional bureau chief for Politico, is the third co-founder.)While some digital media startups go to great pains to hang their differentiation on a new format or approach or business model, Punchbowl’’s model is fairly straightforward. It is going to out-report its competition and be a must-read for those who need to keep up with the ebb and flow of legislation on Capitol Hill. While many outlets wander to focus on the White House, Punchbowl is squarely focused on the legislative branch.“We know we know the audience, we know what they're interested in, we understand the business model, we have ambitions,” said Sherman, speaking from his office at the Capitol during a week when the legislature was in recess. “We felt like we had the playbook, so to speak.”So far, so good. Punchbowl reached $10 million in revenue in its first year, with $1 million coming from subscriptions and the rest from sponsorships bought by trade groups and companies looking to get their public affairs messaging in front of those making and influencing policy. That’s with a team of 10.Jake and I discussed how Punchbowl differentiates by using the Capitol as its lens, how being entrenched alongside the audience helped, and why ads and subscriptions can work well together. (Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.)Focusing on the CapitolAs Trump and Biden have learned, the presidency’s powers are limited when it comes to passing legislation that reflects the president’s priorities. For Punchbowl, named after the Secret Service code name for the Capitol, the focus is on the legislative process, in particular the priorities of the leadership of both parties.“I’v

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyThe roaring 20s of publishing has begun with several new brands launching, each with their own twist on dealing with the challenges of audience growth and sustainable business models. What’s notable is most publications are not promising to build massive audiences. Instead, most are focused on high-value audiences that lend themselves to high-priced ads and subscriptions.Grid is one of this crop of newcomers. Laura McGann, a Vox.com editorial director who is running Grid’s editorial side, saw an opportunity to build a news brand premised on a new newsroom model that seeks to tell a more complete picture of news stories through a collaborative approach that taps into different areas of expertise. The end result: a “fuller picture” of the news.“We're trying to create our brand around the idea that we can create additive value where one plus one equals four by putting really smart people together.,” said Brad Bosserman, Grid’s CRO who joined the company following seven years leading brand partnerships at Politico. Brad and I discussed the current boom of publishing startups, journalism-led innovation and building a sustainable business model around targeting influential readers.The new cycle of publishing innovationMy view is we’re at the start of a multiyear cycle of innovation in publishing, as legacy publishers look to consolidation and efficiency while a new class of upstarts spring up to move faster to capture new  opportunities that inevitably spring up with the macro environment changes. Brad points out that media is a reactive business.“Media companies tend to be born in generations. When you look at that 2005-2007 period, you had all sorts of companies that were born in that same window. And now 15 years later, you're seeing another one of those generations where a new breed of companies is being born. A lot of times media companies are downstream of larger changes in the culture, consumer behaviors, business models and technology platforms. As those things change, media companies react to those [changes]..”The pivot to direct connectionsDuring the last period of publishing innovation, platforms were at the heart of most companies’ distribution plans, at a minimum. The idea was simple: Facebook was connecting the world, might as well hitch a ride to grow alongside a once-in-a-generation company that’s adding millions of users a day. Easier to swim with the tide than against it. These days, you’ll rarely hear mention of platforms in the pitches for new publishers. You’re more likely to hear about how important email newsletters are.“There's a lot more skepticism around the platforms [and] the idea that you could get a lot of audience quickly from Facebook. There's a big push toward owning audiences in a much more authentic way. That’s at the core of everything that's being launched: the idea is that you really need to own your audience. That's because of all the experiences that folks have had over the last 10-15 years. [Platforms] did allow for a lot of companies to acquire large audiences at various points, but they found that they were renting them. That’s behind a lot of the push toward subscription models and the push to first-party [data].”Sign up to get The Rebooting every Monday and WednesdayJournalism-led innovationNew entrants to a market typically lead with a product innovation. In the news publishing bu