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[on-hold music] If I'm blank, I think one of the frustrating things in media is there's a lot of time spent trying to fight the tide instead of seeing how do we get ahead of the [audio glitching] tide.

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Publishers needing to collaborate, and yet that's anathema because everyone is better than everybody else. Yeah. Right? And we're all trying to protect our own.

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Okay, but in so doing, where you've got like a prisoner's dilemma on some of the future of this.

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And so I do think the lack of innovation and, quite frankly, willingness to collaborate and solve some of these problems at scale is a huge barrier.

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And just time and time again, showing publishers being on the, whether you call it nostalgia or sort of the- Yeah... the way of the train, and they lose every time. Yeah, that is true.

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There is, there is a great track record for that.

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[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.

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This week, I'm joined by Corey Munchbach, the CEO of Blueconic.

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Blueconic was one of two presenting sponsors for the Rebooting's recent New Growth Agenda event, which gathered together 40 top publishing executives to discuss how the industry can move past the many external challenges it faces, whether that's declining search traffic or life after the cookie, in order to put in place a framework for sustainable, equitable, and resilient media ecosystem.

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Now, I'm not a believer in de-growth movements. I think you need growth or you're gonna resign yourself to ultimate extinction.

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But the kinds of growth that the industry had chased, big traffic numbers, for instance, is clearly changing. And Corey and I discussed how the weight of the publishing business is shifting from breadth to depth.

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That means depth of understanding of your audience first and foremost, or really the many different audience segments you have.

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It means not treating all of your audience the same, it means using first-party data to drive your business forward, yes, through subscriptions, but also through advertising and crafting products based on a full understanding of the nuances of the people who are visiting you.

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[on-hold music] And we've moved on from users, and it, it might be time to move on from audience as a monolith.

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Blueconic is a consumer data platform that works with publishers to put in place the foundations for this kind of growth by zeroing in on the needs of the people who are attached to these publishing brands and give them value.

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I really enjoyed this discussion with Corey. I really appreciate Blueconic for their support and partnership, and I hope you do too. My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. Now here's my conversation with Corey.

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[on-hold music] Corey, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So last week, New York City at the Tribeca Grill, some interesting arts on the walls.

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Apparently, Robert De Niro [chuckles] chooses the art himself. Wow. I can't verify that. [chuckles] Anyway, we, we had the New Growth Agenda. You were one of our partners. Thank you so much for that.

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And, you know, we broke into tables around topics and wanted to have very candid conversations under Chatham House Rules, so don't, don't mention anyone's names. We gotta keep- Lips are sealed. Yeah.

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[chuckles] But your, your table was... I was at a different table, but your table was, was talking about something that I hear about all the time, right?

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I mean, we're coming out of the traffic era, and publishers have to be audience-focused, okay? And that sounds, you know, that's like Save the Children. Sounds great.

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[chuckles] Who's, who's not, who's gonna argue against it, right?

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[chuckles] What were, what were the sort of three takeaways that you ended up, you know, taking away from the conversations that you were having at that table? Yeah.

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Well, let's start with the one person who went a step further than the Save the Children and actually challenged the premise and said we need to stop calling it audience and start thinking about it as consumer, which was the probably the first person- Okay...

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in all of these years of doing this.

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And not to be splitting hairs on the semantics, but we had a really good discussion about that, and I think the orientation where you're thinking about not just the people, which is the shared premise of the audience piece of it, but also in support of a particular business model and revenue and driving growth and much more of a business outcomes lens on the conversation than simply kind of the, the media first one.

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And I think that was actually something that everyone at our table who was approaching this from a variety of different approaches to revenue, some multiple revenue streams, others not, really came in agreement around, was, yes, it's the audience, but we need to be thinking about them as consumers in a variety of ways that they may consume our products.

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And that, I think, is important to your point about not just thinking about traffic.

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That's a very non-audience, non-consumer lens, and that is a great way of starting to sort of far- start to make the distinction between what we're talking about here. So that was, I think, takeaway number one.

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That was a really good discussion. Another was about how much of this requires alignment from top to bottom and bottom back up.

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And so that's inclusive of editorial, but management, sales, that if there isn't real clarity on what the priorities are and what is taking priority over other things, not just a equal list, but really being able to sequence that out and having everybody understand what we're driving toward.

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This goes to the point of this is- Mm-hmm... this is a leadership question as much as [chuckles] anything else and having a strategy and knowing kind of what we're running at.

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So that was another big topic.That we spent a lot of time discussing and then I think the third one was just about how hard this is.

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And because every company is a little bit different, a lot of their financial situations are different, therefore, their constraints vary. There isn't a one-size-fits-all to this.

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And again, sort of save the children level of insight there.

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[laughs] Like, of course, it's not, but I do think there is, you know, in the discussions that we have outside of the spaces like the one you've created here, where it's harder to get into the nuances and the differences, we end up spending a lot of time talking about the platitudes- Yeah...

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and not getting into where it's worked, where it hasn't, where we've made mistakes [laughs] where we haven't, what's different, so we can actually- Yeah... learn how to address some of this stuff more broadly.

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Well, let's, let's do that here. I- I love it... that's what I say. [laughs] Okay? So let's get into the details. Any specific, again, you can anonymize them, please, but any specific pain points?

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'Cause you said all that sounds great, and I don- I don't think many people would object to moving from calling them audiences or it's better than users, right?

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We went from users to audiences to, you know, talking about consumers. Maybe we'll even start to talk about people because a lot of...

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By the way, a lot of traffic and an increasing a- amount of traffic is gonna be, is, is non-human, right? Mm-hmm. There's a lot of bots out there, and there's gonna be even more bots out there.

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But let's talk about, like, where the pain points are, all right? Because this all sounds like it makes perfect sense. Okay?

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So what, what, what, what came up as far as, as the, the stumbling blocks to making this a reality? Yeah.

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One, I'll start with the most obvious, but probably the one that nobody wants to spend the most time talking about, is the budget piece of this.

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Transformation is expensive and takes a long time, and it is just resource heavy. And so a lot of the discussion was around how do you create the financial case for making some of these changes?

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And realistically, depending on your ownership structure and the health of the organization currently, those are very real realities that anyone listening to this who knows anything about media and publishing is very aware of.

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One discussion that we had, we've had folks at our table who are working for publishers who are 100 and something plus years old, others who are, you know, 100 quarters old.

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And so the difference between the folks who are getting a s- a start in this environment versus those that are on iteration teeth of who they are as a media company and moving through, really that profile and, again, the financial appetite and wherewithal that they have to make some of these changes over a period of time was just the honest reckoning.

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That was a good discussion of kind of laying the land there. So if you're already debt-ridden, taking on a ton more money to be able to make some of these changes is ch- ch- just not available to you.

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And so starting that conversation and right-sizing the ambition and the approach to what the financial health of the business is, was a really important discussion.

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I don't think that takes place in, in a lot of rooms necessarily in that way. So that was a big one. Another was around the kind of sources of power, let's call it the people aspect.

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But in an organization that is historically more run by editorial, uh, this move to consumer and thinking about revenue is a, is a different path than it is in an organization that is potentially born more in that orientation of how do we think about this as a revenue-driving business.

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And again, if you've been around for 200 years, that looks a little bit different [laughs] in terms of where those centers of power reside in the organization.

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And so I- that crafting of who is making the shots, calling the shots on this, and where does that impact how we can move forward, talking about the organizational design around that was another big theme.

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And then the third part that makes it really difficult is the technology, which is some have lots of very old tech, a lot of homegrown things, just investments over the years that are perhaps not serving in the way that they need to.

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And, you know, we talked about the move away from traffic.

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It's a fundamentally different technology stack in a lot of ways than one that is more oriented around subscriptions and moving away from big reach stories to a much more high quality, maybe niche audience.

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And a lot of folks don't have the technology capability, both in the partners, but also in the skill sets to make that an easy or kind of quick transition for them.

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So those would be the three, the kind of financial health- Yeah... of the business, org structure, and then the technology capacity within the business. Yeah.

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It's funny 'cause I can remember having, you know, covered this and, and been in this industry for so long. It used to be that the... This is, like, sort of my shorthand for it. I'll try not.

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But it used to be that the, it was the CMS that people wanted to brag about, and a couple of people at your table were, were people that used to brag about their- [laughs]... fancy, custom CMS.

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And now I think it's, you could call it a CDP, you could call it... I mean, you guys are in the CDP space, like, and- Mm-hmm... I call it sometimes, like, a CRM.

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But, like, basically, where you house your core audience data, that, to me, is, is, that's where the, the weight is shifting, not, like, how you push the content out to the, quote, unquote, "audience", but how...

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But what you know about the audience, it, it... You have to start from that as the core. That just seems to make intuitive sense to me.

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[laughs] It makes intuitive sense, but I also think the CMS being the center of this historically aligns with a period of time where content was the king.

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And now that's also this shift away from maybe editorial needs to at least be on par with, not ahead of, the business side of things. And so I think in a lot of ways, that's a reflection of how this shift has manifested.

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It can't just be- Well, pe- wait, were people really, but, like, editorial is calling the shots? Where are these places? Don't, don't- I think they were... don't name them. I'm like, my God.

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Look, I come from the editorial side, and I'm like, "I wouldn't even do that." [laughs] I am sure this is one of those, you know, everyone has their religion on either side of it.

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But, yeah, I mean, we, they talked about-You know, part of the reluctance has been to adopt certain- Yeah... technologies or d- different approaches because of the risk perceived by editorial, right?

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And threatening the quality- Yeah... of the journalism and all those things, right?

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I, again, I think it's like a matter of perspective, but getting to the point of what is hard, those tensions are part of what makes this hard. Yeah.

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There isn't necessarily lockstep alignment right out of the gate for a lot of these organizations as they're working toward. Right.

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So you work with different types in different industries, companies in different industries. Are, are, is the publishing industry the most dysfunctional? [laughs] I wouldn't say that. [laughs] No.

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I mean, it has its place. Or is it everywhere? 'Cause sometimes I wonder, I'm like, "Is everywhere this crazy, or is it just here?" You know what I mean? I don't know.

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Like, I've sometimes used to feel this at companies I worked at, and I'm like- Here's what I think... "Is it crazy here, or is it everywhere?" [laughs] There... Every- everyone has this.

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I say this, right, that every, every organization thinks that they're a snowflake, but all snowflakes are made out of snow. So we all have our- [laughs]... our things that are similar and things that are different. Yeah.

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What I would say about media, what makes it different is up until now, the shifts that we're talking about away from content toward consumer are existential. I mean, your organization exists because of this.

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There's an existential threat that has been posed to media and publishing that I don't think is shared by really any other industry.

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And if you couple that with the fundamental kind of public good that much of media and publishing, at least a large chunk of it, is, is serving, you have a very unique dynamic at play there that doesn't exist in retail or CPG or finance or wherever else that we work with.

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And so I think that sense of there is, again, the, the existential threats that have been posed and the elevated role that these organizations play in a social context creates some pretty unique challenges that don't...

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They have echoes elsewhere, but do not resonate with the same in other industries, I would say. Yeah. And I think it's just there are different constituencies within the publishing organization that, that do...

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I mean, it's, it's been since I, I'd... since I can remember, they don't work well together. I mean, it used to be the church and state divide, and there's still elements of that.

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I guess the advantage of when your house is on fire, usually [laughs] those sort of things go, get, get put to the side. And this is a time when obviously there are a lot of pressures on this business. Mm-hmm.

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And change comes slowly and then all at once. And anyone who watched the OpenAI demo and then the, the Google announcement with generative AI coming into Search, this is gonna be a far different industry.

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I just had a coffee with a executive at a, at a very large media company, and one of the things he said to me that really st- stuck was, he was like, "The way we make money in five years is not g- I know it's not gonna be like how we make money now."

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And every single organization needs to sort of embrace that. And I, I personally, I get sometimes frustrated that there's a little bit of nostalgia in this industry. I don't know if it exists in many other industries.

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I mean, I get it, like, wanting to go back to the way it was, selling ads on pages and... But, but you can't watch the OpenAI, the, the GPT-4o translating into Italian in real time, and I set it at my table.

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It's hard, it's hard to see that and then say, "Yeah, people are gonna be, like, going to webpages, hitting back buttons, and, like..." It's just difficult.

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I don't know what it's, it, it, it's gonna be out there, but that is difficult to know. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I see a lot is publishers struggle with the loss of signal, okay?

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And they struggle with competing. You compete with everyone, right? And you've got these closed loop attribution systems that are... I don't know how publishers, like, tell, tell a story or be able to compete with them.

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How do, how do they end up competing with, you know, something like retail media when they can't prove that the, the, that their ads are working as well as they would like to think they are?

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No, I think there's a couple pieces to that.

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One is based on the findings coming out of the Google antitrust lawsuit that we saw even just last week, I think there's a lot of, let's call it fat, in every source of advertising attribution coming back.

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So I'm, I'm not willing to say that the retail media networks are just so far advanced further than what a publisher could be providing right now.

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But this goes back to that financial piece of being able to invest and what, what that has looked like. But I don't know that there's such an added level of sophistication there that that would've been out of reach.

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If I'm blank, I think one of the frustrating things in media, and this goes back to your point about the nostalgia, is there's a lot of time spent trying to fight the tide instead of seeing how do we get ahead of the fucking tide.

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Like, this is crazy that we're still having these...

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First it was Facebook and Google and letting the fox into the henhouse, and now it's, you know, everybody making big moves and figuring out how to navigate this to better and less effect.

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But I came up, I think at one of the tables or, or perhaps in the debrief around publishers needing to collaborate, and yet that's anathema because everyone is better than everybody else. Yeah. Right?

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And we're all trying to protect our own. Okay, but in so doing, where you've got, like, a prisoner's dilemma on some of the future of this.

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And so I do think the lack of innovation and, quite frankly, willingness to collaborate and solve some of these problems at scale is a huge barrier.

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And, and just time and time again, showing publishers being on the, whether you call it nostalgia or sort of the, the- Yeah... wavy train, and they lose every time. Yeah. That is true.

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There is, there's a great track record for that. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. There are antitrust issues with the, you know- Of course...

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colluding, colluding, but I think i- if you look at, you know, the existential threat of AI, there was, like, a brief glimmer-Where it was like, we're gonna band together. We're gonna not again, not again Mm-hmm.

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And then of course, they just peeled them off [laughs] one by one by one. Yeah. So obviously to me, one of the big stories of this, and you guys are in the middle of it, is, is the shift to you know core audiences.

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Like, how do you define a core audience? Because I think for a lot of publishers, right, that come down from traffic to, to not just audiences, but core audiences, I mean, that can be painful.

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Look, it's, it's just, you know, reality. Totally. I think quite frankly, there's an element of this for me that is almost excessively binary.

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One of the, like, that's sort of my observation, and we talked a little bit about this at the table, is it's not just a move away from traffic, it's these violent swings from we're gonna do subs, to we're gonna do advertising, to we're gonna do traffic.

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The best businesses have figured out how to diversify these against the right audiences, as you just described, and this is why I have, you know, whatever we wanna call it, but I'm bullish on what does that actually mean in practice?

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And I would say that while we all can clap each other on the back and say, "Yeah, yeah, of course I agree," but an audience-centric or consumer-centric approach is one that understands the value of different audiences, and maybe one strategy is to drive traffic among a certain subset of your audience.

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For others, it may be, don't worry about it if I only come back twice a week. I pay for my subscription. I'm super high value.

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But if you don't actually know those pa- those patterns of behavior and how to attribute revenue to them, which is an area of very deficient muscle in most media organizations, you end up, I think, actually missing in, in so far as swinging away from traffic to something else, you actually overshoot it because there may still be a very valid role for traffic, building up an asset that could turn into a media network, as an example.

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A- and so I think there's an ele- Yeah...

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all in, all out part of it is, to your point, is painful just to go from one to the other, but every time we go from one to the other, we sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah.

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And I think that's, that's a huge miss for- Mm... these especially larger scaled up media co's that could be doing a mix of these things more effectively. Yeah.

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And, and we saw that with, with, honestly with subscriptions, I think. You know, a lot of people got over their skis with how, when they're in, like, lifestyle, right?

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But the reality is i- in, in lifestyle, you're most likely not going to have subscriptions as the biggest part of your business. It's just, it's never been that way. It wasn't that way. It's not going to be that way now.

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Like, and I think a lot of times there was...

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And this is, you know, I always say this industry can sometimes be like a children's soccer game where, like, the ball's in one part of the field and, and there's just a clump of kids around it.

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And when the subscription ball was out there and The New York Times is building a big subscription business, uh, you know, all of a sudden everyone was gonna build, uh, these big subscription businesses, and, you know, that sometimes is not the case.

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And, and, and I think what's interesting and I think what you're getting at also is this idea of you don't have an audience, right? Mm-hmm.

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I mean, you have, you have segments of your audience, and you need to build products that, that serve those segments. That's exactly right. I mean, that's where we've seen such amazing...

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Like, our best customers, we'll keep them also under wraps so I don't blow up their strategies here, but they are public about talking about it themselves, let them toot their own horn, but, you know, the adding an events business in some cases, which has been extraordinarily profitable.

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Is that good for everybody? Of course it's not, but it might be for your audience.

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And really what that fundamentally comes down to, and this I think goes back to the comment at the table, it's not just understanding that the audience might have an appetite for that, but it's also knowing how to turn that audience into a consumer of it, i.e.

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monetizing it in a way that will actually make me pay for it.

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And the gap between those two things, a lot are very immature, and even the audience element that you just described, and then even if you have a great sense of that, there's still a lot of immaturity at turning that audience conceptually into a consumer audience that is monetized effectively, and that can take a lot of different forms, as you rightly say.

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It, it, it shouldn't be all or nothing, but it also means that not everything is necessarily available to you, nor should it be.

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And the ones that we've seen be the most successful have started that from who is this audience, how many ways can we sort of slice and dice it, and what's the monetization revenue opportunity that comes out of this, and where's their overlap, right?

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All of those questions that are probably pretty intuitive, but having the data and the recognition that that's what needs to drive the strategy rather than the other way around, here's a strategy, go find the data to support it.

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Yeah. It's been a little bit of that kind of chasing its tail dynamic for a long time. Yeah.

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What, what are, what are some of the, the core habits that you've seen of successful publishers to implementing this kind of consumer first strategy? Yeah.

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So first of all, the, I mean, a lot of this is not rocket science by any means. It is starting the technology question with use cases.

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There are a lot, and this is not unique to media and publishing, but, like, we need a, in our case, CDP, or we need a, you know, CRM, whatever it is, and then very little sophistication around.

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But, like, why and what are you gonna do with it, and that gets you half of the way there at best, but you don't have the tool that actually supports your use cases, your environment.

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So really being clear about what the use cases are, what's the current state, why do we need to change the current state, what do we expect to get out of those changes immediately and over time.

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That level of sophistication, companies that are coming into technology conversations with that are head and shoulders above those that are not.

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The second follow-on to that is-A commitment of a product owner of that technology so that they are clear on these, maintaining a backlog and a roadmap that's accountable to the broader business that it fits into trying to make this something that's either completely decentralized out makes for a lack of alignment in a lot of ways, right?

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This is a shared audience, so you need to have that.

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But also, I think it can be very challenging if a technology is sort of forced down from on high and doesn't have the buy-in from business units or whatever the case might be.

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So having a really well-defined product owner or center of excellence, if it's a big enough organization to house this and then support the business, those are two places that add immediate time to value, get there faster, and then on an enduring basis, those use cases, and then having that central management done in the right way.

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So with having this at the center of the strategy, right, does that mean that bringing people back to the owned property becomes like the sort of North Star?

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Or I, I'm interested in how you balance as a publisher, as I hear the, the nostalgia, I think it's nostalgia for like the homepage, right?

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It's hard for me to believe that in five years time, tons of people are gonna be like typing many URLs into browsers and navigating that way. I, I think the surfing is, is over. But maybe, I don't know.

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Because you, you obviously where we're, where we're going and where we've been really is it's completely decentralized, and you have to go to where the audiences are. Mm-hmm.

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I mean, I was just talking about this at the coffee I was having, um, and this, this executive is like, "Oh, we have to be totally liquid. We have to be everywhere. And we have to...

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Our brand can do the work," but expecting just people to come to, to our property is just most likely not gonna happen. Um- No, I think that's fair. Yeah. How do you, how do you balance that?

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Because I mean, you wanna get, you wanna get the data. Let's just say you, you have to know your audience better- Mm-hmm... in order to serve them better.

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But then you run up against reality of, you know, more people are, are... If you're a lifestyle brand, more people are... You're reaching more people through Instagram than you are on your website. You definitely are.

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And you can make money off Instagram. You're selling me of a big Instagram ad business, but you wanna collect the data, right? Mm-hmm. So like how... What is that balance? I don't have an answer for you.

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I mean, I really think it depends, and this is where, you know, the element of sophistication comes in, which is, you know, doing the work to understand, like, how much do you know about that Instagram audience?

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Is it just driving them to a landing page at least gives you some visibility that, you know, X amount of your revenue is coming from Instagram.

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You may not convert those people to anything beyond that initial article, but that's still information. That tells you something different about your, quote, unquote, Instagram audience. Mm-hmm.

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Maybe it's worth knowing that if your Instagram audience does go beyond that at first landing page, not to a homepage, but to some other experience or what have you, then that's inherently more valuable than the folks who maybe just come to the homepage, scroll, and never leave, and that...

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or then they leave right after that. I mean, it, it just taking the who are these people? What are their behaviors, and what did that... does that matter to me?

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If it's a throwaway audience, then maybe spend less money on Instagram. But like, there is no right answer for this. It does come back- Mm-hmm...

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to what outcomes are you trying to drive, and what experiments are you running that help you assess?

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Are these channels or these interaction points serving more as a brand type of awareness like you just talked about, or is it creating legitimate demand?

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I mean, I think in some ways, media needs to have a better grip of like how B2B marketing works, right? There is going to be a mix between brand and demand. That's the age-old challenge.

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But if you are not able to slice and dice on the audience side and do some amount of kind of measurement attribution that out- like, lets you do that allocation, you're, you're never going to be able to get a, a good answer for you.

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But I would expect that to look very, very different for a broadcaster, for example, in terms of, you know, the audience and what the value is depending on their sources and how they interact than I would from a niche subscription-only publisher, right?

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The advertising proposition and the revenue from advertising on a broadcaster is fundamentally more important than it is for maybe the niche, high, high-end subscription business.

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Those are gonna look different in terms of where the Instagram or the other sources play a role.

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I think that's different for every publisher, but it, it seems like the, the shift overall, the pendulum is shifting more towards depth versus breadth.

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I mean, you'd rather have a deeper relationship with a smaller audience than a thinner relationship with a larger audience. Is that fair? I think I'd say it's both, which...

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It just, this goes back to like which audience are we talking about?

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If they're never gonna pay, then having a lot of people who are exposed to a quality amount of advertising that gets a pretty good CPM on behalf of your, your ad partners, there's nothing wrong with that.

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It's just recognizing that just because I read a lot but don't subscribe, maybe you don't need to push me so hard into a subscription funnel. Yeah.

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That, that's a way in where they come back to this like, it needs to be all or nothing. It doesn't. It does not at all.

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It just means you need to allocate resources accordingly, and I, I think that is such a challenge for most publishers to operationalize.

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It's like, well, if we're gonna not do this, then what are we gonna do with our whole sales team, ad sales team? And the... There's just this need to try to get to- Mm...

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one set of answers, and I don't think there is a right... You...

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I, I tend to agree with you, but I think if we say just dogmatically that quality and depth will, will always be better than shallow breadth, I think that's actually what we ran into with traffic. Yeah.

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That's a good point. There has to be something of a mix.Yeah. So I'm, I'm legally obli- obligated to, to ask you the AI question, right? [laughs] I think as a human being, it's not even legal- [laughs]...

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just humans, we have to ask this question now. We have, we have to. I was just like, can't have any conversation without AI coming up these days.

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But, I mean, how is this going to change the understanding of, first of all, an audience?

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Because I, I don't, I don't wanna get too, like, down there, but like we did a dinner the other night, and we're talking about like B2B versus B2C.

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It was, it was ad buyers and, and then this, this one person brought up like, oh, we're gonna have B2A, which is the business to agents.

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Like, we're gonna need to be thinking about how we advertise to agents, 'cause agents, AI agents are gonna be making an increasing number of decisions on behalf of people, and therefore we need to influence the agents.

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And this came right after a meeting I had where basically the company, they were obviously interested in, in this, but was saying that, that, you know, there's so many agents that are, are going to be out there scraping websites.

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It's beyond just the core, the core models that a few things, one, that like advertisers are gonna say, "Did people see this, or is this just, are you, are you ad- advertising to droids?"

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And then, and then two is how you, how you end up monetizing that when you don't have as much data as, as, as other people have that are real people, basically. But how do, how does AI end up factoring in, into this?

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Le- leave aside the distribution challenges and stuff like this. H- how does it factor into how publishers can get this better understanding for different audience segments? Yeah.

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I think I'd be gunning for bigger jobs than the one I have if I had a great answer for this. I, I admit that I'm still, in many ways, kind of wrapping my head around it.

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I do think that much the way we've had to grapple with this idea that the internet is free [laughs] for the last 30 years, like talk about the biggest fallacy maybe of the 21st century, that the internet is free.

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The internet is not free- Yeah... and has never been free, and a lot of mistakes were made, especially media and publishing, going back to what we were talking about, sort of the existential.

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Nobody was more affected by that. Free shipping was about as close as retail got to that, right? Right. [laughs] And, and, you know, Amazon kind of screwing them there.

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I think this is a similar catalyst moment of setting the expectations and the terms before it's too late, and I would like to think we've learned something from the internet is free, and that AI just being able to intermediate or disintermediate in a lot of these places is going to need greater regulation and scrutiny and terms.

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And I say that because, uh, I'm not sure you put this cat back in the bag by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't need to be a one way that the publishers are just kind of at the mercy of what AI decides here.

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Talk about collaboration, nothing antitrust or collusion about saying, we need a better mechanism, that if you're gonna take our data and our, our journalism, our content, then we need to get the consumer data back, or we need to get something back in return that we can monetize ourselves.

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I don't have a great sense yet of what that business model could look like, but I think it is a, it is a clear example of history about to repeat/rhyme itself very aggressively if it's just taken for granted that AI can just kinda run roughshod here, and then everyone else is left to figure out what to do with the crumbs.

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This would be the opportunity to say that, that that's not gonna work, and protecting those assets, coming up with new formats and spaces for that to happen also.

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To your point about maybe it's not the homepage, but it's the next generation of a homepage- Yeah... these are all things that we should be, and, and smarter people than I- Yeah...

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absolutely are exploring and figuring out how viable they are. Yeah. I think they're for sure. I think the big thing is, is the change consumer expectations, right?

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This can go in so many different directions, but I always just think it's very unlikely that it will not change consumer expectations around personalization and convenience, right? Just like you brought up Amazon, right?

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I think the biggest impact it had by far was free shipping. Mm-hmm. Like, the idea that you would then go to, quote-unquote, "luxury retailer", and they would be...

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and they would say that it would take five to seven days to get what- Totally... you paid. You're like, "What are you talking about?"

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Like, "I'm paying a lot of money, and you're telling me it's gonna take five to seven days, and my toilet paper showed up the next day?" Right. But even that, remember, it was only free because of Amazon Prime.

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This was always the long game, and that's what Amazon did really well, and most other companies, A, have never been afforded the luxury of doing what Amazon did, so let's be honest about that.

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But that's what we need to name, is that they used that as a hook, then it became Amazon Prime, and now people are paying $100 a year for this thing that used to be free, and by the way, the service has gone down.

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We don't even do that anymore. Like, that long game of what is it that we're actually doing here instead of these short-term single moves, like Amazon was playing chess when everyone else was playing checkers.

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We need to have starting to play chess with this AI piece, like seeing around the corners. What is gonna happen? How do we onboard people to this? How do we start to shift that behavior?

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It's not just gonna be a one, one change and done. It's going to take many, many years to evolve that, and hopefully we've learned that lesson. I don't, I don't know. Yeah.

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I think definitely the, the, the free shipping of this, I, I think a good bet is, is around personalization. Yeah. Everything is gonna be so personalized to people, like beyond, like, how we think of personalization now.

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I mean, when people have a, their own AI assistant that is with them all the time, that is clearly where this is going. At best, people will be the supervisor to the agent, I hope. I mean- I hope...

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not the other way around.But that is gonna bleed over into the, the experiences that, that they expect from publishers. And so publishers, the only way you can personalize is by knowing a lot more- Mm-hmm...

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about your audience. And then if you- but, but if you don't know a lot about your audience, forget it, like [laughs] you can't personalize a thing. That's it. No. And, and you will get to...

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I mean, there's already an issue of creating content that's so generic, you know, because it's written by an AI trying to universally.

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Like where publishing can have a really magical impact actually could be in preventing it all just degrading and sounding exactly the same and being presented in the same ways.

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And the idea that, you know, I'm not much of a video content person, I really like long form.

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Give me the long form version of the story and use AI to have a video version, and an audio version, and a, and a bullet point version, right? All of those are things that I would be happy to share, right?

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This is also going back to what could having expectations for consumers around like, this is what you're gonna need to give us in order to get these other things, and that kind of new version of this value exchange is still so early days, but I think- Yeah...

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would be palatable, but we have to start. We have to start setting that expectation. It's not gonna happen overnight. Yeah. I mean, this is a little tactical, but do you... Is, is this like when the reg wall really...

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Like, I just get the sense that because there's so much pressure on the publishing business that there was like 10 years straight that I, I was told that it was the year of mobile.

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I think it might be like the year of the reg wall for 10 years straight because so many publishers are gonna need to build up their, their data that they're gonna insist on registration, I think.

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I, I think there's nothing wrong with insisting on registration. I think it's what are you getting back? Yeah. That's the entitlement element where- Yeah... you're not just entitled to me giving you that information.

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I- because to be fair, you could have been entitled to it, if that had always been the expectation, but you were all up in here giving it away for free, relying on Facebook, like the, the- Yeah. I mean-...

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average consumer... I- like, I pay for a lot of news. I think I have something like 20 subscriptions. I pay for them all. I am, I am, I'm, I'm... but I'm not the average- Good for you... consumer. We know that, right?

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[laughs] And so how do you start again?

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You have to wean people off of that expectation and do it in a way that is personalized, that understands what am I gonna get out of this, and give me an offer that is actually relevant- Mm-hmm... for me. Yeah.

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I think that was always the problem of the third-party cookie and just really how ad, the ad targeting architecture was developed was- Yeah...

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so much stuff happened behind the scenes, and it sort of needed to happen behind the scenes for a reason, is because there wasn't a real value exchange. No. There was an entitlement. Well, e- exactly.

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It was an entitlement masking as a value exchange. It was like, "Look, if you give us this information, we're giving you the news," but nobody ever said that, right? That was, that was the sophisticates- Right...

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who knew what was happening, and now you have literally two generations of, of consumers who would never have, have never even experienced the news in a way that was actually more of a transaction and have only experienced it in the ways, and probably actually news content writ large- Yeah...

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in this way. Yeah. And I think you can... I would make the argument that GDPR has been something of a disaster, at least as [laughs]

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as implemented, but I think it proved that a lot of people, one, didn't understand this value exchange- Mm...

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and two, didn't think it was a, a really good bargain for them and, and that's tough because when, you know, signing into Google and, and all that, you know what you're getting.

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It's like, "Oh, yeah, of course, I wanna, I w- I wanna be signed in to, like, Chrome." Mm-hmm. That makes total sense. It personalizes, and why would I not want that?

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Yeah, I understand that they're gonna be tracking me, but mo- you know, most people are, are better with that and, and so, you know, making that explicit.

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But that also goes back to having, like, a strong tie with the audience- Mm-hmm... that you can just be upfront with them. Absolutely.

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I mean, we've, we literally have customers who have done these experiments around, even if it's just the cookie consent, how they use the language, explain what is happening, just approach that from a much more transparent kind of consumer friendly way, and the fear, of course, is that you do that, and much like Apple, right, when everyone was given the option to opt out of tracking on the apps, everybody said no.

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And it's like, well, of course not, because tracking is scary. You have no idea what that means, and as far as you're concerned, the consumer experience doesn't change.

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So there's no, there was no value to you tracking me across apps. That was purely only advertisers benefited from that.

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However, you need to know if you are clear about, hey, you know, here's the cost if we don't do it this way.

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All of the kind of math that goes into this has been completely opaque to really all the stakeholders in this ecosystem. I think if we made the math a little bit clearer.

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Now, the counterpoint to that is you risk turning privacy and all of this into a luxury good, right?

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If, well, if I can pay not to have ads, you know, collect my data and have ads shown to me, then you create a really skewed access to the internet or to content that I think is problematic, but it's, it's...

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no one is having that level of the conversation as a how do we think about these as different tiers or other ways of conceptualizing the data for content exchange. Mm.

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It's just been a vacuum or cut off entirely, nothing in between. Yeah. I mean, it kinda reminds me of how, like, dynamic pricing. One person's dynamic pricing is another person's, quote-unquote, "price discrimination."

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Totally. I completely agree with that. You know? And, and- And I don't think I don't have a good answer for that.

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[laughs] I think about it, I'm like, okay, if, if I'm on an airplane, the person next to me paid a different, like, I don't know who paid what or anything like this, but I've, I've heard from a lot of publishers that they have a lot of debates about-This, I mean, this is a form of quote-unquote, personalization, right?

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You're basically deciding based on, you know, a bunch of different factors, what you're gonna put in front of a particular person that they'll find attractive. And it, this happens...

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It's funny, 'cause I feel like publishers sometimes overthink a, a lot of things. I mean, this has been happening forever. I remember reading, you know, about if you go from iOS versus Android, like- Yeah...

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Android people are, are, get a cheaper price. Totally.

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I mean, it's, it's something, there's a, the data that, like, with Apple, you might have 200 trackers running in the background, and on Android it's like 1,000, right? Or some just ungodly amount of...

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And e- even that, okay, that sounds scary, but even I am like, "Well, what are those trackers?" You know, where, where, where are they pr- providing me utility? Yeah. Right?

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This is a very old Forster framework around utility.

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And, but, but we've made this so opaque and hard to understand, and wishy-washy in some cases, best, and I think a lot of these is quite frankly downright exploitative if you look at some of the stuff we're seeing out of this Google antitrust.

249
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So it's a problem, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't mean that everything is a problem, right?

250
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It, it, it's not all bad, it's just potentially the bad implementation of it or the bad actors, and we're not able to, to g- engage with this at a level of what can we keep?

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What is useful to us in the technology world, to the consumer, to media? How do we actually engage this across a bunch of different stakeholders?

252
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And I think fundamentally the problem is that the vast majority of this oxygen is taken up by the big tech players who have no incentive to come to the table and, and try to fix some of these problems in a constructive way, and that is probably the biggest barrier, I would say, to progress on a lot of this is, is Google- Yeah...

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and Facebook and Apple, even under the guise of being privacy- Privacy... friendly. No, it's not, right? It's just, it's just- It's a scam... makes you less- [laughs]... creeped out. That's not the same thing. Yeah.

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I mean, they, like, started their ad business right after that. But- It, it literally started there be- because of that. [laughs] Big billboards of privacy is a human right. Not that people would ever do such a thing.

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Anyway, this has been amazing. One, one sort of final thing about the, the provocative question. Gi- give me the case for why there's a future for ads on webpages.

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This is something I've asked everyone I, I meet with lately.

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I think it goes back to what I said at the beginning, is that the internet is not free, and advertising was the original way of making information accessible to people.

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And whether that's an old magazine, a newspaper, radio, like, advertising has always played a role in facilitating the movement of in- of, of information. And so I think it has a place in this ecosystem.

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It doesn't necessarily look like it looks today or has been at its healthiest. Yeah. But I, I do believe that it has a place in the ecosystem. Yeah.

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I mean, I, I'm just like, it is going to be fascinating just the number of, of changes that take place to, to publisher business models in the next five years. Like, I can't wait. I think it's actually kind of exciting.

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I know it's gonna be very painful, and any of these transitions are extremely painful. I started in this business at the dotcom collapse, and man, there was a lot of carnage around there. Yeah.

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And that's just the way, that's the way markets and industries work. Yeah.

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I think the optimistic note of that is I don't think we have to accept the carnage as the end of the story and, you know, more of the phoenix from the ashes. But I, I think we need to have that hope. Things rise. Yeah.

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And, you know, like, nothing ever... Nothing ends. Like [laughs] No. It's just- But I do agree- It just goes on in different forms...

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I do agree that there is, there are a lot of lessons to be learned out of what arose from the carnage over the last 20 or so years to make sure that the thing that emerges next is a healthier, a healthier version of what we got in this iteration.

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But I'm confident- Yeah...

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that this kind of the generation of leaders, the, you know, the folks that you have working with you now and who I'm talking to have such brilliant ideas around how this can be tackled and so much energy for doing it, that gives me a lot of optimism.

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Awesome. Corey, thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. [outro music]