[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. This week I'm speaking to Jess Sibley.
I've done a few podcasts with Jess over the years, including one soon after she took over as the CEO of Time. I, I find Time a fascinating asset at this point in time.
You know, we've seen how a lot of digitally native media brands were not that valuable in the long run, at least as brands. But that's not Time. I mean, this is a brand that still has value in the marketplace.
Only the way that value is realized and expressed has shifted, and it's now owned by Mark and Linda Benioff, and Time is a far different asset now than it was when I read it as a kid. Nobody is waiting...
Maybe some people are, but very few people are waiting to get Time or Newsweek to understand the news of the week. Its economic purpose has simply changed.
So Jess unpacks how Time is transforming its business while staying rooted in journalism.
But at least in my view, you know, going far beyond that in the business by focusing on how to extract value, less from placing ads on web pages or even print pages around that journalism, or even charging money to access that journalism, but instead using the trust and reputation that's rooted in Time's heritage and capital J journalism to create value in the forms of things like convening, for instance.
I think one interesting stat that Jess mentions here that I think we'll hear from more publishers is she said that only fifteen percent of Time's advertising is basically ads on web pages.
And I think we're gonna hear that a lot more.
You know, Business Insider had its cuts last week, and Barbara Pang, the CEO of Business Insider, had noted something like seventy percent of its revenue is quote-unquote traffic sensitive.
I think that's my translation of what Jess is talking here, and she's saying that is not the case here.
And that's the advantage of having diversified businesses and something, you know, I keep going on and on about, but I think it's kinda obvious but very true. So Time is in a different bucket.
D-doesn't mean it doesn't have its own challenges. It absolutely does have its challenges because, again, the brand rose decades ago, and now it needs to find its modern footing like any other brand out there.
But I'm really struck by how, you know, an asset like Time, and even its archrival Newsweek, is really pivoting into focusing on being almost like a business publication.
And Jess and I talk about what that means 'cause she talks about it being a B2B publication in a, in a lot of ways, and so we unpack that a little bit.
And, you know, the reality is that general news audiences are of limited value in the marketplace right now. I wish it was otherwise, but that's just what the market has, has determined.
And so instead, you know, Time is building up a lot of franchises and cachet that it can realize through, through different means. You know, journalism still matters.
You know, as J- as Jess mentions, Time is one of the few outlets to have, maybe the only outlet, to have exclusive interviews with Taylor Swift and Donald Trump, you know, who has been on its cover dozens of times.
And actually, I think w- it was accompanying Jess to the- to ring the opening of the New York Stock Exchange.
Of course, in, in true Trump fashion, he ended up attacking Time after they ran a cover of Elon Musk sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office by, by claiming that he didn't know it was still in business.
You know, very Trump. But that's also simpler times. Obviously, [chuckles] that cover was maybe a little prescient with how that relationship would go. I enjoyed this conversation.
Always enjoy, uh, catching up with Jess. I hope you, you did too. Please email me with feedback and ideas to bmorrissey@therebooting.com. One quick note before the conversation.
I am, you know, heading out to Cannes later this week. I know this is a very difficult assignment, but, you know, I, I soldier on. You know, you gotta, you gotta suffer for, for your craft.
We have several activations that we are doing there, including a pair of live podcasts.
In one, I'll be speaking with Cosmo editor-in-chief Willa Benet and Hearst global CRO Lisa Ryan about the reinvention of that publication for a completely different modern context.
Another later in the week, I'll be doing a live recording of People vs. Algorithms with my cohost Troy Young. Alex is not making it, unfortunately.
And instead, we're gonna be joined by Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel, a friend of this pod, and Axios media correspondent and another friend of the pod, Sarah Fisher. These are always great conversations.
We're also gonna have some cocktails. It's gonna be by a pool in a villa, so it's a pretty nice environment compared to where I regularly record this podcast.
And finally, I'm gonna be sending text messages to a lot of people all week through a partnership with Subtext. I'm interested in giving this a try.
I suspect texting will be increasingly popular with publishers as email gets tougher and media narrows even further. I think smaller rooms are better than bigger rooms. So I'm interested to see how it goes.
I'm just gonna basically sign up, and I will be sending four or five messages throughout the day of my oddball observations and perhaps more serious things that I'm hearing along the Croisette and in, in meetings.
Cannes is a very strange thing. It's not, it's not a news event. So I know a lot of people will be covering it as news events because they have sponsorship obligations, and I honor that.
We all have our own hustles, but it's not really.
So instead, it's better just to do a bit of a temperature check or maybe even a vibe check of where the industry is based on, you know, what kind of carnival is going on along the Croisette.
I'm not saying it's, like, completely [chuckles] accurate, but at least it'll be fun. So I'm gonna leave a link to signing up to all those things.
You know, whether you wanna come to one of those events or whether you, you just wanna get some text messages from me, you can always respond to me.
It won't be like a respond all, but I'm interested to see how it goes, so check it out. You can get those in the show notes, or also just look on the Rebooting's website.
There's, there's a post link about what we're doing in Cannes on our site. Now, onto my conversation with Jess.Jess, thanks for returning to the podcast. Oh, it's good to see you, Brian. Yeah.
Thanks so much for having me. Okay. I think it was two years ago, we were in Chicago when we talked, and you were still kinda new, I think in the role at Time at the, at, at the time.
But I wanted to, to catch up because I think, you know, Time's just such a fascinating brand. I mean, we talked about it there.
You know, I grew up with it, and it has a different purpose now, and I kinda feel like I have to ask this for everyone. It's not Time only, but, like, what is Time now? And, like, what role does it play?
Because it's different. I mean, you, you know this, but I want you to tell me, like, what, what is the brand now?
Well, it's great to see you again, Brian, and I very distinctly remember when we were together in Chicago a couple years ago now, and we did a, a live version of your podcast which now seems to be the one of the number one trends, so you set- Yeah...
you set the stage on that, Brian. Good for you. I'm, I'm excited to talk about Time now. I wanna talk today with you about, like, new Time, Time New, and then get into, you know, Time Next, but Time now.
We are spending every single day at Time building the best version of us, of ourselves- Mm-hmm... of Time.
And our mission is to build a sustainable business, and we are harnessing our history, what we believe is truly a competitive advantage, the inspiration behind our history, and we are very optimistic about our future.
Time now [chuckles] is embracing new ways of storytelling.
We have doubled down on investing in communities that matter most, and also real-- with a strong focus on telling the stories, getting access to leaders that are shaping the world.
And we are really proud of what we have achieved so far. I would say our product, and I know you and Troy spend a lot of time talking about good product. Mm-hmm. I look at our good product as our capital J journalism.
So it's, it's capital J journalism. We've doubled down on that, and I would also say capital I, impact and ideas, and I think that also translates to, to influence.
And so for us, it's sort of what's Time Now, but that's really nothing new for us because that's what we've been doing for over 100 years. Right.
And I think we're doing it better now than ever before, and we are getting exclusive access to the most important people in the world in...
We have a large and very diverse canvas as we cover so many topic areas, and, you know, I'd argue that our covers are meaningful. We have 60 of them a year, some print, some digital only, some both, and,
you know, we are-- we have the largest audience in our 100-year history. So we've embraced new formats. We've embraced new technologies, new platforms to reach a wide and global audience.
So I, I'd love to do a little, like, let's do like a SWOT exercise. Like, let's go through strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats. Let's go. Strengths. Strengths.
I would say, you know, I'll give you a couple of examples. Number one is our, is our brand, right? We, we honor our history. We celebrate our history. We don't look at it as an obstacle.
It is very meaningful to be on our cover, on the cover of Time, to be in our pages. We have a, a legacy that is very meaningful. So what does that translate to?
I mentioned audience and having the largest global audience in our history, the youngest audience, but we also have what I would call our own creators or influencers that are doing capital J, high-quality journalism.
What does that mean? It means that we're investing in communities, and we are getting access to individuals and to stories that no one else is. Couple of recent examples. We've talked about Taylor, right?
We have- Taylor Swift, right?... Sam Lansky. Taylor Swift. Okay. Just making sure. She hasn't given a- Just making sure. [chuckles] She hasn't given an interview, she hasn't given an interview in over five years.
She did just give one to- This is the second podcast in a row that Taylor Swift has come up. Yeah. That's it.
You know, Sam Lansky, Eric Cortellessa, he spent more time with President Trump than any other journalist in the world. We've gotten more on the record time with President Trump- Yeah... and Eric is our reporter.
We just got the 100-day exclusive interview. We were picked up 10,000 digital articles. We actually could measure who was reading the article or who was reading the transcript.
We actually had more people even reading the transcript.
I would say Alice Park in, in health, David Ricks, CEO of Lilly, gave Alice, gave Time the exclusive on the GLP-1 weight loss pill version that was a market-moving story.
So yeah, I mean, I could go on and on with this topic.
But it sounds like, like you're saying it's like, like elite audiences, Time is still incredibly important to them, and I don't mean that, like, in a, in a negative way, but, but, like, I, I always think, like, the brand of, of these, you know, companies, like, is, is so much bigger really.
Like, and I think you see that, and we talked about this, the, the divide, and you, you, you, you know this well from Forbes, between, quote unquote, "legacy brands" and digital brands.
Digital brands turned out to be, like, less resilient-For sure. A lot of them just disappeared, and people didn't go out and protest a-as far as I could tell.
Yeah, so, so Sean Gregory just did a cover story on David Beckham. We launched a philanthropy platform. It was extremely well-received. We're not counting people's money. We'll leave that to Forbes.
They do that very well. We're talking about, again, ideas, impact. We're talking about what the future of giving and philanthropy is all about. David Beckham and Victoria came to our event last week, spoke at the event.
So, you know, I can't think of another brand that, as you say, Brian, has that type of access.
They actually sent me flowers thanking me for such an incredible honor to talk about him as a philanthropist and to tell a story that no one had heard. He's been with Unices-ces-- UNICEF since he was 17 years old. Hmm.
As a kid. What 17-year-old do you know is making a philanthropic commitment like David Beckham? So again, Sean writes for us about sports, but this was... These are, these are things that...
and stories and information and inspiration that no other brand is, is getting and getting that TIME. And it, it kind of all feeds into our ecosystem.
But you mentioned that we focus on leaders and this sort of highest level, but that's not actually true. And Brian, when we sat down in person two years ago, I said to you, since I was still fairly new at TIME- Mm-hmm...
wherever I went, and I started traveling the world for TIME. I mean, I went to Dubai and Dallas, Detroit, DC, and everywhere in between, and everyone, as the CEO of TIME, everyone had to tell me their TIME stories.
And I have never experienced a brand that has such a personal and emotional connection with its people, with its readers.
And yes, some of them are like the CEO of Mattel, who told me that he learned how to read English by reading TIME, or Jeffrey Katzenberg, who told me- Hmm...
he's been reading TIME since he was 15, and if there was anything that I ever needed, please reach out to him.
But then also, you know, I recently had to go to a printer and print something, and the printer asked, like, "How did you find me? And I'm so honored to be printing for, for TIME and for you."
I was recently in a car, and the, the driver said he was so honored to be driving me because he grew up in Nepal, and he would go to the embassy to get copies so that he could learn how to, you know, speak English by reading TIME.
I mean, I get these stories every day, and I've never had the opportunity to work for a brand that has touched so many people in so many different ways.
And so we need to harness that, that history and that legacy, but make it relevant and put...
and, and pull it forward so that not only can we, you know, be the best version of TIME today, but also, you know, make sure that we are always realigning our business, our priorities to meet, like, the realities of where we are, where our, our audiences are, and then make sure that we are resilient for the long term.
Okay, so let's look-- I-I-- The weaknesses part, I, I know you're not [chuckles] gonna... This is, this is a fraught question, [laughs] right? Maybe we skip over it.
If you'll give any, like, I mean, 'cause everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Like, and I, and I think to me, I'll just, like, throw it out there. Like, right?
Like, so historically, as, like, a news weekly, like, you need to-- Like, obviously TIME has stopped being that a long time ago.
Like, I always, like, think of the competitive set, at least from maybe until, like, in the nineteen eighties, my childhood.
But, like, TIME and Newsweek, and you guys have, you know, r- interesting assets that you're doing different things with, right? But that sort of...
I would think that that, like, if you were doing a SWOT, like, you know, being still thought of as a magazine is a strength but also a little bit of a weakness, particularly a, a news magazine.
Because, like, w-what I was relying on TIME for when I was growing up, I have a TIME story, too.
I would sit at the, the ki- at the kitchen table as a precocious, maybe semi-precocious young person and, and read Strobe Talbot, I remember.
He was a, a columnist, and I was learning about the world through TIME, and I waited once a week to find out about the world. [chuckles] That doesn't happen anymore. So what, what would you say are, are, are those?
What would be the in the W category? Yeah. Well- I know this is fraught. This is like asking someone in a college- No, this, this-... entrances them their greatest weakness. They always say, like, "I work too hard."
Look, this is a great, this is a great question.
And, you know, I've, I've talked about our strengths in, in really doubling down on, on impact journalism and getting exclusives, and we've gotten a lot just the, since the start of this year.
Weaknesses, I would say when I got to TIME, there was a lot of experimentation going on, and there was a lot of areas of opportunity that the team had made some bets on. Mm-hmm.
And I had to assess, again, the-- We need to be commercially viable.
We need to be a sustainable, healthy business, and I know you wanna hear some of the financials and, and the journey that we're on, and I needed to assess, like, what we were gonna sort of exit, you know, pause, maintain, and grow.
Yeah. And we had made some interesting bets that had a moment that weren't gonna be a, a roadmap that we were gonna continue on, and we had made some bets- That's the Web3 stuff...
that wereThat were, that were really successful Oh, yeah... and were gonna be part of our opportunity to, to grow as a, as a company, both on the editorial side and the commercial side.
So yeah, Web3, some of the NFT stuff. We made an acquisition in a, in a SaaS no-code company. But also we had TIME Studios, which has been- Mm-hmm... you know, we just won our sixth Emmy, you know, recently.
So that's been a huge success and an extension of not just our, our storytelling and our IP, but also we're doing work with brands now in new, again, new formats. What I would say our weakness was, was really two things.
Number one, sometimes the experimentation had meant neglect of the core. Yeah.
And I knew day one that w- at the end of the day, our product is our journalism that drives an audience that we can then figure out how to monetize. It's very, it's very linear. And we had neglected our core foundation.
So it's like a home that didn't have the great core foundation, but had some, some exciting things happening in terms of a renovation.
I needed to strengthen the core of our business, and that was what I needed to do day one, and we've done that very successfully, and I can give you some of the financials around that. It's our core media business.
Part of that was pivoting to P-to-B2B, right? Yeah. So strengthening, pivoting to recalibrate and move into real growth areas for us. Yeah, let me just jump in- Exiting the, exiting the ones that didn't work.
And then I do wanna talk about the sorta the digital transformation- Mm-hmm...
that I would say was a weakness for us, but where we are today is very much something that will, uh, it mitigate any risk of where we're headed in this potential Google Zero environment.
Yeah. So let's get to that 'cause we can get into the threats, but I wanna do the opportunities. It's more fun. You flip back and forth, good, bad, whatever.
Because you mentioned the B2B, and that's really sort of what I was getting at 'cause what you're saying is you wanted to reinvest in the journalism. But let's be real, like, you couldn't really...
But at the same time, you had to, like, build a sustainable business.
I mean, from our previous conversations, I get the idea that, that I don't know Marc Benioff and Lynda Benioff, but they don't wanna lose a lot of money.
Usually, you don't get a lot of money by liking losing money, so they don't wanna lose money, right? And so you have to build a sustainable business. And the...
When you talk about doubling down on the journalism, if you're doubling down on general interest news journalism, it's tough to square those two, those two things, right?
And so what I'm sort of interested in is this B2B, and to me that's like finding these elite, I would call them elite audiences, you call them influential audiences, whatever, you know, that monetize at a far different rate and a far different way than grabbing a bunch of traffic off of whether it was Google, whether it was Facebook.
Time, I can remember, went through a phase where it was, it was churning out a lot of, like, social media bait, right? And it was building these kind of audiences. We've seen that the tide went out on that, right?
Obviously. So talk to me about the opportunity that you saw with B2B and what that means to you.
Well, number one, I looked at our digital business, and I had to make the decision to either go back and try to catch up or just run a different playbook- Mm... and just go forward.
And that was sort of the start of what I call Time 3.0, and I've spoken about this publicly and written about it, and I developed the idea even before I started on day zero, day one.
And, and really, Time under as an, as an independent individual single brand owned by, as you mentioned, our co-chairs and co-owners, Marc and Lynne Benioff, hadn't been as successful in the digital transformation as other of our competitors, and I would say widely defined.
And so our digital business was small, and we had the paywall,
and we were not in going to be able to compete in the, like, scale game, which I would also say the, the low caloric, l-lo-lower value audiences commoditized information presented to audiences that we would monetize in that capacity.
And I knew that we didn't have the time nor the investment, that we weren't at two years ago or almost three years ago now, going to be able to catch up. Mm-hmm. So I said, "We gotta run a different playbook." Right?
And I, a- and I'm not gonna say I had all the answers then, that now we're seeing a different playbook and a different ecosystem, and I think why we're even in a more competitive advantage and an enviable advantage than ever before, is I pivoted to where I thought we could win, which was in the B2B space.
And what I mean by that is going direct. Going direct.
Going direct to our customers, high value, high touch, bespoke opportunities around our brand, around our business, around our capital J journalism, around the communities that we're investing and building in, around this whole ecosystem, and it's not just events and/or live journalism, but it's those...
having those conversations and having the opt-in.
So I immediately started spending a ton of my time sitting down with CEOs, with chief communications officers, with chief marketing officers, with chief-Of staffs of these individuals as well and we started working together and doing business together and it was very much a relationship building opportunity to monetize what we had been doing great, but now even better all along which is what was the output of our, our newsroom with very focused areas.
So health AI climate and around sort of our biggest temples and our biggest moments like our Super Bowl around Time one hundred. Not diluting that, but again, creating those high touch, high, high opportunities.
And so in a way, when you look at sort of the traditional core media and strengthening that, I said we gotta ru- we gotta, we gotta be direct.
And part of being direct was also not being reliant on other platforms, which we're less so than I think some of the larger, more scaled digital businesses.
So when you look at our overall revenues, Brian, only fifteen percent of Time's revenues are reliant on that webpage, on that digital webpage that is a complete correlation to traffic.
Okay, so what was that like when you joined? I guess we could get into that because I think that's like interesting in that, you know, look, you can make money off these brands, right?
And the way you make money off them is, is different than putting ads on webpages, you know? And, and it requires... Like, I've been trying to get this-- like, it requires going from like wholesale to retail.
Like, you have to have direct relationships with your customers, whether your customers are the audience, you know, and you've moved away from that model, and I think that's probably right for this brand.
We can talk about that. But, you know, you have to have direct relationships with your, with, with your biggest advertisers.
It doesn't mean that programmatic is not still important, but I've just seen a lot of publishers where literally their business is just they're wholesaling content to Google, and then they're wholesaling like the, the ads are, are being monetized by programmatic, and that is a challenged business.
I mean, we've seen obviously Business Insider cut like twenty-one percent and a lot of that just ye-yesterday, and a lot of that comes back to frankly just not, not pivoting that business quick enough away from what was working at a particular point in time.
It's not to say it's easy, 'cause you always have to operate the old business [chuckles] while you're building the new business.
But it seems like, you know, you're building up the, the brand of content with Red Border, Red Border Studios, right? And the franchises are key. I mean, you obviously knew this quite well from Forbes, right?
Like, and I think of Forbes as a real, like, leader in building these franchises and scaling them, making, making money in a lot of different ways off them.
Like, talk to me about the, the role that the franchises have played. Yeah. I, I mean, to go back to your question and the conversation around B2B, you know, I'm gonna-- I'm heading up on three years at Time.
So we started this three years ago. Yeah. We s- again, less reliant on the middle ecosystem, less reliant on the platforms.
When you look at the runway that we've had in building this, and it relates to building some of our new tentpoles, but mostly growing existing successful ones, and those are communities, and you mentioned the word franchises.
I look at it a little bit differently. Mm. When you look at our success with our, our B2B approach, and that is twofold. You said, you know, having a relationship with your customers, right?
Which we do, and I spoke about that. Mm. Very direct, very high level, ongoing.
Number two, with our audiences, and I'll, and I'll get to that in, in a minute because we really respect and value our audiences, and we need to meet them where they are.
And, and that's what we've done successfully over a hundred years. When you look at where we are to date, our B2B business is twenty-five percent up year over year in the first half.
Number two, our pacing is thirty-seven percent ahead versus last year, so we're off to a very strong start.
And if you think about tariffs and a new administration and a lot of the complexity and the, the market gyrations, it's-- we're in a very strong, enviable position as a business.
So this is-- this strategy and this pivot- Mm-hmm... is paying off. Again, we just didn't ha- we weren't in the scale game, and I just said, "Where are we gonna win, and where are we gonna double down on our growth?"
We did. We have a big and successful print business. I mentioned, like, being on the cover is an entry point. It is a very valuable- Oh, yeah... piece of real estate. Hey, Trump's not up there- And-...
ringing the bell with you without that cover [laughs]. Oh, and he's- I, I also don't know Donald Trump- He's seen many of-... but I'm fairly certain on that one. Yeah. Yeah.
He's framed many of those covers in the most important places, as you can imagine.
But we did need to go through that sort of recalibration of our print business, which is still healthy and strong for us, both on the advertising and subscription side.
We needed to invest more in digital, but I would say off platform. So you mentioned Red Border Studios. We're building a really strong and healthy social business, as well as events or live journalism.
But I look at that as an entry point into our ability to really grow on the B2B side with integrated high value, you know, bespoke programs that we put together for, like, the biggest global blue chip brands, best in class, you know, programs that we are working with all year long in certain franchises or, or tentpoles.
I would say for us, as I mentioned, we've really doubled down on health-So we have always done health. You know, we, we have the in-- this is very intentional.
We have the permission to continue to expand on something we've done for a hundred years.
You know, we have some of the most important health journalists in the country, and I just announced, announced Time Longevity, and the response has been amazing.
So we're working with companies like Lilly and Pfizer and Merck on the commercial side. Mm. And, and we got the, we got the Lilly story exclusive.
So, you know, because of our deep reporting, because we understand the science behind these new drugs and, and what, and what a game changer they are in the entire societal landscape.
So, so I think that's really important to mention. Mm. We have expanded in AI, so we did launch the AI one hundred.
We've got some of the most incredible, important journalists also working in crypto and, and blockchain and, and AI. So a hundred of the most important influential people in AI today.
We, we show up really big at Dreamforce. No surprise there. Largest AI conference in the world. One theme, you know, several days. So we're gonna continue to do that. We've expanded in climate.
Justin Worland is one of the leading climate journalists in, in the world.
And climate conversation, depending on what part of the world you're in, is evolving and changing, and we are focused on, again, the ideas, the impact, sustainability for profitability.
And we just launched philanthropy, and I'm really excited about the reception that we have, and I think when you look at all those things, what Time does differently, and the magic is it is broad, and we have a larger canvas.
So when we, when we tell these stories through people, 'cause we tell these stories through people, it's, it's not just focused on CEOs, or Fortune does that very well, big companies or entrepreneurs.
Forbes does that very well. It's their-- in their DNA. We focus on the entire wide spectrum.
So whether it's activists, athletes, icons, CEOs, celebrities, researchers, scientists, like it-it's just a very wide range.
And so when we look at philanthropy and what we had just launched and who was in our room, we had people from all around the world.
And yes, we had Ken Griffin, but we also had David Beckham, and we had Christy Turlington, and we had, you know, just people that are doing incredible things, but very different. Mm-hmm.
And we're not just counting money and evaluating, you know, who's number one or who's one hundred. It's the impact that they're having, and it's really about the future of what giving looks like. Yeah.
So yes, franchises are very important, and they're very important to who we highlight. They're, they're very important on the editorial side as well as how we're able to, to monetize our business. Yeah.
But, 'cause that's what I think of when, when people talk about... when they talk about events, right? Events are like the [chuckles] now, like, everyone wants to talk about events.
I mean, in the BI thing, they, they said, you know, now, now they're turning to events, which I found kind of weird because they hated events, like, for years.
They literally tried to get Digiday to operate, like, their flagship event, and it's 'cause they had no interest in it.
So in their DNA, they can't stand events, so now they're gonna be into events, and a lot of people are getting into events.
But to me, like, for a lot of brands, the real opportunity in events, that's why it's kinda weird to talk about, is really around franchises.
You know, I, I don't know what exactly we call them, but, like, something like, you know, the Time one hundred or the Person of the Year, like, events are a incredibly important part of that, and you can, like, you can take it out and say events revenue is, is up to thirty percent or something.
But, like, in reality, like, it's just a really important part often of, like, a larger franchise opportunity that you can stitch together for one of your, your big advertisers in a way that you can't get this on an ad exchange.
You know? It's, like, unique. Yeah. And look, I, I know many are trying to sort of follow the successful playbook that, that we've been running at Time for now almost three years. Yeah. It's, it's...
And we've improved our margins, but it-- you, you can't just say one day you're gonna show up, you know, and do events. And I'll give you an example of how we've expanded in our events.
And yes, we look at that exactly like you do, Brian. It's an entry point. It's building a community. It's around our capital journalism, capital J journalism, our live journalism.
And when we launched philanthropy, we had, you know, o-- you know, nearly two hundred billion in the room and over the one hundred most important influential i-- that are making an impact in philanthropy, we had, like, nearly fifty of the one hundred from around the world come and join us the Thursday leading into Memorial Day weekend.
When we did Person of the Year, we rang the bell with President Trump. He had never rung the bell before. Seventy-eight New York titan hadn't done that before. Interesting.
So when we looked at not just Person of the Year, but we extended it into a year in Time, at our event, we named Lisa Su the CEO of the Year, CEO of AMD, one of the m-most incredible leaders in AI.
We named Caitlin Clark Athlete of the Year, and we named Elton John Icon of the Year.
Lisa gave an onstage interview, Caitlin Clark did as well at our event, and Elton John performed for us that evening, even though he has admitted that he's nearlyBlind and retired. And so...
And we don't pay f- our talent.
So if you can replicate that, great, but the magic of that room of the community that's in that room and of the customers that we have that wanna participate and opt in, and I hate using the word sponsor, but be part of that, that is so special and so unique to have a CEO, an athlete, and Elton John.
And I can say that because we're gonna do over 30 events globally, and I could say that and drop those names like that for each and every single event that we do at Time.
So talk to me w- how the, the revenue portfolio has changed. You can be as, as [laughs] as precise as you'd like.
You know, if you'd like to, you know, give me the dashboard, I, I'll put it behind the, the paywall for pro members, be great. But, like, if, if it's even just percentage-wise and in how that has shifted.
I don't know how, how do you sort of divide up the, the revenue pie? How do you even look at it? Do you look at it like print, digital, events, branded content? Like, how do you divide it up? We do. We look at...
I think it's important to talk about our growth area in B2B, which is really our core media. So when I started at Time, print was 48%. And again, if you look at these as sort of visually pie charts, we're now at 25%.
So we're sort of- I hope that's from the pie growing [laughs]... mitigating the loss from our [laughs]... legacy business. There's two ways you can accomplish that.
[laughs] But ev- but, but we had six covers- I gotcha... of Time 100, and every single person on the cover came to our event. Yeah. Ed Sheeran performed three songs. Well, that's the thing. It, it does a different job.
Like, I mean, almost like, like you want the print to almost- Demi Moore came... break even- And, and spoke... but it's not gonna be- And Serena Williams came and spoke.
Like, again, I, I can't think of another media company- Yeah, it's leverage... is ha- is able to, to, to do that and to cover- Yeah... that, that range.
As I said, I don't think Trump would have ever rung the, the bell [laughs] if it wasn't for that red border and the cover. I mean, 'cause it needs something. He has a Time story.
I know he has a Time story because I- And he's taken shots at you guys. He, he said you guys still in business or something. You, you, you made him mad- Of course... or something. [laughs] Of course. Of course.
And it's... That's not new for us either. We've been doing this hard journalism stuff for over 100 years. But so, so, so really managing the decline of our legacy business, which I would, I would call print.
Digital, we've made some increases in our digital business. We were at, you know, 37%, now we're at around 41%.
And then events, which we've, you know, talked about, when I started, we were at around 14% of our overall revenue pie, and now we're at 33%.
But again, it's this whole ecosystem and this whole sort of 360 that if eve- events aren't in and of themselves, but they drive so much- Well, they're leverage-... of our business because like-... right?
Like, I mean you have to like... It...
You're not out there selling, I don't think so, like, you know, the, the sort of, like, keycard, you know, sponsorship or the, the Wi-Fi or you put in the brand's name [laughs] like sort of thing.
But, like, you're, you're, you're using the scarcity which is gone from media, right? But it still exists in, in w- it, with events, good and bad, like, because they're, you know, notoriously hard to scale.
But there is scarcity with events. I mean, I always say, like, with trade shows, you know, they, they, like, line up after trade shows, the sponsors to, like, renew their contracts.
Like, that doesn't happen in most [laughs] media, I don't think. Yeah. This sort of line of, like, customers, like, waiting to sign.
So, you know, events have a different dynamic that you can drive scarcity, but I think it, it behooves, you know, publishers and media companies to use them as leverage to have far broader programs than, than sell, quote, unquote, "event sponsorships."
Yeah, and it's again just another form factor that then we create content from. So our, our covers, our communities, it's all based on our franchises. There's no one and dones.
And then we're able to capture, as I said, video, put that on social. We've got nearly 60 million following us across the social net. So we reach a broader audience. We wanna meet audiences where they are.
We've been very mindful of that for our entire 100 years. We respect our audience, we revere our audience, and we've gotta show up and give them the experiences that they, that they demand, or else it's game over. Right.
So- So- So let's- So that gives you a little bit of, like, the, the inside view of, of, of our business. And then, you know, we are excited about the work that we're doing in documentaries and docuseries.
We just have a number one show on Netflix now, The Fall of Favre, Brett Favre. So, you know, we're, we're doing that work as well, and we're doing more of it, as you mentioned, with Red Border Studios with brands. Okay.
So are you profitable? We have made a significant impact- So, no. [laughs]... on our business. And we, we've had some very big milestones.
I, I will say first, and I've said this publicly, externally, and internally, like, media companies, and I've done this work my entire career, they... For, for very high-profile owners. Mm-hmm. Right?
Think about where I've worked. Bloomberg. [laughs] Yeah. Forbes, Dow Jones, now Murdoch, used to be Bancroft. Like- Some opinionated folks... these, these, these businesses need to be healthy and commercially viable.
Yeah.
Period.We are a business, we are not charity, no matter who our owners are, and this is the only work that I've done as a P&L leader, as a revenue side leader my entire career mission, purpose to support trusted journalism that's balanced and fair, high integrity.
I think that's the backbone of democracy and is, and is critical. So I'm very proud that we've had a couple of milestones where we're able to be completely self-funded.
We hit two q- consecutive quarters in a row recently of being self-funded, and I have, a-along with my team, have slashed the cash needs with an over eighty five percent improvement since I joined.
So we are, we are well on our way.
This has been a balance of both doubling down on the areas of growth and opportunity, mitigating and exiting the areas that were costs but weren't gonna be short-term or longer-term- Yeah...
opportunities for revenue monetization for us.
And then a lot of the harder decisions that we've had to make as a, as a business in terms of cost adjustment and cost management, and, and one of them included moving out of an office that was way too expensive and way too big- Oh, the Bryant Park one?
... for the company needs. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember. I vis- Yeah... I visited you and Mark there. So we've look- we've looked at everything- Yeah...
and I'm really proud of, of the work that we've done and, you know, we've, we've got some more work ahead of us, but we're in a very strong position.
So I wanna talk about the, the threats bit, but it-- I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually bring it into opportunities, 'cause most of the threats are, are these-- I mean, there's lots of threats in publishing, but really it's around AI and it's, it's, it's around search at the end of the day.
And I think there's two sides to the AI coin that I wanna talk to you about. But let's start on the threat side 'cause there is a threat and opportunity there.
And the threat, the biggest one, is the fact that search is completely changing, and the patterns are there. I mean, yesterday BI talked about tren- traffic sens-sensitivity or something.
I mean, it was, it was a euphemism for the fact that they're getting far less people who are coming to their website because Google's under pressure, and Google's changing things, and people d- are just, "I don't care what Google says, they're never gonna click through to websites as much on those AI overviews," and that's a winner-take-all game anyway, and on and on and on.
I, I will not believe that Google says that it is just grows the market. It doesn't for publishers for the most part. What are you seeing on the, on the search front in particular?
Well, now I get to talk about what I'm gonna say is Time next. So we talked about Time now, which was your first question- Yeah... and we talked about sort of Time new. I wanna talk to you about Time next.
And I guess I'll start by saying like imagine a world where, you know, again, people have told me these incredible Time stories that, you know, Time technology enabled would be available in remote villages, in local languages, or would be completely personalized for people's usage.
And so my editor and I spent a lot of time on this, and this is again not new for us as a magazine company over a hundred years ago, which I have to say, the thesis was we're gonna start a magazine, and we're men- Yeah...
for busy men that don't have a lot of time. So imagine a, a, a-- you know, and my editor said, you know, "I, I, I'm such an SNL fan," and SNL just had a huge moment fifty years.
And imagine if you're like, "I've got fifty minutes, I'm gonna go on a run," you're a runner, right, Brian? Yeah.
And I just want like all the archives from SNL, you know, from Time in a audio version for my fifty-minute run, and you hit play. Like imagine that.
And so, yeah, that's some of the things that AI can do for us if we use it proactively. So number one, now I'm gonna give you my sort of where we're at on AI. Yeah.
We're, we're-- we wanna play offense not defense, and we've decided, and I've talked about this, we weren't gonna litigate, we weren't gonna do nothing, so we're-- we've been negotiating, okay?
That's like, that was like phase one- Mm-hmm... chapter one.
Chapter two is how can we make sure that we are not passive, that we are being very proactive and we have a seat at the table, and we're not learning about this stuff on your po-- by listening to your podcast that we were- Okay.
Well, I hope you'll still listen... in, in the game. I'm gonna listen, but I wanna be part of it- I, I get it... and I don't wanna be- You can do both. You can do both. It's fine... learning about it after the fact.
And I'll tell you something now, when we were in Chicago together, ChatGPT had just launched, like day one. Oh, God. And- Did we, did we even talk about it? [chuckles] Shit... I'm, I'm, I'm telling you, I think we did.
Oh, good.
And I, and I get an introduction to Sam Altman, and I stepped out of that conference to get on a call with him to start what I didn't even know then was like a negotiation about a partnership, a licensing agreement with OpenAI, and those were like very, very early days.
And it, you know, it took us a while to get there, but I think when you think about where I just went, like imagine a world of, you know, personalization, imagine a world of any language- Yeah...
any, you know, our content could be available globally to- Well, I think the question is-... the widest audience in the format that they wanna get to... I think, I think that's, that's inevitable.
I think the question ends up being- So, so-... are you gonna provide it or is Sam Altman going to provide it? Well, let me get to that.
Let's, let's make sure that we are being proactive, playing offense not defense- Mm-hmm... like I said.
We also, part of that is protecting our journalism.So you just mentioned that, like we need to protect our human journalism, and I gave you some great examples that AI could pr- potentially enhance but not replace.
We need to be part of the distribution channels. Media has never owned distribution, ever, at least as far as I can think of. Mm-hmm. So we've always been reliant on distribution, and how do we figure that out now?
Like we figured it out since we started as a, as a magazine. Google zero is less of an issue for us because, as I said, only fifteen percent of our ability to monetize. If that goes...
If, if that fifteen percent of our business is fifty percent reliant on Google, and that goes down somewhere- Yeah... between twenty to forty percent, what is that? Like three to four percent? Not a big...
Not, not something that I can't make up somewhere else. So what have we done, and what are we doing? It's we're still in the early stages. We are experimenting. We are leaning in significantly with AI.
I think a great example of that was when we launched Time AI with Person of the Year.
We knew who [chuckles] Person of the Year was gonna be, so we knew that the stakes were high, and the optics were there, and we needed to get this right.
We actually, before we launched that MVP, that product, we actually sent out twelve RFPs to different companies. Mm-hmm. Some were in the sort of native AI hyper scaling company space.
Some were companies that, you know, are in the, the, the search and social business- Mm-hmm... that are our partners, and in some cases are, are challengers. And the...
And then the other bucket was some of the, the larger kind of consulting companies that are leading a lot of the transformation in AI or helping companies make that, that transformation.
Some never responded to our RFP, never heard back. Some responded with lots of work that we didn't have time for, nor did we have budget for or resource for.
And we wound up going from twelve to, like two to three, bringing in all the key stakeholders across our company, including editorial and technology, legal- Mm-hmm... finance, and we wound up working with Scale.
So we launched our first product with them around Person of the Year. We were able to have a multimodal experience. You could listen to the content. You could chat, ask questions.
We made sure that we had guardrails for safety, so there was no hallucinations. And we had translation, and we're on our new next phase of our second launch, which I wanted to share with you and announce today.
Again, working in partnership with Scale. We think that they're a perfect partner for us.
They understand technology, but they also understand the high integrity in protecting our journalism, and protecting our brand and our reputation.
We didn't really talk about reputation, but trust is our number one core value- Yeah... and we need to always maintain that, so we wanna be cautious and careful, but also adopt and embrace AI.
And so, you know, Alexander Wang is an AI 100 Time community. He's a Time 100 Next CEO, young CEO, fourteen billion dollar valuation company.
And we're gonna do a soft rollout, which is going to be sort of the next phase of what we're doing, and it's gonna be site-wide.
So we're, we're starting with our daily brief, which is one of our more successful, in terms of audience and engagement, newsletters.
And we are taking four articles that are generated by our newsroom, curated by our editors, where you can then go on our site, go on the newsletter, and using gen AI, turn that into a podcast.
We're gonna have two versions of the podcast. One you could set to five minutes or less, so the shorter version, or the longer version, which will be ten minutes or less. Okay.
So again, a great way to story tell in a new format. The rollout will then- Is... I'm sorry. Is it, is it like AI voices, or is it- Yeah. Yeah. We selected two A- AI voices. Do both have British accents or just one, or?
Well, no. No. Oh, you're American-brand. Got it Henry... You'll love this. Henry and Lucy. [chuckles] Okay. Henry, Luce. Okay, gotcha. You know?
Again, we are, we are experimenting a-around, and I would say innovating around our journalism and celebrating our, our heritage. And so we're really, we're really excited about, about this.
I, I'm not a h- I'm more of a text person, so I'm excited about the full release. So we're gonna do the soft release with the AI podcast.
We're launching that next week, and I'm most excited about the full release, which is gonna be a little bit later on this summer- Mm-hmm... which will be site-wide. We are redesigning and relaunching our homepage.
We worked with Code and Theory to re-platform time.com. We're on some legacy tech. They're a Stagwell agency. They're amazing.
So between Scale and Code and Theory, we're really excited to have the, this opportunity now to have what we're calling sort of an AI toolbar, which will be visible and easily interactive across the entire site's ecosystem.
The full rollout, you'll be able to listen to the content. You'll be able to have a summary version of the content. You'll be able to speak and chat and ask questions, so it'll be interactive- Mm-hmm...
and have that chat experience. You'll be able to generate a very per- even more personalized podcast of the things that you wanna listen to and how long you wanna listen to them for. And then translation.
So we had rolled out translation with seven languages.
We found that the interactivity was able to communicate with twenty-four other languages, so we're really excited to, to bring that opportunity to all of our-Of our readers. Hmm.
What are, what are your KPIs for when, when this completely rolls out? I mean, because I think the open question still... This sounds amazing, right?
But I think the open question still to me is, are people gonna visit websites in order to have these AI experiences?
Because the-- And I don't know, and maybe it's a mix, like, whether, whether these AI chat experiences are centralizing or decentralizing.
Because, you know, when people-- The behavioral changes with, with using these and not, like, clicking and clicking links on Google and then hitting a back button and finding yourself on some SEO farm site, you know, are very different, and they're also...
They're very attractive, I think, from a consumer standpoint of, "I'm just gonna go to one place and get, and get what I need there." And you guys are cutting deals. You cut a deal with, with OpenAI, right?
And I think it seems like, you know, a lot of, a lot of people wanna have one foot in both camps. But I, I'm just wondering, how are you gonna judge whether this is actually working? Wow. That's a great question.
I think it's early days, and this really expands across all of the stakeholders- Mm-hmm... you know, at, at Time. The way that we're looking at AI in terms of KPIs and success, if that's what you look at a KPI- Mm-hmm...
for sort of what's the performance, the outcome, the expected outcome, and what does success look like, we're looking at it in really three different buckets.
So I would say the first is our own infrastructure and, like, as I mentioned earlier, like, protecting our journalism. So how do we make sure that we protect our impact journalism, but our hundred years of archives?
And so we were-- we've done, like, fif- at least 15 deals public, more to come, where we're making sure that we're either first or we're, or we're signed on to see who's scraping, see the usage, verify our content and our IP, and there's a lot of new providers that are able to do that.
We're working with Fox Verify, we're working with Toldit, we're working with ScalePost. So that's one, right? Mm-hmm.
Number two is, again, I was, like, first on the phone with Sam Altman, and, you know, we've decided that we wanted to figure out licensing and partnerships.
So yes, we're doing something with Amazon Alexa that was just announced with The New York Times. We're doing a deal with them, OpenAI, Perplexity, Perata, and, you know, yeah, we want to have a seat at the table.
We were able to leverage all of our OpenAI credits with, which is also part of it, with Scale, and we feel like we, we are using some of these companies as, like, incubators for us to develop product and to, again, meet audiences where they are.
OpenAI is be- while it's still negligible and small, it's definitely growing in terms of referrals for us. So we think that's really important, especially in a, in a Google Zero world.
And then the last thing, the last bucket for us is sort of our own internal operational enterprise improvements and efficiencies.
And so whether it's working with GCAI for our legal team or working with a company called Glean, where it's basically has all kinds of, you know, all of our content and everything about Time from a technology standpoint, a business standpoint, a contract.
You know, anything you need to know, you can literally ask Glean, which will give you the inside, and then it'll bring you to the outside and get you really smart really quickly. So those are the three areas. Yeah.
Long-winded answer to a short question. I think it's hard to- Yeah... it's hard to say.
We've made an investment in this area, so it's something that we're funding in terms of our partnership, and I just think that doing nothing is- Right... and, and trying to catch up is, is go- is a terrible idea.
Yeah, and I think that's the, the battle, right?
It's like offense versus defense and, and it's usually gonna be some mix of the two, and there's some people who just say, "Hey, we're just gonna play full defense, try to lock everything down."
I'm actually reminded of David Carr. The late David Carr was an amazing media columnist for The New York Times.
He had, he had written almost over a decade ago about Facebook and that era, and it-- to me it applies to AI, and this was his lead.
"For publishers, Facebook is a bit like that big u- big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it's hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you."
[chuckles] And I think there's some similarities with, with the AI companies because it's hard to tell sometimes. And I understand, you know, like, deals are...
You know, I had Neil Vogel on this podcast recently, and, you know, he was, he was saying something similar about having a seat at the table, but doing it with, you know, eyes wide open because obviously there, there is a history which David Carr was getting at back in 2014 with what happened with a lot of these tech companies.
But I don't know.
To me, I'm not sure what the, the alternative is, and still open question to me, like, whether or not different and AI experience is, is going to be enough in an agentic AI world to get people to come to websites, and that's why I think it's, it's an important KPI to [chuckles] have is, have, have not, like...
Have, have a small enough percentage of your revenue determined by, by people who are arriving on your website at the end of the day, as weird as that sounds- Yeah... for publishers. Arriving and having good experiences.
And we'll say, I hope- It's really, really important to us... I hope that's, I hope that is, is, is
enough or is, is a good offer for people to, you know, fire up their browsers and, and put, and put time.com in, and that's why I'm interested to, to see how these experiments turn out. That's all I have.
I hope to see you in Cannes in a couple of weeks. I know that sounds, like, snooty, but whatever. Yeah, I'm definitely not gonna complain about- [chuckles]...
having to go to Cannes this year, like you said in your- Yeah... in your newsletter- You can't complain. It's gauche... this week. No. It's gauche to complain. No.
But a lot of business gets done, and, and we're doing some great programs for, for some great customers there, and it is great to, to see everyone, although we know it is long days. It's grueling.
Everyone- Late nights... who's listening to this, you should know- Lots of heat... it is grueling. It is hot there. You're, you're constantly dehydrated. It's, it's, it's, it's real... It's a struggle.
The struggle is real. Well, I'll definitely see you there. Okay. Thanks again for having me. Thanks again. It's always good to see you. Thanks, Jess. Okay. Take care. [outro music]