[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting Show.
I'm Brian Morrissey. This episode is brought to you by BlueConic. I recently partnered with BlueConic to do research in the state of publisher subscription businesses.
We wanted to find out where publishers are seeing opportunities and of course challenges.
And what we found is that at many publishers, their subscription businesses are maturing as they move from relying on deep discounts to focusing more on bringing more revenue per subscriber.
Just check out the full report. There's a link to it in the show notes, and thanks again to BlueConic for making it possible.
This week I spoke with Tomiwa Ladekomo, the CEO of Big Cabal, the Nigerian digital media company that's home to a pair of properties, Tech Cabal, which I describe as similar to TechCrunch, but with more memes, and Zikoko, a BuzzFeed-like culture publication.
One of the things that Tomiwa and I discuss is how many of the challenges of media businesses are similar in all markets, although each market has their own unique differences.
I hope you enjoy this conversation and send me your feedback, uh, at brian@rebooting.com. Now here's my conversation with Tomiwa. [upbeat music] Tomiwa, thank you- Sound good.
Thank you so much for joining me, joining the Rebooting Show. Really appreciate it. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Brian. All right. Big Cabal, we had talked over the pandemic.
I've already done my due diligence, but you're in Lagos. Explain... First of all, explain your background, how you got to media very quickly, because you've had a lot of different...
I was like skulking around here, and you're like at- Yeah, it makes no sense... like a big brewery, like Star Beer and stuff like this. There was this resorts thing going on.
Um- I've been in media my whole career, but I've been all over the media chain. So- Yeah... I started in the US, went to school in Boston, Boston University, did a master's at Columbia.
I then worked for market research to start, and then was at Atlantic Records for about a year, and then moved back to Nigeria. My first gig was at newsletter, a newspaper.
I worked on their online presence at the time, which was not great, but worked online and worked events for them.
And then after I left, I started my own media business and kind of did music events and festivals and brand activations for about four years, which was great.
Built like a really cool jazz festival and had concerts from lots of interesting people, but could never make a real business out of it. Like, we just could never really stabilize the revenue. Very boom and bust.
So I quit, and went back in to work for the man, which was the big brewery. And so I joined- Yeah... Nigerian Breweries, which is Heineken's... which is a Heineken-operated company in Nigeria, as their head of digital.
And so I spent a couple of years there helping them do digital activations, think about digital strategy, et cetera, until I got poached by one of my own agencies.
So one of the agencies that did some work for me while I was at Nigerian Breweries, uh, a bunch of really interesting guys from the UK, actually, would come into Nigeria and were doing some interesting things in digital.
And so they convinced me to leave the brewery life and join them on this adventure.
And so we spent a couple years doing, again, more digital stuff for a range of different clients, the biggest one being another newspaper.
And then so for The Guardian, which is one of the big four newspapers in Nigeria, we helped them build their online presence and their digital strategy and do monetization, all of that kind of stuff.
And so when the opportunity came to do Big Cabal, I'd just come off this stint of helping a big publisher figure out their online strategy, and I'd done everything, social strategy and content- Yeah... and monetization.
And so I felt pretty primed to at least get this off the road. And that's- Yeah... that's how I came. It's a very roundabout journey. I don't recommend it, but it's been fun. [laughs] That's great.
So for those who are not... Like, give us the... 'Cause you've, you've been in like... You're aware of the different markets here in the US market. So a lot of- Yeah...
my listeners probably don't have a ton of exposure to the Nigerian market. So give us the similarities and the differences because each market has its peculiarities. Media market. All right. So we can... Yeah.
I started out in media in the US, so I'm very familiar with the US sort of media landscape. Yeah. And I think what got me into Big Cabal was the gaps I saw.
So when I was in the US, like 18 to 34-year-old men are like the holy grail in like US media landscape.
And if you looked at what the publishing landscape for them was, you'd say there's FHM, there's Maxim, there's GQ, there's a dozen publications that are aimed at young men, and there's a bunch of digital publications.
When I was at Nigerian Breweries selling beer to 18 to 34-year-old men, I'd look at the media landscape, and I wouldn't have the same range of options. So there'd be the sports publications.
Nigeria is a football mad, mad country, so lots of like football and sports publications.
And then there like, in terms of the online presence, there were like these big gossip publications, these big, like broad publications.
And this is pre-Instagram really becoming like a big dominant thing or TikTok becoming a really big dominant thing. And there were just no really big publications aimed at young men.
And so I started to look at the media landscape with a little bit more detail. And what it is was comparing it to North America, where I had started working, there were just a lot of white spaces.
And this is the same in Nigeria and mostly across Africa, which is the US is one of the most sophisticated, the most sophisticated media market in the world. And so there is a Home and Garden.
There is a popular science publication. There is a... And it's not just publications, there's TV channels for each of these things.
If you are a Lego obsessive, there's probably like a publication and a community of obsessives for you in the US growing gangbusters.The landscape in Nigeria is newspapers dying as everywhere else.
There's no New York Times equivalents maintaining dominance here, but they're doing what they're doing important to pub-- to politicians and a certain stripe of businessperson. Digital's become really massive.
You have a very young population in Nigeria and across the continent as a whole, across Africa as a whole, and digital natives coming online.
We have a mobile-first, in fact, you might say mobile-only market because there are millions and millions of Nigerians for who, who don't have a laptop, who may or may not have television, probably have a radio, but who their mobile phone is their primary access to the internet, and mobile is everything, you know.
And Nigeria is a population of two hundred million people. If I'm getting my stats right, probably a hundred and forty million of those on the internet signed with data.
Still a decent chunk of that, maybe thirty, forty million on 2G phones, lots on 3G and, you know, 3G and 4G devices. We've recently launched 5G here as well, so there's a few people on those kind of connections.
What else is big? Adult home is big if you're- But Nigeria-... into a brewery or... Yeah. Yes. But the overall Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa, right?
You know, it's us and South Africa, and so- It's still bigger than South Africa? I don't know. There are great places on that depending on how you calculate it in terms of that year or by... But yeah.
But Nigeria is one of the largest populations. It is... I live in Lagos, which is the commercial capital, so think New York. Abuja would be DC. It's the actual capital.
Lagos is twenty million young, very ambitious, hustling people. It's got even more energy than New York. It's like New York on speed, and it's where all the commercial activity is happening. Yeah. But yeah.
You've got a super interesting- We think New York, we think of New York as a big city. We think of New York as a big city, and it's- Yeah... not that big really.
You know, like, [laughs] when you start to compare it with like even Mexico City will be- It's compared to like Tokyo or Lagos or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. It is big. Yeah.
It's like the mega cities of the world like- And we've got big tech. We've also got this big tech ecosystem that's developed over the last few years.
A lot of Silicon Valley investment, a lot of global investors, and a really booming and thriving tech scene. And so that also provides a bit of impetus to the economy. Yeah.
Nigeria is primarily oil-driven, petroleum-driven in terms of our exports. But an interesting country in lots of ways. Yeah. So. Yeah. I don't know if that answers your question broadly. Yeah. Tell me. Yeah, yeah.
No, it totally does. You've got... As, as Big Kabal is basically two brands, right?
It's Tech Kabal, which in my like crude sort of American version would be like TechCrunch, but like for Nigeria and br- more broadly for Africa. And then Zikoko, which I...
It seems like BuzzFeed-ish, maybe a little bit more mobile first. I don't know. Explain, first of all, the genesis of those brands and why those two brands that seem different.
So Kabal, for Africa, pretty decent sort of way to describe it. It simplifies it a bit, but yeah, that works. And it is for Africa.
We started out covering Nigeria, but we've expanded coverage, and now we've got somebody in Kenya, somebody in South Africa, and we've got people focused on the other regions even if they're not physically there.
The big thing to know is Big Kabal Media, which is the parent company, precedes me. So I wasn't a founder. I actually joined, and I took over from the founders.
And the original thesis from Big Kabal was that there are all of these white spaces where there ought to be really interesting and innovative media publications.
And because the media landscape in here on the continent is so under-invested in, the founders, couple of really smart, creative guys, were like, "We are gonna build the publications for a bunch of these niches, and we are gonna figure out monetization, and then we're gonna take over all the spaces."
What we found out over the course of the existence of Big Kabal is that building in multiple verticals is really quite difficult. So Tech Kabal launched first. It really started out as a curiosity of one of the founders.
This tech ecosystem I was talking about was starting to boom. And he was meeting interesting founders, and he just wanted to know their stories, and he would just chronicle.
And over time, we've built that into the most formidable publication covering the business and the impact of tech in Africa.
Um, Zikoko came a couple years later, and it started out very, very BuzzFeed, but it was also the idea of taking a BuzzFeed model and applying it to like Nigerian cultural touchstones and BuzzFeed, but very localized with localized topics and a localized agenda.
And I think it did really well.
But then when I joined, we took a look at it, and it had gotten a bit stale, and BuzzFeed itself was doing BuzzFeed News at the time, and we were like, "How do we make this a bit more robust?" That mysticals and quisits.
So we started out with that BuzzFeed mysticals and quisits voice. And so we started to tell a lot more stories of the things that matter to young people. So relationships, money, sex, careers, all of that kind of stuff.
Probably a bit more Refinery29, so Money Diaries and just more anonymous interviews, just young people talking about their lives.
And it's become a real cultural touchstone publication where it covers a lot of content that other people won't co-cover, and it tells a lot of stories other people won't tell.
And it's a lens for young people to understand Nigeria in a way that they might not otherwise do. So two very different publications under- Yeah...
our portfolio, and there's crossover in that we tend maybe forty to fifty percent of the advertisers are common to both publications.
Anybody who's targeting young people, tech tends to aim to a young audience, and they should be both Tech Kabal and Zikoko. A lot of tech companies advertise with us across both publications.
But in terms of the editorial teams and editorial direction, they're two completely different things.
And there's maybe an attitude that cuts across both publications where it is playful and very sharp and in the know, and we keep that with both- Yeah... publications.
So if you read a Tech Kabal newsletter, there's really funny memes and it's like-We are a strong authority publication in terms of if, if something's going around on Twitter or X and you wanna know if it's real, then you go check TechCabal to see if TechCabal published it, then it's real.
But at the same time, if you open the TechCabal newsletter at the beginning of the day, you get like a really witty opening, you're gonna get funny memes, you're gonna get like a sense of humor, and that kind of permeates through everything it is that we do.
And that attitude carries over to TechCabal and Zikoko. So do you think of TechCabal as like a B2B brand or is it somewhere between B2B and B2C? Somewhere between B2B and B2C. And who are we speaking to?
We're speaking to people within the tech industry, and so they need to know what's happening, but also to a broader sort of business audience as well.
We've seen technology change the way that they work and the way that they do things. And so our advertisers and the sponsors of our events are trying to reach decision-makers in technology.
They're trying to reach decision-makers in business.
But we know that we're speaking to tech insiders, and again, over a couple of years ago, we started to really shift the perspective to make sure that we're not just speaking to...
Like, when we started, we were speaking to coders and founders, that's it. Uh, and literally, if you open our strategy document for TechCabal now, it says, yeah, we're not just trying to talk to tech bros on Twitter.
We wanna make sure that we're talking to everyone who's affected by technology.
But from a business and a revenue perspective, we know that the bulk of our money comes from people who are trying to speak to and influence tech decision-makers and business decision-makers who are buying technology.
Okay. So I'm interested by the Pan-Africa sort of approach.
I think you started with the Nigeria approach, but then you expanded, and it's always, as an American, Americans like treat Africa as a singular thing [chuckles] instead of a entire continent- Yeah...
with impossibly diverse.
But tell me why that makes sense, like for this, for this field, but it doesn't make sense for Zikoko because obviously Nigerian culture, which is popular throughout Africa and the world, is-- it's particular.
But, uh, talk to me about that. So I think tech travels a bit better than say culture. Nigerian culture is traveling globally very well. But in terms of creating content about it, you've got to be incredibly specific.
If you're gonna create sort of humorous cultural content, then people have to have the same cultural touchstones. They have to have the same reference points.
Zikoko is very popular in, say, Kenya, but that's because Kenyans watch an incredible amount of Nollywood and consume our music and are really up on Nigerian culture anyway.
They're happy to dive really deep into something like Zikoko, which is super culturally specific. But tech as a business and, uh, as an area of coverage, I think travels pretty well.
So we are able to cover the big tech markets in Africa relatively well. So Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Cape Town, Joburg, probably the biggest cities. And then you have like a whole slew of other smaller cities coming up.
Rwanda, Kigali is one of those. And so you're covering what's happening in big cities, you're covering the big players in big cities.
And so if you've got one person sitting in Nairobi covering East Africa and one person sitting in, say, Cape Town covering Southern Africa, you could do a pretty decent job of covering those markets.
Plot somebody in Cairo or say Casablanca to cover North Africa, which we don't have yet, but it's coming. And then you've got pretty decent robust coverage of the continent. And how does that make sense?
It does make sense from a business perspective. There are big global advertisers looking to reach decision-makers across the continent.
So it's Meta or it's Google or IBM or Microsoft or whoever it is, and you've got the scale to actually reach those people, and you're reaching decision-makers across all of those places.
Uh, we do some work with governments and with foundations and NGOs, and so those guys also need to understand how to reach people in all of those sort of big markets.
And so if you have that Pan-African reach, then you can do that. There's also, I think, about reading a lot of high-quality coverage of the tech industry.
When we started, there were lots of blogs, small blogs, regionally focused, so Nigeria-focused blog and a Kenya-focused blog. And it's a tough market, so a number of those have gone out of business.
A number of those are just not done as well from a competitional perspective. And we've grown over time to step in and fill, to fill that gap, and so to be like the dominant Pan-African tech publication.
And so I think that's, yeah, that's how we think about it, and that's what's given us the opportunity.
And we think as we have grown the business, we have seen that there's a pretty significant opportunity to really own that space.
So now when there's a big conference in North Africa, a big tech conference in North Africa, we get the organizers calling us and saying, "We'd like you to have a team here to make sure that you're doing enough coverage so that what's happening in our ecosystem is well reflected because you're speaking to a global audience about what's happening in Tech Africa, and we wanna make sure that we're present," or there's something happening in the Congo.
And any markets where we don't have a significant presence or we're not already covering really well, we're starting to find that they actually give us a call and they say, "Hey, you should send a couple of people out here for a week or two and meet the ecosystem and cover them."
And so it might not be a permanent presence- Yeah...
in every country, fifty-four countries on the continent, but it is enough to have a touchstone and people who understand that market and who can cover what's happening in the big, in the big sort of like cities.
You're not, you're not- Yeah... going into deep rural areas, so you don't need a big bureau everywhere. But how does that play into the business model?
Because you know from being on the marketer side, like a lot of times, and maybe it's different, the budgets oftentimes are country specific or market specific.
So also explain the overall business model for TechCabal and how it's different from Zikoko.Okay, so across the business, we have four major revenue streams. So advertising is a big one.
We also have a consulting arm, and that's mostly TechCabal focused, it's something called TechCabal Insights.
And that does research data, research data consulting work for foundations, from big tech companies, for some startups and some investors. And then we also have events as a big revenue stream.
And last and the smallest is our content studio. An interesting thing with content studios is they come in and out of fashion, so that's been a bigger part of our business at various points than it is right now.
And so those are the four revenue streams across the business. Now, the split tends to be a bit different. So most of the content creation revenue would come from Zikoko.
TechCabal is still the big advertising revenue driver. TechCabal Insights, obviously consulting, research data, that's all TechCabal related. And then events are interesting. So both publications have events.
TechCabal's been doing events a lot longer. Zikoko's only sort of picked that up on that the last couple of years. But growing in interesting ways.
So TechCabal has-- we launched this year our really big conference called Moonshot, Moonshot by TechCabal, and that happened in October and will happen every October for the foreseeable future.
And that's a major tech conference bringing tech decision-makers from across the continent.
If they have an interest in African tech, uh, particularly in Nigeria or West Africa, they usually come to Lagos in October, and that's been quite robust.
And we have a couple of other smaller conferences on the TechCabal side. Whereas on the Zikoko side, we're doing festivals. And so you've got Zikoko Festival, which is a big general interest festival.
We've got Her-titude, which is an all-women's festival, and that reflects women being one of our big content buckets on the Zikoko.
Last month, we did a really clever festival, a barbecue meat festival called Burning Ram, and that was the first time, um, we did that one. Yeah, it's fun. Don't have many calls from Burning Ram.
And, yeah, next year under the Zikoko brand, we're gonna do a big personal finance event because money and personal finance are a big content bucket for Zikoko as well.
And yeah, that's how we think about it across the business, is advertising is the biggest revenue bucket.
It's followed by the consulting this year, I think, took over from events and then events and the smallest bucket at the moment is the content studio. What subscriptions? Is there... Is, uh...
How is the subscriptions market in Nigeria? Is it small? It is small and it is tough. I've seen a lot of media businesses experiment with it, with very little success, to be honest.
I think that BusinessDay, which is the biggest business newspaper in the country, recently pulled theirs down.
We've seen a couple of sort of new media upstarts really take a hard whack at it and then step back away from it. And it's not been a priority for us.
There is a subscription bundled product that we've had in our imaginations for the longest time, and it's just sitting on the idea list, and one day we will do it.
But we always suspected that there wasn't a large enough marketplace willing to pay the kind of numbers that we require to make a substantially sized business work. And so it's not been a place that we've leaned on.
Interesting. What's been interesting over the last few years, the streaming platforms have come in, so Spotify is making a big push. Netflix has made a big push. Amazon Prime is here.
And so they're building subscription-based businesses in Nigeria and across the continent.
But Spotify is charging what's the equivalent of a dollar in local currency for a premium package that would cost thirteen to fifteen dollars in the US.
I don't know, can't tell you how much a Netflix subscription is in the like Naira. But yeah, they're just not charging at levels where you can sustain a big business. And so I think they're banking on future growth.
They're banking on creating content from here for global export. And we're of course, we're a big culture creator as a country.
But trying to sustain a business on those kind of subscription levels, it's not really, it's not something we're willing to bet, bet the business on. Yeah. Yeah.
So that leaves like advertising as a larger share of the business, yeah? Is it the largest share of the business? Advertising is a really big share. It's a, it's the largest share.
It's the largest share, but the consulting business is pretty significant. And it's interesting if you are coming from a North African perspective, is-- and then events. And I think events.
I think a consulting business maybe is the odd one in there because that's usually the kind of thing where you do when you're a really small operation. But for us, we do...
It has become a decent size part of our revenue, and essentially the selling point is our expertise and our depth of knowledge and connection with Africa's tech ecosystems and understanding of the customers. And so
we end up speaking a lot to people who are trying to understand the consumers on ground or the digital economy in Tanzania or the way Fintech, the Fintech landscape across the continent.
And we've been covering that on a day-to-day basis, so there is some sort of in-house expertise on there.
And there's the relationships to be able to call any Fintech CEO anywhere on the continent and to have the credibility to have a conversation. And so that's become a decent sized part of our business.
That's actually, I think, a growing and important part of the business. And it's Pan-African work, which is important. You and I had a quick chat about inflation and what it does to markets just before this call started.
Yeah. But if you're doing business in Africa, you've got to deal with inflation at levels that Americans absolutely cannot imagine. You also have to deal with the currency devaluation.
We freak out when it's six percent inflation. You guys have twenty percent, right? Let me give you... Yeah, no. So I think inflation figures came out a couple weeks ago. They're about thirty percent.
Just shy of thirty percent. And if you-- this year there's been a currency devaluation. There was a massive fuel subsidy in place in Nigeria that got removed this year.
And so at the beginning of the year, if it cost you10,000 Naira, and let's just say, this is, the math's gonna be wrong, but let's say that's $30 to fill a tank of gas. Today it costs you 35,000 Naira. That's 3.5X.
So it would cost you $100 where it cost you $30 at the beginning of the year- Yeah... to fill a tank of gas.
And I imagine that, like- I was reading up about the fuel subsidies before this, 'cause in the US we don't take enough... I don't know, we're not, like, thankful enough that, like, we, we don't have- Yeah. Yeah...
like just, I'm, like, just doing a little bit- I, I-... I was like, "I gotta know a little bit more about, like, the Nigerian economy." I gotta be honest with you, Tomiwa. [laughs] I didn't know about the fuel- Yeah.
No, that's all right... subsidies thing until a couple of hours before this. But then I started getting into it. A couple hours. And I was like, "Oh, is this that big of a deal?"
And I was like, "Oh my God, this is, like, a massive change when you subsidize fuel." And eventually you have to- Think about this, 3.5X. Yeah. Yeah. Um- And it affects everything.
So the cost of transportation goes up for everybody, and then that affects the cost of food, and that affects... It's just a rolling cascades.
And so for us, one of the places that having a Pan-African business is valuable is that then not all of your revenue is in the local currency.
So if we're doing Pan-African jobs with global tech companies or with global foundations that they're paying us in dollars or euro or pounds, whatever it is. Yes.
And that's a bit more inflation and currency devaluation resistant than earning 100% of your revenue in naira, which is Nigeria's currency. And so every year we- Yeah...
set a target for what percentage of our revenue we want to be local versus we want to be global. Yeah. So that where there's currency risk is an additional factor. [laughs] Yeah.
I mean, that's just as a total aside, but I guess it's tech related, is that's why I'm not totally giving up on crypto because, like, it makes a ton of sense when you think about the kinds of...
We, we freak out, Americans freak out about inflation, like, but, like, they don't realize how pernicious it is in many markets throughout the world, and just moving money around is a pain.
And so I don't know if crypto can, can solve this, but [laughs] Moving money is a big mess. I will say I'm not the biggest...
I think crypto's promise in Africa really has been about that, making it easier to move your money, reducing the friction and moving money across countries within the continent and then globally.
I won't say that I'm the biggest crypto booster even now. Again, it does sometimes just seem like a very complicated way to do things that we already know how to do.
But we continue to cover it, and I think there continue to be people carrying out interesting experiments in crypto. I'd keep a bit of a side eye on it, but it's...
Yeah, I, I would never be confused with a crypto b- booster personally. Okay, so you're not a crypto bro. [laughs] Noted. No. [laughs] Um- No. [laughs] But so, so you raised money.
You raised a couple million dollars, I guess it was, was it last year? Yeah. Last year. Yes. Yeah, early last year.
And, uh, we had talked over the pandemic, so I went through your l- like, deck, so I already know the, the details. But talk to me about that decision about raising money and, and being a venture-funded publication.
There's upsides and downsides. Definitely upsides and downsides.
Again, media's greatly under-invested on the continent, and I think it's a continent where the majority of our wealthy class and investor class is used to investing in heavy industry and extractive industries, petroleum, et cetera.
So there's not a ton of funding available for sort of these things like media.
Unlike the US where I think there's been a long and, and more mature markets where there's been a long sort of deep understanding of how to make money from media.
And I have considered, I think, about media as a media lab, and figuring out monetization effectively is one of the things that we've been keen on and has been su- just, is our reason for existing.
And that, it does take, it, it just takes cash. You just need enough time to build and figure out and try different things. So is venture capital the ideal funding for media? No, probably not.
But for us, we are ambitious enough. We've grown at a pretty significant clip year on year every year since we started. Some years more in audience than in revenue, but other years really growing at a pretty robust clip.
And so I think that gave us the confidence to go out and raise venture.
And for the people who back this, again, when you look at the lack of investment in this space, it does mean that if you get a clear winner, there is an opportunity, and it's why we're Pan-African, for instance.
There is an opportunity to be the only skilled winner and, in a sense, the only business in town if you can really win at the levels that we want to. Does it increase the pressure as a business? Absolutely.
And I think something that I wanted to talk about was the way in media, but also in other industries, you are emulating models frequently in the US, but in other markets where they're still testing things out.
For instance, BuzzFeed and Vice, and all of those have been the touchstones for what media publications should be doing, like how to build a media business over the last, say, 10 years.
And so if you're watching those and following those publications and see them fall off cliffs, you gotta say, "What the hell are we doing here?"
And so it's been important for us as a business to pay attention to what's happening globally. We've always said this, one of the great things about doing media today is everyone's solving the same problems.
There is nowhere Bob Iger and Disney are trying to figure it out. The Washington Post is gonna lose $100 million this year. So we're all trying to figure this out on a global basis.
If you're a media from Mumbai or Bombay or wherever it is, you're trying to figure out the same things that Puck is trying to figure out or the Information is trying to figure out.
And we've always had this kind of be careful where we're watching BuzzFeed and Vice and whatever it is, and we're taking the lessons that we can from them, but also being careful that you don't fall off a cliff because you slavishly follow the model that isn't fully proven yet.
And that- Yeah... is a big part of how we think about operating.Yeah. I, which brings me to the, you had cutbacks this year, right? You laid off, like, 19%. We did.
So obviously this, in the US, it's, it's been a, it's been a tough year for publishers. People, like, sometimes write me and they're like- Yeah... "Oh, you're pessimistic." I'm like, "No, I'm not.
I'm just, like, talking to Blake." [laughs] I know. [laughs] It's been a...
I always joke, I'm like, "There's two kinds of people I talk to, the kinds of people who tell me it was a shitty year, and there's the kinds of people who lie to me." Yeah, there you go. Those are the two kinds.
I, I'm not gonna lie to you. So I appreciate that. [laughs] This podcast, sometimes you get both kinds, but most people don't lie to me, I don't think. But talk to me about that- Right. [laughs]...
'cause it's been a, it's been a difficult advertising y-year in the US, and this comes at a year where we heard all about a recession that never came.
I think the old joke is economists have predicted five out of the last three recessions. And- [laughs]... that is a little worrying because, like, I wonder whether there's structural changes going on.
Obviously, there's a lot of money getting, it's continuing to get sucked up by tech platforms, and anyone who has the kind of granular data that performance- Yeah... marketing is, is driven off of.
And then you have the growth of retail media, and it's just, it, it just keeps eating away, I feel, at a lot of the, the ad business. But what, I don't know, what did you see, like, in the market?
Obviously, the market was not great for you guys. Like, uh, talk to me about what happened- Yeah... what's been happening in the market. So it was a tough year. It was a tough year.
The ad industry is a big part of our customer base, and there was a big cutback in funding from that. So lots of layoffs at the people who pay our bills at those companies. So obviously that's not great.
And I say from a business development perspective, I haven't seen as many pulled contracts in my time running this business, even 2020, which was a horrible year, where everybody...
I don't know whether you remember March, April 2020, it's just like every advertising deal that you were talking about just tumbling at once, as like, down, at least they did in this market.
And this year has been even tougher for that, where you're 80% of the way through a conversation and they pull it, or they've actually signed a contract and then they're trying to renege on it, and you gotta go and decide how hard you're gonna fight your potential future clients.
And it's been a really challenging year on that front, and we came in knowing it would be tough. There was a bit of conservatism that we started to build up as the year went on.
And I'd say going into, we had revenue targets for the first half of the year that we wanted to meet, so, like, a certain amount of cash in the bank that we wanted, and we looked at it, and we weren't hitting those targets.
And the only thing you gotta do is you gotta extend this runway. You cannot get into a place where you're in trouble. Yeah. And so really tough decision.
Uh, layoffs are not fun for the people who are laid off or even the people who do the laying off.
But ultimately, for the best of the business, I think we try to handle it as humanely as you can handle the layoffs and decent severance packages, and we didn't just cut people's email access without a warning or any of that.
But yeah, quite tough. And I think in the reckoning, as we come to the end of the year, it's been a year of high highs and low lows.
And launching a major new comms brand, having it succeed, I think even beyond our expectations, was a really strong high point.
On the Zucoro brand, we got three major events done this year, and something like Brittany Ram had been on the books and the idea bank for a few years, so it's good to actually finally get it done and find both audiences and sponsors really enraptured with what it is that we did.
So we're really excited about the events front. We're excited about that going into next year, taking all the lessons from this year into next year and building on them.
Our consulting business grew quite significantly this year, and again, going into next year, we're quite enthusiastic about making that a more robust piece.
Then the advertising market going into 2024, it's a bit hard to predict, but editorially, Techabal is growing at gangbusters rate, crossed a million reader a month mark in October and repeated it in November, and that feels like a new baseline for us as a publication.
We have a newsletter that goes out to 200,000 people on a daily basis, a number of other smaller newsletters.
And it's been a challenging year, but also one with sort of some strong upsides, and I think going into next year, we're really quite excited about the, where the business is going and where the-- and, and thriving
the market despite what the market is. Because all the- Yeah... indications are that 2024 will also be a tough year. Great news. [laughs] In terms of the economy- But you had to pull back- Yeah, advertising.
No, I understand, but we can make it- Yeah... a good year in our, on our own. The economy- Yeah... we can't control. But you had to pull back on some initiatives, right? 19% is, like, pretty sizable. Yeah.
Like, it's hard to... So- It is... one was, like, Citizen, right? Explain what Citizen was and, like, why.
'Cause you have to-- I always figure, like, when times are difficult and you do have to make the cuts, it's important to make the cuts, obviously, looking ahead to what is going to be sustainable and growing.
And so sometimes you have to- Absolutely... stop doing some things that in the best of times you would keep doing, and it hurts, but that's- Absolutely... that's the way you gotta do it. Yeah. Okay.
So I told you our initial thesis was there's all these white spaces- Yeah... and we are going to fill all of them.
And so beyond Techabal and Zucoro, there's actually a whole slew of publications that are on the list to, that will exist one day when we have so much excess cash that we can afford to experiment with new publication a week.
And you gotta think about it a little bit like a Hearst or Condé Nast model, where it's just we're gonna have different verticals and serve the market-And that's our foundational thesis, and it's taken a lot longer to get to our third publication just because media is hard.
And so- Yeah... we started working earnest on Citizen, our third publication last year, early last year. And so we started hiring one stringer and one reporter and then like an editor.
Like, I'm testing out some of the ideas for Citizen early last year, and by late last year, we'd ramped up to a really s- strong team.
And Citizen essentially is trying to figure out what a US equivalent would be, maybe political, but with Buzzfeed energy. So- Yeah...
really talking about politics and, you know, the role of the citizen and what's the connection between government and the people, but with memes and on TikTok and on the street.
So definitely not political professionals, so not aimed towards like government insiders, it's more publication. And- Yeah... great publication.
We hired a fantastic team of people who are doing some super innovative stuff like gangbusters business on, uh, no numbers on TikTok and arranged really interesting distribution plays, WhatsApp, which is a big, which is a really big year.
I'm trying to distribute content via that. And then we came into this year, and as we started the year, again, we looked at it, and if you're gonna incubate a new publication, you gotta know,
sure, you're gonna go out and strike whatever deals you can, but it might take twenty-four months to really get to significant revenue, to really ramp up that revenue.
And again, that's the kind of thing that you can do and take the time to make happen in good times.
But in a really difficult economic year, we came into the year and it was immediate and it started to look a little bit dangerous, and then we come to the end of Q1, we review performance, come to the end of Q2, and the writing was on the wall.
And this is a great initiative, a great team, a great publication. The audience loves it, but it's not... And then it's political content, which- Yeah...
in this market is extremely difficult to fund and for advertisers to get comfortable with, with advertising against writing was on the wall.
And that was a tough call to make, to kill like a darling that we've been waiting for so long, and then to disappoint all these great reporters and journalists that we pulled from other publications and telling them that we are gonna shut this down.
But that's media. Absolutely.
And I feel like quite clear the reasoning for the public, for the team, and we've doubled and tripled down on our investments in Tech from Tech alum Insights, which we can see real growth there.
That's, that's how we're going forward. So what areas for twenty twenty-four are you most focused on? Is it around events? Where do you see the growth coming from? So I think events are gonna be really interesting.
Again, I think in the market where if you can differentiate yourself by imagination, if you can differentiate yourself by execution, events are a great business. And you talk about this a lot.
You actually have to look forward a rebooting newsletter on events. So yeah, always great to hear Brian talking about events with too much enthusiasm and respect anyway. I've done a lot of events. Yeah. No. Yeah.
I, I kept track of the stuff you did at Digiday with that.
So for us, events are really big, and there's opportunities where on the conference side, building something really high quality and then coming to understanding kind of the,
what is the value proposition for these things. You gotta have a really strong programming core and make sure that the core reason people are coming is solid, but you also gotta make sure that this thing is a vibe.
And it's, my wife described conferences as like spring break for adults and, or you gotta make sure, yeah, these things are, they're fun, they're worth going to, and whatever the networking and all that.
We think that's gonna be really strong next year.
And the conference that we launched, Moonshot by Decabal, the, the reviews of it through the roof and everybody who wasn't there this year have sworn they're gonna be in there in Africa Tech.
They're gonna be there next year, so that's exciting.
On the Zuko side, again, growing the portfolio of events, and we've got four major event formats that we've tried out now where our sponsors, our partners have a great deal of confidence in the value that these things bring.
And so you can grow that. And there's a market from a ticketing perspective, from a sponsorship perspective, from an exhibitor's perspective that I think is really strong.
Zuko is one of those publications that has a really strong audience, like we show up for everything. And so I think that's quite an exciting part.
And in the consulting business by adding a chunk of mile back, we've already reviewed, and that's what next year looks like. Got it. So I, I have one last question for you because like I run into Justin Smith- Okay...
and he always tells me that Semaphore is doing amazing in Africa, and I can never check it out. So I'm, I'm doing my reporting here. [laughs] Is Semaphore making any sort of impact in Lagos?
They hired, I don't know, Yinka Adegoke. I think that's how you pronounce his name. Yeah. So I know Yinka well. You know Alex, who, who reports. Yeah, I know the whole team. It's an interesting place, Semaphore.
Really, really interesting place. In every sense, they've got a couple hundred thousand subscribers across the continent. I am one of those subscribers.
It's a pretty decent newsletter with a unique approach to the market, and it's not a big business by any means, but they are Justin Smith's, the kind of business maker, business, a business person or a media person that can come in and sign a bunch of deals with a bunch of, like big industrial concerns or off of the brand and his brand, and they've got enough people and they can say, "Yeah, I think we'll use the decision makers."
So it's not a big publication. It's not something that the guy on the street is gonna tell you that he's ever heard of, but I don't think they're doing too badly. And as a product, it does serve a certain population.
So it's a little bit like going on the streets and asking if anyone's ever heard of Puck. If you're not in the media business, you probably haven't heard of it, and so you probably haven't heard of Semaphore. Wow. Nice.
Okay. [laughs] No, no. But Semaphore is going after, you know, the elites, I guess I would say. Yeah. So I think they're squaring their target-You've never heard of it, yeah. Yeah.
I'm just, like, always wondering when people- Yeah... from the outside try to come into new markets and make a splash about whether they're- They've hired a good team, and you gotta go, okay, I would...
Impact is not what I would say that they are having. It's a very small business. It's a very specific business. Yeah.
It might be a decent business from a financial perspective, but they're not exactly moving markets or moving policy or- Right... like winning hearts and souls and hearts and minds. That's not what they're doing here.
It's a business, and I, I had my reservations about it even as a business when they launched, but from what I can see, they're doing the business. Yeah. So as a financial play- Okay... it, it might be working. Okay.
I'm just wa- But yeah, I get it. I just wanted to check it out. Yeah. 'Cause when they had the Africa's Not in, Not in Africa, I was like, "What's going on here?" Not a fan of that. 'Cause, like, I... The...
There's lots of places in Lagos. I haven't been to Lagos, but I'm sure there's lots of places to have an event.
'Cause to me it's like you always win when you're from a different market going in a new market, you gotta decide if you're covering it for your home market or you're gonna compete in the m- the local market.
Meaning, are you gonna be a Nigerian- Yeah... publication or even a Pan-African publication, or are you gonna do people who are in the US or whatever who need to know what's going on in a specific market?
That's what I was interested in. Yeah. So I think Yinka's, Yinka's done this play a couple times. He was at Quartz Africa. He was at Rest of World. Now he's at Semaphore.
So I think he's got quite a bit of experience in covering the market for a global perspective, but also capturing enough that's new and that's worthy that the local audience will read it as well.
And he's got a team of people on ground who are pretty savvy about the continent.
Again, I wouldn't say they're breaking a ton of stories or the most unique or publication on, on the continent, but they're doing an interesting enough thing that they've got...
They're building an audience, a small audience. Yeah. I'd be doing some business against that. Cool. Awesome. Tomiwa, thank you so much. Yeah. Really appreciate you taking the time. It's my pleasure.
Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Thanks for listening, and thank you to Jay Sparks for producing the Rebooting show.
If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelp us and what Jay can do for you. Go to podhelp.us.
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