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[on-hold music] This is like our conversations at that weird WeWork that we almost got kicked out of. Yes. We could sense something was wrong there.

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Yeah, remember they complained about us because, like, we were on the phone? Yes, we were do-we were doing work. We were talking. We were [chuckles] doing work. That's a problem for some people.

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[chuckles] That's a problem at WeWork. Yeah. WeWork didn't like people doing work. No, they wanted happy hours and stuff, but not that. Exactly. Different era.

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[on-hold music] This episode is brought to you by xCo.

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It might be time to upgrade your video strategy. As revenue-driven businesses, publishers need to keep their bottom line top of mind when selecting an online video platform.

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xCo's new guide for publishers, Choosing the Right Online Video Platform, demystifies the selection process and empowers you with the knowledge and insights you need to make an informed decision.

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To learn more, visit x.co, or click on the link in the show notes or on the Rebooting newsletter. Thanks, xCo.

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[on-hold music] Mike, really happy you're doing this, really appreciate you partnering with me to, to thank- Thanks for having me, Brian... for Advertising Week. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a while since we worked together.

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Although we did during, during Cannes about, like, advertising. Let's just start with advertising. What- Should we? Remember, remember when, like, someone brought up Michael Wolff to me last night?

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It was actually, it was actually just at Adweek, uh, when we were there, and remember when Wolff would always have the, like, who or what is X? Like, I think we could do that about Advertising Week.

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Who or what is Advertising Week? Yes, not X the, the new platform. No, no, no. Yes. What is Advertising Week? I mean, it's, it's very, it's... Do you, do you re- I don't know. You were this is a side...

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I don't think I'm breaking any embargoes. Please turn every question around on me.

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But no, at, at one point, I, I wanna say, when I was at Adweek, they talked about potentially buying Advertising Week, and although I don't know if it any, it went anywhere- Oh, no, no, no...

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and the whole regime is gone. But uh- I just mean, like, as, like, these are, like, industry set pieces, right? Yeah. You know, they call them tentpole events or what- whatnot. Mm-hmm...

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but, like, I think about Cannes, I think CES is in that possible, I believe is- Trying to be... getting into that discussion, and Advertising Week has established itself there. So W- what is this sort of...

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I think we all struggle with it, have struggled with these kind of things over the years because we've sort of been cosplaying like these are news events. [chuckles] But they're not. You know what I mean? Yeah.

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Like, I can give you... All right, so, like, there is obviously- I, I don't mean that, like, there's no value in these things. There obviously is value in it.

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I'm just saying that, like, there's this play pretend aspect to it in which the sort of coverage of it is, is... Look, we, we get, like, d- we... I, I don't consider myself in the news business anymore.

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I don't know about you, but, like, you get deployed to act like it's a news event, but it's not a news event.

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No, and there'll be, there will be some companies that are, you know, like, scheduling some sort of news thing that is usually very minor. I would always...

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I remember I was, I would always recommend to PR friends, like, do not schedule real news that week because it's just gonna be in a zoo. That's funny because, like, I think you can give...

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They're all ridiculous on some level, but, like, CES has a purpose of, like, kicking off the year, and they're sort of close to all this new technology.

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People will say to you, like, "We nego-we negotiated our, a bunch of our plans early on," and then Cannes is, like, a midway point where we'll have discussions about the rest of the year, and that there's some, like, some real business reason for those things, where I don't know if Advertising Week has any kind of, like...

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I'm thinking this in terms of, like, there's no media marketplace that occurs here, I don't, I don't think, or a lot of, I don't think a lot of budget decisions are made.

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It's, it's definitely, like, a spectacle, and it's, it's definitely been a way that seems to bring a lot...

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I noticed, and this is not new, there's a lot of people from out of town, so there's a reason it pulls in people from all over the world. But what it's for, uh- You think it pulls in people from all around the world?

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I mean, maybe not this time of year, a little bit. I mean, I came from Florida, so maybe. Yeah, that, that's true. That's, that was, I was once far from the country, I think, I think at one point.

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But I feel like there's a fair amount of international people, not like, like CES obviously, like massively more. Okay, so, but what is the economic function, I guess? We, we're talking in circles.

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What, what is the economic function of Advertising Week then? I mean, is it just, is it a PR spectacle?

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Like, 'cause I mean, it has an economic function, otherwise it wouldn't continue because, like, you know, it got bought for a bunch of money, so it, it makes a ton of money.

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So what is the economic function that it, it plays?

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Is it just- I, I think it, it makes money for the organizers, and it's a, it is a total marketing orgy, and you've always, you always hear that it's pay-to-play like crazy.

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I can't speak to how every panel comes together, but I think it's, there is a h- every, every session is a huge moneymaker, and I don't know that it does, it brings in...

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I don't know if you could point to a lot of revenue that the presenters can derive from that.

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Like, I don't know if I, like, if, I don't know, Google goes in there and all of a sudden we can attribute a whole bunch of deals they made to, during Advertising Week. I don't, I don't think- Yeah...

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if you have ton of numbers. So what is, so what is the, I, so what i- again, like, what do you get out of it?

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Like, what is the [chuckles] I'm trying to get at, like- You're, you're assuming as if I, I actually get things out of it.

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I mean, I'm- So you think it's just, like- It's, I don't, I, I feel like every year I go, and we, and I'm talking to people, we're having the same conversation. Mm-hmm.

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So the location's terrible, can't find anything, you can't get into anything. The panel quality is all over the map.

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There are some decent ones, but then it's like people just saying the most obvious vague things possible, 'cause it, it's, it's not clear who it's for. For example, like, X changes how their programmatic IO event. Yeah.

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They know who that's for, like it is really laser focused and they're trying to talk to people, and then this is like all over the spectrum and I don't know if it- Yeah... if that helps. Yeah, I wonder about that.

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I mean, I don't wanna get too, like, meta, but I figure that this podcast, a lot of people- Mm... know these events, go to these events. This isn't, like...

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And so, and I think this is a question I end up having with, with a lot of people. We, we had a dinner last night, the rebooting had a dinner. He didn't come, but that's okay.

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We had a dinner last night and, you know, I was talking withThe CRO basically at, at one of the biggest digital publishers, I'll just say. And, you know, you get...

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You do the normal thing, "Oh, how's your advertising week?" She's like, "I haven't done anything." Yeah. Just, it's like, "I sent some people-" I got, I heard a lot about that too. It's funny...

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from our teams and stuff like this. So it is interesting that there is that feeling. 'Cause I think one of the things that came up at the dinner revolved around industry events and the glut that there is.

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Now, there always has been a glut. All roads in B2B lead to events. People pay for sales leads, and they pay the most for in-person leads, and there is the feeling that you get those in person through events.

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And it, it is a, it is a tool. It's, I guess it's, it's a nail. I don't know, whatever. It's a hammer looking a nail. But the, at the end of the day, you know, there is that function.

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To me, the economic function is, is that, is how it, it brings people together for in a, in a sort of marketplace dynamic. I think CAN is probably the best at doing that. I think CES is, is really good. I don't know.

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I think Advertising Week is more in that squishy, quote unquote, "thought leadership budget." Yeah.

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And that's why you're saying, like, the, the stuff about the panels, I don't know how they, they do the panels and stuff like this, but there's obviously a lot of, of sponsor involvement.

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You know, there's a lot of the technology vendors, uh, who power this industry in many ways who take prominent roles, and I think it can serve, like, a signaling function, I guess, when I, like, sort of cut through all that for what the...

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You know, I think we're both... I had Brian Weiser on before, and I was joking with Brian that he was, that he's, like, a, a, a quantitative-based analyst.

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But I think, you know, I, I fashion myself more of a vibes-based analyst because [chuckles] spreadsheets are- Different skills... not my forte. Yeah, and I think they're both important.

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But- Well, for- So when you think about, like, Advertising Week, and then the other thing, actually, I'll just finish that, that point, was that a lot of, like, the big events, like, I think the big events are actually gonna be in trouble.

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And I had predicted this, like, with COVID. I was wrong with, like, pretty much everything, so- Mm... take it with a grain of salt. [chuckles] Noticed that. If you did notice, nobody's been good. Yeah.

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That's the thing, it's like you can make sort of all sorts of like, you know, you know, predictions and prognostications, and you just have to, you just have to hope nobody goes back and, like, perfectly visits them.

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Yeah. At the end of your panel, you're like, "What happens in five years?" Like, you can say anything. Well, that's the thing, you never put, you never put a time horizon on any- Right... prediction that you make.

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That is the most amateurish mistake. It always still can come true if you just always have a- Yeah, you can just be like, "Well, I said Web3. I didn't say when." Yeah. I, I said it was gonna- Could be I don't know. Yeah.

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So Web3 is totally gonna happen. Sure. We're gonna be doing Advertising Week in the Metaverse. It might be better, to be honest with you. I bet, I think that'd be even lounger.

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You wouldn't have to go to the Manhattan Mall. Oh my God. IP Manhattan Mall. So yeah, but I think one of the things is these big events, I think, in some ways are gonna be long-term challenged.

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Now, I, I'm biased in that 'cause I'm n-not really building a business around these big events. But I just think when you combine...

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And I was wrong about, like, COVID concerns being, but when you combine, like, the reality is publishing is, I'm giving a talk later about this more with Less Era, it has been challenged for the last generation, and the last generation has been the best time to be building a business.

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Capital has been free. Mm. It was [chuckles] a zero interest rate era. Right.

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And if it was bad then, and then you look at the, the secular challenges that are coming down the pike, you know, traffic has already fallen off a cliff in most publishers.

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I don't understand, honestly, because again, I'm not in the news business, but anyone out there who is in the n-the news business, I don't have Comscore account.

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Okay, get a Comscore account and just literally make a table of everyone's traffic, okay? And you will see that it is down amazingly. Forget about AI coming down the pike. It has already gone. Before, yeah.

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So before any of that stuff happens that you're worried about with the SEO going away and, and, and conversational search- It already is going away. Google zero clicks.

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Are you, are you, are you saying is that primarily the ones that were built on social or everybody? Everybody. Everybody has been exposed. There's only like...

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This is what I find funny i-in some ways about this industry, is that there's a lot of, like, boogeymen being, like, you know, painted, like MFAs are the new, like, quote unquote, "boogeyman." Yeah, yeah. Right?

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And I don't know who is... I, I have, I have a suspicion that there's probably a vendor who is interested in, has a solution for MFAs.

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I remember when I first started covering, the early days of covering this industry, I covered, like, the direct marketing side of it, like email marketing, search, when it was just starting out and stuff.

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And there was this moral panic that I call about click fraud, and this was before Google went public. Oh my God, I forgot about Click4. Yeah, yeah.

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And there was always these r-these reports, and I probably wrote up one or two, because you're just desperate to get something out at the end of the day.

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There were these people in Asia just clicking all day long, and it was a secret scam, the whole thing. Yeah, there's people in India clicking all day, 17% of search clicks- Oh, God... or whatever.

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It was like, there was predictions that Google's IPO would be a total disaster because of click fraud, that the whole thing was like a house of cards, like. And we have seen these moral panics again and again and again.

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Yeah. And they never... And like, I feel like the guy, I mean, then again, I was like- But they're good business for somebody. Well, I was...

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Usually there's someone, and it was always like according to Click Forensics, and I was like, "Hmm." SDS, yes. "Gee, Click Forensics, what's your job?

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Oh, it's policing click fraud, and so you found that click fraud is a major, major problem." Right. That's a shame. With every ad fraud company, with the, the industry is losing six billion a year.

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You're like- And so-... "Well, how did, that's terrible. How did you find that?" [chuckles] I, I always find that when people say, like, "Whoa, you're very cynical," I'm like, "I'm not cynical."

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Like, I mean, this is how it operates, and I don't think, I mean, maybe it's just, like, accepted and stuff like this- Yeah... that a lot of this stuff is nonsense.

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But I think sometimes you have to really unpeel who is leading to a lot of these, you know, panics.

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And so around, like MFAs and, and stuff like that-A lot of the aspects are already being done by quote unquote premium publishers.

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The, the, the people who are MFAs are just like, the ones who aren't just completely stealing content, are just doing it to an extreme.

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To me, like that was the story about Ozzy, was that like what Ozzy was doing was kind of unremarkable. Aspects of, of the Ozzy model, if you will, exist within the most premium publishers, okay?

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Like, everyone buys traffic, particularly after social has, has gone away. Right. Everyone engages in arbitrage. Right. It's just the degree. You know what I mean?

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They just don't pretend that they're an executive from YouTube and call the [laughs]... That, that was, that was the- Yeah. No, no, no, there was the, that was the part that- Yeah...

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that Ben got, and I said, like- Right, right... you know, 'cause otherwise, you know, I remember we tried to break the quote unquote Ozzy story.

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I mean, like I had seen enough, I'm like, "Come on, this is nonsense," right? Mm.

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And, you know, I assigned that story probably three times, and each time the reporters came back with like a whole lotta not much, and so we didn't, we didn't publish it.

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Even though, like, you know, Ozzy had their lawyers involved preemptively, it's like it tells you, like they know. They knew something was coming, yeah. [laughs] They knew that this was...

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We just didn't get it across the line. We just didn't execute. Right. I mean, it was the right idea. Well, Trump's got a lot of lawyers, it's not 'cause he's a really good guy. Like, you know.

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Well, I'm not gonna- You have an army... you know, I'm, I, I, you know my Florida ties. That's right.

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But, you know, I just, I see this like aspect of the gambling in Casablanca with a lot of these, you know, recent, you know, the, the, the new panics, and one of them is, is this third-party cookie thing, right?

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There's a lot of entrenched interest that... I, I'm like, phew, come in, this is like a Joe Rogan meets ad tech episode. [laughs] Everything's conspiracy. The market for this is gonna be very small, but very deep, Mike.

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Yeah. But I, I see this happening with the, the disappearance of the third party c- we're going on four years of this thing. I think it was four years ago- Yeah...

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that I asked the, you know, Ivy Liu, the creative director, uh, at Digiday to, to do a piece of art of a, of a M&M cookie being crucified. Ooh. And I was told it was too offensive. I still stand by it.

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I, I wanna try and- It works. I wanna try to get it back. I think it might be this- You could do that in, in, uh, AI now. It might be two seconds. It might be Digiday's intellectual property now.

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But, like we're going on four years of this, and if you go... That's why I think when we started off the, this thing you did, the, like what's said in public and what's said in private.

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In public, it's gonna all be about the cookie and cookie. Okay, I had a private dinner last night. None of these premium publishers are...

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They're like, "Yeah, it's another like, it's another signal loss, but like, honestly, like could be good for us, should be good for us." Yeah.

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And the people freaking out about it are really a lot of the middlemen who- Yeah, if you had different-... aren't delivering a ton of value...

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table, different dinner with all ad tech, maybe middlemen, it might have been a different conversation, or they would just probably not tell you the truth, but...

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And I'm just reminded of this again and again, and I feel like, you know, like before Hurricane Sandy, I don't know if you remember, like all the...

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I think when Terry was really starting those videos, like he was do- he was making fun of like The Weather Channel for like- Yeah... making up storms and stuff like this, and it was like, ha ha, yeah.

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And, and then like Hurricane Sandy happened, and I was always like, "Oh, there, it's another storm," and then I was like- Yes... trying to like flee [laughs] my feet evacuating. Whoops. Sorry. Blown over.

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I, I was blown over on like Boerum Hill. And I was like, "Oh, well, it does-" Sorry, you weren't getting the sun... storms, storms do hit every now and again. But I'm reminded of that.

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Like, can you remember like when the IEB and like Randy Rothenberg was like getting up and like, "This is the death of democracy. Democracy is...

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If democracy dies, it is not gonna be at the hands of the third-party cookie." [laughs] Yeah, he was kinda right. He was right, but in the wrong- There's so many other things.

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Yeah, I don't think he got the culprit exactly right. Right, right. Yeah, back then it was all about self-regulation.

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It's gonna, it has to save us, or we're, we're gonna fix this, or we'll- Yeah, and then they just like-... 000 bank... turn on a dime, and it's like, "We need a national privacy law." I'm like, "Okay." Yeah.

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"Wait a second here, fellas. You've been literally spending 20 years fighting tooth and nail against any piece of regulation-" And now you're like, "Please." "...

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asserting that, like it was gonna destroy democracy, and the direct mail guys were sketchier, and it's just PII, nobody's harmed," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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And then the hands get forced, and all of a sudden, "Oh, we're pro-regulation." But guess- We've gotta treat people the ri- way they deserve... guess who, guess who that regulation benefits? Yes. The big guys.

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Regulation benefits incumbents, okay? Right. And the biggest incumbents are, are giant technology platforms. Guess who the biggest contributors are to the organization advocating for this?

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And so- Are you sure you're not cynical? I mean, it's hard for me to get around. I, I don't know. I guess nobody cares. Wait, hold that thought. Why is all the traffic down? That is interesting to me. Oh, SEO.

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I mean, look at Google. Google has been for the last basically 10 years, like the idea of the 10 blue links really went out the window a long time ago, right?

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And Google's- Yeah, if you look at it now, it really is unrecognizable. It's fro- Yeah, they're the zero-click searches, right?

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If you look at the number of zero-click searches, which is that someone goes to Google and doesn't leave Google- The movie time comes up right on the screen- They've gone-... or the weather or whatever...

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they've gone completely up. Yeah. Right? And so Google's interests... I remember I used to...

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Do you, would you do those, like interviews with, like, Google product managers that were a total waste, and they were like 15 minutes, and they read a press release to you?

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Yeah, they would give you a 15-minute window, and you'd have to, like, be ready and drop everything. And they s- they killed the clock.

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They read, they read the, the blog post- Yeah, 'cause everybody against pr- press releases, yes... because they were too cool for press releases, so they, they, they sent you d- a draft of a blog post.

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I'm like, "It's a press release." Like, "I'm sorry." Yeah.

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[laughs] And they would give you 15 minutes with some random product manager, and the random product manager would read the press release that was gussied up as a, as a, as a blog post, and then would make clear that any, whatever they were doing was to be- was in the, in the interest of users- Mm-hmm...

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advertisers, publishers, uh, all sorts of constituencies, but never Google was mentioned, [laughs] which I always found strange. Yeah, it was like, "This is in the interest of us.

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W- this is gonna make us a lot more money." I was like, "What are you, like, a United Way?" [laughs] Like, who's buying this? Yeah.

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You're like a nonprofit.Yeah, but like they've been, they've already been choking off referrals to, to publishers.

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And then on top of that, particularly if you're in the news industry, Facebook has just divorced news, and I don't... honestly, I don't blame them to some degree. I mean- Right... who, who wants any part of it?

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It- it- it's not in the company's interest.

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And, you know, these companies, I think it's a uniquely American viewpoint that we expect our, our, our corporate, our corporate friends to be the ones who are affecting societal change. It's, it's, it's bonkers.

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Like, it's not the job of companies.

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And I think that's one of the things that I think you hit on a little bit in, in your piece, I guess, on Monday about this, in that, you know, I think we're coming out of this weird time where, let's just say good impulses.

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I'm not... I can't judge people's motives. Companies are always gonna advocate on issues that directly impact their business. Sure.

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But I think because of a new set of employees and just the, a really shift culturally, a lot of companies really pushed it and, and probably got out over their skis. Yeah.

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And now it's not just that they're gonna piss people off. There are group that will take, that are act- actively waiting for anything to slip off, and they will amplify it like crazy and go and...

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Like, the Bud Light thing pissed some people off, but then it was, you know, fueled by everyone and their, every other conservative influencer just going after them purposefully.

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And then it's like there's like a playbook now that they're just terrified of. Yeah. And it's only, it's only gonna make them more skittish, I would think. Yeah. I mean, you, you see, I mean, this is like going to...

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I mean, my belief is the terrorist attacks that happened, and then the subsequent w- in, in Israel, and then the subsequent war that is happening in Gaza and is only gonna get worse, is gonna lead a lot of brands and publishers into a completely...

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Like, it is gonna be really, really bad because this isn't like, you know, there were a lot of like easy things. It's like, yeah, we're on the side of, like, equality and stuff like this. Guess what?

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You've put yourself out there, and you're gonna now need to start to take stands on every single geopolitical issue. Right.

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And your employee- Which are incredibly nuanced and kind of- You've basically instructed your employees that that is what you're, you're, you're all of a sudden Anthony... Anthony. Is it Anthony or Anthony?

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I think it's Anthony. Blinken. Anthony. Oh, I think it's Anthony, yes. He looks like an Anthony. Yes, definitely. [laughs] That hair. It's a, it's a statesman name. He's got amazing hair. Yeah.

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He's got total Secretary of State hair. Yeah, he's pretty dashing. He looks, he looks the part.

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But yeah, so they're, you- you're saying they're, they're, they're gonna be so neutral now to like a, to a hateful degree or every position on it. No, I think that they're, they're gonna be pressured.

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I mean, you saw this, like I linked to like, you know, McDonald's has like warren, like literally warring franchisees. You know, they've got like McDonald's in Oman is like raising money f- uh, for, for Gaza.

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Others are, are raising money for it. Like, it is getting- So they're gonna dive further in, you're saying. Like, they're not gonna be- I just think that they're gonna get pulled in... they have to.

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I mean, you saw, it's a very sort of fringe case, but with the events industry, like the Web Summit guy- Yeah...

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you know, went out there and, you know, officially, you know, made like a, a statement right after the terrorist attacks- Right... about like war crimes in Gaza and stuff like this, and, you know, he's been pilloried.

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Yeah. I mean, it might destroy that man. And it, I don't e- Which it was, it was always like a, a, you know... You know someone's gonna climb down when they're like, "I will not back down." And it was like hours later.

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Seven hours later. Yeah. My apology. And, you know, I think that is, yeah, something that, that is operating in the backdrop of a lot of these... I don't know, have you seen that at all with the, the advertising week?

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I know you probably haven't been, you know, from, into every session. Yeah.

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There's al- there, there's definitely a lot more of like, you saw there was coverage of issues like me- mental health, and there's definitely like a lot of still pushing diversity and, and, uh, inclusion.

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That's, that's the... Right. Yeah, I don't know that you're just, you were, be able to react that quickly to, like, the Hamas situation.

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But no, I, I don't, I can't say it was everywhere, but I, I see, I would, I would think there'd be more caution. It's interesting that you say that, that they're gonna be, they have to 'cause there's no choice. Yeah.

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I mean, I think people... I- I- I think most people will wanna be cautious. That'll be interesting to see. I, I could be totally wrong on this.

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But people are gonna demand, the consumer now is gonna demand it, that you have to say something. I, I think it's, I, I think what is sort of underrated is how, how responsive companies need to be

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to their employees and to the ecosystem, to be honest- Yeah... with you. Yeah. And like I think that is a, a challenge within this industry.

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That's just the reality of how companies operate today, and they're gonna have to figure it out. You set expectations, and you're gonna have to, you make in the bed you lie, et cetera. Right.

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The pressure is, is there now you- It's hard to, whatever, all the cliches. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, et cetera, et cetera. Toothpaste and the tube. Yeah, [laughs] toothpaste and tube.

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I love the toothpaste and the tube. The other thing is you wrote a little bit about retail media, and actually we're just publishing this two minutes ago. All right. And I find it fascinating.

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I got a, I got a response about retail media, the, the retail media piece from yesterday. I w- I won't quote the person. Mm-hmm. But we both know this person, and he's, they are [laughs] a veteran. I already said.

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He is a veteran of, uh, this industry and, uh, has had some very high up revenue roles. Uh-huh. And he said, "I think this is a much bigger issue." And that was basically about where this money is coming from.

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Like, yes, there's shelf taker ads and stuff, but, like, the amount of money going into retail media and the fact that in a post-zero interest rate policy era- Mm-hmm...

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these tech companies need to find high margin sources of revenue because they need to get profitable quick.

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You're gonna see advertising taken over even more by technology and retailers.That's my working theory Wait, when, when you, when you say this person said this is a bigger issue, the issue- It's a bigger issue for publishers.

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Like, it's not all coming out of shelf taker money. It's not all coming out of shopper marketing budgets that, you know- Oh. Oh, okay [laughs]... when, when...

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Like, so last night at the dinner there were some publishers that were like, "Listen, advertisers have no interest in having all of their money tied up in Google and Facebook."

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[laughs] Right Like that's basically what it comes down to. Right, right, right. It just doesn't make logically sense. They're always gonna want to diversify.

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Even if we can't perform nearly as good, it's just gonna be basically insurance. It's gonna be safety. Right.

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I think the issue is going to be that advertisers in many cases will in fact diversify from whatever the, the duopoly became. What did it become? GOFA or something?

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I don't know what- whatever it became, but they're just gonna add a ton of other people who have a lot of great first party data and particularly they have commerce information that they can, they can layer on to advertising to target it better, and that that is gonna [laughs] they're not gonna diversify by putting more budgets against banner ads on, on news articles.

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Right. Okay.

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So you're saying it, it might be good, you know, the publishers may have been okay for a while because this money was coming out of trade, shopper marketing, whatever you wanna call it, but now it's just gonna come out of general media budgets at some point.

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Yeah. And that's, and that's bad for the- Well, yeah... they, they can't compete on that. They don't, they don't have that kind of data or transaction activity. No.

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It's like I would always say in the, in the, you know, in the old days, like the old days, you know, trying to out Google Google is never a good strategy. Right.

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And- Yeah, trying to out Amazon Amazon is like- What I hear from publishers is they wanna...

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One is, one of the things that I heard last night, which it was kind of provocative, was, you know, top, top product person at a major publisher, I'll just say, and this person said, "Open web's dead in 10 years."

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Like, there's basically no econ- there's no viable commercial- Wow... strategy to operate in an open web based publishing company within 10 years.

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If you look at the structural pressures and the direction that things are going, I mean, just today I, I saw a report that, that Twitter is moving to, like, a dollar, y- new users have to pay a dollar- Mm-hmm...

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and stuff. And I think the open web is... We already see, like with, with Twitter not putting links, it's really, really challenged because Google was the backbone nervous system of the open web.

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And when Google starts to lose faith in the tenets of the open web, spraying traffic everywhere, and the idea was, our job is to get people off Google- Somewhere else... as quick as possible. Yeah.

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That was literally their job. That is no longer their job. Their job is to keep people on Google and Google properties. Right. Right. And nobody talks about this. Maybe it's because Google is their, like, main sponsors.

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I have no idea. I, I, it's hard for me to say. Again, I'm a little conspiratorial, but I don't know. So the open web is gonna lose that. It's gonna lose the cookie.

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It's gonna- Yeah, but I don't think the signal's like that.

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I mean, uh, you wrote a, a little bit about the signal loss and, and the privacy stuff, but you also, so like you sort of like, you know, took both sides a little bit, right? Yeah, yeah. It was wishy-washy as usual.

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You were on both sides. But I guess the- To be sure [laughs] I love the to be sure paragraph. That's, that's my journalism history. That's like- No, it's good... that's the backtrack.

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It's like, "Oh, shit, I went too far." Yeah. There's no es- I gotta cover my ass. Can't escape that.

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I, theoretically this is pr- like this retail media money could help the open web 'cause thinking is, well, all this demand that had, that, that these retailers capitalize happens on...

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You're reading about stuff all over the place, and you just decide to buy something.

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Theoretically you could, you can, you can already take Amazon and Walmart, all, all these guys who are like your target ads all over the place. Is, uh, is there gonna be enough there to help these publishers?

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Is that- No... or is it just gonna fan out like crazy? I- N- I mean, I just don't see... I think the, the thing about retail media is in many cases it's just search, right? Like, we're what, how many years?

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Like, 25 years plus into the commercial internet. The only really good business models for media have been search and whatever you wanna call what Facebook does, social, some kind of version of it, you know- Yeah...

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scooping up shit tons of data. Everything else has failed. Display ads have, have failed. I think it's time to turn the page on the display ad. Like, it's not, it's not gonna happen, right?

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Now, this is something that came up at the dinner, like there's no future- It's not, it's not an area that you're gonna invest in right now if you're like trying to- There is no future for building a sustainable and resilient media company based off of display advertising.

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On display ads. Yeah. I, I, I don't know if you [laughs] do, do you see anyone out there who is like, who is coming, it's like, "You know what? This is what we're gonna do.

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We're gonna rely on search and social, and we're gonna bring people to our properties, and we're gonna monetize mostly through display advertising." The only ones who do that are the made for advertising sites probably.

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That's their bus- that's the [laughs] that's their model. And, and so, like, how do you compete with the...

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You know, AI is coming, is gonna create, like, what Peter Kafka very poignantly called a tsunami of crap on this podcast. Mm-hmm. And it's gonna further, you know, challenge those models.

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So when I talk with publishers, I mostly hear th- them trying to get as far away from dependence on display advertising- Right... as possible. Right. And particularly open web display advertising.

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So that's why when people talk about the, the threat of the third party cookie, most publishers I talk to are like, "We want that to be a threat to, like, 15% of our business, not a threat to 50% of our business." Right.

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Right. Like, you can't control... Like, it's like a truism of business, but you, you focus on what you control, and, like, you make peace with the, the stuff you can't control.

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The reality for publishers is unless you're News Corp and you're, like, sitting outside the Competition Commissioner's office at the EU-Like, you're not gonna be able to have much, if any, impact on any of this stuff.

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So if most of the publishers I talk to are just taking a very pragmatic view and saying, "The thing that we can control is being less exposed- Yeah... at all to this area."

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By having just a more diversified revenue stream, better products, and things like that. Yeah, by moving into areas- Yeah...

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that, one, aren't reliant on big comScore uniques number, two, are not reliant on open programmatic monetization.

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Look, programmatic, yeah, it's just a way to buy ads and stuff like this, but we know what we're talking about. We're talking about- Mm-hmm... indirect sales channel that is enriched by data. Okay, that's my definition.

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And that's in flux right now. And so y- if you can't control the outcome of that flux, your best strategy is to cut down on your dependence.

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I had Jason Wagenheim from Bustle on here, and you know, when Bustle is talking about how 15... I forget if it was 15 or 20% of their revenue now is tied to ads on page. Mm-hmm.

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You know, when Bustle gives up on the, the scale game- When a big volume player does it, yeah... it's over. It's over. I mean, that- Yeah... the company was built off of that. Right.

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And you know, I d- I did, Brian came on, Brian Goldberg, always entertaining, by the way. Oh, yeah. He came on. He told me I'm not invited to the Nylon House, like, at Art Basel, which is offensive. Wow.

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He said I'm not cool enough. [laughs] That's, that's nasty. I know. I know. Anyway, that's fine. I don't wanna g- I didn't wanna go anyway. But what you're describing is, is a smaller universe- I didn't wanna go anyway.

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I know... uh, of publishers that can probably do well, like they're, they're going to not...

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If they're not gonna rely on all these things they can't control and only focus on what they're trying, that's probably not a b- as big a group as there once was. No, look, I mean, that's my thing.

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I'm, I'm, I'm giving a little talk after this at the Self-Serve Ad Summit powered by Dan Ads, and that's the theme of my talk. That's probably why I wanna talk about it with you right now, is, is just this post-SERP era.

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I talked about it on the podcast with Alex yesterday, and the, the more with less, so I won't repeat it. Hopefully everyone has listened to it. Hopefully everyone jumped on, actually.

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Um, but, but yeah, I mean, to me, when I look around... And this is... So we went around the table at this dinner that we did last... I keep saying we. I did, I guess, 'cause I was hosting it. Mm-hmm.

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But I had help putting it on.

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But I went around the dinner and I asked everyone, like, you know, something you're optimistic about, something you're pessimistic about, and the most common answer for optimistic was the future for niche media.

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The most common answer for pessimistic was a combination of social media and, and just disinformation. Like that, like, you know, people had genuine... And this was a private dinner.

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This was not, like, you know, trying to score points- Mm... on stage. And I think that is, like, sort of telling. It's both good and bad. Like, I mean, I, I've always been more in favor of niche, really. Sure.

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Um, but at the same time, I think it's, it's more, like, an acknowledgement that there aren't a ton of big independent digital media companies to build, at least in, in publishing. There just isn't, you know? Yeah.

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And we always talk about how bad it was to be in the middle, but now it's, like, really bad. Now it's almost unsustainable to, to be, like, the fifth-ranked news site or 10th-ranked travel site or whatever it is.

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It's really hard. Yeah. And I mean, there's gonna be... If people thought there was a race to the bottom before, like, there's gonna be a race to the bottom, but I think it's gonna be a different race to the bottom.

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The race, the race to the bottom's gonna be, like, how do you create leverage in these businesses that have lost control of their distribution? And the only way you do it is you gain control of your distribution back.

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Now, everything in life comes with a trade-off, and a trade-off of regaining your distribution and having a direct relationship with your audience and a direct relationship, for the most part, with your, your clients and your advertisers- Mm...

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the trade-off of that is scale. Yeah, sure. Like, that's the trade-off. Yeah. Right? And so I look at, I look at, like, Punchbowl as one of the biggest successes recently.

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I don't know how you feel, but I think, think it's one of- But yeah, but they're not, they never were trying to get 100 million uniques. I mean, they're, and never sh- nor should, nor should have.

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That was not their thing. No. No. They, they- Yeah... they, they generate a, a million dollars per employee, okay? And they've been incredibly cautious. I think they've added all of...

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They've been the biggest success, I think, you know? I- it's hard to know without, like, having the public numbers and- Sure...

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and stuff like this, but in my mind, they've been, if not the biggest success, you know, top three successes of new publishing brands in the last, say, five years, and they have gotten to $20 million.

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They've added, like, three pe- Like, they have been very, very cautious. If you look at Puck, Puck has raised, you know, you know, they raised that second round at a difficult time, and I know- Mm...

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some people don't like Puck and whatever. I, I get it. I personally, I like it. I like Puck. It's a different version. Yeah, a lot of reporters are like, "Well, they don't really break ne-" And I'm like, it's different.

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What they're doing is different, and it's okay. Like, not everything is, is being- Yeah... first to a story. Like, it's fine. Like, there's, this is a big world. They add value.

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They have veterans who are really, uh, skilled at their analysis and stuff like that. Yeah, they're plugged in. It's good. It's, it's kinda gossipy. It's kinda, you know- Yeah... whatever. I like it. And anyway, the...

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But if you look at, like, Puck, same way. They have not expanded rapidly. It's a totally different model than what The Messenger is doing, right?

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It's like build it and first, and then they will come, and, you know, I don't like to fall back on cliches since I've only said, like, 15 so far, but time will tell. What about Semafor?

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They just, just noticed- They had a one-year anniversary. Oh, they had a one-year anniversary. They, they w- are aiming really high. I mean, I don't know if we, we could tell how their business is doing.

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They definitely seem to be going more the scale route, but they w- I don't think they would describe it that way. They wanna build this big global brand.

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I don't think anyone is going the scale route, and, and that's what I mean. It's like even if people say that they have big ambitions, and everyone will say that. John will, will tell you that at Puck, and, and- Mm...

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he's told me that plenty of times, and Justin w- uh, and Ben will say the same at Semafor.

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And by the way, like, Jake and Anna and Rachel will say the same with Punchbowl.But I think the difference is when people are trying to build a, a new version of scale, it will be a collection of niches at best.

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Like, that's the only way you- Interesting... get to scale. You don't get to scale through PE roll-ups. The PE roll-ups are a disaster. It's a story waiting to be, be told again.

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Like, maybe I should start, like, a news publishing arm, because these- Yeah, you have to-... stories are ready to be told. You, you, you could join us. I should try that.

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I should think about, like, going into that field. I don't know, real estate seems like a better... Honestly, it's a better option. Their interest rates are horrible. You can't sell anything. Yeah. I don't know.

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I mean, like, you get a lot of foreign buyers in Miami. I don't know. Well, I'll- Yeah... maybe I'll, I'll decide later. But, you know, the roll-ups thing, they never, they don't work. They just don't work.

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And, you know, this is... We, we've seen an- another era of these, of these PE roll-ups, and nope, I don't think it's gonna work. I think it's a, a really difficult model.

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And I think if you look at the people who are making it work, they are a collection of niches, and they're built pretty much from the ground up. And they're not expanding super fast, but they're focused on profitability.

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You look at Semafor, one year in, I don't know, I'd give them a B- Right... I guess, I would say. I wouldn't give them an A, but I would give them a B.

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And I think one of the things that if you talk with Justin a, like, about what the business has been like, and the surprising things have been, is that it's a totally different playbook.

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Building this now, uh, what, what they're doing at Semafor, is completely and utterly, like, it has, like, nothing to do with, like, how you would go about building, like, back when Justin started Quartz.

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I, I don't believe he would disagree with me. Lucky me, meaning they weren't trying to get their unique numbers up, and they weren't trying to, to- It's impossible... be, be everything to everyone. It's not...

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The, the best thing, and the reason that I'm most bullish... I hate the word bullish. I'm, like, so full of clichés this morning.

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The, the reason I'm most optimistic about niche plays and new brands emerging is that you don't have the sunk costs of before. Mm-hmm. Like, and that's why I really admire what Bustle did with changing its playbook.

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I mean, it was, it was forced to change, and it would be disaster and suicidal probably if it didn't. Right. But that only could have gone on far. Yeah, very few people can, like, operate on a new playbook.

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If you look at, like, the big successes of Semafor, it's in areas like newsletters, events- Mm-hmm... finding a seam with, like, Africa. Yeah.

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Like, I mean, th- this is a different ballgame than, like, we're gonna open up bureaus all over the world, and we're- Right... we've got a giant newsroom.

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And if you, you know, that, that feed news era, you know, I know we all, like, mourned when BuzzFeed News disappeared and stuff like this, but, like, I think it should also be, like, a wake-up call that, like, no, this is not how you do it.

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Not anymore. Right. Good or bad, it's- It actually wasn't, it wasn't how to do it. It really never worked to begin with.

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It wasn't, it wasn't how you do it then, and like- Well, that's, you know, that's, like, one of the things from my talk is, like, you know, I compare it to, like, the DTC industry, you know?

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Like, the world really didn't need the 74 different, like, bikini DTC companies. This woman told me about, like, she was running one. She's like, "There's, like, 74 others." I was like- Jesus... how does that work?

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And the reason is capital was super cheap. It was easy to raise money. Google and Facebook were customer acquisition machines. Mm-hmm.

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You know, Chris Kimball from Milk Street was saying, like, it was almost impossible to not succeed- Right... at, like, e-commerce for a bit during that period because, like, it was abnormal.

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Like, you could acquire customers. You just, you just put quarters in and dollars came out. Right. Yeah. And- Yeah, and Apple really b- well, the interest rates thing, certainly.

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Apple really hurt that business by, by- Yeah... wrecking the acquisition of Facebook.

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And but the reality is those businesses never should have existed, really, if you think about it, because they were taking advantage of an abnormality that had, that was existing and stopped to exist. Like- Yeah.

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And many of them weren't really even brands that had a real connection with customers. They were just like pe- things that people stumbled upon. No.

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I mean, look, I don't blame them for taking the seam, but my question was always like, don't you have to build a real brand? I mean, you're just- Right... renting.

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And I think this is part of the reason why I really like focus, but I think you need to have a b- a slightly broader view of the overall, like, economy and society and stuff like this.

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I still maybe it's just liberal arts education. Mm-hmm. But, like, you start to see patterns, and we, you know, at, uh, at the time, Digiday had moved into this area with, with glossy and, and then modern retail.

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And I was, I was like, "Wait a second. You're renting Instagram's users, and you're acting as if they're your customers." Right. I'm like, I have seen this before. That doesn't seem like it's gonna last.

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And it didn't, it didn't work out well. Right.

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And- So I think something pretty similar ha- has happened, you know, to DTC, and I think, you know, that's, that's the story of our times is, like, the irony was that DTC people weren't really that direct.

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[laughs] You know what I mean? True. They were relying on another- Yeah, they had a, a pow- very powerful middleman, or it was really- Yeah. And when Lou started losing at the track and raised the price of Coke, too bad.

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Things change, yeah. Cool. Okay, so what's been the overall tenor of your discussions both this week but also just in general lately about how 2024 is looking? Look, Q4 is baked for most people.

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My conversations, it, it was, you know, the people who are being most honest have just said it, it was a terrible year. It was just a really bad year. Mm-hmm.

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And I was talking with one publishing CRO, and this person was saying, "Can we just say we're not doing as bad as other people [laughs] like in the category?" Right. Like, and that is the new, you know...

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It, it's not even flat is the new up. It's like less bad is the new good. [laughs]I don't know. Maybe I, I, I really do wanna be optimistic. That's inspiring. Maybe it's like being away from Florida. I don't know.

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In, in general, I don't think anyone's like, "Holy crap, we better start... Their economy's just gonna take off." Yeah.

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But they're like, we, we went, we went through the really, the, this constant uncertainty, and things are looking better. Yeah. Optimistic. But it's also, like it's not one industry. Like- I know...

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just I'm stating the obvious, but like if you're in CTV or retail media, it's been a good year, and you're probably like thinking next year's gonna probably be pretty great. Yeah, but I'm talking about publishers.

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It's a different ballgame 'cause there's, there's no visibility beyond like a s- a small period of time for that, that part of the industry. And that's still the thing that's tough for people. Like they- Yeah...

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I don't think, I don't think anybody can say like, "Oh, the whole year of '24." They're just like looking at first quarter, like trying to get through it. That, that- Yeah. I think that's- Like a general sense...

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the interesting part of like publishing is the forced short-termism, and it's so hard. It's easy, you know, to be one of the Muppets up in the balconies- Mm-hmm...

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sitting and being like, "Well, you should've seen this," you know? But like- Yeah... the reality of operating these businesses day to day is it's a knife fight.

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Like [laughs] it's a knife fight in like a dark corner- Yeah... for a closet. It's a hotel. And, and that I think...

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'Cause I guess what I hear is, yeah, there, there, there are these glimmers of hope, some like stabilization and whatnot, but something always comes down the pike.

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And the reality is digital advertising for publishers, content publishers, has been in recession this year. Yeah. Yeah. It's been in recession. The economy has not been in recession. Yeah.

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Advertising historically tracks the overall economy. It's something like- Right... I don't know, 3% of GDP and stuff like this. Now, I think both you and I, over the years, have always been part of like a growing...

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Like, you know, I would just like quarterly write, you know, the IEB [laughs] report, like, you know, digital advertising- Yeah... was up 70%.

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Yeah, it always kicked ass other than like a brief moment in 2008 or something. Yeah, it, it always grew. Yeah.

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Yeah, it was like the one quarter where it was down, but like there was so much sec- There was so much shift going on. Yeah.

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And that Mary Meeker slide and, and whatnot, I wrote about it earlier, you know, in talking with Brian Weiser and time spent. Mm-hmm.

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And the reality is I've seen some evidence that brands are over-invested in digital media. So if that's happening, I think the big outstanding question is, is this cyclical? Is this structural?

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And that is, I think, the big open question. Yeah. I think that's a tough one. Yeah. Is digital publishing like linear television? It's always gonna be a little bit smaller. Yeah, that's what I mean.

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Or is it like just a, a rocky period that's gonna settle in better? I, I- That's a great analogy, I think, because like for a long time, linear TV had declining audience and rising, you know.

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And it was like how does this make sense? Yeah. Like what is this? And there's like, you know, I'm sure you interviewed like very smart people who are like, "Well, you've gotta understand- It's a point, right?...

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blah, blah, blah." Yeah. And then like, and next thing you know, it's like the bottom falls out [laughs] and- Yeah. You know, these, these people didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Right, right.

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They were just talking up their own book. [laughs] I think that's the lesson out of this program. Like- Yes. Take that home, folks. All right, this was fun. This is like our- This was great. Thank you.

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This is like our conversations at that, that weird WeWork that we almost got kicked out of at La Brea Street. Yes. We, we, we knew things. We could sense something was wrong there. Yeah.

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Well, it was like they- But- Remember they complained about us because, like, we were on the phone? Yes. We were do- we were doing work and we were talking. [laughs] Doing work. That's a problem for some people.

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[laughs] That's a problem at WeWork. Yeah. WeWork didn't like people doing work. No, there weren't happy hours and stuff. It was not that. Exactly. Different era. Zero. Yeah. All right, Mike, thanks so much.

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All right, man, thank you. [upbeat music] Thanks for listening. Thank you to Jay Sparks for producing the Rebooting show.

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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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