[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. We are wrapping up our recent series on product development at publishers.
This was sponsored by WordPress VIP which works with publishers to have enterprise-level versions of the ubiquitous WordPress content management system.
I have spent a fair bit of my professional life inside a WordPress CMS, and a CMS is still the locus of digital publishing businesses.
In this spotlight episode, I speak with WordPress VIP CTO Brian Alvey about the current state of product at publishers.
The Rebooting and WordPress VIP recently completed a research report that found something of a back-to-basics trend at publishers, where flashy projects have given way to those that serve critical business needs.
And as Brian says in our conversation, he's not here to build a website, but to build a business.
And throughout the sessions we did at the Media Product Forum, several of which you've, you've heard in previous episodes on this podcast, I heard how that starts with an audience focus.
And the website's role is morphing to a degree, but it's still the critical way to understand an audience.
You can publish to social platforms all day long, but you are not gonna get much in the way of audience data back, and the industry has shifted decisively to value direct relationships above all else.
We also get into the role AI is playing today in publishing operations and how it will be used for efficiency gains, no doubt.
And a lot of the initial opportunities for AI aren't in the sexiest areas, but they're also incredibly critical to making these businesses work. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Nearly twenty-five years ago, I submitted my very first story in journalism in a CMS that Brian Alvey built, so it was fun for us to reconnect. Hope you enjoy the conversation.
[upbeat music] Brian, thanks for joining me on the podcast. I'm excited to see you again. Yeah, it's been a little while.
Actually, we saw each other last week, but for those listening, Brian and I worked together on my first job in journalism at the late, great Silicon Alley Reporter. All right. The New York.
[laughs] We don't have to do the, the down memory lane thing, but we worked at a literal sweatshop. Oh, right. Uh, right. Yeah, yeah, that was good. That was over on... by the New Yorker Hotel.
Yeah, it was in the Garment District- Right. -when it was still the Garment District before it was- It was a Garment District building. I had a startup near there, like, afterwards, where there was a...
Basic-basically it was a tiny little bunch of us in the back doing web stuff, and the rest of the floor was a furrier. And there was this- Yeah.
-like mob kinda guy who'd ride the elevators down with us at night, and he's like, "You know I have a gun and a million dollars of merchandise up there." [laughs] And we're like, "Okay, we have a million- Yeah.
-dollars worth of web IP, which means nothing, you know." Anyway. We- It was the ta... I feel like it was the tail end of the New York, New York. There was still, like...
You could still get run over by, like, racks of fur coats in the Garment District.
Well, well, from our windows you could see into other, you know, whatever, not offices, but, like, things in that building, the building we were in. Yeah. And there were people and sewing machines.
There was- Light industry. Well, I- Light... Definitely people getting on that elevator were going to, like, work, work, not laptop work. [laughs] Anyway, and here we are podcasting. Here we are.
So last week we did this event together called The Media Product Forum. I thought it was great. I hope you guys did too. We had great feedback.
Yeah, thank you for hosting at your offices, which will soon be no longer, the old Tumblr office. The, the nice thing about it too is, I, I mean, I don't know if it was the, the people on stage, the... you. The...
There was something that was a draw because usually we set up a line, a bunch of chairs, you know, I don't know, a hundred chairs, and that's it, and people watch the little stage. They wrapped around the corner.
When I got off stage- Nice. -and I was trying to hear who was on next, like, I couldn't see them, so I couldn't pick them out in the crowd later because it was a, it was a hit. Yeah.
I think it was me, but that's, that's... [laughs] We're gonna have to go into the data. But, you know, in conjunction with that, we did this report which was basically the state of product.
And so we, we surveyed a lot of product executives at leading publishers to understand where they see the product function at, at, at their organizations. You know, it...
And these things always, you know, yield some kinda mixed reviews, but I think one of the things that really I took away was this idea of a back to basics in that, you know, the product organization, it's less about coming up with, you know, some really crazy, never, never been done before, future-facing, you know, tech implementation, but more getting, getting the basics in place.
But what do you think are...
Obviously we're in a time of tremendous change, and I would love to get your impact on, you know, the essential question of what should publisher product organizations even be focused on at this time when there's a lot of unknowns out there in the market?
Yeah. So, I mean, the, the answer's gonna be kinda simple, I don't know if it's boring, but back to basics, right?
So in that same spot where we had the event maybe a year ago, a little over a year ago, we had another event, which is my second favorite event now. Yours is my first. I mean, it, it really was. The people were great.
I, I, I haven't written so many notes about who I'd met, who I had conversations with, and I didn't even reach all the people. It was, it was very good. But the one we had last year, we had...
This is before Box was a customer, and they were there. Like, old friends of mine were there. It was a really good event. And the person we had on stage was the, I think, CTO of Fortune, and he gave... He... We were t...
We were telling a story about him going, "How did you get there? Why do you work with VIP when you're so good at DevOps, and, like, you can kind of run circles around anybody? Why do you hand that off to us," right?
Like, literally, "Why do you even, why do you even pay us?" It was a cool question to ask on stage, ask a big customer, "Why do you even use us?" Right? But his story that...
My favorite part of the story and the part that stuck with me for the year since then that I've talked about a lot is, you know, he said, "When they brought me in," and this is kinda like a bold, I don't know, like, brassy kinda thing to say.
He's like, "Dude, they brought me in and they're like, 'So tell us about the website you're gonna build.'" And he goes, "I'm not here to build a website. I'm here to build a business.
You tell me what your business is, and I'll tell you what kinda website I'm gonna build." And I was like, "Oh," and everybody in the audience was like, [gasps] "Whoa," you know, like, "Oh, my gosh, he gave a..."
But seriously, like, what's the point of a website? So I've actually been spending time thinking about that, sort of deconstructing, why do you have a website? You know, why do you have a CMS? Mm-hmm. And the goal...
You know, the reason you have a CMS is so non-technical people can update your website fast.And safely and not break things, right?
And, and changing your website grows your business but only if you tie what your website does to your business So I look at a, a handful of different verticals that, that WordPress should support at the enterprise level, that WordPress VIP should support, and one of them is media and there are very specific conversion goals, very specific kinds of businesses that media companies run, right?
There's ad supported, there's subscriptions, there's, there's a, a certain set of things that they do, and all I care about is the point of it is the content's the product. We don't need to reinvent how articles show up.
I mean, you can if you give me something interesting, but really if you're not connecting that to how you make money, why have a website? Right.
And that's, that came through in, in the research really, is that w- when I sort of summarize it as back to basics, it's back to the basics the, of the business, right? I mean, these are businesses.
It's not about winning awards for the, the next Snowfall. Remember the Snowfall year? I do. It was like 12 years ago. Yeah.
And that was, you know, to me, I mean, that's how I used that in the read of the report because it was indicative of how a lot of publishing organizations were viewing, like, how they presented their content and they wanted to reinvent.
And then I, I think there's, there's room for that. You know, you're just mentioning Vox. You know? There was this period of time when there was a bunch of publishers who were masquerading in my view, I...
You don't have to say it, I'll say it, as technology companies for, for reasons, you know, optics reasons at the end of the day. And, and some of them believed it, right?
They believed that they could create a tremendous amount of competitive differentiation on the basis of their CMS. I mean, they gave them a lot of fancy names. Right.
And, and Daniel Halik, who was in the audience, was like, "Were you trolling me by mentioning like three, like, CMSs [laughs] that I was a part of?" Yeah. I like...
He, he was talking to me before I went on stage and like I'm writing notes and trying to, like, get stuff going. But I- What was with that era? That's over, right? I mean, like, Vox is, is, is moving. I, I don't...
Like, I don't hear about it as much, and I think part of that is just the investment levels needed are just, are not practical. So you said that some of the people who do this, that it came from a good place.
You know, they, they, they weren't doing it to- I'm trying to be charitable, Brian... No, no. But no, but you're right.
I think a first crop of people did it, and then the next crop of people were like, "Oh, we have to tell our investors we're a product company. We have a-" Yeah.
"We get a SaaS multiple instead of a media multiple or a services multiple," or something like that, right? So instead of 1X or 6X, we want the 32X that, like, an Airtable would get, right? That we want the, the- Yeah...
the SaaS multiples. We're a product company. But I don't think they were. I think the first ones though, and if you just take Vox, I mean, I, I worked with Benkoff. He bought two of my companies.
One of them was a, a publishing, you know, a bunch, a bunch of blogs, and one of them was a, a platform.
And when he did, uh, Vox, so The Verge and Polygon and SB Nation, all those things, I, I said, "Oh, I've got a CMS you can use." And he said, "No, no, no, no, no. I don't need you. I don't need your CrowdFusion CMS.
You know, I don't need you because I learned from you and Jason, build your brands and your CMS hand in hand. I've got my own Brian..." L- the quote from him was, like, "I've got my own Brian Albie.
His name is Trey, Trey Rundlett." Like- Yeah... "I don't need you." And I'm like, "Ah, well that's really sad," 'cause I like Benkoff and he's, he's good at what he does and I'd love to work with him again.
And I thought oh, well that's, that's, that stinks that I'm, I'm the reason that he's not gonna use my new company. He learned this from me. Like, that's weird. But he did. He took our playbook, added a few zeros to it.
He is really good at what he does, collected a bunch of really, like, legendary brands.
And so 18 years ago, building a CMS yourself, tightly coupling a platform with the, the brands you have and the, the types of things you wanna do, you know, for audiences, your audience experiences, made perfect sense.
18 years later, okay, it doesn't. And in between, I do think you got a lot of people who just said, "Oh, we're gonna build... We're gonna be a media company and a product company."
And here's, here's a, to your point before, it's hard to be a media company. It's really hard to be one company and do it well. Why try to be two, right?
And I think the reason everybody's going back to basics right now is because, one, media's always been hard, right? Newspapers have been dying since before we were born, right? It al- it's always like that.
And then two, the economy went bad over the last few years, and so yeah, it's like, it's all... It's gonna be a back to basics moment. Oh, wait, we can't waste.
We have to focus on maybe being profitable and, and yes, you get back to basics. Yeah. So I think those things hand in hand. No, that's totally right.
So this, maybe this is a little too much into the semantics, but that's, you know, I'm a writer, so that's, that's how I go.
But explain to me the difference between being a technology company and being a product company.
'Cause to me, you know, product is, it's so amorphous, and particularly when you get into a, a media environment, like you, you had said earlier, the content is the heart of the product.
It's not just how you present the product and how you distribute the product. In my mind, publishers have to be product companies, but they should not be technology companies. Or is that- Sure.
I, I would not split it like that- Okay... and I was wondering where, where you were going with the question, but I understand it now. [laughs] Hopefully I landed it. I don't know.
[laughs] No, but they should be product minded. Right. They are creating a product for people to consume. They should have product talent. If you are The New York Times, you have, you know, a thousand product people.
If you are- Right... somebody else, you have 10, and there's a s- there's a little range in between, or one, and there's a range in between.
But no, no, they shouldn't be a technology company, and I think that one of the differences is, which I think was probably a flaw in all the companies that were gonna rent out their own CMS, was that they were gonna sell that technology to other people, but they're gonna sell that technology to their competitors.
So I think, yes, be product minded, actually be great at product. I, you know, again, they have large product teams are doing good things.
I think you build a product for people, but I think that the, it only scales with authors, so it's more of a services kind of business, right? If I want to double my output, I have to double my editorial team.
It's not something that scales like Dropbox does, where just millions of people can sign up and nothing changes. You know what I mean? So there's, there's kind of that.
So I think being a technology company means you're gonna rent that technology out to someone else, and I think there's that weird flaw of, you know, Coke thinking that they're gonna sell stuff to Pepsi.And like why would Pepsi give money to Coke right, to kill them?
I mean, the act-- this actually did happen with Coke and Pepsi Matt: Yeah.
Pepsi went to a bunch of restaurants, changed them all to Pepsi and then those, the, the people, the, the Coke people went, went to all the other restaurants and said, "Why would you buy Pepsi for your restaurant?
Because Pepsi owns the restaurant that's trying to put you out of business." Right. So these weird...
Like, you gotta draw a line and say, I'm either the provider or the consumer, and I, I just don't think it's-- I don't think that if I had a CMS and I was a publisher that all my competitors would want to buy that from me.
Right.
I feel like that was a period of time and it was a period of time when there were a lot of venture capital funded publishers, not a lot, but there was-- they were sucking a lot of oxygen out of the air and they- Mm...
had to justify some of the valuations that they were getting. And the only way you could justify it is with SaaS like multiples- Right... because it's very, very infrequently that this happens.
I always go back to Aquantive was the only on the agency side, they were able to pull off an amazing trick.
They start- they had an agency business in Avenue A and they built an ad server 'cause they needed the ad server and they spun it out as Atlas, and they did license it to their competitors, but- Mm...
and they were able to get bought by Microsoft. And depending on how you look at it, it was one of the worst tech acquisitions ever or if you were the seller, it was one of the best.
If you're an agency, that's, that's heroic. Like- Yeah. No. The six billion dollar acquisition, you don't get that for, for an agency business.
I have friends that, friends that run agencies and they come to me and they go, "I can't scale. I, I can't double my revenue without doubling my team. And I'm constantly having to face this.
If I have a hundred people and only eighty of them are working, I'm losing money," right? It's like how do we balance this stuff? And I go, "That's services business. That's, that's tough.
That's a really hard thing to do." But they all want to take something they've done and productize it because that's the dream, is I can then go and get my thirty-two X multiple on my...
You know, if you sell a services business, you get point eight to one point two times revenue. Like there- Yeah... there you go. And if you sell a, you know, SaaS, eight X, thirty-two X.
So one of the things you told us in the report was that every-every-everybody has to be more scrappy, more tactical, and do more with less, and I could not agree more.
How does that then translate into what you're seeing with your client base and how they approach product? I think they... I don't know.
I think they get a bit more sober about what they're gonna do themselves and what they're gonna outsource. So I see, so I see a couple of things going on in there.
One is there is that like the, you know, really, really, really smart guy from Fortune who is amazing at DevOps and running servers and doing all this like sysadmin stuff.
He, he goes, "You know, I'd rather WordPress VIP does all that," even though he probably thinks he's better than us, and he might be, right? He's a really smart guy. He's very talented.
But he goes, "If I outsource that to you and I can trust you to do that piece, I can do cooler things. I can do fun stuff. You know, I can work on AI. I can work on, you know, whatever other thing I wanna do."
And then, so that, that's one piece of it. And then, I don't know, just, just you can't do everything. So, so it, it, it's... The other thing too is vendor consolidation.
So you take that two years we just had, this terrible economy, and there isn't a business out there that pays for eight services who isn't looking to just drop that to three.
And, and if, if a person isn't, their boss is telling them, like, "Cut this down to three." And so as, as a vendor, we look at this all the time. We look at this side of it.
You know, with Salesforce is our biggest investor, right? And Automattic and w- WordPress VIP, we deal with enterprise.
So we look at their trends and we look at our trends and we get reports from them and it's really, really nice being related to them.
But across the board, everybody, top to bottom, everybody sees this, which is, "Oh, we have eight vendors. We need to cut that down to three."
The three they're gonna keep are the three that do the most of those eight things.
So the more that you can do that maybe some other vendor does, the more I can say, "Actually, we got a feature that does that" or, "We've got a product that does that," or, "Don't worry because there's a way we can handle that," that's huge.
So you wanna be that. You wanna be on the list of three when they go through the eight and they get rid of five. Okay. So you see a winnowing.
You always want sort of best of breed, and that's why I always say like a publisher's tech stack gets, even of any moderate size, gets pretty extensive. Mm. Like just to run the business gets incredibly ex- e- extensive.
And you're seeing that consolidation. I mean, you guys bought, bought Parsley a while ago.
And in any industry there's a lot of, of features that aren't necessarily products, and then products become part of platforms, and that always happens. There's always point solutions, right? It does. It does.
I mean, and over time, none of... I mean, I, I, I was at the compu- one of our teams had a meetup in San Francisco, so we went to the Computer History Museum on the corner of Mountain View where Google starts.
Oh, I've been there. I've, I've, I've gone to an event there. Okay. Well, so, so I hadn't been, and I've lived in the Bay Area for nine years, right? Came from New York, lived out there. I'm not gonna be there forever.
We got one more kid in high school, right? Then we're, then we're free to go wherever. So I was very happy I got to go to this place, but so, so first it's amazing, right?
Here's the stuff they did with the, you know, the Enigma machine and Turing and all this stuff in the war and then tubes that became transistors, that became, you know, wireless.
And so seeing that is amazing, but the other thing too is groundbreaking stuff in the '80s that was like the biggest thing and changed the world- Mm... in the '90s, people, other people built on it and it's forgotten.
Yeah. In the 2000s and the 2010s.
So anything we're doing, the fact that you can make a, an app, an app on your phone to hail a car and pay with a credit card, like there's so many things, payment processing, GPS, app store.
There's so many things that went into that, so much history, that that year, that decade, that was groundbreaking, you know, multi-billion dollars worth of value, it's irrelevant now.
Very few, very little of that survives. So I forget what your question was, but the, the visit to that place was very sobering.
You know, we're building on the shoulders of giants, and we feel like giants now, and will we be remembered? Are we g- are we doing something remarkable or not? Yeah. It's an interesting question.
So when you're thinking about what WordPress is going to be doing, you know, through, you ask me three years or five years down the line, h-how does the CMS's job change?
I mean, it's, it's the central location to publish content that reaches an audience, right? And it, historically, that's been very tied up in the article page, right? Mm. The, the webpage.
And there's a lot of threats to the webpage. If you think about the threats overall to the open web, I mean, is the webpage have a central role in five years' time?Oh, so it, it has to.
Well, well it does for the business of- It does have to. [laughs] No, no, it-- no, no, you're right.
No, it, it doesn't if you wanna run a business and not have a website and not be here in five years don't have a website. Like go, go to town. No, if you wanna be around in five years, I think so. Don't you...
Like, why would you... Ha- has nobody ever learned that building up... And, and no offense to any of these, you know, what I call bastard gatekeepers that like take your audience away from you.
[laughs] How could the, how could they be, how could they possibly take offense to that, Brian? [laughs] Exactly. In a lo- in a loving way.
But you, you think of like Facebook convinced everybody, like, "Don't put McDonald's dot com in your commercials, put Facebook dot com slash McDonald's." I know. What a scam. It's... Right.
No, but, no, but let's get 10 million people into a stadium, you know, and then lock the door, and then charge McDonald's to get access to them when McDonald's paid to build that, that audience, right?
Now, again, I get what they're doing. No, that's a great, you know, great business, whatever, no offense. You know, I love, love Instagram, love all their stuff, but I love React is what I really love.
But if you, if you do that, like s- at some point you go, "Oh, I don't have a direct relationship with my audience. Where can I have a direct relationship with my audience?" There are only two places.
One is the web, the other is I have your email address. Those are the two, and even then there are still middlemen.
If I want to send you an email, Gmail and Google are kind of in control of what you see and don't see a little bit.
It should be 100% delivery, but though there's the promotions folder, and there's this, and there's that, and whatever, right? And some things don't render, you can't... Whatever. Okay, great.
And then you look at the web and you go, "I could eliminate all the middlemen between me and my customers and have this very direct natural relationship," oh, except 90% of that is in Google's browser.
You know what I mean? Like at some, at some point they're the ones that are always going to be in between you and your audience.
It's a funny thing, but why would you want three other hops in between you and your audience, right? Why would you... I get you can build an audience on TikTok.
I get that you can build an audience on Twitter or, you know, Instagram or whatever, and people do that. I think the, the, what is it? Gallery Media, the Vaynerchuk company has like a bunch of- Yeah...
basically Instagram magazines. It's like Instagram dot com slash cars, Instagram dot com slash wine.
They're beautiful, but you are building like on somebody else's planet, and that planet may go away, and you don't own the audience. Yeah.
You don't have a direct relationship with the audience, and at some point they'll be like, "Sorry, there's just too much stuff to show. If you want it to be seen, you gotta pay." Right. And I get that.
I get the mechanics of that, the math. There's three million things. If I, if I open the Facebook app right now, there are like three m- it used to be 30,000, used to be 3,000.
There are probably three million things it could potentially show me based on every TV show I've liked, every friend I have, all the st- all the photos my friend CK posted. You know, all this stuff.
There's tons of d- I have to show a little bit, so a brand wants to get in there, you have to pay. I understand the math. Totally, totally with it. But that's not a direct relationship with anybody. Yeah.
Direct relationship with people is I have, I have a website. You come to my website, I have your email address, I send you email. Those are the two. Yeah.
But increasingly, I mean, you could say like with, with web pages, Google is the one that distributes most of the, a majority of the traffic to those pages.
You know, look, some people are able to make the homepage work and get direct traffic, but a lot of this industry has, has been built and is sustained on indirect traffic, and- Mm-hmm...
you know, that's going through its own changes. So I would, I would assume, you know, long term the having that, that home is, is going to be probably more important maybe than less important. Yes.
Which I think was what I, which I think was how I was trying to answer your question. Yeah. Is that it's never been... So five years from now, what does a website mean?
It means, it means you weren't, you weren't one of the fools that said, "I'll build my audience on some platform that doesn't exist anymore." Yeah. Or that took it away from me, you know? Yeah.
And, and this, this showed up in, in the research. We asked people what their, to rank their top priorities for product development, and as far as the top priority goes, the website won out by far 55%.
AI was a distant second. So we gotta talk about AI, right? Yeah. So how do- Iverson. Oh, and [laughs] yeah, we could talk about Iverson. [laughs] Oh. I would love that.
So before we do that, I was showing an app once to the Sacramento Kings, and they were telling me how technologically savvy they are. Of all the NBA teams, they're the best. Like they adopted VR and all these things.
Yeah. And in the middle of all this, I just got, I got kinda sick of the guys.
Like they were just like so excited about what they're doing, 'cause they're like kind of a last place team even in their own state, and they're, they're so high on, on how technically savvy they are.
They have a billionaire tech, you know, Silicon Valley fa- owner guy, and I just said, I s- I th- I said, "You know, you, the 76ers were the first team to use AI to reach the finals."
[laughs] And like the whole room went just like- Yeah... "Did you just make an, an Allen Iverson joke about AI?" It's good. Yes, I did. That was actually when we were at, at Silicon Alley Reporter. I remember it.
It was 2001. So anyway, great summer. Unfortunately, it was like right when the dot com industry was- Oh, yeah. It was all gonna end... about to collapse and, and ended up leading to the end of Silicon Alley Reporter.
But we won't dwell on that. So we gotta talk about AI and how... But, you know, how publishers can use this to move forward their, their business goals.
I mean, this was something I kept asking like on stage, how are you using it in practical terms? Not, let's not talk about theoretical, and let's leave gen AI aside and, and who knows what's gonna happen there.
But how are you applying AI to drive forward business goals? 'Cause it would seem like AI is perfectly positioned in a more with less era to allow publishers to be more efficient. This came up in the research.
We asked people what's the biggest impact do they think that AI is gonna have on, on their business? And the number one answer was efficiency by far. It was 35%. Personalization was a distant number two.
But then we also asked like, "How prepared are you for the changes that, that AI will bring?" And the overwhelming answer was no, they're not prepared.
H- how should, how should publishers be thinking about applying AI, AI in a very practical manner to do more with less?
The simple answer is if you have a good handle on what you're doing, right, that back to basics thing, the... What, what, what, in product, what you call jobs to be done, right? Mm-hmm.
There's a loop that when you get up every day or when you do certain things, right, there's a, a loop. You know, pre-publish, publish, whatever.
You know, there, there, there's a cycle everybody's on, and if you know what that is, then you can use AI to do that loop faster.And so sometimes if it's like an eight-step process AI is not gonna do the eight steps especially the AI we're talking about.
So when people talk about AI today, they're talking about OpenAI and ChatGPT and LLMs, and so language models.
So really it's artificial creativity it's artificial language, it's artificial-- it's, it's a writing-based thing. It's a creativity, creative-based thing.
So I, I kind of joke that you know, everybody thought AI was gonna take all the, like, the entry-level jobs, that AI was gonna drive cars and stock warehouses and stuff, and it does, but ChatGPT doesn't drive cars and doesn't stock warehouses.
So they're two different things, right? Yeah.
The AI for the first set of tasks is completely different than this, this new AI, and this new AI is just, it's artificial creativity because it writes things and it convinces people and it, and then hallucinates, et cetera.
So if you look at that, n-that can't do everything. People are like, "Oh, we'll take it, and we'll train it on this thing." It, it depends on the job, so depending on the job to be done.
So when I look at features, products, things that we're re- that we're releasing, I go, "What are all the steps? Okay, step one, we have to get this data. Step two, we have to do this with it.
Step three, we have to send it back to this. What are all those steps?" Of those eight steps, maybe two or three should be AI. Maybe the rest are algorithms, right?
It's not all AI, and there's things that AI is, is good for, and so when you talk to somebody about an AI product, you go, "Well, where, where... What's the AI doing?"
Usually, it's like, "Oh, well, when you type into the search box, it's doing the en-- the language parsing to figure out what you're talking about. It's translating that into SQL queries and stuff like that."
I go, "Okay, great." Mm. That's like a thin layer on top of something. If you take your documentation site and you throw a chatbot on top of it, that's an AI documentation site.
The AI part is only translating the question into, you know, finding the right information, and all the rest is not AI infused or AI powered or whatever.
So anyway, I think, I think the, the simple answer is if you know your jobs to be done- Mm-hmm...
you understand what the, what the pieces, what the steps in those things are, what the eight-step recipe is from here to, you know, increasing your conversions, some parts of that can absolutely be handled by modern, generative, ChatGPT-style LLM- Yeah...
AI. Yeah. I'm often talking to people with technology products that I've only used in passing or not at all. I have spent a lot of time in CMSs. I, I have.
[chuckles] Over two decades, I've spent a lot of my life inside of CMSs and, and there are a lot of steps to, to accomplish the job. It's not just the place you, you dump content. There's a lot that needs to be done.
How are you applying AI to cut those ten steps down to, like, four? And I, I felt this as an editor, like, I always saw, like, when reporters...
Anytime I would ask a reporter where their story was, they were always, quote, unquote, "just dropping it in the CMS" or, [chuckles] like, looking for art or something or adding links, and it was always, like, the last thing and, and they were like marathon runners in the last, [chuckles] like, mile, and they were fatigued.
So how are you using it to, to, to speed up and make more efficient just the basic publishing process? So that is-- that, that's actually product manager research first, right?
Research driven, so that is back to those jobs to be done. I think of, you know, when I, when I got to VIP, we kind of had two products.
One was the platform for launching sites, and the other was Parsley, which they'd acquired, so an analytics platform. It's a, an amazing real-time dashboard for newsrooms, right? Two very different things.
One is a platform, and one is like a, a real-time SaaS app in a, in a browser, right? Okay. We're, we're-- We've realized, well, w- not that we realized.
I think they made a, a conscious decision before I got here to say, like, "We're gonna leave WordPress alone. Whatever your, you know, whatever, Conde Nast, New York Times, New York Post, whatever the...
Rolling Stone, whatever your team builds for the people, that's what, that's what Brian Morrissey shows up to write, that's what he gets, whatever their developers did. We're not gonna have an opinion.
WordPress is WordPress." That's changed, so now we're saying actually VIP's WordPress should be radically different.
So now we have a different kind of set of product lines, and now in that CMS one, the role that we're looking at, you know, if, if you deploy code, that's your developer.
If you, if you make content, okay, you're an author. If you do these, uh, analytics and growth stuff, you're con-- you're-- you, you deal with conversions and funnels, right? So those are the three roles we look at.
So you're asking specifically about authors. If I'm making- Sure... content in a CMS, how do you help me do my job better? And the answer is all three of those people are on a loop.
You know, if you're a developer, you like, you know, build, test, you know, deploy, whatever. There's a whole loop, and then you do it again, right? Think about it, you know, pseudocode, you know, and you're on a loop.
Authors are too. The, the interesting thing is there's not one big author loop.
A lot of people look at it, and they think, oh, so content is, like, somebody ideates it, somebody drafts it, somebody puts photos in it, somebody edits it, they publish it, they promote it, they measure it, and then start again, come up with a new story, and that's the loop the content is on.
That's not the loop the people are on. That's l- not the jobs to be done. That's the, that's the life s- life and death cycle of content, and- Mm...
you know, five years from now, te- twenty years from now, you, like, you archive it. You put it out to pasture, right? Like, that, there's a-- that's the content journey, not the same.
At each one of those steps, the ideation phase, there's a person on a loop, like, pitching story ideas. They don't write them. They don't find photos for them. They don't edit them.
They're lit- their loop is look at what's going on in the world, come up with ideas, pitch them, get to a place, whittle it down, and then assign, and then wake up the next day and do that.
So you have probably at least a dozen major people whose jobs are on that conveyor belt that the content is going through to, like, do their little part over and over. Each of those people is on a tight loop.
So if you are the photo team, you don't care about the headline. You don't care about SEO tags. You care about your, "I've got a bunch of photos. I need to weed them down. I need to find the stories that match.
I need to commission stuff.
I need to get an illustration done," whatever that is, "and I'm gonna add the graphics and the photos to this piece of content," and then the content leaves, and a new piece of content comes in, and I add graphics to it, right?
So it's really actually looking at the human part, those human loops, not the content life cycle, the content journey, and looking at those people and saying, "How do you take... Okay, now, great.
Where's the person getting the photos from? What else do we need them to do? Oh, we need them to tag them at the end. Great. Here are great places where AI can help."
Absolutely can look at a photo and give you tags.And have a human, you know, go, no, go, you know, accept or reject them, right? Approve them or, or kick them out. Mm-hmm.
But save them the time of the five minutes of looking at the photo and thinking of the right words or whatever. Like, great, we can do that. How do we find the pieces?
So, so there are parts in each of the individual's loops that you can automate. Sometimes it's an algorithm, sometimes it's AI. Yeah. Yeah. Whether it's an algorithm or AI is sort of... I mean, from i-i... whatever.
It's however- That's your sphere... however it gets done. I could really care. But yeah, that's true. But I, I, I think about like, you know, the basic things.
So if, if people are gonna be more self-reliant in some ways with tra- it-- they need to, to build loyalty, right? They need to build depth, for the most part, depth of a relationship with the people there.
I mean, that means that they can't just be someone comes and eighty-seven percent bounce like- Yeah... with, you know, one page.
And so you got, you know, things like backlinking, things like, you know, having, having related...
All these, all of these aspects to me should become both more effective and more efficient by using, whether it's AI or algorithmic technology. Yeah. No, it absolutely should.
Uh, I mean, there's no, there's nothing more important than serving that person the right experience, the right content, and there's a lot that goes into it.
And, and actually, I think people probably overestimate the amount of things that AI are going to help them automate of what they do today, and I think they underestimate how many things they're just not doing because it's so hard that AI is going to let them do.
So you just talked about like SEO hygiene, good backlinks, things like that, right? You mentioned that. I think people think the AI is gonna write my title, write my story, fi- Mm-hmm...
make a photo, find the photo, tag it, and do all of that. I think it will do some of that. I think that's the one where they overestimate AI is gonna help. I can... I mean, we, we... I...
There was one company that eliminated six hundred journalists a year ago because they were so high on the promise of AI- Mm-hmm...
and what it was gonna do for their business, and they were gonna get out ahead of the curve. There's a... I don't know, you know, Google, six hundred journalists fired for AI.
But I think they overestimate that I don't need journalists and I-- and that part's gonna be-become AI driven. And I think they underestimate all the stuff that they're not doing.
So the examples I use are like you did about the, the SEO links, right? So the story I'm writing, I c- you know, I'd love to go back and link this to other stuff.
Or even better, take old stuff and link to this new thing.
But it is so hard to go find the documents, find the articles, the stories, and find the top, the top ones that are getting traffic, find the ones that have links to, to stories on this topic that match the topic.
So if I'm writing about, you know, some, some political rally, maybe something happens at a political rally. So I'm writing about that now. Where are all the other times that's happened, right?
Where I can go and, and send links, send traffic to the new thing. But then when you go in, there's like already five recirculation links to internal content. So how do you find the least performing one?
Oh, that's another...
That's gonna take me another thirty minutes to like go through traffic charts and figure out which link to get rid of, so I don't have links with, you know, documents with hundreds of links in them, or excuse me, articles with hundreds of links in them.
So that whole process, you... I can, I can describe and in three hours of work for a story. Yeah. That's not being done for every story as you publish. Right. It can't be done. But now it can. So I think you...
I think people overestimate how much work they're gonna save of things they do today, then they underestimate how many things that they o-are going to be able to do that they were never b- able to do before that are also just best, best practice type things.
These aren't- Yeah... rocket science. I think it's because we're obsessed with the Jetsons and, and, and getting our own robots. We keep like anthropomorphizing these technologies.
And, and in reality, you know, yes, we get the, we get the robots, but they're in like warehouses, and we don't- Yeah. You know what I mean? They're in, they're in factories, in gigafactories.
You know my favorite thing about those robots that are in the warehouses is, one, you don't need lights, right? So they can be in there in the dark.
And two, they can move at like ridiculous speeds, but they slow them down to not scare people.
So when people are in the f- in, in the place, in the Amazon warehouse, it's like picking up a box, moving it over here and doing whatever. When they're not there, these things are whizzing around doing stuff.
Oh, really? Yeah. That's it. Yeah, and the lights are out. It's like a completely dif- there's a different world. Robots don't need that. They will sl- Yeah. They will like, "Oh, no, they're...
Look, it's building a car." And it's like, [mimicking robot] and it's just doing- I like the idea of like robots after dark. It's like, okay- Oh, right... now we c- now we can be our full robot selves. Exactly.
[laughs] Take off, take off the... Yeah, exactly. Take off the sheepskin thing. Yeah. Yeah, no. I, I, I, I think when we talk about more with less, and we talk about, you know, that back to basics, this is exactly it.
Being able to do these basics in a much more effective and efficient way- Mm-hmm... that's where it's at, versus replacing what humans are probably best positioned to doing. And a lot of the...
Trying to replace the person who's creating the content, in my view, is and maybe I'm biased about this, is probably not the best place to start.
There's a lot of in-between layers, and so that is probably where you want to apply this, this technology first and foremost. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I mean, there's, there's a reason people show up for certain TV shows or show up for certain news shows or show up for certain content, and it's usually there's a person, a personality. There's somebody you love.
I mean, all of talk radio, all of, you know, every political channel that's just filled with these personalities, you're there for that. You're, you know, you can't really replace that with AI. Yeah. And I think the...
You know, one of the other questions that I wanted to ask you about was how you maintain your distinctiveness in an AI era.
I don't know if the AI slop, quote-unquote, problem on Facebook is, is overdone or underdone because I'm not spending a ton of time on, on Facebook, and I don't have good data that shows. Help you.
But let's just assume there's a, a healthy amount of AI-created slop out there. The cost of creating content is, is basically zero at this point. You can churn out a ton of AI-generated content.
I think, you know, Google is c- has a major, major challenge on its hands with sorting through that, but I've got faith in them.So how do you end up maintaining your distinctiveness in a world where AI is going to be used to create so much synthetic content?
Yeah. To me, like being human is like one way, but what would, like how would you encourage publishers to think about it? There's, there's two things there. One is, it's, it's the responsibility of the platform, right?
To weed out this junk. Me as a person contributing to the platform, I'll go somewhere else if you can't weed it out. So there's an incentive for the platform to weed it out. We'll talk about that in a second.
The other is, is just the age-old question, goal, whatever, of being remarkable. I mean, what makes one comedian, you know, sell out an arena when the rest don't?
Being remarkable, being somebody newsworthy, being somebody worth being talked about, being somebody that does something that resonates with people.
So, so I think if you're looking at just publishers, yeah, having a brand and a voice and content and, and experience for me as a reader that like helps me and makes me feel smarter and better and helps me, you know.
Something I'd rather see than what somebody else does. So, so be remarkable, number one, right? That's how you'll stand out from a, a sea of junk. And then number two, it's on the platforms. And I mean, there's...
It's not just, you know, Google results are full of a lot of crazy algorithmic content. I mean, this happened on, on Spotify, right? They're just like, "Oh, you can just generate songs," and, and 'cause there is... Yeah.
So this actually goes back to something I, I don't know if I've been saying this- But to be fair, you don't need... Like I, an AI-generated white noise, I'm like fine with. I don't know if it's- No, it's not about that.
I would guess it might be fine. No, no, it's, it's not about...
Well, well, so if, if it takes away money from like another artist because the pool is split, it, it goes back to this thing which is like anything worth being gamed will be gamed, right? Well, yes.
There, there- Then I'm aligned on you 100%. [laughs] That's the thing.
That's what they're doing, which is, "Oh, look, there's a spot, there's a pool of money going to big artists and little artists, and I think that I can get in there." You know, it's like a Sopranos episode.
"I think we can go in there, crack some knees, go in and like make our, take our vig, take our cut, get a piece of that. I think 20% of that should maybe go to my, go to my family," right? You know, or to my crew.
That's crazy, but that's what they're doing. There's something worth being gamed. There's a lottery, there's a thing, there's whatever.
There's something somewhere, and I wanna get in there and get a piece of that for me. So that's what they're doing. That's, you know, on not on necessarily the white noise thing, you know, there are other goals.
Sometimes it's, oh, if you leave this playing overnight, we donate money to some, you know, charity, some relief fund or something. Like I get it.
There's a, that, that's maybe less crummy but still kind of scammy and weird and it's, it's a, it's a misuse of what the platform's there for, which is big and little artists put up their songs, people listen to them, and then we split the money between all the people.
Hmm. It's a- Do, do you have faith in the platforms being able to, to handle this, tell you? So on a platform by platform basis, I don't have faith in them. I have faith that ultimately if Spotify...
Let's say that was a problem on Spotify. I don't know that it is. But let's say that's a terrible thing and it's actually causing problems, or on Twitter or on whatever service you have.
I think that ultimately that, that the market will vote and move to a new platform, and yes, it will work itself out. So I think either they will figure it out and fix it, or people will say, "Oh, this stinks.
I'm going to SoundCloud," or, "I'm going to," you know, whatever new thing comes out. No, I think it works itself out. I'm an optimist. Yeah.
I think the thing that I get concerned about is particularly around Google and it not being incentivized by keeping the open web a healthy and resilient ecosystem.
You know, they're, they're keeping a lot more traffic to themselves. They've been doing this over the years with zero click searches, and they obviously have a lot of different economic interests now.
And, you know, it was always an uneasy bargain, but it was a bargain. Mm-hmm. And we saw Facebook just simply walk away from news altogether and in many cases publishing.
And for Google to do that would be really a, a bigger challenge. It is the nervous system of the open web, and I think that is, to me, the big, the, the, the scary thing.
Here's a, a different twist on that, which WordPress has been around twenty, twenty-one years now, right? You know, Matt Mullenweg's company, Automattic, is about twenty years old, and I'm now at that company.
I've been here two and a half years. But I did not spend my career doing WordPress. Like I joke that I'm the Ted Lasso of WordPress.
I just showed up and like don't ask me what the, what the pitch is or how, what offsides means. I don't know. You know, like I just got here.
But that's because I was doing CMSes for, you know, almost a decade before WordPress existed.
So I don't have this thing where like I'm, I'm here because I have a WordPress tattoo and I, I, you know, or believe in open source. I, I love working with giant, famous, high pa- high traffic websites, right?
Big brands, important brands. That's kinda my thing. When I look at Automattic though, Automattic and Google both fit that thing you were just talking about, which is they have a lot of power.
WordPress powers a half, half of the web, and it could power the other half, and they have a lot of responsibility, and Google has a lot of responsibility. They're your browser. They're your analytics for everybody.
They're all these different things. They're your search engine. They give you the traffic. They charge you for traffic. They take the traffic away. They control how people see webs...
Like, like literally if they wanted to, they could just shut you off in the browser, right? It's, it's, it's crazy how much- Yeah...
and, and, and all of our email that we sent to each other before this call was probably all through Google, right?
So they kinda own a lot of this stuff, and I would hope as an optimist that they really aren't going to be evil, that they're not going to decide that, oh, we're gonna put a nail in the coffin for all of publishing.
That's not cool. I know I, on the, on the other side, Automattic has... And again, I've learned a lot about what they do for open source since I got here 'cause it just wasn't, wasn't my thing.
Like build something amazing and give it away? I think that's weird, right? [laughs] But they're like, "No, no, build something great and give it away."
And what I've seen is because they do that, because they open sourced WordPress, there are other giant companies that make a lot of money off of WordPress, you know, the GoDaddys of the world and these other, you know, WP Engines and all these things.
There's all these other companies that are kind of a reason why you can sell a hundred-year WordPress plan 'cause it's probably not gonna go away.
If, if Automattic was greedy-And did what you're saying we're worried about Google doing. Yeah. And they said, "We're just gonna, like, pull it all in together and own it all and just absorb all of that."
I don't know how long WordPress would last. Right. For the last 10 years. Yeah. It's not gonna be on a three. Well, that- that's the ecosystem, right?
I, I mean, you need to build an ecosystem, and you need to have healthy parts of the ecosystem. And that's why I say- Okay...
if you look at the media ecosystem, the publishing part a- and particularly the news part of that is obviously the most challenged part of the- Mm-hmm... the ecosystem.
And I think there is, to me, hopefully, there is alignment in that if, if the publishing part, obviously it will never go away, but if it, if it goes into, like, you know, serious decline, it will have, just like any ecosystem, the overall ecosystem will be less healthy and less resilient w- with the- without that part being healthy to a degree, so.
Yeah. Well, so that goes back to what are... what is news and what are people... what are they buying it for?
And I constantly remind the younger people who work with me that, you know, the New York Post, their website isn't that old, like, we power their website, but the, the newspaper was like, was it Ale- Alexander Hamilton, 200 and- Yeah...
many years ago? I mean, that's old. So I would like to think that outside of maybe a London phone hacking scandal or something where a, an, a 100-year-old paper just vanishes in a week, right?
Outside of a few weird things like that, these things are gonna last. And when, you know, I, I remember when Snapchat, a friend of mine was running their, I think it's their Discover screen. Discover, yeah. Right.
And so it had all this stuff. All the things in there were like Sports Illustrated and New York Times, like, real, real publications.
Like, there's, there's a value to having that brand be what tells you the news, even if it's telling you it in six-second stories in video format, you know? Yeah. I don't think that that trusted brand part goes away.
Okay, so final thing is wh- what's one piece of advice you would give to, to those who are leading product organizations of publishers? Yeah.
It's, it's the stuff we discussed at the beginning of the call, which is zero in on the business, that thing that Jonathan Rivers, really smart guy from, uh, Fortune said, "I'm here to build a business, not a website."
So always business first, and then second, none of this works.
If you are building things that are not part of someone's job to be done, that loop that you are on all day long, that you repeat all day long, then, then what you're doing is a nice to have.
The features you're adding are cute. The features you are adding are not indispensable, and I think in a bad economy, you need to make yourself indispensable.
In a good economy, still a good idea to make yourself indispensable. Yeah. So that's the advice I would give. Words of wisdom. Thank you, Brian. Appreciate it. Thank you, Brian. [outro music]