[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. I'm in Paris this week for The Piano Academy, which gathers top publishers from Europe and beyond.
I'm speaking about rebuilding trust in a world of infinite content, which to my mind starts with focusing on what won't change at a time when everything is up for grabs in the AI era.
In this week's episode, I am joined by Piano CEO Trevor Kaufman, who I've known since his digital agency days when he founded and ran Schematic. Talk about that a little bit.
Piano has worked with publishers for many years to power their direct revenue operations. I used Piano myself in my last job.
In this conversation, Trevor and I get into how Piano has evolved far beyond being, quote-unquote, "paywall software" into an audience and revenue platform, why publishing carries so much complexity per dollar, and the costs of giving up distribution to platforms.
We also get into a back-to-basics playbook for now that starts with great homepages, testing the bundle as a product, and putting product and revenue teams on one scorecard like ARPU.
We also talk about our total monetization research and what it says about aligning ads, subscriptions, and commerce, as well as subscription fatigue versus at least the perception of, of s-subscription fatigue versus what the reality is in the numbers.
And also, I get Trevor to talk about different patterns he's seen across US and Europe because Piano does have a global customer base.
As, as well as a little trip down memory lane to talk about micropayments, because Piano really began, you know, its life, I know it, it went through a few iterations, but as TinyPass.
And I don't know, I think that the time for micropayments might be now. I think, I, I really do. And so we talk a little bit about that because the infrastructure is there to pull it off, so we'll see.
If you haven't already, be sure to check out the Total Monetization research report that Rebooting completed in collaboration with Piano.
We surveyed revenue leaders at sixty-five leading publishers to understand how they're crafting revenue strategies in this more with less era.
I'll leave a link to the report in the show notes, and you can also find it on the Rebooting's website at therebooting.com. Now on to my conversation with Trevor. [upbeat music] Trevor, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Brian. Okay.
So we've known each other many years, go back to Schematic, but I wanna talk a little bit about, like, the evolution of Piano before we talk about this total monetization approach and, and the, and the research that we, that we did together.
I think a lot of people, you know, and I, like, would... It's like, yeah, I'm working with Piano. It's like, oh, you know, the, the paywall, paywall people. But you guys are more than that, you know?
I think of it as, like, an audience platform at the end of the day. But how do you describe it? Well,
the, the business problem of publishing, right, is of course more complex than the moment somebody buys something, right? Yeah. I, I remember the really early days of e-commerce.
People used to call e-commerce software shopping cart software. Yeah. 'Cause their whole experience of e-commerce was, you know, you put stuff in a shopping cart. And Shopify is a lot more than a shopping cart, right?
It's content, it's recommendations, it's identity, it's, in, in e-commerce it's inventory. And the same thing's true with Piano, right? I mean, we worry a lot about user data, about behavioral data.
We're using that information to segment audience and decide the right moments to show the right content and the right offers to different people.
We talk a lot about helping sites make the most of every single visit, right? Yeah.
And so that longitudinal journey of the first moment you see an article on social, and you click on it, and you explore a site, and maybe you come back, and we recirculate you with content recommendations, and we ask you to turn your ad blocker off, and we try and get you to sign up for a newsletter, and then eventually we try and get you to pay and to retain you.
There's a lot of customer experience in that, and there's a lot of financial complexity in that.
So, you know, particularly with big multi-title publishers who are bundling certain things, or might have print and digital, and then you go on vacation, and you wanna pause the print but not the digital and, you know, there's a, just a lot of, you know, gifting, site licensing, promo codes, refunds.
There's just a tremendous amount of complexity around managing a subscriber experience, right? So Piano was built over ten years to help publishers with all the aspects of that.
And of course, most of our clients, some of our clients use us for absolutely everything, and then others use us for pieces of what we do because they have some platform, either a legacy thing or a new thing- Yeah...
they're excited about, and they use us around the, to, to be the, the mortar between the tiles on that stuff. Yeah. And, and you also work beyond publishers, right? I mean, so- Yeah. Yeah.
And, and I think that's interesting because, like... And tell me if I'm wrong, like, publishing seems to me th- to be a really complicated business [chuckles] for a whole bunch of different reasons.
And a lot of what I have seen just over my career is that complexityleads to a raft of issues, just internal issues, and just simple alignment issues.
Is that somewhat unique or, or just, you know, more extreme in publishing or- Man... do you see that in other industries too that are- Brian, that's a great question.
I, I mean, if, if we were to rank industries by complexity per dollar, right? Yeah. That's what I mean.
Like, how difficult is it to run the operations of the business compared to, you know, f- for each dollar of revenue? I, I think publishing's probably pretty high on the list.
Wh- when you get inside a retail bank or you get inside a airline, there's a lot of, there's a lot of complexity there too, for sure. But they're flying and landing planes. Exactly. Exactly. Like, I also think that.
I mean, nothing against... I've...
You know, look, I love publishing, you know, web pages [laughs] so I can send e-newsletters and whatnot, but, like, it's not the same [laughs] as operating a- It is definitely not the same.
And but, but there's a lot more money in aviation- Yeah... than there is in publishing too, so you gotta- Yeah... factor that in.
Well, and there's also the fact that, you know, they ma- they, they make more money as a financial services company than they do [laughs] actually with the, uh, you know, with the- Moving people around...
frequent flyer cards. Yeah, I think some of that's overblown, but yes, absolutely. So, so look, I mean, I, I think it is a very complex business. I think publishers are trying to streamline it.
I think a lot of publishing staff hold onto that complexity because it's justification for a lot of roles within the publisher. Yeah. Right?
But, but you know, what you're doing and what a lot of other people are doing to, to create, you know, small, successful publishing businesses, and in fact, content businesses, I think are making a lot of publishers rethink the complexity that they layer into their organization.
Yeah. Right? So w- we're trying to crusade for a lot more simplicity on a lot of this stuff, even though that, that complexity leads to software and software fees. It's not good for the clients. Right.
So when you talk with publishers, is there, like, a, a thread of sort of what kinda ails publishing at this moment? Like, I mean, there's a raft of challenges, and there, there...
It's, it's always been a tough business, always will be a tough business. Some of those are more heightened now because of the distribution challenges and...
But what i- what is the sort of common thread that you come away with in your discussions with, with pub- publisher leadership?
Y- you asked a slightly different question at the beginning, I think, than the end, and they're both good ones. Okay. The, the, f- the first question is you were asking sort of what, what ails them, right?
And an interesting exercise is to say to a publisher, "What do you think the original sin was that led us to a point where the publishing business is as hard as it is?"
And sometimes wha- people will say, "It's that we gave all our content to Google and let them index it, and, you know, didn't take any money from that."
Or it might be that they say, "It's that we let all these ad tech vendors, particularly Google, get in between us and the, you know, the relationship with the advertiser." Or lots of other things, right?
But, but I- Those are the two big ones. But- If you lose control of your distribution and you lose control of your ad rights, you lose control of your business. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And, and look, the, the losing control of distribution has lots of episodes along the way. Right. Right? It might be that you let people index you and s- you know, they make, can make money on search and you don't.
It might be answers that appear on the page, you know, as famously as we trend towards Google Zero. It might be that you give your content to Facebook or to Apple for free.
Y- there are all kinds of moments, or it might be where you give your, you know, you do a cheap short-term licensing deal with OpenAI in exchange for them having all your content, right?
All these things weaken the distribution of publishers. And what, what I think publishers mistake, you know... I love publishers too. The nature of this is we're gonna talk about a lot of mistakes in publishing.
[laughs] There's a but coming here. I mean that in a disclaimer- I know, I know when a but is coming... to land. But if you give up the point of distribution, right? Yeah.
One thing that drives me nuts is publishers say these things that are well-meaning and sound good, like, "We're gonna reach people where they are," right? That's good, right?
That's an audience development tactic, but it's not a real bus- it's a, that's a marketing tactic. It is not a sustainable business tactic.
So, you know, when you're publishing on YouTube or Facebook or s- you know, and, or any one of these other sites- Mm...
y- you're getting distribution, but you're paying for that in, in losing your point of distribution, right? Sure. As being special and critical.
And I think publishers think about audience and people without being as precious as they should be about safeguarding their own ability to distribute content.
I remember I had a meeting at Medium when Medium was a different thing than it is now. [laughs] And, and they were saying, "Look, should, you know, should the San Francisco...
Should, you know, should The Boston Globe have its own website? I mean, shouldn't they just publish through us? We're really good at making websites. They're not." Which I thought was very arrogant for Medium- Yeah...
to say. But then, you know, they said also too, like, "And over the long term, won't people go just directly to content, you know, the creators of content and reporters, and we don't need the editorial organization?"
Which was this giant, you know, San Francisco's not a big editorial town, frankly- Yeah... in, in the last several decades. And as a result, people don't understand the role of- It's true...
investing in journalism and how much it costs to properly report a story or the role of an editor, right? They confuse commentary and reporting.
And so there was, there's this disaggregation-That everybody tries to do in two media companies and too often they're, they're good at it.
They go, "Here's a, a, you know, five hundred thousand dollars this year in exchange for totally changing the value of your, of your editorial organization." I mean- Mm-hmm... this is up, up for debate. Personally,
I don't think, and you know, again, this is controversial, like anybody should be able to write for Forbes, and that means Forbes is just as authoritative a voice as it was when it was a sort of, you know, more traditional editorial organization.
I feel that stuff hurts the brand, right? But it certainly resulted in a lot more traffic, and so I, I just think that short-term thinking has resulted in a lot of problems. And to, to me that's...
The, the two biggest problems are the two hardest ones. Short-term thinking, which- Yeah... you know, ails a lot of businesses in a lot of sectors.
And then the other problem is there's a lot of legacy thinking about how competitive publishers are.
When I hear a publisher say that they're competitive with another publisher, I'm like, you know, you're r- if I read The Atlantic, I feel like I'm more likely to read The New Yorker. Yeah, yeah.
If I'm reading Newsweek, I'm more likely to read Time, not less. They may fight over an RFP for an advertiser, but for audience attention, it's not a zero-sum game. The- they're taking people away from Netflix, right?
Yeah. Or away from the gym or coffee or something like that, which is what, what they should be doing. And so that kind of m- my thinking may be antiquated 'cause I've gotten really old while I've been doing this.
But fundamentally, like, creating a loyal audience that shows up at your front door, that's the business of publishing.
And like, we get too distracted with a pivot to video, oh, it- apps are gonna come over the hill and save us. Yeah.
It's Facebook, it's AI, it's whatever, as opposed to saying, what does it mean to be a subscriber, a member of this brand? And there, there's not enough attention to making the site great. Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, there, there's... I think there's always been this tension of charitably to, like, following, you know, the, the trends of, like, consumer behavior and where- how consumer behavior is changing.
Uh, but at the same time, there's an element of, you know, chasing whatever is the shiny object or the shortcut of the moment and, and not, you know, focusing on the basics.
It does seem like we're on, in a bit of a back to basics moment.
Like, you know, to use Silicon Valley, like, argot, like, sort of what would, what would be a first principles approach to publishing now in twenty twenty-five? And we can all talk about the original sins.
I think there are, are... unfortunately, it's hard to have one. There's many original sins. [laughs] Separating the audience data from the media impression, I think that's, that's, that's got, that's a candidate.
What do you think is-- what would a first principles approach to publishing now look like?
There's, there's tons of tech and organizational debt with- within these organizations, but, but how would you counsel, like, starting anew?
An easy way to do this, right, is to do what everybody does but doesn't do enough of, which is look at The New York Times, right? Meredith Levine is everybody's hero. Mm-hmm.
And, you know, the homepage of The New York Times, remember we were like, "The homepage is dead." Yeah. Because social traffic links, deep links into the site.
Well, the most valuable people are the people who type the URL in directly or who bookmark the homepage, right? The homepage is, is great. So, like, that's where I always think people ought to start, right?
Organizations feel like the article is their product, right? The article's not the product. It's the bundle of everything that's the product. I think- Yes... direct relationships with advertisers are so critical.
You know, I think people lean into programmatic overly so, right? And that being able to set up special programs with advertisers is everything.
It's so much more money, and it's easy to say, but this is the blocking and tackling and competitive stuff you have to do.
I think a compelling subscription proposition, right, that has lots and lots of benefits on one end of the scale, right? You're either a subscriber and you get everything and it's incredible, or you're not.
I think that is a, is a...
I mean, and there are lots of less for less and more for more strategies that you can layer onto a mature subscription business, but you have to start establishing the value and uniqueness of that thing and the community around it, you know, really, really critical.
So, I think, you know, y- you touched on sort of creating the organization. Yeah. And I think publishers need really strong product teams, you know, 'cause it's a product. Mm-hmm.
And that those teams need to be in a really advantageous place partnered with e-editorial as opposed to, you know, subservient to them.
And I think they need really strong revenue generation teams that are looking at the same metrics, right, that are evaluated in the exact same way as, as everybody else, right?
And so if everybody's looking at one set of KPIs across the organization and rowing in the same direction, if they treat it like a product, if they're thinking about user experience as much as they're thinking about, you know, articles and content reporting, that, that, that's what I think is, like, kind of the recipe for a strong, you know, publishing organization.
Yeah. In the research that we did, you know, we found that... I mean, it wasn't, it didn't totally shock me, like, the lack of, like, alignment particularly around just common sets of metrics.
You know, I, I think it was good to emphasize that because the complexity of these organizations leads toThe inevitable silos and you know, different groups being at cross purposes.
You know, they have their own their, their own KPIs that don't... That sometimes work against each other.
And I think in some ways the divide between, you know, subscriptions and advertising is probably, you know, has always been the, the most acute.
Like I, I remember starting like memberships at Digiday with Piano, I should add. Yeah, immediately the ad sales team was like, "Wait a second, this is gonna cut down on the number of impressions we have."
And I'm like, "But- I mean-... you haven't sold sixty percent of the impressions yet." [chuckles] Yeah. And Brian, I mean- "I'll make more."
Look, I mean, y- y- you know, I'm friends with Nick, and I think Digiday's an incredible organization, but like how much revenue is ads on Digiday.com driving- Ads dot-... for that company at this point, right?
I mean, it, it's very hard.
I mean, the, the insight that, that started Bienna was, you know, advertising has, with the possible exception of the broadcast monopoly in the '80s, advertising alone has never supported any media, right? Right.
And y- you asked me a question i- in this, you know, r- our prep for this at one point, which was how do you think about or how do you balance business metrics and editorial metrics? Yeah.
And my immediate reaction to that was, "What's an editorial metric?" Right? Because if you think about every other content form, music, television, books, movies, right?
You go, "That movie had a $40 million opening weekend." You go, "That's a gold-selling album. That song's at the top of the charts. He wrote a bestseller." Right? These are, these are...
E- everybody thinks about revenue as their key metric except some people in publishing in a crazy way, right? So look, it's an, it's very simple.
It's a very simple math problem if you are capturing the right data to go, "Okay, I have this user coming in. They're coming in from X or Snap or Google or whatever it is. They're in this geography.
They're on this device. They're reading this content. They're worth this much in advertising dollars to me.
They have this propensity to subscribe and to return to the site, therefore I'm going to give them this experience," right?
"And I'm gonna tally up all the money that I made from people who looked at various pieces of content or came in through my newsletter and read that newsletter, and I'm gonna put a value on every single activity that I do and optimize that."
And that's what, like, sometimes when people have advertising and, and subscription working across purposes, I just think you're not looking at the right data. Right.
You know, in this report we talked about, like, ARPU as, like, a unified metric, like average revenue per user. I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to implement, like, a clean...
Like, a lot of people talk about, like, a North Star metric, and it's really difficult just because the, the number of activities that across publishers they do in order to make money are, are, you know, so many.
Uh, talk, talk to me about, like, is it, is it realistic to have, like, a single unified metric that, that everyone is working towards? So I've gotten in a lot of trouble internally and a little bit externally- Okay...
for advocating for ARPU as, as one North Star metric. Okay. And the reason is not because it's nonindic- sorry, it's not indicative. It is.
And, and to your point about lots of revenue streams, there aren't that many, right? There's an events business, and that is an offline business, and- Mm-hmm... it's, it is somewhat more difficult to track.
But- There's commerce. There's, there's subscriptions. Well, affiliate's pretty easy to track, right? Yeah. Affiliate revenue is pretty easy to total up, right?
So you have subscription, affiliate, and advertising, and that's ninety percent of ninety percent of the media companies in the world's business, right? Mm-hmm.
And those things you can assemble into a average revenue per user number on a cohort by cohort basis to help you figure out what to do, okay?
I've been banging the drum at Piano and making everybody across the organization, the professional services people, the, the client success people, the product folks, focus around delivering against ARPU, right?
What I've gotten is a lot of pushback because they've said, "What period of time are you looking at? Don't we care more about lifetime value?" Mm. And the answer should be yes.
The problem is a lot of our users are anonymous, right? We're making money off you from the first moment before you've registered, before you subscribed.
And, and cookies are, have a y- you know, s- often a short lifespan, and people are on multiple devices. So for the anonymous audience it can be hard to say, this is all the same user, and therefore...
I mean, there's just no m- no magic on the web to do that. And therefore, you know, you gotta look at ARPU for that audience, and so I like to look at ARPU consistency- consistently.
Really a lifetime value metric would be better. Mm. That's also a lot harder. And, and my...
What I advocate for is an average revenue per user metric is just much more accessible and indicative and available now and measurable now versus kind of anything else, and certainly much better than page views, which really don't correlate to revenue at all, right?
So yes, more page views theoretically means you're showing more advertising, but there's...
You know, one ad can be worth 400 times what another ad is worth, and one user can be much more likely to subscribe than another, and the value of a subscribed user is astronomically higher than the value of a, an anonymous user.
Even someone who registered is much, much higher, about eight times higher than someone who hasn't. Mm. So, you know, it, there's stuff you can measure.
We should be measuring it now.We should have one number, not 20, and I think everybody in the organization ought to be aligned around it. And so that's what I keep trying to push clients into.
And, and to, to what you were alluding to, I think some people wanna keep editorial very sacred and free of some metrics, and I understand that desire, but I don't think at the end of the day it really means the editorial's gonna be better 'cause we don't expose them to performance metrics, right?
I think, you know, I think that's a, a decision that smart executives can make about what they wanna publish and, and what makes them money, and both matter, right?
One really matters for the brand and for the world, and the other matters to keep the lights on, and I think they can make that decision on their own- Yeah... hopefully in a smart way, right?
But, but having one thing that people measure I think is really critical, even if it doesn't capture these kinda really important lifetime value- Yeah... aspects.
I do, I would say sometimes, and by that I meant like, you know, sometimes the, the, like you talked about like the bundle, right?
Like I, I've seen like organizations, and this is, you know, previously, that were looking at like almost like last-click attribution.
And so they were organizing editorial, yes, around metrics, but the metric was did this piece of content on a unit economics basis lead to a conversion, Y or N.
And you're trying to get people to subscribe to a bundle, and my problem with that was always the fact that different pieces of content do different things, and you're not...
Uh, you can't like isolate it into, you know, did you produce a subscriber, like black or white, because you're losing- I could not agree with you more.
I mean, and, and by the way, y- you'll, you'll notice this in your own behavior, right? But- Yeah... wh- what people think is that we stop people with a paywall, and they go, "Ah, I guess I'll subscribe now."
That doesn't usually happen. [chuckles] What happens is you stop people a bunch of times from reading these things they wanna read, and then they say, "You know what? I've been one...
I really wanna do something good for myself, and I wanna subscribe to Rebooting." Right? Yeah. And then they go and they click the subscribe button, and they subscribe there, right?
But the idea that just like, "Oh, I wanna read this article, and I have to pay, so I'm gonna pay now-" Yeah, it's an A... that, that- It can work. It can work. Yeah, it can work, but guess what?
We would add two classes of content. It was like things like, like how much money people make or like pitch decks. It was like I need this l- this literal- Yeah... it was like- Yeah... cotton candy- But, but-...
of the corporate sense... but those people chu- those people churn, right? Yeah, I know, but- The only reason those people don't churn- Yeah... is if canceling's too hard.
[laughs] It's a- Well, then you'd like, you know, that's what you add in. You got a call between- Yeah, yeah... 3:00 and 3:15 PM.
[laughs] No, I, I think, look, I mean, at, at a certain point, you know, we have all this sophisticated logic for like when we stop people with a paywall, right?
And other companies are like, "Our logic is better than Piano's at when to stop people." And it does make, like
knowing when to do that does make a difference, but at a certain point I'm like, "If we stop people on the second page view or the third page view-" Yeah... is that really gonna change the business that dramatically?
The propensity models- Right?...
can sometimes be like, you know, using- So, so- I used to always say, and this is very simplistic, I was like, "People need to see locks on the homepage to tell them that there's stuff they're not getting, and then they need to hit walls."
Right. And then like- But, but except, except we, we do that not based on the content you're looking at but based on you. Yeah. Right? So we can't put locks on the articles. But I understand what you mean. Yeah.
Look, people find out soon enough, right? And I think the discovery of like, you go to the Wall Street Journal homepage, and there's tons and tons of interesting stuff, and you try and read it and you can't.
You go, "Oh, maybe I can read something else." You can't read that either, and you go- Yeah... "I guess if I wanna read this kinda stuff, I should be a Wall Street Journal subscriber." Yeah. Right?
And then you click to find out more about it, and you find there are a ton of other benefits, and you can gift articles and all this stuff, and that's a great experience.
You know, most of these things, they're so expensive, subscriptions, sadly, but they really are mostly very inexpensive for the value that they're delivering. And so- Right... I, I think there will be...
we will get better over time.
We've gotten a lot better over the last 10 years, and we'll get a lot better over the next 10 years at figuring out models that make it less onerous to subscribe for people and make the publisher more money, and that's gonna be a happy day, and we're working on that literally every single minute at Piano.
And, you know, but, but in the meantime, there are definitely cases where I'm like, "God, these guys have a great product and they're not making enough money," and that's because they have a marketing issue or they have a staffing issue or they're letting too many people in the front door.
But for the most part, th- some of these fantastic editorial products do very well. You know, there are a lot of- Right...
really good editorial businesses out there, and I, I think the, the days when you could have a magazine about pretty much anything and get tons of ad pages- Yeah...
maybe never existed in the first place, but people have that idea, right? I mean, Tina Brown- Right...
who's a lovely person, goes around talking about the good old days of publishing, and Graydon Carter published his biography. Yeah. [laughs] And I think everybody wishes that like they- Bar cards.
Yeah, I remember the bar cards at Adweek... yeah, they could ex- expense everything, you know? But... [laughs] Nobody, nobody took care of people's mortgages in B2B publishing.
Let me ask you this just qui- quickly on, since we're talking about subscriptions. Because you guys, y- you have, you sit on the data, right? Like i- is the idea of like subscription fatigue a, a myth?
So I don't know where I got this stat, and so I don't know whether it's true, but it sounds true to me.
In the heyday of magazines, before the internet, if you were subscribed to any magazines, the average number you were subscribed to was eight. Okay. I...
Look, I think subscription fatigue is a thing because there are so many things, not just editorial products. Right.
But there are so many things, apps and lessons, and, you know, where you go, "I'm subscribed to Masterclass and ukulele lessons, and-" Yeah... "this," you know, "vitamin that shows up," and all this stuff.
Like you can be subscribed to so many things now.That I think- And it's aggravating... that kind of freaks people out. Yeah.
And it can be too tough to cancel, and you tend to find out just when you were billed for the next year and you've got a whole year to wait to remember, or you turn it off, want to renew now. It's very confusing.
And, like, all the time, you know, we have people try to subscribe to things that they're already subscribed to 'cause they've forgotten, right? Yeah.
So I do think that's a real factor of contemporary life now, but I don't think that that's a reason that publishers shouldn't develop loyal [laughs] monetizing subscriptions. Oh, no, no, no. I know.
[laughs] That would be a very counterintuitive posture. Yeah. No, no, no, I would not... I, I just...
I guess I was asking because, like, I feel like for years now there's been the prediction of the- people can only have so many subscriptions, and so this, you know, th- that the growth, particularly the people saw when Trump first came into office with the news publishers and when it was kind of new, the reality is, like, there's so many different subscriptions that are out there now.
Amazon's trying to push you into, like, the face cream subscription and, and paper towel subscription. And- By the way, your skin looks great. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. Uh, absolutely.
I, I guess I, I just, to me, it's like always it's vibes based and it's not like data based. Like, this, this idea that there's a, there's, there's a ceiling of subscriptions.
It makes sense, like, in the abstract, but I don't, I don't know it... I don't think that the data necessarily proves that. Yeah. And, well, look, I think that there is an interesting...
The, the great thing about media is als- also a terrible thing, which is we're all consumers, right?
I was talking about, you worked in the bank and airline business, and everyone, when you start talking about a bank or airline business, people say, "Well, in my bank account," or, "The last time I took a flight."
Uh-huh. Like, we're all consumers too, right? Yeah. And all of our media taste is different.
So I might be a New Yorker subscriber, an Atlantic subscriber, and, you know, when I was, many moons ago, when I was trying to raise the money to start the company, people said, "Well, how many publications in the world can charge for access to content?
Is it f- even five?" I mean, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Right. I don't know, Times of London, FT. There's not more than 10, right?
And they didn't say, "Well, what about Women's Wear Daily, and Billboard, and Variety, and Hollywood Reporter?" They didn't say, "What about America's Test Kitchen? Or the New Yorker or the Atlantic?
Or what about Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs?" And, like, there's just, my media mix is different than yours. Sure.
And so I might have BBC+ or CNN+, proud new, you know, recent Piano customers, and you might not, right? Mm. And, and so we each have our kind of media bias, but, but that, isn't that wonderful, right?
Like, isn't that great that there's so much rich content out there? So- sometimes, like, when I've subscribed to something, I just go, "Why didn't I do this before?"
Like, it's 30 bucks, and, like, now I have all this amazing... Like, I don't know. The, the experience of being able to get through the web in an unfettered way is really important to us at Piano.
And, and one of the things that I lament about the ways we need to make publishers successful is that we need to fight sometimes against what I call the unmolested web, where you can just surf around and look at anything without anybody stopping you, right?
And, you know, a- all of our- But that's, like, kinda, that's kinda gone, isn't it, almost? Like, I mean, I, I feel like the, the, the modern... I mean, first of all, I don't even, I just hope the open web survives.
But, like, the modern experience of it, it reminds me of, like, Phoenix, where you just, like, you're always in a cul-de-sac. Look, I, I mean, first of all, like, this, the open web survives thing is such a...
I mean, talk about Troy Young and arguments that I have with him. I mean, the, the, you know, he was convincing me that everything would be WeChat- [laughs]...
uh, in the US, or Facebook Messenger- Troy's catching, catching, catching bullets here... 10, 10 years ago, right? So I, you know, love to Troy, but that's not happening. The open web is like a miracle of the world.
[laughs] It's not going anywhere. S- I mean, meanwhile, says the guy who publishes on Substack. [laughs] "Oh, it's, the open web's going away." The open web is this tremendously...
One thing I do at conferences is I'll ask some questions, like, you know, "Who..." Car industry is huge. "Who in here bought a car this month?" Right? Okay. Home improvement.
"Who's spending money improving their house right now?" That's a big industry. Yeah. And, like, a couple people raise their hand. And then I say, "Who in here read an article today?"
And every single person raises their hand. The article economy is massive.
And whether it's Google Discover or Apple News or the open web, which is your discovery mechanism around that, it's not going anywhere, and it's a wildly ingrained behavior.
If anything, I'm worried about the fact that we can't wait for an elevator anymore without pulling out our phone and starting to read- [laughs]... the beginning of some article. Right? So I, I...
Don't shed too many tears or stay up too late- Okay, so you're not, you're, you're not-... worrying about the death of the open web. Okay.
You're, you're not, you're not, you're not figuring out your outfit for the funeral- Yeah... or the webpage. I mean, you know- Okay... Piano manages about four trillion events a year or something like that now.
Most, nev- certainly not all of which, there's lots of other types of customers on our platform, but- Yeah... a lot of that, I mean, the s- a small media site does a lot more traffic than a big e-commerce site.
Like, there's just a lot of volume of people looking at this stuff. Do we monetize them well enough yet? No. Do we need better ways to enable them to contribute to the value that they're getting? Absolutely.
We will get there. I'll think of it and do it, or somebody else will in some garage somewhere right now. But-But that experience of sharing information about the world is fantastic, and it's not gonna go anywhere. Yeah.
It, it seems like an emerging sort of theme of how these businesses will need to evolve. I guess there is a few. One is needing to be f- very audience-focused.
This sounds, like, very obvious, but, you know, I think in the past, a lot of times these strategies got to where they're trying to serve too many masters at once.
And understanding your audience and having a ideally, like, as direct of a connection as possible with them is, is the best. I think one of the other realities is just this idea of more with less. You know?
There's a lot of publishers have less, like, traffic and volume, right, because of search changes. But you need to make, you need to make more money off of, off of less audience, basically.
So it seems to me like you can't rely on having... It almost goes from volume to value to, to a degree. I think that's right. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. I mean, look,
your audience, right, I mean, you, Brian Morrissey- Yeah... is incredibly valuable to a lot of companies, including ours, right? And you've done that very deliberately. Right?
And, and that is a level of intention that you've put around it because you're not exac- I mean, while it's great, you're not a general interest. You're not trying to appeal- Yes... to everyone in the world.
I'm not trying, but that's true. [laughs] You're trying to appeal to a very specific type of person, right? Yeah. Like, for example, me, right? Yeah.
But, but, you know, my, my wife is not gonna read- I can walk, I can walk down the street without, without, [laughs] without being stopped, if that's what you're saying. It's, it- [laughs] Well, not for that reason.
[laughs] But, but that, that's a really valuable... I mean, you've created an asset, right? And lots of publishers have done that, and that's fantastic. And yes, they can do that with the kind of incremental investment.
I mean, yes, legacy media businesses have it hard because they have to change what they're doing so dramatically, and the economics changed, and the, the source- Oh, yeah... of money changed.
And, and meanwhile, you know, around the world, 60% of the magazine revenue that f- of the circulation revenue from our clients in magazines is from print, 70% in the newspaper business.
Like, they're still getting a ton of revenue out of the print operations. Yeah. And so they can't let that go.
And v- that's very difficult for a business, is the drag that some legacy things that they don't really know what to do with have on it.
And then you have, you know, Racket starting a print thing very successfully, and then you have Atlanta Journal Constitution dropping their print entirely, right? Yeah.
Everybody's trying different stuff to do what you're talking about, which is identify and appeal to the audience, build a great product.
And that, all those changes, while they're very stressful for us internally at Piano when it's like GateHouse bought Gannett or, you know, Vice goes out of business or whatever those things are that are really, you know- Yeah...
difficult news for- There's a new documentary, by the way. I don't know if you saw it. I've heard. But Vice Is Dead. I wanna see it if- Those are, uh...
Well, I mean, the Shane Steel covers a whole other- Yeah, we'll do a different podcast on that. That's a, that's a different podcast. It's for Digiday, Digiday Pro subscribers. That, that's the, the Digiday after dark.
[laughs] So, so, but on, on... One of the other, the, the other things that I wanted to get into is, is just whether there's differences, 'cause you guys are global.
I mean, do you see differences in how, how, say, like European pub- you big European business, how European publishers are adapting their businesses and American publishers?
'Cause I always think, look, being, being born a American, having a company that is in the United States, it's such a massive, deep market. It's a, it's a tremendous advantage- [laughs]...
that you have, and that, you know, just in European markets you don't necessarily have. When you go to, like, the UK versus the US, the... Just the, the test budgets there are, like, just minuscule compared to...
It, it leads to a dif- different types of businesses in Europe. Uh, just the audiences are smaller because, you know, the, it's a more fractured landscape. Mm-hmm. There's only so many people who speak Dutch. Yeah.
I mean, so, so Br- Brian, uh, fir- first of all, the behaviors in European countries are different, partially because the politics are different.
We don't have quite the idea of newspapers lined up along the political spectrum from left to right as they do- Eh, we could... in the UK. We'll, we'll see. Yeah. No, I know, I know. I just mean, like, in market dynamic.
I mean, when you see how they're internally, like, adapting to changes in the market, are you seeing any differences in how European publishers or, or Asian publishers are- I mean, again, it's pretty similar. Yeah.
I think the shift from print to digital has been somewhat faster in the US than it has been in Europe, but it's different by market. I think people's perception of willingness to pay is different market by market.
So if you're in Spain- Yeah... no- everybody in Spain says no one in the country will pay. Yeah. If you're in Germany- Yeah... people say no one in the country will pay. But of course, they will.
You know, the- The Norwegians pay... the, the, yeah, the Nor- The Scandinavians always pay... the, the Swi- They're the best... the Swiss and the Scandinavians have it a little bit easier than everybody [chuckles] else.
But, but no, honestly, look, the, Piano's global, so is The Trade Desk, so is Google. [laughs] I mean, their advertising dynamics are exactly the same globally, right? Okay.
The, the, the print revenue dynamics are very similar. The, the reader revenue, digital s- circulation revenue dynamics are pretty similar.
And so clients will ask me a lot in ways that are awkward, 'cause I don't always know all the tactics of the, you know- Right... 500 or so media clients that we work with.
They'll sit me down in Japan and they'll say, "Tell us all the things that are working around the world," right? Right.
And, and, you know, it's different in different places and for different publications, but I think there's more similarity between-You know, the things that ESPN might try and the things that Kicker in Germany might try.
You know, like that sports publications and financial news publications, those tend to be more distinct categories than, hey, it's totally different in Denmark than it is in Poland. Right. Got it.
Than it is in Argentina, than it is in the States. Like, those things l- uh, the, the national boundaries matter less than the content categories. Right.
So I wanna talk to you about micropayments a- and mostly because, like, you...
I, I remember I, I had alluded before, I think, you know, I- we first met when you were running Schematic, which is a- an early digital content agency that WPP bought, and then you were running Possible at WPP.
But then you left to do TinyPass, which was at the time TinyPass, and it was around micropayments, microtransactions for content. Yeah.
And I remember running into you, I think it was at a, I think it was at a Digiday event, and I was like, "Oh my God, Trevor, what are you here for?" [laughs] And you were like, "I'm doing this company, TinyPass."
And I, I was like, "What is it? It's, like, microtransactions?" I was like, "Eh, never work." [laughs] Yeah.
Which is one of those things I'm, like, obsessed with, with micropayments because, like, I'm convinced they will work.
I, I'm also convinced I'm right that they, they never work, but, like, I'm also convinced that at some point they will work. I just don't know if I'll be alive to see it.
Well, don't let me, don't let me un-convince you of any of your will and will work ideas. I, I, I think- But that was what the company originally started with- Absolutely. Yeah.
So we originally were, like, a micropayment wallet where you would fill it up as a consumer and then spend out of that. Yeah.
I think we have very different ideas now about how micropayments work, and because we have a big internal effort which we haven't announced, I'm more than happy to talk to you about it, just not yet. Okay.
I, I, I think that the- Philosophically is the ti- like, eventually someone- No, philosophically... is going to crack this. So, so let me support the idea philosophically.
There is definitely a massive difference that has only been growing in terms of lots of people are willing to pay something. Yeah.
Like, they understand that editorial organizations need to make money on some level, but they, they don't want to go through either the friction or the cost or the ongoing obligation of a recurring subscription that costs a lot of money, that they might forget about, that is hard to cancel, and that they might forget to use.
I mean, the pay as you go model is g- is just much more conducive to the way people consume content, I think, than the subscription model.
And the numbers, if we have a lot more people paying, but they're paying a much, much smaller amount, that's great for everybody. It's great for- Look at the video game industry...
the publishers, it's great for the publishers. It works. It, it's, it's very lucrative too. Yeah. Well, depends what part of... If you think about mobile gaming, yes, but, like, you know, Switch 2 games cost $90.
So- Yeah... you know. But you're right. I mean, the model fundamentally makes sense, and I think there's some questions about how the money flows in and how the money flows out and what the user experience is like.
But, and by the way, every six months there is another micropayment startup- Yeah... that somebody will say, "This company wants you to have a partnership with them." And I'm like, "I'm sure they do." Right?
Troy, I mean, all the, the joking about Troy aside, Troy was really instrumental- Yeah... in my thinking about this in that I talked to him when we were doing the micropayment thing.
And I was like, "Troy, we've got this idea. People will pay a little bit for a little article. We've already been testing it with Granger, who's the editor of Esquire, and it... we sold this article. It was great.
And now we wanna wr- write and do it more broadly." And, and Troy was like, "Look, I mean, the numbers are still small, but my problem is not that I can't charge micropayments.
My problem is that here at Hearst, we don't know where users are. We have one pocket of people in print. It's totally different than the pocket of people we have in digital. Those two things don't talk to each other.
We can't administrate this properly." And it just dawned on me that what the, what publishers needed before we... they could experiment with models- Yeah...
was, like, agility and, for lack of a better word, new plumbing. And I've spent the last 12 years, I mean, not every media company uses Piano by a long shot- Yeah...
but I've spent the last 12 years relatively substantially replumbing the media business so that there is a lot of agility there, and building a lot of relationships with people who, you know, w- we're not, like, not deeply integrated with our clients' tech stacks and organizations.
And so now we have a lot more trust and s- and just a lot more contractual and technical ability to make, to experiment with that kind of stuff. Right. And make that kind of thing work. And so- But that would make-...
I'm still very excited about it. Yeah. It would make sense, right? Like, 'cause I mean, if you, you... There's, there's people who you're ne- you're not gonna convert them into, like, recurring revenue subscribers.
But, like, it makes sense to, like, you know, if you're basically using a bunch of data in order to understand what to put in front of these people, whether to block them, whether what, you know.
And it's like that, it seems like it would make sense as, like, a, one, as part of the toolkit. Yeah. And the- You know, if you're looking at how can I maximize my ARPU?
And, and there is a lot of complexity of how does that- Yeah... dovetail with the corporate site license? How does... What if you wanna share an article with me? Yeah. What if you spent a micropayment and didn't mean to?
What if, what if... How, you know, does... Like, you don't wanna take a percentage off of that, so how do you motivate a sales- Yes... team to work on it? Like, there's a million bits of complexity.
That's why it doesn't exist now. [laughs] And that's right, and that's why all these things fail, right?
And, and look, the, the friction to say to you, "Hey, you've gotta go put your money in this wallet," and there is an incomplete list of publishers that you'll then be able to spend that on.
And every time you go to one of those articles, there's this, like, cognitive friction of, like, should I spend- Yeah... six cents to view this? Like, that's no good.
So there's a lot of reasons that this fails over and over and over again, but again, with all hubris and arrogance- Yeah... we think we're g- we've gone a long way- Yeah... towards solving a lot of these things.
Well, yeah, the plumbing. I mean, there was some, like, Y Combinator coming a couple years ago I remember coming to me and was- Oh, dude, there's a hundred of those things... saying they were gonna do this.
I was like, "Okay." I was like, "I've heard this before." [laughs] And there's, and by the way, one thing that's been a privilege is meeting a lot of smart people behind these. Jim McKelvey from Square- Yeah...
launched a thing called Invisibly that was really interesting for a little while. Alexander Klopfing from Blendle- Yeah... was really g- fantastic guy.
Cosmin, and I'm gonna get his last name wrong, Ioin, who does, did LaterPay, I think it was called, and now has another thing that he has Google integrating that thing with.
So there's lots of people trying this, which is... The, the guy from Waze, an Israeli gentleman whose name I'm forgetting, was great. He and I talked, and he, that became Posted or whatever. Kevin Systrom from Instagram.
Yeah. [laughs] All these guys have tried some kind of, like, "I'm the Messiah and I'm the savior and I'm gonna come in and have a new model." M- Our, our good friend- Yeah... Tony Hale. I ran into Tony.
I was walking by the W- [laughs] the West Village yesterday and ran into him. I mean, these are, these guys, these are the smartest guys in the media business- Yeah...
in my view, and, like, everybody's tilted against this windmill. We will do the same thing, and, you know, someday somebody will get it. I know. Somebody's gonna do it. Awesome. Thanks so much, Trevor.
It was really fun to catch up. Thanks, Ryan. Great talking to you. [outro music]