The Rebooting Show

I’m joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which works with publishers and other companies with recurring revenue businesses to align their business goals with audience needs through customer experience frameworks. Some highlights of our conversation: Shift to audience-centric approaches: There's a significant shift towards understanding and directly engaging audiences rather than relying on platforms for traffic, which involves a fundamental transition to being audience-centric. A key part of that: Realizing an audience is not a monolith but different groups with different needs. The importance of intentional audiences: Publishing became a (big) numbers game. That’s changed, as every publisher now much compete for “intentional audiences.” These are people  you have a real tie to, who subscribe to a newsletter, follow a podcast, visit your site directly. This is what Business Insider is after with its shift to focus on “digital go-getters.” Looking beyond efficiency with AI: Synthetic content is about to overwhelm the internet. Many publishers are focused now on the efficiency gains of AI, as all businesses are and need to be, but stopping there is a mistake. AI needs to be harnessed to – you guessed it – provide added value to audiences.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to writer John McDermott about his recent expose of self-help guru Jay Shetty and what it says about the chaotic Information Space. We delve into the paradox of influencer culture, where authenticity is a currency, even if the influencers themselves are as flawed as the general population. There’s often a blurry line between fake-it-’til-you-make-it and fraud.

Stephanie Kaplan Lewis founded Her Campus in 2009 with Annie Wang, and Windsor Western as college undergraduates. They saw a need for college women to have a publication made for them by other college women. Her Campus has grown since then as a profitable, growing media business with 85 employees. Stephanie says Her Campus expanded revenue by 50% last year – and did it with an entirely ad-focused business model. Stephanie credits the growth in large part to building a long-term business that works in any environment rather than a specific environment, such as the easy-money era that’s now in the rear-view mirror. The twist is that Her Campus is part agency, part publisher, with campaigns leaning on experiential and influencer marketing. This is a path many publishing models will go, as the economics of relying on putting ads on webpages or newsletters grow more difficult. Stephanie and I discuss: The forced discipline of a bootstrapped model. Her Campus has been profitable for all 15 years of its existence. Imagine. Not aging up with the audience. Her Campus turns its audience over by design, as it stays focused on college women. When it started, Her Campus was for millennials, and now it’s for Gen Z.  Being part agency, part publisher. Her Campus ends up with other media companies as customers.  Doing the basics well. In the media business, strategy is overrated. Execution tends to play a bigger role in separating winners and losers. That means doing the boring things well: Setting achievable sales goals and hitting them, excelling at client service, collecting receivables and such.

Matt Cronin is a  founding partner at House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers and other companies on recurring revenue growth. House of Kaizen, which is a sponsoring partner of The Rebooting, uses research-backed experiments to foster audience-first engagement. This allows clients to turn total reader revenue into cumulative gains. We discuss how publishers can become truly audience centric, what publishers can learn from other consumer companies and more

Mosheh Oinounou, a broadcast news veteran, started posting summaries of the news of the day during the early days of the pandemic. He found they were resonating, and over the past few years, Mo News has amassed 440,000 followers on Instagram for news delivered mostly through Instagram Stories. Mosh has since expanded to a daily podcast, a membership program that’s attracted 6,000 paying subscribers, newsletter and more. We spoke about the prospects of “creator journalists,” why his evenhanded approach resonates with his 85% female audience and the inherent challenges of building a business built around a “personal brand.”

 The Rebooting is launching paid memberships. All the details are on therebooting.com. In this episode, I speak to my collaborator Reid DeRamus, founder of Caddie Labs, which is working with me on implementing and growing memberships. Rather than discuss the benefits, we talk through the strategic and tactical decisions we made. Among the topic we cover: Why sequencing your business is important – and realizing your “unfair advantages” is critical in that The importance of first-party data in a niche media business Orienting subscriptions for specific audience segments rather than the entire audience Figuring out pricing The challenge of “getting to start”

Digital media veteran Scott Messer discusses the structural changes to the publishing business, from the deprecation of the third-party cookie to the critical role search plays in many publishing businesses. Scott is a longtime digital media exec who understands the mechanics of the digital ad industry as well as anyone I know.

This week on The Rebooting Show, I spoke to The Juggernaut’s founder and CEO Snigda Sur. We discussed the need she saw for a publication focused on South Asians, going through Ycombinator as a media company, using subscriptions as a base of a business model and more. Listen on Apple, Spotify and other podcast services.

This week, I caught up with Larry Fitzgibbon, the CEO of Tastemade. I think of Tastemade as an original digital video brand, ahead of its time in many ways since it was founded back in 2012, before streaming was even a thing. This was an era when online video was still mostly about webisodes nobody watched and YouTube’s famed dog on a skateboard videos. Tastemade has been at the forefront of many trends, as it is now with its focus on everything from IP to subscriptions with Tastemade+ and recreating the modern version of the cable channel. 

The media business in 2024 To kick off the year on The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer about the main themes of the year ahead. Among the topics we covered: The value of identifying patterns from the torrent of news The unrealistic expectations of the ZIRP/scale era Cyclical challenges vs structural changes The wasteland of general interest publications The existential threat of AI to many publishing businesses AI’s impact on the non-content aspects of the publishing function How debt will accelerate the inevitable consolidation of streaming services

I spoke to Matt Cronin, founding partner of House of Kaizen, a consultancy that works with publishers on their subscription and recurring revenue products. Among the topics we covered: fixing misaligned incentives in publishing  whether peak subscription exists subscriptions as a force function to be customer centric  what publishers should and shouldn’t learn from the success of The New York Times The struggles of many streaming services  what publishers can learn from subscription companies outside media 

Matt Reustle, CEO of Colossus, a business-focused podcasting network that’s home to Invest Like the Best, Business Breakdowns and Founders, sees podcasting as an antidote to many of the ills of algorithmic media. “To me, it's the highest trust media. I think everything else now lacks nuance. And I actually still care about nuance. There are shorter attention spans, which I completely understand. Where do you actually get time to hear someone talk about opinions that aren't scripted? Is it proper back and forth conversation, not just a bunch of us talking at one another on Twitter and replies aren't really constructive conversation?” We spoke about why podcasts excel at nuance, the business models underpinning the business, and why subscriptions haven’t yet become as widespread in podcasts as other digital media formats.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Tomiwa Aladekomo, CEO of Big Cabal, a Nigerian digital media company that’s home to a pair of properties: Tech Cabal, which I describe as similar to TechCrunch but with more memes and Zikoko, a BuzzFeed-like culture publication.  Big Cabal has raised $2.3 million in venture capital as it builds an independent digital media company in Africa’s largest economy that's geared to shifting consumption patterns. Tomiwa and I discuss how Big Cabal looks to find white spaces in the market, making hard calls when to pull back on efforts like it recently did with a citizen journalism project, when brands can be pan-African vs market specific, and an on-the ground assessment of the impact of Semafor in its Africa push.

The Rebooting recently wrapped up its second research project in collaboration with BlueConic. Patrick Crane, vp of sales at BlueConic, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the state of subscriptions at publishers and the maturation of the market.  “One of the reasons I call it a forever business is to call out the fact that there is going to be ongoing work,” Patrick told me, “but also that it sets you up to play a very sustainable game.” Among the topics covered: The shifting role of steep discounts in subscription programs Why ad avoidance is really more bad UX avoidance The wisdom of making subscription products for specific slices of your audience Check out "The State of Publisher Subscriptions" report.

Bridget Williams is a veteran of the industry. I first got to know Bridget when she was at Business Insider prior to heading to Food52 before landing at Hearst Newspapers in tk, where she is chief commercial officer. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, we spoke about the progress toward a sustainable business model for Hearst news outlets like The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle and others around the country. All told, Hearst newspaper properties have 400,000 digital subscribers. Bridget and I discuss how a "thoughtful mercenary" approach to local news means looking to non-news products to provide utility to communities to subsidize the critical impact journalism that is disappearing from many places.

The Guardian has used voluntary reader contributions as a bulwark of its unique model that blends philanthropy, advertising and voluntary contributions. In the U.S., The Guardian now generates 57%, or $33 million, of its revenue from voluntary contributions, either one-off or recurring.  On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Steve Sachs, The Guardian’s U.S. managing director and veteran of non-profit news models, about this approach and how extensible it is for news publishers.

Jeff Selingo spent eight years at the Chronicle of Higher Education, serving as editor in chief and editorial director, before setting off on his own path. Jeff and I have traded notes on the independent path over the years, and I wanted to have him on The Rebooting Show to discuss what we’ve both learned on the independent path. We discuss the transition from editorial to sales, why treating “lifestyle business” as a pejorative is strange, and fighting the pull to rebuild what you left behind.

Blockworks, founded as a crypto events company in 2018, has rode these ups and downs. It began in the face of a crypto pullback with the thesis that crypto would become a major asset class and as it grew, institutional investors would need a credible source of information, analysis and research beyond an anonymous Twitter account with a monkey avatar shooting lasers from its eyes. As crypto recovered and headed into a bull run that accelerated during the pandemic into what I’d consider a bubble, Blockworks expanded from events into podcasts and news. With $12 million in VC raised in possibly the hardest time to raise for a crypto media company, Blockworks is building out a research arm. Jason Yanowitz, CEO of Blockworks, discusses the evolution of the company and the benefits of staying focused and being a "mile deep" vs an inch deep.

Defector is a worker-owned media company that was born out of disillusionment with the tradeoffs the digital media ecosystem often requires (or at least incentivizes). Instead of chasing traffic, Defector relies on a subscription model for a small but sturdy business.

My former colleague Mike Shields of Next in Media joins me to discuss what to make of Advertising Week, which is mostly a PR vehicle but a useful gauge of the prevailing winds of the media and advertising worlds.