[intro jingle] Did I hear you were fifty, the big five-oh this year? Oh, yeah. When did you turn fifty? Yeah. I don't look a day over forty-five. No. I'm gonna be fifty in two weeks. Oh, really? Yeah. So- Get ready.
Get ready... it's, like, a weird, it's a weird number, man. I hurt myself while sleeping. I gotta hear that story. That's a good one. [laughs] That's what happened.
Did you roll out of bed and hit your head on the night table or something? I was like, "I'm actually hurt from sleeping." Anyway, let's get started on the podcast. Okay. I... You probably don't want to.
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That is P-E-R-M-U-T-I-V-E dot com. Thank you so much, Permutive. [intro jingle] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.
We are continuing our CRO series this week with Jason Wagenheim, the CRO of Bustle Digital Media. I'm interested in Bustle because it's one of the survivors of the scale media era.
At its founding in two thousand thirteen, the Bustle playbook was very of the times. It was based on amassing big audiences in a very big category, and it was very display advertising focused.
The Bustle today is very different. It's far more focused on ways to utilize its brands beyond just putting ads next to content on web pages.
And I wanted to have Jason on to talk about this transition as well as the state of the market. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and if you do, I urge you to check out another podcast I do every week.
It's called People vs Algorithms. I do it with former Hearst executive Troy Young and former head of design at Airbnb, Alex Schleifer. And each week, we dive into patterns in media, technology, and culture.
It's a fun conversation. Um, we're just actually celebrating our one-year anniversary of this podcast, so give us a visit. And it has a far broader purview than this show, I think.
But it's also the context that informs how I think about the future of the media business. You can find People vs Algorithms wherever you get your podcasts. Just put in People vs Algorithms.
Also, send me feedback on that show as well as this show. My email is brian@therebooting.com and rate and review this podcast. Now, here's my conversation with Jason.
[intro jingle] You know, in going back over doing my research, Jason, I'm realizing you guys have a ten-year anniversary. Yeah. We just turned ten.
August of twenty twenty-three was our ten-year anniversary. It's hard to believe.
I remember being the publisher of Teen Vogue back in two thousand and thirteen, and there was an article, and I think it was The New York Times, it was somewhere like that, and it was about this little company, Bustle, that started up in Brown- in a brownstone in Brooklyn with seven people, and they had hit, like, fifteen or twenty million uniques.
And I remember banging my fist on the desk going like, "What-- why are we allowing this shitty little upstart in Brooklyn to beat us in traffic? We are Teen Vogue. We're a brand. We matter."
And fast-forward, here we are ten years later, and I've been here for seven of it.
So here's my Bustle origin story, 'cause in going back, 'cause I remembered it, it's actually before Bustle began, and I got a call from The New Yorker. Lizzie Widdicombe was writing a profile of Brian Goldberg. Mm-hmm.
And I had just started at Digiday, and I was like, "Oh, my God, The New Yorker?" I'm like, "I'm totally available."
And I know at least a little bit about how these things go, and so, like, I'm f- for me, like, I was optimizing to make sure you get in the article. And I could tell. I was like, "Okay, I'll give a... I'll..."
I'm thinking to myself, "I'll give you what you want," right? I'm gonna be the negative quote.
And so I was a kinda negative quote in the launch article, and Brian then sent me a note and was like, "Hey, let's grab coffee." [chuckles] I was like, "Oh, jeez." [laughs] He still talks about that.
I was like, "Oh, no." And then we met up at Ground Support in, in Soho, and I really liked him. And, um- Yeah, he's a great guy.
He's- But it was very funny in meeting up with him 'cause I was trying to, like, size him up 'cause of my, quote, unquote, "negative quote," which I don't really think was that negative.
It was mostly like, look, most people have one playbook, and the Bleacher Report playbook is this, and Brian's most likely gonna run it like, here, this is how I see it, and stuff like this.
And it was a very scale-oriented playbook, right? I mean, that's what Bleacher was able to get these big audiences very quickly.
And I remember meeting with Brian then at Ground Support, and luckily he wasn't like, you know... At the time, it was before he started his, like, workout kicks, so I would've been more scared [chuckles].
[chuckles] He's pretty ripped now. Yeah, he's ripped. [laughs] I think it was because they called him, like, doughy in the, in the article. Anyways- Yeah, it wasn't the nicest profile.
It definitely wasn't the nicest profile back in the day, and we've come a long way since. And he hasn't forgotten that negative quote. He still talks about it. It still haunts him, Brian. Oh, God.
I'm going down to Miami tonight. Maybe I'll go and try to make peace with him. Give him a call. But I think when I met up with him, I remember him, him being likeI'm really good at spreadsheets.
[laughs] Which, uh, it was stuck with me a decade later 'cause I thought it was, like, both hilarious, but also very indicative. And I think about it- Mm-hmm...
like, in talk, in, with this conversation because, like, the Bustle today is very different from the Bustle that started.
And I think about that era, and we've seen so many of the publishers of that era that are either zombies, skeletons themselves, or, you know, simply don't exist. But Bustle has evolved.
So explain Bustle today and compare it to, let's say, when you arrived seven years ago. Yeah.
Well, I think the tenets of what this company was launched upon ten years ago remain the same, and that was about diversity and inclusion and creating a women's lifestyle brand that could reach every woman coast to coast.
It was for the every girl. It wasn't just for the coastal elites.
You know, the Condé Nast and the Hearst publications were catering to tall, skinny white girls on the runway that donned their covers for the last one hundred years of time, and they weren't talking about body positivity.
They weren't putting people of color on covers back then. And Bustle launched as the other, and it was rewarded very quickly for that.
Fast-forward a couple of years, you hit the MeToo movement, you hit all of the conversation that we're having very positively now around DE&I, and we didn't have to pivot. We didn't have to be something else.
I remember Glamour very famously put Amy Schumer on the cover back in two thousand fifteen or sixteen and called it the body positive issue, and they caught so much shit for that.
I mean, it was a bit tone-deaf, and we weren't doing that, and we're not doing those things now.
Bustle today, I mean, the company itself is eleven brands, and we've built a platform to be able to ingest acquisitions and companies that we acquire or things that we build onto one CMS, and it's really just about, you know, very great, engaging storytelling and still again, you know, reaching every woman coast to coast through our social platforms and our O&O and the, and the dotcoms.
I'm really proud of what we, where we've come and what we've built based on all that. It hasn't really deviated that much. The editorial premise still remains very consistent.
I think what we're doing differently now on the advertiser side is, you know, there's a lot of innovation and things that we are doing that are very different than our competitors with our CMS and with how we distribute content for the content that we create for brands off-platform.
Only fifteen, sixteen percent of what we sell now is an actual media impression. Eighty-five percent comes from our studio work. That's where most of our revenue is really generated. So wait, wait, let me back up there.
So- Okay... eighty-five percent is studio versus ads on page. Correct. Yeah. We- Of some kind. We- That's the part I understand the preamble about the brand, right? But when we talk about what the business is- Mm-hmm...
now versus, I'll just go seven years ago, it's really different. Yeah.
And I just did this slide for our last board meeting, but seven years ago, eighty-five percent of what we sold, every dollar that we made was a media impression.
It relied on an eyeball going to our website so we could deliver an ad impression or an ad slot to fill an ad.
And years ago, with, w- as we started amping up our studio business, we realized that we had an infinite supply of inventory off-platform through mostly Meta, through Snap, through TikTok now, to be able to distribute the views that we, o-o-on content that we create for brands.
So most of our partners come to us now to create some kind of very rich, engaging story or piece of native or branded content.
It could be in a variety of formats, whether it's video or just an article or some great photography, or maybe it's tied to an experience or an IRL moment that we create.
The content from that is then distributed off-platform to Bustle or the ZoReport or Nylon's audience on the social platforms. And it's great margin.
We buy views for a certain amount of money, and we distribute it for, uh, another cost that we're charging advertisers.
In that cost is also the, the hard cost for production or talent or other things that go into it, and it's very lucrative.
And what I love most about it is, you know, as we enter this age where scale should be de-emphasized by publishers, we have an infinite supply of inventory off-platform where we can buy and distribute views for content we're creating on behalf of brands, and it works very well.
The engagement metrics on the branded content that we create is four, five, six times what it is on other more traditional media type of formats or things that are just, you know, for lack of a better way to put it, spots and dots.
But I mean, the, how do you make that work? Because, like, I think about, and we talk about this on the people versus algorithms, media models, and, like, media business is hard. It's just hard.
[laughs] It's hard now especially. Yeah. It's always been hard, and it's gonna get, like, harder probably.
But you know, the reality is, a lot of times media businesses have been front, I call them front operations for other businesses, and that, like, works really well.
And I think at its best, you know, Vice was like a front operation for a production business, right? I mean, I think for a while, BuzzFeed was almost like a front operation for an agency business.
And how do you think about the services element to that and, like, what the role the brands play and...
'Cause in some ways, like, having, when we talk about scale, having, like, a large audience to an O&O property is maybe insufficient these days. [laughs] Well, you know, I, I get hung up on the word scale.
As pedestrian and easy as the word is to understand, I sometimes lose it when advertisers or my team comes to me and says, "You know, we lost this deal because we didn't have enough scale."
But let's actually boil that down for a second.How long is a piece of string? I mean, scale can be as big or small as you want it to be.
People are buying impressions or views on a media plan, and they are very specifically gonna get that amount of impressions or views based on whatever they spend.
So I can deliver for you a million views of a piece of content or an ad impression, or I can deliver a hundred million. It doesn't really matter what my O&O traffic is or how much content I have.
People are only coming to pages because we want them to come to pages, and we've somehow either paid or through organic means, gotten our traffic to go to pages so they can view content or an ad impression.
So it's a complicated word, and I think that it's kind of becoming more and more irrelevant. Like, I can deliver for you as many views or, or impressions as we need to based on how much money you wanna spend with us.
So that's, you know, when I talk about de-emphasizing scale, I'd rather focus more on creating really meaningful content engagements and experiences and stories that we can do for brands that we know are gonna work and create a meaningful engagement with our audience, and then figure out how to scale that based on however much money they decide to invest with us.
Does that make sense? Mm-hmm.
It's literally, it's full on how we think about our business and why we think we are relatively insulated from some of the other outside forces that are impacting publishers' traffic right now, whether that be generative AI or, you know, what Google's doing to us or Facebook does to us.
Yeah. I mean, as, like, a narrative person, though, I love it because, like, to me, again, as the person who gave the semi-negative quote to The New Yorker sort of thing- [laughs]...
it's different from the original playbook, at least that I thought of, in that Brian and his co-founders at Bleacher were really good at getting traffic and putting up big numbers and then monetizing that traffic frequently through display.
And I think the test of it, I'd say with admiration, is to change up the approach because this is a different market than the 2000-teens, if you will. I, I mean, like this is Ben Smith's book, right?
I mean, this is Traffic. The, all of our sites, and I, and by that I mean the current version of the new media we used to call it. When I was at Conde Nast, there was new media and old media- Yeah...
back in two thousand and seven, eight, nine, Refinery and Vice and BuzzFeed and Popsugar. Bustle came along in two thousand and thirteen. The, all of those sites, let's just call it what it is.
I mean, I, I love the straight talk on your podcast, you know, that, that you, you have with, with your guests. It's all... It, it was all built on clickbait.
It was all built on writing thirty-seven articles about the solar eclipse. You know, I-- where to watch the solar eclipse.
I just watched the solar eclipse, and I think my corneas are gonna burn out even though you told me not to watch it. Like, I mean, we, like the, those days are gone. It's over.
Like, getting traffic and acquiring traffic, there are so many other forces and things at play that the game of, the game of gaming Google and gaming search is just long, long gone and long past us.
You know, we believe we're entering this new era of intention, where consumers and readers, whatever you wanna call them, audiences, are seeking out and very prescriptive about the time that they decide to give a platform, and clickbait is just a thing of the past.
Yeah. [instrumental music] So what does that mean?
Right? Like, so when you say like intention, not attention, I like that. It's a good turn of phrase. Mm-hmm. But the reality is for...
And again, I keep going back, like, you know, Bleacher and then Bustle, I always thought it was like very SEO-driven, going to get a lot of traffic through, I mean, this, the founding sort of story, I believe, of Bleacher Report really revolved around, you know, finding those pockets of interest that were out there.
And, you know, search, John Battelle had a great book, The Database of Intentions, and all that. It, it's, I remember that era like it was yesterday.
But w- we're in a different era, and I wonder then, what kind of competitive advantages does like a media company have out there?
Because like scale used to be a competitive advantage, and now you've got a lot of creators out there who can amass just as big of audiences seemingly without all of the infrastructure costs of media companies.
So what are the competitive advantages for like a media company like, like BDJ? I think it's probably threefold if I think out loud about it.
It is absolutely positively what publishers have been doing since the dawn of time, especially the Conde Nast and the Hearst, and now to a large degree, us and others in our space.
It's really about premium content, and it is about access to things like people, talent, celebrity. It is about experiences, creating IRL moments that bots and ChatGPT and other things will never be able to replace.
I think when you can triangulate those three things, you know, premium content, talent, and experiences, that is a differentiator for our space, and it's a place where we can create intention or meaningful engagement for brands with our audiences.
And I don't think that there's, you know, other platforms or media companies. Facebook and Google certainly don't have the access or the opportunity to create IRL experiences for brands the way that we do.
They don't create branded content. They don't have the studio teams that we do. They are really just massive scale plays and, you know, eyeballs at all costs and different types of engagement.
Our lane very clearly is about those three things and figuring out ways to bring those to brands and audiences. Yeah.
So take like Nylon, 'cause I think it's a good example, 'cause it-- when you think about really strong brand, differentiated brand, right? Mm-hmm.
But it's also one where if you were to look at it based on like the sort of fundamentals, I guess, you'd be like, "There's no future here. They're never gonna have enough scale to have like a real ad business."
Hard to see how subscriptions work, maybe some commerce and stuff. But talk to me about what the playbook is for a brand like Nylon and how you can make it successful.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because Nylon is the best example of what I'm actually talking about in real life.We acquired Nylon in two thousand and eighteen, and it was doing maybe half a million uniques.
It was doing a few million dollars in revenue. Now it's only doing probably two to three million uniques last check, but it'll do fifteen to twenty million dollars in revenue for us.
And most of that is coming from experiential, and it's coming from branded content.
So I'm not worried necessarily about generating traffic to nylon.com as much as I am about scaling and creating engagements on our social platforms and definitely experiences.
So we've created the Nylon House franchise, which pops up at places like Coachella and Art Basel. We just did a big event at New York Fashion Week.
And if I take this example of, you know, this triangulation between talent, experiences, and premium content, I'll take us back to Coachella this year.
We had Samsung make a significant investment with us out of their global team in Korea to activate on the ground at Coachella.
We created this massive immersive a-art display using some well-known visual artists and visual effects artists. It created this incredible just entryway into the event. We had thousands of people there.
They had this massive footprint where guests were able to trade in their iPhone and check out a Samsung Galaxy phone for the night and use the photography feature, which is something that they were really promoting.
They created a lot of opportunity to engage and just interact with the festival goers and the people that were at our event. And overall, we generated two billion press impressions just for Samsung.
Nylon House itself got seven billion press impressions, but the Samsung piece, as the title sponsor, was tied to two billion real impressions that we're able to tie back to what their activation was with us, and by all accounts, it was a massive hit.
There was also great content that we created from the event that they used on their own platforms and that we distributed on ours.
And it was a really-- I hate to use the buzzword, Alex would probably, you know, make fun of me for, but a three-sixty program. You know, like, one that was really well-rounded and kind of- Oh, God, Alex, earmuffs.
Don't, don't listen to this... checked it, checked all the-- And that's the way forward for us. You know, another great example, Brian, was Lexus last year. They had a new vehicle launch.
They had a campaign with Warner Brothers' Wizard of Oz, encouraging people to take the road less traveled. They created a ruby brick road. Okay. A ruby-colored brick road.
Don't take the yellow brick road, take the ruby one.
And we had a gender fluid fashion designer named Harris Reed actually create and then fabricate ruby red rims for a Lexus that then popped up at W's fiftieth anniversary party.
And there was just a ton of content and press and things and videos that we were able to create for Lexus that they couldn't get from Warner Brothers, that they wouldn't have gotten from Google or Facebook.
They came to us to do it, you know, as part of our studio team, and we knocked it out of the park for them. I mean, that's the kind of stuff we're focused on selling and, and, and activating now.
Yeah, I think I flicked at this in, in a newsletter too. Like I, I sort of snarkily called it... Is that a word? I'm making up all these words here. Like being a, a cultural general contractor in some ways.
And it's not a- Yeah, totally... perfect sort of thing.
But, like, the reality is there are things that a media company like Bustle can bring to the table, has the brand relationships, has the track record with them, has the infrastructure to pull this off, that this is the craziest thing.
There are influencers out there who would say that they had better reach than, like, a Nylon, right? Totally. But you know what's funny? All of those influencers are dying to get into Nylon.
They're dying to be on our covers. They're dying to be on Bustle- Yes... or the Zoe Report or W Magazine covers.
You know, journalism and editorial brands and whether it's the Condé or the Hearst or the new guys like us, it still really matters because our brands are at the center of these conversations that talent and celebrity wants to be a part of.
I'll reframe what you said, you know, how you put it, cultural moments. We are now a moment-driven company.
We are attaching our brands and our IP to major cultural tentpoles and moments that we can then leverage to create a deeper relationship and engagement with our audience, but also ultimately for our advertisers.
And when you can put those two things together in a way like I described for Coachella or Art Basel or these other big moments, that's where it becomes very lucrative for us, and we also continue to build a lot of equity with our readers.
They-- Influencers beat down the door at Nylon House. They can't wait to get into our party. They're not throwing these parties. That's our place.
That's our lane that we very distinctly own, and when we can monetize it and get the turnout, that's a win. Yeah, I was actually just on a different podcast. I, like, reversed it with Colossus Media.
I don't know if you know them. It's a really interesting company. No. Have you ever listened to, like, Invest with the Best, like Patrick O'Shaughnessy? Yeah, sure.
It's the company that does that, and they have all of these vertical podcasts that are really sort of expert-driven. I think it's a great area, so I was very happy to be on their media one.
But one of the things, like, after we finished the podcast, they were just like, "So let's talk about the ad business, the agency business." [chuckles] And the-- Matt was-- he's from, like, investment banking, right?
And so he didn't know anything about this agency world. And he got into it [chuckles] and was like, "WTF?" I'm like, "I can't explain it, to be honest with you." But the stuff you're talking about is very different.
And look, publishers all want, like, bigger and deeper relationships, and these kind of three-sixty, cover your ears, Alex, tentpole, whatever you wanna call it, moments like campaigns, they involve a lot of moving parts, and they are totally different than the churn and burn of, you know, look, the RFP is alive and well, and programmatic didn't kill it.
Nothing's gonna kill it as far as I can tell.But how does that change your sort of go-to-market strategy? So we put our studio business front and center in every one of our pitches. We excel in customer service.
We decided many years ago that digital media, to your point, is complex and it's layered, and it's really hard to do the stuff that we do. Not anyone can do it.
And we decided we were gonna be the company that didn't fuck up when somebody trusted us with their investment, and we were gonna focus on executing really well.
We weren't gonna be the biggest or the most broadest reaching or even the most likely to buy your lipstick, you know, next week at Sephora. We're just gonna be really good at execution.
So we built a studio team around that has an incredible reputation for customer service, and we've created a lot of endeavor and upfront partnerships.
Out of our top seventy-five accounts, a good twenty to twenty-five percent of them are on some level, always on. We're outside of the RFP grind, which sucks and I wish would just die.
It's so antiquated, and we're stuck in the nineties operating, you know, with transactional RFPs, and I wish honestly that would go away. I can get off on a whole different rant on that.
But it's the studio business that we lead with and our ability to execute and some of these innovations that we're going to market with.
We just launched a feature for Tyson Foods, Hillshire Farms brand that is a lunch bot using generative AI that will help you, Brian, figure out what you should have for lunch today and how to make the best BLT or whatever other questions you wanna ask it.
And, you know, is this the future of our business or are we gonna be doing a lot more of this stuff?
I don't know, but we're the first ones to do it, and we're there, and we're using and deploying these new technologies in ways for brands that they might not know or are thinking about doing on their own.
And that's where I see, you know, again, our place in this media ecosystem is to bring these kind of new technologies front and center, new storytelling formats, new ways to engage and reach with audiences that brands aren't gonna get from their NBC linear upfront or their big JBP that they have with Facebook or Google.
This is, again, something that's very differentiated for us and, and how we go to market. So we gotta talk about generative AI. Yeah. 'Cause again, I always thought of Bustle as very SEO-driven. I mean- Mm-hmm.
I thought about it as the expertise really that was in the DNA. I mean, Bleacher was built off of SEO. I'm just like, I just navigated over to like Similarweb.
In the old days I would pull Comscore, but they're not giving me anything now. Yeah. And it has like sixty-eight percent to Bustle is organic search. RGA is about half is search. Okay.
I think my entry into reporting this thing was back when there was like net ratings and stuff.
And I remember the first story I wrote, I like quoted net ratings, and I got like an irate email from a publisher who said like, "Our numbers are way higher."
And I had no idea at that moment in like two thousand that I, that [chuckles] I would repeat that moment like hundreds of times. "Our server stats are way bigger." I didn't know. I was like, "Oh, no. Really?
Wait, aren't you guys like terrified?" Yeah. So I, I will say that generative AI and ChatGPT, and I've heard you talk a lot about this with Troy and Alex and others in different podcasts, it, it's keeping me up at night.
Uh, Brian, I haven't felt like this since two thousand and seven when the smartphone came out, the iPhone came out, and I was at Vanity Fair at the time, and I looked at it and I was like, "Oh my God, we're screwed."
Like, this is gonna fundamentally disrupt and change our business forever now that you have this thing in your hand that is your phone and your social networks, and by the way, it looks beautiful, and there's these, you know, full mobile screen versions of our pages.
This is a problem for print, right? I genuinely do feel that way now. I don't know if many other publishers will admit it to you, but I'm gonna be fifty and, you know, can give two fucks these days. Yeah.
That's the best part. I, I think- That's honestly, it's the best part about getting over forty is like- I'm telling you... you just, you really care a lot less about- You just tell it like it is.
I, I think in the, in short order, and by that I mean the next, you know, one to three years, let's call it, you will be searching for something, and you will get a definitive single article that has stolen and culled information from thousands of sources, including ours, and you won't have to go to bustle.com and get an ad impression delivered to you and a view.
It is going to be very disruptive, and I'm losing sleep over not this quarter or this year, that is weird in itself.
It's really about how we re-resource and think about the company differently, so that the things that we do really well, like our access to talent and celebrity, like our access and ability to create premium content for our audiences and our brands, and like the experiences we create, those are things that generative AI and Chad and whatever you wanna call it, Bard, Bing, et cetera, won't replace.
So we're leaning more heavily into those things because I do feel a great disruption in the force, and I think the traffic for publishers like us is probably going to continue to decline.
When you mention and think about the forces at Google and Facebook and other places that we get traffic from, they're also making it harder for us. You're seeing what Google is doing to news in Europe and in Canada.
It's just the beginning.
So I feel the tsunami coming, and I think the best thing that we can do as a company is be very aware and start to, you know, one, put sandbags in front of the doors, but also figure out how we're gonna rebuild and rethink our business in the years ahead.
Yeah. And that's what we're doing. Well, I think when the tsunami is coming, the animals always run inland. That's how you know the tsunami is coming. You just like look.
If a bunch of animals are running like away from the water, something's up.
[upbeat music] And so I mean, you can g- like, I think that's part of like going towards activations and, and more services and production, is that it's more protected fromGet traffic from Google, monetize through basically Google, you know, served ads and stuff, rinse and repeat, and it's all good.
I mean, I think, again, back to that New Yorker article, you know, in it, there's this quote about how Bustle's already creating sixty articles a day, and, you know- Mm-hmm... how jealous they were of that.
And that's a playbook that lasted for a long time, and that playbook is not gonna be very applicable for much longer, I don't think. It's, it's over, Brian. It's over, and it's been over the last couple years.
I think that it's only some are just starting to realize it. But, you know, call it what it is.
It was clickbait back then, and we wrote, you know, thirty articles about what happened on The Bachelor last night and had some of the biggest days in search that we ever had.
That's not a current meaningful way to create engagement with an audience anymore. There's a lot of ways to get that content.
Social has changed a lot of that game, and we got up to doing about three hundred articles a day, like, long after that New Yorker article, and I, I would venture a guess. I don't- That's not that bad.
The height was Huffingpost. I think it was a thousand. Yeah, that's insane. But think about the machine required to bang out three hundred, three hundred and fifty articles a day.
I mean, we're a bigger organization now because we have eleven sites and not just one or two.
But we're probably as a team now, I mean, a, a, a portfolio, we're probably doing sixty to seventy a day, maybe, and I think that's a much more healthy number across eleven sites, six, seven articles a day.
I'm, I'm venturing an educated guess, but it's probably in that neighborhood. And the content that we are producing is not thirty articles about what happened on The Bachelor last night.
There's probably one, and it's really good, and you'll find it on search or your social platforms, but we don't need the other twenty-nine. Those days are over.
And I'm glad we've evolved as an industry because I don't know how sustainable that model ever really was. The, the crack cocaine that is traffic and Google search. Like, we, we were too reliant on it for many years.
Yeah. So let's talk about this year, and I wanna get your read on the rest of the year.
I mean, Bustle's not immune to the trends of the industry, and you guys have had, I think, a series of cuts over the last year, and that's not unique. That's the environment every publisher has had to do that.
That's why I think that in some ways we're going into a more with less era, and you need to refactor the business to fit the environment. Obviously, the first half of the year was pretty rough out there, right? Yeah.
It's-- This is not a great year. It's the weirdest, most volatile time I've experienced in almost thirty years of doing this, to be honest. Uh, we will be down this year in revenue.
Um, it's the first year we've ever been down in our ten-year history. We've had this just rocket ship growth. We've grown, you know, low to mid-double digits every year since I've been here.
We were a twenty-five million dollar company when I started seven years ago, and we're a hundred and seventy-five or so million now. But this is the first year that we'll be down, and it's due to a lot of outside forces.
The macro sucks right now.
If it's not supply chain or inflation, it's war in Ukraine, or it's just the stomach ache that marketers get when they read a bad headline in the Wall Street Journal about one of their competitors.
They're very reluctant and hesitant to spend money, and they're releasing dollars very late, which makes what we do even harder because we need time to be able to produce the type of work that we do.
We're not programmatic. We're not linear television. We don't just ch-- you know, hit buttons and ads go live. We spend many weeks, if not months, producing the work that we do.
So timelines are super compressed, and it's been v-a very challenging year to do what we do best. Certain categories are suffering more than others. Automotive is booming after a couple years of not. Tech has the flu.
It's been a tough year in the tech category. Our big retail and fashion categories are v-very mature for us, and they're experiencing much more nominal growth than some of our growth categories are. So it's a mixed bag.
I mean- But how much, I guess, what I'm trying to always get at when I hear this stuff is like, how much of it is, like, cyclical versus, like, secular? You know what I mean? Yeah.
Like, is there-- Because we see a lot of... Like, for instance, like in cable, like, that's a secular problem. Like that- Big time. Big time.
And I think in digital publishing in some ways that we don't fully appreciate or many people don't fully appreciate that this is kind of a matured industry.
Like, I can remember every, like, four times a year, I would write the, like, IAB, and it's, like, always up, and, you know, it's like, you know, it grew thirteen percent, fourteen percent.
And, you know, people complained about the duopoly, but, like, it's an oligopoly, um, now. It's, like, even worse. I mean, like, the money comes from somewhere, and it- Yeah...
you know, Instacart, it's not all shelf taker money that's going into retail media. You look at streaming now. People-- You can argue, and I, I think there's a good case to be made.
There's all the people flocking to streaming. It's usually just because, like, the measurement hasn't caught up. So nobody's able to tell if they're getting what they paid for.
But how much of the challenges do you think are just the new reality, or is it, or how much of it is just economic uncertainty?
Even if we haven't had a recession and the economy has really held up, advertising is always weird and fickle. Yeah. We are in an ad recession. I don't know if anybody's formally said that- Yeah...
or it's official or what even makes something like that official.
I can just tell you by what I do every day and talking to my other CRO friends in the business, there is this general recession from the boom that we've experienced the last few years.
Twenty twenty was ironically one of the best years we ever had. Yeah. And, you know, things like profit and revenue growth and everything else, it w- it all came roaring back in the second half.
I would answer your question by saying I think it's cyclical. I think that we are in this weird cycle in time. We're all waiting for some other shoe to drop that hasn't yet, and I don't know if it will.
But again, I think marketers are a bit fickle. CMOs get influenced by things like headlines and CNBC stories, and their business is probably not as bad as what the headlines might indicate.
American Eagle, who's a, you know, good friend and partner of ours over the years, they just reported massive earnings relative to what they thought they were gonna do for their Q2 or Q3, whichever they just reported.
I guess it was Q2. And there's a lot of other great cases like that.
I do think we are headingTo your question, to a secular change in what media looks like, and a lot of that will come with whatever becomes of generative AI in the next couple phases of it that we're going through.
I think publishers have to take on the big platforms, and there needs to be new legislation and policy around what people can and can't do with our content for free.
I really believe these platforms and these, you know, open AI and other things are stealing from us legitimately. It's theft.
It is grand larceny, and I think we have to figure out a way to take them on with the resources that we have to create new policy and legislation, 'cause none of this was contemplated with all of the digital copyright acts from the nineties.
Yeah. So why not block 'em? I think there's this Wild West time of figuring it out and what it all means for us.
I don't know if that's the right answer or the wrong one, but I think that we're being too reactive, and I think we all have to take a step back and figure out, like, what does this look like moving forward, and what is our role versus theirs versus the big platforms.
Yeah, it's a tough one because, I mean, I think that The New York Times, like, has a certain amount of leverage, and the reality is, like- They're not taking it on, though...
a lot of, like, lifestyle brands are not gonna have the same leverage. The same reason when people- Totally... talk about subscriptions as the be all and end all, I'm like, "You're not gonna put up a paywall on Bustle.
It doesn't make sense that you would do that." We never would. It, it-- People aren't gonna pay for our content.
And by the way, like, Condé Nast made a decision many, many years ago to make all their money off of advertising and not subscriptions. The only thing that makes money at Condé Nast is The New Yorker.
You know, it's a hundred and twenty, hundred and fifty dollars a month for all access at The New Yorker, and everybody pays for it no matter how much you charge them. The other brands aren't like that.
You can get Vogue for eight dollars a year. Yeah. Probably for free if you want. And then it runs out, and you're still gonna get it. [chuckles] Yeah. But we're not gonna play that game.
And I think we also-- we're a relatively small to mid-size lifestyle publisher. We're not gonna take on Google or OpenAI.
There was a lot of talk, I don't know if you heard about it, from several of the big guys, News Corp, IAC, New York Times, Future, Steinberg was involved in it for a while, Vox, and signing up for a little consortium of publishers that would together take on the industry and figure out how to create some new legislation and policy or at least begin lobbying for it, whatever that means, and it all fell apart.
I don't know how many of the big guys, you know, The Times, News Corp, et cetera, really have the appetite to take it on.
W-we, we could go back to the record industry in the nineties and the early two thousands with, you know, trying to sue Napster. We're, we're in that very similar time right now for an industry, right?
It's an inflection point. Yeah. We can either figure out how to get on the same side of the table with them and figure this out together, or we can try and sue our way out of it, and I don't see that happening. Yeah.
It's actually something I've thought about writing about is, yeah, the music industry actually came mostly over to the other side, and, you know, they did it through, you know, a lot of, like, hard work.
But I think what's going on right now with Universal Music Group and, and how they're approaching AI is kind of instructive in some ways, in that music industry went first and publishers have to, you know, learn from the music industry because they tried suing Napster out of existence.
And it was only when they changed their, their models. Touring [chuckles] is a major part of the music industry, and I think that is indicative of what the strategy it seems like there is.
Napster is not going to take away touring. Like, it's just not. And I don't know, maybe a lot of these stars don't wanna, like, be out, like, on tour a hundred and eighty days a year. Yeah.
But, like, that's the business, baby. Yeah. Look at Taylor Swift's story right now, right? Yeah, not bad. Not bad. Not bad. She's not doing so bad. Yeah. The music industry could learn from that.
I don't think there's gonna be that many Taylor Swifts of the publishing industry, but I'm, like, reading, like, the economic reports and stuff like this, and there's always a Taylor Swift paragraph.
Like, she impacts, like, employment numbers [chuckles] and stuff. I know. It's pretty insane.
I mean, her movie I just saw is projected to be, like, the largest opening film of all time when her tour movie comes out in October. But there's only a few of those, right?
You know, you can't have a million Taylor Swifts.
Let me ask you this, and something that it doesn't seem like you guys decided to bet on, and I wonder sometimes, and you know in this, I joke that the industry is a lot of times it seems to me like one of those, like, children's soccer games where if the ball goes to one part of the field, like, there's a clump of kids around it, and it goes to another.
[laughs] And the, the ball was, like, the...
I think for a lot of times, and you know how this goes in this industry, there's all these things that's new incremental revenue streams that people mistake increment-- Incremental means small.
Mistake for replacing the hole that, um, is gonna be left when display advertising erodes as it has been. I wonder if commerce is one of those sort of false hopes in some ways.
I mean, you saw it with Barstool, and a lot of people did the high fives with Portnoy being able to trade the asset a couple times.
But the reality is that deal didn't work, and it doesn't seem like you're betting much on the commerce.
I'm glad you bring it up because I, I think it's-- it comes with the self-awareness that maybe age and wisdom comes with at, at the same time.
We were that kid on the soccer field following that ball for two or three years, twenty twenty, twenty twenty-one. Everybody was home. E-commerce sales were just booming.
We all read those headlines, and we created an opportunity for our readers to check out natively on our site. So the thought was, "Okay, we're curating product like magazine editors have done since the dawn of time.
Here's a list of things you should buy. And by the way, you can also check out right here, and we'll take your credit card, and we will have our, you know, the vendor ship you the product directly."
But we created storefronts, and it bombed.
We had, you know, fifty, sixty million views on products and engagements, but when it came time to actually put in your credit card and check out, our readers basically told us through inaction that they weren't gonna check out on Bustle for a product, that they'd rather go to Amazon or Target or Walmart or wherever it was.
So that was a good eighteen months of a test and learn opportunity that didn't go our way. And I haven't seen yet.
I'm pitched all the time.Shoppable video and all these shoppable native content integrations and commerce integrations. This is why you should have come to the Curve Cafe at Cannes. I, I walked by it a few times.
[laughs] It was popping. I couldn't get in. Yeah. Velvet rope. So it's very, it's very challenging to get our readers across the finish line.
I'll tell you what we do really well is our, our affiliate business through mostly Amazon, about ninety, ninety-five percent of the, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of product that we do sell every year comes through Amazon links and creating hundreds, if not, you know, a thousand-plus articles a year on stupid shit you didn't know you needed on Amazon, but we're gonna tell you why you need it.
That stuff drives real GMV on Amazon, and we make a nice commission off of doing that, and it is a healthy, you know, growing part of our business.
And there's other things like Skim Links and things that work, but again, it's really just about editorial activated to be able to drive product, not checking out on our sites.
So let's just be self-aware and call it what it is. Yeah. It's understanding what you're good at versus, like, what sounds good and you see, you see things. Well, this makes a lot of sense on paper.
We can be this, we can be that. And, you know, sometimes people are not in that mindset necessarily and don't associate your brand with making transactions.
Like, I think we all sort of have that experience of like, "Oh, I'm just gonna go to Amazon." And some people- It's cool. It's stunty. It's cool. I'll tell you the other thing that goes along with it is live shopping.
So everybody's on the live shopping bandwagon. We've done some really cool programs for Walmart. We did something for Visa.
We've done it for some other brands, and they look amazing, and we get our editors all glammed up, and they go in front of a camera, and they talk for an hour about best looks for spring, or here's your music festival looks, or here's your holiday hotline, whatever.
And you know what? We have, like, five hundred people on. Two hundred of them are BDG staff who is-- who has to be there to watch. And we sell, you know, maybe ten or fifteen thousand dollars worth of product.
Like, it's cool, and it's stunty, and it gets a Digiday headline. But is it really moving the needle? Like, is it really moving people down the funnel? Not so much.
I think these things are still mid to upper funnel, you know, stunty nice-to-haves rather than meaningful commerce executions.
I'm glad you say that because maybe some former colleagues at Digiday [chuckles] will listen because I would- And I love those guys. They still write those headlines. At our stand-up meeting, I'm like, "Seriously?
Does anyone care about this? Do they even make any money on this?" [laughs] Awesome. Let's leave it there, Jason. This was a, a lot of fun. Really appreciate you taking the time.
Great to see you, Brian, and thanks for all the work you do. I l- I love how you cover our industry.
I love the podcast and the newsletter, and I'm grateful that people like you are reminding me to start covering our business the way that you do. So thanks. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening.
Thank you to Jay Sparks for produ- If you have a podcast that- You should check out Podhelpus and what Jay can do for you.
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