[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. This is Brian Morrissey. We recently completed a survey with our partners at Piano.
We surveyed revenue leaders at top publishers to understand how they're reorganizing themselves to adapt to what we call the total monetization challenge.
And that means, like, how do you make money off of your entire audience rather than just pockets.
This is very needed in a more with less era where most publishers are seeing less traffic, and that means you need to make more money off the, the audience that you do have.
One of the findings that stood out to me was how publishers identified misalignment as the biggest challenge they face in unified monetization strategies.
It was named far more frequently than incompatible tech or siloed teams or even cultural resistance. You can download the entire report.
We've got different interviews with top revenue leaders as well as all the, the data from our survey of about seventy-five publishers. You can download it on therebooting.com or in a link in the show notes.
Thanks to Piano for its partnership in creating this research and also for partnering to sponsor this podcast series where we are speaking with publishing leaders about how they take a unified approach to monetization, among other topics.
If you don't know Piano, Piano's digital revenue optimization solution helps digital services and publishers grow revenue by better understanding and influencing their customers' behavior.
Piano does this by unifying analytics, segmentation, and personalization in one AI-driven application. This enables sites and apps to efficiently maximize the value of every user visit.
It is headquartered in Amsterdam with offices in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, and it serves a global client base, including BBC, Deutsche Telekom, UK, AXA, and The Wall Street Journal.
For more information, visit piano.io. I am excited to be going to Paris in a few weeks to speak at the Piano Academy. If you're gonna be there, let me know. Hope to connect with you.
This week I spoke to Essentially Sports co-founder Suryansh Tibrewal about how Essentially Sports is adapting its strategies in a time of quite a bit of traffic flux.
I think of Essentially Sports as, you know, a classic high-volume web publisher. Always been really good at search traffic and at being, you know, having a high metabolism, really.
I would consider it, like, a classic page view publisher, and so I'm really interested in how these businesses adapt to a completely different landscape.
And, you know, from my conversation with Suryansh, it's just fine, actually.
And we discussed how Essentially has continued to benefit from, you know, Google Discover, which is really a lifeline for, like, a lot of publishers, you know, as, as they've seen their search traffic decline.
You know, for, for news publishers, Google Discover is absolutely critical.
We also discussed, you know, Essentially shifting its business model to focus more on direct sold advertising revenue versus its programmatic operations, which it's long relied on, and also how its fan perspective is a differentiator in a crowded category.
Hope you enjoy this conversation. If you do, please leave it a rating and review wherever you hear podcasts, and they allow you to do such.
And always interested in your feedback, send me a note at brian@therebooting.com. Now here's our conversation with Suryansh. [upbeat music] Suryansh, welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm glad we're finally doing this.
Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. It was really fun that we put this together. Yeah. Well, we're in your studio, so- [laughs]... hopefully it'll go well. Let's talk about the origins of, of Essentially Sports.
I mean, you started it when you were in college at a totally different era. Mm-hmm. 'Cause I, I basically wanna get at-- I talk with tons of publishers all the time. Mm-hmm.
And one of the big things is about refactoring their businesses- Mm-hmm... for a totally different era. Mm-hmm. And twenty fourteen was a totally different era. Yeah. Yeah.
That's, that's an interesting perspective to ask. So when we started in twenty fourteen, I was nineteen year old. My other two co-founders were nineteen and eighteen year old.
We were engineering students back in India, two of us in the north side of India, the third one in the south side of India. And so a little bit about me that will make sense why we did that in college.
So s- when I was a kid, two things I was really fan of, internet and sports. One I was great at, one I was really bad at.
So I would go play sports, but I was not good at it, and then I would go online and do things, and I would make money. So I was, like, making money online when I was fourteen. Wait, what were you doing at fourteen?
I, I was not making money online. I was doing- There was no online when I was fourteen. [laughs] What am I saying? [laughs] That was one problem. Yeah. Well, I didn't have that problem, so- Another advantage. Yeah. Yeah.
Actually, I was doing bunch of things. I was playing quizzes, building quizzes. I was, like, doing these online competitions. I used to freelance on fiverr.com.
And funnily enough, there used to be these things of, like, clicking ads and, like, being part of, like, these ad ecosystems. I also used to click ads. Okay. So you were, like, an internet hustler. Yeah.
I was, like, an internet hustler. All right. Great. That's what I like to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I also was, like, new engineering, so I would code and, like, do these scripts which would, like, run on four AM or something, but I was an internet hustler. That's all part of it. Basically, yeah. Cool.
That's part of the scheme. So I did that, and then sports I used to suck at. So these two things were part of my life. Then when I went to university, and I met my co-founders.
Harit, who's my co-founder, he pinged me once, and he was like, "Do you want to write?"And we used to talk a lot about cricket at that time. And I was like, "Sure."
And I remember writing, like, women's cricket game debriefer one day on, like, a Saturday. It was, like, a five-day test match that happens in cricket. And this was like a chain in the college.
So like, all of us just used to keep asking each other to write to just on this platform. We just bought a domain for $10, essentiallysports.com.
So at a certain point, there were 250 different people across different colleges in India and in West Indies, in UK, and like other parts of the world just doing this for fun.
There was, like- Were you like hooked into ad networks or- Yeah, but we were making, like, $20 a month or something. It was- Okay... like nothing. Like it's, everything was kept in the business.
You're not making money out of it. It was like we didn't know anything that we know right now. It was more like an expression. We just did it because we thought, "Okay, we like this topic. We want to write about it.
We watched this game, we want to write about it."
And then there were like these like WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups and Reddit communities that all of us were, like, part of, were created by us a lot of times, where we will meet somebody else who's like, "Okay, I am also a fan of this team.
I want to write." Or somebody would be a fan of the opposing team, and they would want to write. For example, Jaskirat, my third co-founder, he's a big Formula One fan. And at that time, in India it was not famous.
It was before the Drive to Survive era, and it's before like almost all the eras that existed in Formula One. Mm-hmm. And he was practically like probably like three guys followed it in India, and he was one of them.
So for him, it was finding an online community who loved F1.
So he would like talk to like people from UK and just like jam with them and talk about a race that he was watching together and then come write on essentiallysports.com.
Harit has been playing tennis for the last 20 years. For him, it was, "Okay, it's a way of expression of how I play tennis." So first three years it was just this. It wasn't a business.
It was like a passion project we all did because we liked it. Somehow, 250 people believed the same thing. And for me, it was putting the internet and sports piece together.
So initially in this 250 people team, 249 people were just, like, doing content, and I used to do everything else, the internet hustler piece, like graphic designing, website development, ad networks.
I remember doing a call with Sovereign, which was my, like, first US call or something at that time, and like finding these new ad placements or like doing analytics.
But how were you getting, like the audience was growing at the time with like what? Like Facebook and- Reddit groups, Facebook. We were just- Okay... sharing this organically. There was no paid or anything.
We were just like- Okay... and we didn't know SEO or anything at that moment. Sometimes something would go on top stories or something, but our domain was also like very new at that time. Okay.
But you were getting an audience. Yeah. Yeah. There were like, a good piece would get like 5K, 6K clicks, but, like, that would be rare. We used...
I remember we used to be happy seeing 100 active on Google Analytics- Okay... at that moment, which is not a crazy number. We have had like 70,000 active now at a certain point. Yeah.
Or like seeing that was a big deal for us at that moment. I don't know if- Okay... it adds up to you or [chuckles] Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Yeah.
I'm just, I'm just wondering like how, how you ended up, you know, 'cause th- again, that era, particularly when you were starting, it was really going into the Facebook traffic flood. Like, were, were you...
Did you, did you guys really benefit from, from the growth of Facebook? So I think- 'Cause there was tons of Facebook publishers then. Yeah. So 2009 to 2013 was big on Facebook.
I think we were a couple years late, so we didn't benefit. No, that was like super early phase. It fa- now to me, like- No, so, so there are two phases of Facebook.
There is one, the Facebook Pages era, which is the 2010, fifty... the Buzzfeed era, basically, right? Yeah. And then there is the Facebook News era, which happened somewhere around like 2020 to 2023. Mm.
That you didn't need to have an audience, but if you were a good news publication, you would get traffic. The Buzzfeed era was like, you had to still build an audience. Right. Right?
So I think we were somewhere in the middle of it, so it was almost the end of the Buzzfeed era, but because we were new, we didn't have that big an audience.
But what we did was, so there was all these like fan communities that we built by like sharing memes and everything, like which we would build ourselves, and then memes would go viral.
And then we would have like, for example, Lewis Hamilton lovers was one of our big Facebook page that we had, or tennis fans was a big page for us at that moment.
So these pages had like 300K, 500K followers, but these are not like EssentiallySports pages. So we'd get our initial traffic from it. Mm-hmm. Right?
And we were part of those instant articles program and everything at that moment. Okay. Right?
A big thing for us at that moment was, think it wasn't about a big traffic number, because we weren't doing it for money at that moment. It was more finding validation.
So the high was if you get like even 5,000 clicks on something, it feels rewarding because it was like you didn't expect anything out of it. Mm-hmm.
Much later it became, okay, what's the revenue model around it, et cetera. Because we were on college, we had in mind that we will do jobs after this, so EssentiallySports was not supposed to pay our bill.
And everything we were doing by our own hands, so we didn't really like need money to do it at that moment. Okay. So when did it become like, you know, a business? Yeah.
So somewhere around 2017, we all graduated, and then we moved to different parts of the world. I moved to Amsterdam. I used to work at booking.com.
I was leading their, like, new product development department, just trying to hustle again. EssentiallySports was my weekend project at that moment, and same was the case for my other two co-founders.
Our volunteer organization died down because everybody graduated, so then people didn't have time. A big part of media is consistency.
It was very hard to do consistency with a volunteer-run organization which was just doing it.
And most of the people used this for like, like for some other endeavors they wanted to do because they just learned the skills and then they did something with it in their life.We hired just [laughs]...
me being the core team. We were like, "Okay, let's keep it alive." And I have to credit my co-founders. They definitely did way more than me to keep it alive.
From 2017 to 2019, we had like a slow phase where we were figuring out what does the new era look like?
So we shut everything else down, and we focused on tennis and Formula 1 at that moment, which we were strongest at, and like as founding team, we cared a lot about.
And we saw that a UK and a US audience was really engaging with the content that we were doing at that moment. Like, because a big difference between India and US and UK is, like India has a much younger audience.
Like, most of the population of India is under 30 year old, so they don't actually read. They like, like to visually see things like, or like see Instagram and stuff like that.
But America and UK has a very big reading audience, like mo- a, a big population is above 40 year old. So we would see that our time on page and everything was good from like an engagement perspective.
There is also, of course, the revenue side, which was good with it.
But the fact that people actually cared to read and we were getting these valuable comments and like feedbacks, people wanted to write as well, that really became a thing that, okay, we thought it, it makes sense.
And then I remember in 2018, October, we regrouped and we were like, "Okay, let's do it seriously now. Let's really sit at it."
And then we made like a ritual that every weekend we would like, "Okay, this is the goal you want to hit next week." And somehow we started to double every month after that.
So we were like at maybe 50, 100K page views, then we started doubling, doubling, doubling. And end of 2019 is when we were, I think, doing like a million page views or something a month.
And I remember market started to shift, right? Because COVID happened. 2020, March, COVID happened. Mm-hmm.
And the, that was our like aha moment, in my opinion, because the thesis of the market and our thesis was a little different.
So most of the competitors in the market started shutting down departments because live sports stopped, so they thought there is not enough news to cover. But our tagline is the fan's perspective.
The reason we started in college and the reason we continued was we were bored reading the expert's opinion. Our-- and the unstructured pieces on Facebook group, et cetera, was more like a fan rant.
So somewhere in between the fan's perspective is what we wanted to bring in.
And I remember doing this call distinctively between like our like team, and we had three employees at that time, that, okay, the market is trickling down, but we feel that fans would be more bored because you'll be at home more, you would want to read more, and sports is not just what happens on the field.
Like all these players, we'll be sharing more about them. There is always like, you want entertainment when you're bored, and sports is ultimately a form of like live entertainment, right?
So we decided that we'll double down, like we'll actually like scale up, produce more, do more content, expand into more sports. And the market did the opposite. That just gave us a window.
So we grew from a million page views to 60 million page views in four months at that time, purely because we were just doing the opposite of what the market was doing. Okay.
So how much content were you producing at this? 'Cause it seems like, like talk me through the model because- Yeah... like I'm trying to, to, to understand like how...
Because it, it's kind of, like to me it just looks from the outside like kinda counter to a lot of the things that like I talk about. Like, 'cause it's like it's very volume-based. You guys produce a lot. Yeah.
Like, I was on one of the UFC story, and the, the, the writer ha- it was his 2,497th piece. Yeah. And it gave me like a little bit of [laughs] anxiety.
I was like, I, I think, I think this gentleman's above me, like in my career output. [laughs] And I feel like I've been pretty productive. [laughs] I- And obviously you have like an advantage.
Like so, so most of the people writing are in, are in India, right? Versus like you, you're not like, you were not going out and hiring like y- like US journalists to follow along the tour or European journalists. Mm.
Right? Like, so there's a definitely like cost advantage there- Mm... to, to play at.
And it seems like, you know, the, the sort of brand positioning is, reminds me a little bit of, of like a Bleacher Report or, or maybe even SB Nation- Yeah...
and saying, "Hey, we're, we're gonna ha- we're not gonna, we're not gonna hire a bunch of journalists to go to like the press conferences afterwards.
We're gonna give the fan perspective, and it's gonna be somewhere between UGC and, you know, ESPN." Mm-hmm.
It's a good question, and of course, it's the obvious question around our brand as well, so I'll unpack it a little. So first of all, before I even talk about our model, why our model fans require, I'll talk about that.
So our vision statement and positioning is that we are the home for the underserved sports fan, that we deliver storytelling beyond the headlines, which is basically like we go into the right depth in every niche.
So if I am a fan who cares about the sixth ranked NASCAR driver, or I care about TGL in golf, I'm actually not getting the coverage that I want. Yeah. I'm not getting it right now.
I used to get it in the original Bleacher Report era. I used to get it in the- Well, that was their thing... Education era.
Their thing was like, okay, it's the off-season and some sicko is like, i- is, is a Green Bay Packers fan- Yeah... and is really like obsessed with- Yeah... who the 53rd person on the roster is gonna be in July.
[laughs] Exactly. Exactly. And that fan still exists. Yeah. That fan didn't go away. The backup long snapper. [laughs] Yeah.
So that fan didn't go away, even though the models changed over time because the way media changed, the market changed, or they got bought, or whatever reason it is. But the fans still required it, right?
So what essentially Sports came in and did was fill in the gap in the market. The culmination of the model and the way we execute it is that gap in the market. It started with a large scale volume perspective as well.
Like initially we used to like, we'd do a lot of articles. Like, we started at 10 articles, we went to 100. What was the peak? We have done like 450 articles a day also- Okay...
which require like 12 different teams-Which are, like covers every team, every sport. We have done that, and we still do that. But two things we do differently because we care about it.
Think first, and that is partly because of the way we started in India, and the way we started in college, we actually don't run it like a UGC. It's not like some platform somebody comes and writes. Right.
Like in our case, every piece touches five different people before it goes live on the website. And we don't use AI still now, even though we come- we are engineers.
I wish we used it, but we don't know how to use it right now for this use case. So five people touch that piece before it goes live.
So yes, there is the cost model advantage, but we cover that up with the immaculate presence you want to keep. Like, we really spend time listening to every podcast, every angle, attending every press conference.
That was our first phase of the business.
The second phase of the business that we have evolved over time and the way the market has also changed is, we learned so much about the fans by doing this over the time because think of it this way, it was our way to get a fan pulse by just doing...
by, by just increasing our lux surface area, right? Like when you're doing 400 pieces, it's not like all 400 pieces will get traffic. Mm. But what it does tell us, it gives us a pulse of the fan in a way.
This allowed us to build things which, the way I like to put it is, internet editorial is more like a short form content. It's like a reel almost, right?
Like, the satisfaction a user gets is ultimately a two-minute experience, the same way a reel is. It talks about one angle, and it's not a breakdown story.
Because most of the fan, they are just consuming in a, a sports entertainment in a different way. That's one format of doing this.
The second format of doing this is when you know that, okay, this is now what the user wants.
This is the experience that they want, and now we own the relation with them, which is the non-platform way of doing it, where we become the platform.
Where we got into our newsletter journey over time, where we now have like a million plus subscriber. And the writer who writes this just writes that newsletter that day, because that's a very long newsletter. Yeah.
So I don't think it's about where the person is writing from, et cetera, because if somebody has done 2,500 articles, the amount of time they have spent understanding that fandom and they really care about that fandom is pretty high, right?
And two, because as a bootstrap company which is not funded from the like an, like any VC house, et cetera, if we don't do justice to our fans, we wouldn't exist anyways. Like, either- Right...
fans will stop reading us, or platforms will kick us out, or- Right... something will happen. So like talk to me about like the, the tr- the traffic, right? Yeah.
Because like you know, that you, you had tremendous growth in traffic, right? And I assume that most of that came from Google. Yeah, a lot of it came from Google and from our fan communities- Okay, well-...
that I talked about... people are terrified of Google now. You seem very relaxed. [laughs] I think it's maybe my ignorance is bliss. [laughs] No, seriously. Like, I mean, I don't know.
It's like if you, if you put in like media and like doom, you get like a bunch of results in like, you know- [laughs]... about Google Zero and- Yeah... and, and the rest of it. Like how much of...
Like what was, what was Google like, like what was the peak of like Google as far as like, as the source of your traffic? 'Cause I, I would guess it's not just search, it's like Discover.
I think people don't like fully- Understand... comprehend that- Yeah... that Discover is, is so massive for publishers. I mean, like if Google does something to Discover- Yeah...
like it's gonna wipe out so many businesses.
But talk to me about that because there's, look, every publisher has dealt with-- Not every publisher, but so many publishers have dealt with, you know, Search, which used to be the most reliable- Mm...
traffic source becoming far less reliable. Mm. Um, it's not just an AI story. You know, Google has, has been keeping more traffic- Mm... onto its own sites, et cetera, et cetera. Mm-hmm.
What are you seeing on the Google front? Yeah. So I'll break down our phases with Google into two parts. There was the 2020 to 2023 era and 2023 to 2020, like today era. Yeah.
I think 2020 to 2023 was we were like a pure publisher, that we would do high quality original content with the fans' perspective, but the model was website, then like making money through programmatic ads.
It's a page view model. Yeah, page view model. Not an- Which-... or like a- Which, which incentivizes volume... which incent- incentivizes volume. That was our original model- Yeah... how we started.
Then in 2023, I met Dave Nemetz, who's the co-founder of Bleacher Report, and I like that you mentioned that as a reference. Yeah.
I had a similar thought, that I was like, Bleacher Report was a big reason why we started. We used to read it a lot.
And when I was reading the origin stories, and I remember reading this article called Leaky Bucket by Dave Nemetz- Mm-hmm...
which was basically how do you move from a page view model to an audience model, and how do you start thinking- Yeah... about it. Well, they shoved that app down everyone's throats.
[laughs] Yeah, that's one way to do it. [laughs] And it also helps that you launched an app when the app was- I know... the app store came out first time in their life. Yeah. Right?
So I hit him up, cold email, something. He actually responded. I was pretty glad. Then we had a great chat.
He gave a lot of ideas, and I was basically asking this question, like, Google and all these platforms just keep hiding what your brand is, so you can keep getting all these page views, but how do you like actually like build this relation?
What does it mean beyond this? Because that was like a million-dollar question, right? And he gave me some answers. I wasn't probably wise enough to comprehend a lot of it at that moment.
But good thing about him was he was like, "I think whatever you guys are doing, I feel like I found like a diamond in rough where it is right now, your business.
So I would definitely want to like collaborate with you guys and figure it out." And since then he started working with us in different capacities.
And it kind of broke down the way our business was built before and after. The before era was very publisher-focused era, where Google, we even saw like 100 million page views a month.
We have seen that on our website, all organic, no paid done, and actually like on 12 different sports, very spread out, not like by on just on top two pieces.After 2023, we kind of, we were learning all these things about our data, and we expanded our business into multiple pillars, which is our journey from publisher to platform- Mm.
... which is why it makes us less scared about the Google zero era right now
is we started moving that, okay, what does the journey of the fan looks like across different assets, across if you have to become a platform where our website is, where they get the viral piece, where they get the moment that happened behind the moment.
Our newsletters become their daily routine where they wake up every day and this becomes their reporting source.
Our social becomes the vi- uh, visual source, and the events which are still sporadic, but they're growing for us, becomes the place where they can like feel the fandom in a way.
A lot of these things we were not ra- ready at that moment, but we started doing them sequentially.
So right now we are in this journey where Google stays still very, very important for us, and we would love if you could get- Yeah... like 100 million pages monthly. But it's, it's the top of the funnel.
It's the top of the funnel. Like- Right... it's the top of the funnel, but it's- But I feel like a lot of publishers were just top of the funnel publishers, right? Like and- Yeah...
they were saying we're, we're, you know, it was the little things was the most like extreme example.
But like, you know, it's like we're gonna get a ton of traffic, whether it's from Facebook, whether it's from Google, and then we're gonna monetize that traffic often through programmatic and display ads. Yeah.
We're gonna get the people to the page. They're gonna consume one to 1.5 page views per visit. Yeah. And we're just gonna repeat, and it's a flywheel of sorts.
The problem is, you know, you're not in control of your- Yeah... distribution and- You're not in control... you know, et cetera. Yeah.
And you know, I think Bleacher, I joked about the shoving the app down people's throats, but like, you know, they took that top of the funnel- Yeah... and then they, they built it into a much more durable- Yeah...
distribution source. Never gonna be as big, you know, as indirect. So it sounds like you're on a similar journey, but you're using newsletters as the way to build that habit. Yeah.
So Google brings in the scale, and then you build your audience relationship in terms of engagement, and we are using newsletter as a channel. But I'll take a step back.
I think for us, even when we were doing the publisher era, because like I come from a product background, I used to be a product manager at Booking, and like I've done like what engagement means like.
For us, even when it was a page view era, it was never really just a page view. We were tracking everything, what the user is doing on the website and what do the fans want.
So we would like do things like polls and quizzes and see how we can like increase engagement over time. And that really allowed us to put users in different buckets of loyal, regular, and fly by- Right...
which most publishers actually don't do. So we used to track users across different sessions and see which users are becoming more loyal to our brand.
So for example, we saw that golf, NASCAR, tennis, and combat sports, we have highest amount of loyal audience, which is what made our proof of depth in niches really, really valuable for us.
We used to get crazy scale in NFL and NBA, but we don't have that kind of a loyalty in an NFL fan right now. Yeah. We do have a loyalty, for example, in a Cowboy fan, but not NFL as a broad sport.
So this loyal, regular, fly by, this learning that we did for four and a half years, we have been like tracking this since end of 2021 as something we built in-house.
It really just allowed us to figure out how do we do it. So right now our newsletters are like a million subs plus. They're not one brand newsletter, which a lot of publishers do or like a lot of companies do.
We actually do niche newsletters. So we have a newsletter for every sport. In NFL, we actually have a newsletter for every team. We've launched it for two teams already.
So that just allows to create an experience with the fans where they're getting what they want, and we have been learning about this for four and a half years.
So the way I see it is Google is the platform which is opening the doors for us, but then we are putting them in our room- Yeah...
and then hopefully that room becomes our room over time, and then we can build more products out for the users. How many, how many newsletters do you have? We have seven newsletters right now. Oh, okay.
That's not that many. Yeah. We don't do extreme volume in every- Well, you were talking about like, like one for every team. Yeah. And it's like, okay, that, that could, that could get extremely complicated. Yeah.
But we still do it like it's not like an automatic newsletter. We actually have like an editor which curates- Right... every newsletter, and we are kind of doing two formats in it.
So one newsletter takes the traffic back to the website. That's a more like a flywheel kind of funnel. And the other newsletter is a more special edition, weekly edition that we do, which lives in the newsletter itself.
Kind of like what you do with your Booting- Yeah... newsletter, right? Okay. So you, you still have, you still gotta Google Discover. I don't wanna say it's a problem- Yeah... it's an opportunity.
I'm sure Discover is like a major source of how people discover, literally- Yeah... essentially sports, right?
It, it, it was, and it is, but I do feel like most of the users that come back to our website, even though when they come back from Discover, they already have started to have a relation with us. Mm.
So for example, we track something like how many times a newsletter users come back to our website.
So if we add up the number of times a user comes from newsletter and also from Discover, it is like 25 times a month right now. Okay.
So anybody who's like a good subscriber reads it through newsletter, but also shows up more from Google Discover. Yeah.
So talk to me on the business side about moving from a pure page view model that was very reliant on indirect audience sources, usually that marries well with programmatic. Yeah. You get a lot of programmatic demand.
You become... You go to some digiday publishing summits, and you- Yeah... you meet a million vendors at, at one time. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] And, and then you swap in and out various SSPs, et cetera, et cetera. Mm.
Uh, that was, you know, a well-known, well-oiled, uh, machine. Yeah. It's, it's getting creaky, I would say. [laughs] I mean, I, I don't know.
I look at like, you know, a lot of these vendors, all of a sudden they're saying, "No, no, no. We, we don't really care about websites. We care about retail media. We care about CTV." Yeah.
[laughs] I'm like, if they're not seeing the money here- Yeah... [laughs] then, then this is not a good situation. So tell me about the evolution of, on the business model. Yeah.
Yeah.By the way, CTV, I- CTV I am also seeing show up a lot. I wish we had a fast channel. We're not there yet. Well, I have a whole theory about all of that. You know? I'm curious to hear it, actually.
Well, it's bec- like, usually... I mean, not to be a conspiracy theorist, right? But it's like, it's the areas that are, like, newest and that where measurement isn't the best- Mm.... that a lot, uh- [laughs] Okay.
[laughs]... a lot of money a- uh, and focus goes to. And then, and then when it, it gets out of its Wild West phase- Yeah... it goes to the next, it goes to the next area. But that's, that's my conspiracy theory, um.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. [laughs] So tell me about like how, how you're... I assume you guys were, like, entirely indirect, meaning like programmatic for a long time. Mm. Yeah.
So the whole 2020 to 2023 and '23 to '25, it was not just a shift between page view and audience, it was also a shift in our business model.
And the biggest shift that started to happen for us was, okay, now we have opened the gate and we have seen the scale. But a big principle as a bootstrap company for us is longevity.
And it was very, very clear to us, Dave conversation, me spending more time in the market.
We almost did, like, roadshows in US where, like, for five weeks as three co-founders we would come and just meet, like, experts across different part of US, and we actually do this as a ritual now every three months.
Now I'm planning to move to New York, so it will be different. But, like, we literally just learned on the job meeting experts, understanding what's going on, going to even events like this and see the landscape.
And the biggest thing we realized was, okay, now that we're shifting from this page view to an audience model and becoming closer to the vision that we have, how do we really start the brand equity play, right?
Like, how do we charge for our brand, this relation that we have built, this audience dynamic that we have? So we started setting up our sales team. Vishal was our first sales hire. It was a very serendipitous hire.
We, my co-founder, Harit, went to a co-working space to meet, like, a podcast host we were hiring for our think tank show, and Vishal was just there and he ended up chatting.
And then he explained Vishal what we were doing, and I remember Vishal explicitly saying, so Harit was like, "Okay, now we're going direct sales, and we'll go to NASCAR to ask money." And he was like, "No.
If you want money, you don't go to NASCAR. You go to AB InBev," Yeah. "And then you funnel that money through that. You don't get a NASCAR, you get an AB InBev." Like now it sounds obvious, but it was all new to us.
So you met him in a co-working space. Yeah. I never hear stories where co-working spaces actually deliver on what they claim that they deliver. [laughs] But this is good. This is a good proof point. Yeah.
It was, like, extremely random thing. [laughs] He had, like... And he wasn't even looking for a job. He just did out of curiosity. He got interested.
Then we flew him into New York next week because I was coming into town. He just thought we wanted to chat more. We did, like a...
We have a habit of doing these long-ass meeting, so we talked for like 10 hours, and then we went to Olava and we gave him an offer, and he was so puzzled at that moment.
[laughs] He had no idea that it was an interview, like this was going on- Oh, nice... and everything. Then he ended up joining. Next eight months, he was on the road. He let go of his apartment.
He, like, literally was going to every event. He used to work at Brand Innovators before this, before this- Right... co-working thing.
He was, like, the first zero to one hire, so he had access to the CMO communities and everything. So we ended up becoming a sponsor of Brand Innovators. We were doing shit ton of events.
Harit and me were part-time salespeople at that moment as well. So those six to eight months kind of like did our learnings on a steroid. We just learned things in ways that we didn't know.
It actually made us realize what is the market feedback and where do you, where does actually money live in the ecosystem and what does brand dollars really mean.
Like, what kind of products we need to build out, what, how would a newsletter look like, how would events look like, what would original IP look like. A lot of our offline podcast started for, from those conception.
Second half of the year, Josh join in. He has 12 years of sales experience. He, he used to work at Under Armour. He was part of the Spiceworks era and all these, like- Mm... companies with the sales.
So him and Vishal have been leading our sales. We are still very early. I think two years is nothing for the timeframe we are in.
But the fact that we were able to jump-start and we already had the scale and we had built the engagement through our newsletters really gave us a head start in the market.
Okay, so the transition ends up being from page view and from, from an indirect model and volume to basically having like, you know, a, a tighter relationship with the audience, and then also going direct to selling more of your own advertising, right?
So like what is the split? Like, how much is programmatic now versus what you sell yourself? Yeah. So I'll just take a step back on what you just said.
So the way I look at essentially sports platform right now is like four, five key pillars. There's our website, which is more editorial programmatic to begin with- Yeah...
but has a great display and video performance for us. Then our newsletter, which becomes our engagement funnel. Our Instagram, we are very Instagram-focused from a social and video perspective.
We need to do way better at it. Right now we are much more stronger here. And events and IP, so we plan to do like six events a year. Yeah.
And we do a lot of these podcasts where we shoot original content and then we also go shoot, like we are in the process of starting a creator program right now, which is basically pairing up young creators from college with expert journalists in editorial and doing like a combination of content put together where the young creator program is more social Instagram first, and expert editorial is a more editorial first.
Mm-hmm. And we plan to, like, connect these pieces of content together.
So if, let's say hypothetically, a marketer, let's say a Paramount Plus wants to activate on an NFL kickoff season, they choose between these, like in the RFP, one of these five goes in.
Generally, our inventory first gets filled by the display and video. That's our main property. Newsletter is the second biggest property, and then we generally do like-Like some sort of an event activation with them.
Our goal is to get to sixty forty as a business on this, like from a programmatic and a direct sales perspective, I think we are somewhere in double digits right now- Okay... on this right now. That's our goal. Okay.
And when you're going out to, to, you know, brands direct or, or even like agencies, it's obviously, it's a very competitive market. Yeah. There's a lot of... You know, sports is an area that attracts a lot- Yeah...
of, of entrants. What's the sort of differentiation that you- Mm-hmm... end up, you know, saying that you have that others don't? It's definitely competitive, but you'll be surprised there are not a lot of new entrants.
What you were just talking about at the start of the podcast, right? A lot of companies die in this industry. Like, pe- only like big ones survive. The middle ones keep dying. Yeah.
So challenger brands are not really entering the market so much. Uh, most of the challenger brands are like small right now, who don't have ES scale.
So ES is uniquely positioned that it is challenger brand, but it also has a scale to deliver on. And our positioning of depth in niches that we have audiences at scale in niches that you don't generally get.
Like we are top three in golf, we are top three in NASCAR, we are top three in combat. We are very, very competitive in NFL and NBA. The way we have built regional audiences is very unique.
That really gives us a head start compared to most, like most of the challenger brands. We're definitely like, we're not a Bleacher Report yet for sure. We definitely want to get there.
But this headstart as a challenger brand gives us an edge.
So the way we take, take it to the market is that you're getting a scale and an engaged audiences in pockets of fandom that you wouldn't get otherwise, and you're getting to be the first one on the boat. Yeah. Right?
Like, like most of the marketers that who will work with us, they are first in their categories, like a beer company or a finance company or an insurance.
Like these segments, like people who will bet on us are the first ones in the market. Yeah. That's our differentiator. And, and sports is so, I mean, so many, so many brands want to be involved in sports.
They don't want anything to do with politics, et cetera. Yeah. And if you're going to ESPN, like you're, uh, it's, it's like 500K or you're- Yeah, the entry barrier is also high... not gonna do anything.
So there, there is always, I assume, opportunities there. But talk to me about, about building out from a paid view business from the site being so important.
I mean, you talked about Instagram and that's one, but building like IP and franchises. How- Hmm... what are you doing there? So we have two IPs right now. Our longest one is Think Tank.
It's the business behind the game podcast, where basically what we aim to do is, and we have been doing it for two seasons now, uh, most of the
marketing insights that you get, let's say if you saw your favorite player in an ad, you don't really know the behind the scenes, like what is happening in the boardroom, like why that player was chosen, why that campaign is happening, what are the numbers behind it, did it perform or not.
And there is surprisingly, there is a segment of fans who actually care about it, like they want to know this.
So we came up with this idea where we actually talk to like CMOs and brand marketers who are working, like who actually conceptualize this creatively, et cetera, and they share the details they have never shared before.
So we have done 25 episodes now.
We have had guests from like American Eagle, we have had guests from DoorDash, all these companies where we talked about the latest campaigns that they have done, and then we pair it up with a newsletter, which is like a in-detail breakdown.
If let's say somebody wanted to start using NIL athletes to do marketing- Mm-hmm...
then you'll get a brand marketer who has done an NIL a- athlete activation, we'll use insights from that, and then we'll add our own research to it.
So if somebody wanted to start in that, they would just read our piece and get an idea on it. That's our main flagship piece.
The second podcast series we did, which we have done one season so far, it's about pairing a young 13-year-old quarterback and interviewing senior quarter-quarterbacks, and the story in that is that he wants to learn from the experts of what he should do right now to like improve his game.
These are a couple of concepts that we're working on right now. Okay. And so, but right now, like where, where does like act... Where do like activations fall? Like, uh, I, I mean most people want to, most publishers
and just the demand in the market is do more than sell advertising, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're selling advertising alone, that could be a tough business.
High margin, but it's like, it's tough, it can be a tough business. Definitely. There are two ways to look at it.
I still see a lot of value in pure advertisement because you're ultimately borrowing an attention of an audience, which like really buys into something, right?
So I still see a lot of value in that, but what we are pairing it up with is, for example, we were at WNBA All-Star weekend where we started the creator program that I was just telling you about.
We got Natasha Howard as our athlete correspondent, so she was giving behind the scenes around instead of playing on the court, how does it feel like off the court?
She wrote on our platform, she wrote on our newsletter, she wrote a letter to her younger self. So now brands can become part of that activation.
We had like a whole setup where we had our programming and Natasha Howard took those interviews. We had our influencer go into that. It was pretty cool, actually. I really liked it. I couldn't make to that one.
Then we did one recently at US Open just last weekend, where we paired up with a celebrity tennis tournament, like a charity tournament, so it was Agassi and McEnroe playing.
Then we had an after party at the hotel, and most of the who's who of tennis was there, and we were the media house capturing this, and we put that event together.
So if a brand wants to activate at US Open, they would generally work with us on an event like that where they can make their brand present. Yeah.
I mean, do you see that as a big growth area?I think I- I mean, they're hard to put together. Yeah. Like, I just-- It's the US Open now. I think I was saying this to you beforehand.
I was, like, down in, like, Seaport and, and- Yeah... and seeing, like, a big, like, the Seaport Racket Club from Racket. Yeah. I, I saw that one. I'm l- staying nearby, actually. And I, I was-- I took a photo.
I was like, "Oh, good for Caitlin for doing..." And you know, I mean, this is a very small brand, right? Yeah. And like, but because in... It's a tennis-focused brand.
But because there's so much brand interest in, in, in sports like tennis- Mm-hmm... right? A lot of rich people like tennis. Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. There's a lot of opportunities there. Mm.
And it seems pretty clear that for, you know, that that is, like, a good growth area. Tennis, we have been doing for 10 years. Yeah. So tennis is something that is very close to us.
Most of our founding team, our first five employees were ex-tennis players. One of them played nationals. It's very close to our heart.
But to answer your question, from a brand and an activation and a dollars perspective, I think events are nice in a way that it makes it very, very real for everybody. It's very tangible, right?
Like, you're there, you feel it. Yeah. That's why brands love it. But from an ROI perspective, I think ROI, not just for us- Yeah...
for a brand that is spending, like, actual performance goals that they have will get fulfilled on the digital properties.
So the way I see it is there is a tentpole calendar that we have around the depth initiative sports that we care about, like we did for WNBA and Tennis, and we are present on those events, and we put an event together.
And we were, we were fortunate that most of our founding sales team members, et cetera, come from event background. So they have very bootstrap-ish ways of making those events put together. Yeah.
We don't do it like big corporates. So we are able to do high-quality events in a very sustainable way because we care about it.
But if I'm a marketer, I would see events as a way, as a first touch point, but their performances will come on digital properties. Like, there is no way just events will perform for them. Yeah. Yeah.
So that's how I look at it. Right. So it's marrying the two. Yeah.
Like the- Like, for me, like, just doing one or the other doesn't make sense, and which is where I see a market gap when you talked about the challenger brands, et cetera.
Either publishers are doing this, that they're building scales, and then they're selling PMP, PG deals. Yeah. Which ultimately programmatic will take over, in my opinion.
It's the same ad to just optimize a little better. Or there are new age media companies which are almost like an agency sometimes and are doing events. Yeah, they're like mostly agencies. Yeah. Yeah, right?
So nobody's pairing them up together. Right. That I see as a- Now, and that, that i- it's an interesting point because- Yeah... I think you d- you get, you get... You can easily get pulled into being an agency. Yeah.
And- I don't want to be an agency... I do another podcast, and my co-host jokes that, "Leave it to publishers to find the second worst business to go into." [laughing] Anyway.
I don't know why people keep saying publisher is a bad business, by the way. Like, I've been doing it for very-- It's hard, but everything in entrepreneurship is hard, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, everything. Yeah.
Like, I'm sure, like, whatever you're, like, rebooting, it's very satisfactory because you're doing something you've been doing for thirty years, and you're doing it for yourself. Oh, I'm in too deep. But- Like- Yeah...
yeah, yeah. Yeah. For sure. You're doing it for yourself. Uh, no, I mean, look, it's, it's a hard business. Yeah. There's no two ways about it.
You know, I think on Semaphore, Mark Cuban, like, you know, is just like, "Ah, it's the worst business i-in the world." [chuckles] Yeah. Like, you know, media. Um- It's not great for VCs. That I get. Right. Yeah.
That I get. It, uh, it-- You cannot put gasoline on it, and it grows in two years. That cannot do that. So final, final question is around AI, right? Yeah.
Like, I mean, you're not using AI, but it sounds like you're-- you say that, like, it's just because you haven't figured out how exactly to use it.
I mean, 'cause, you know, I think that's an, that's a question for a lot- Yeah... of volume-based models. Like, I mean, I,
I, I look at, like, where the weight of the market is going in publishing, and people are going out, and to-- I look at, like, a Vox- Mm... to take an example, right?
Like, I don't know what they'll do with, like, SB Nation and stuff, but what Vox is talking about- Mm... constantly is about talent. Mm. They're just looking at talent deals. You know- Mm...
that's where they- That's the difference... wanna focus. It doesn't, doesn't mean that they're not going to be in the display advertising business- Mm...
and driven by page views, but they certainly are making their bet on, on talent versus the, quote-unquote, "legacy business." Mm. Because AI is coming.
So what-- How do you end up thinking about one is AI as, like, an opportunity, not just a threat? Mm-hmm. AI is coming. That I totally believe in.
As somebody who's an engineer, I would be blinded, uh, if I don't re-recognize the opportunity of AI. I think the way the problem statement we originally built for AI would have been negative for us, for sure.
I think the fact that since 2023, we were able to evolve our business model more. We are not really just a large scale media house anymore.
We are able to combine other things together, so it's less of a negative that way. The reason we don't use it directly on our website right now is I think it takes the taste away.
E-every piece of content needs to have a certain signature in the content. And right now, the way AIs are built, the signature is very AI-ish.
The signature is not of the person who conceptualized the idea, and that the fact that we invest five layers to it, we want to keep that. But where I see a lot of opportunities with AI is derivative content.
Taste is required when you create the first signature piece of content. But for example, if you shoot a podcast, and then you, like, create short-form content out of it. Yeah.
There are, like, AI podcasting tools that my friends are building which will solve this problem statement.
Right now, I have a two-member team which actually listens to every piece and, like, breaks it down and then releases it on our Instagram. So I see value in that.
I see value in, let's say, there are some features we use AI for. For example, we have this feature where we create questions around, like, an engagement question.On like a poll or a quiz. Mm-hmm.
There we have AI produce some questions, and then our editorial person reviews those question before it goes to the website. So it can be a good enablement instead of- Right... being the final piece of product.
I see value in creating as we become multi-platform, we keep our website, which is, let's say, Google Discover, and even like just the viral content not using AI because I don't know, like then our differentiation also goes away.
But taking the learnings and then creating systems for other platforms around it.
Like for example, in newsletter, there was this experiment we were trying where we actually like say that it is a take by AI impersonating this person. For example, like SE stick.
So we had this mascot which was called SE, uh, a take on ES. Mm-hmm. And we would call it like, "SE is this mascot who believes in this, and this is SE's take." Okay.
So things like this I see value in AI, but fundamentally what changes our business... Like these are but like hobby project changes in my opinion. A big change in AI will be the way content is looked at.
That we have not figured out right now. That's something we should be thinking about. We, we think about it, but I don't see it as something which will produce articles.
I see it as something which will improve your insight engine. Okay, but you don't see it as something that'll produce articles now or like ever? If it produces article, then yeah. I mean, some basic stuff.
I mean, you could have like a, you know, you see it like on local, I forget the, the name of it, but they're, they're doing like, you know, like, like thousands of like local like newsletters like using, using AI. Yeah.
So depends what you want to call it. If you're doing a report, like a scorecard which you are writing instead of like a scorecard you're writing five lines, that AI will do.
That's basically like information summarization. Yeah. That in my opinion AI, AI can do. But a lot of what we do is storytelling. That requires a signature. Our informational content...
So a- another thing that I think Google zero is going to really hit is informational content. So there are websites which have been doing informational content, all these static evergreen websites.
And then there are news websites which are, let's say more Google Discover top stories, Google News. Informational websites are going to take a hit.
Now, I can imagine if I'm an informational website and I own the relation with the audience, that content I can produce with AI. That makes sense to me. But news and storytelling, right now it doesn't add up to me. Okay.
Mm-hmm. Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Really appreciate- Yeah... you bringing in me into your studio. I'm glad you could come. [laughs] And thanks for inviting me and I love the way that the conversation flowed.
Okay. All right. Thanks. Yeah. [outro jingle]