I never said I was the smartest person in the room. Oh. I just said that- I don't know. I mean, eight to ten BuzzFeeds, you're smart enough. W-we'll see.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.
Each week, I discuss where the media business is going next with interesting people building interesting companies.
This week, my guest is Sean Griffey, CEO of Industry Dive, which against many people's bets, might emerge as one of the biggest success stories of publishers founded in the early 2010s.
But before I get to that, a quick message from the Rebooting show sponsor, Kurv. We are gearing up for three days of programming from the Kurv Cafe in Cannes next month in case you are heading to the Riviera.
And if you are, I hope you will join us there. You can find a link to the schedule in the show notes.
Kurv is an AI-powered video creative technology that creates shoppable and immersive experiences within any video content.
Kurv's tech can recognize depth, dimension, and objects within the video to make it dynamic and interactive, such as allowing people to buy items within the video.
I'll drop a link to the demo of Kurv's tech at use with NBCU's Must Shop TV. This is something I've heard about for a good fifteen years, but now we have the technology, or more specifically, Kurv has it.
This opens up a new way for publishers to make money from their videos to either complement or replace in-stream ads with in-show monetization.
And it's all trackable, so advertisers optimize campaigns quickly and easily for better results. We're gonna be showing this off at the Kurv Cafe in Cannes.
But again, you can also find out more about it and see it in action by following the link in the show notes, or by visiting kurvit.com. That is K-E-R-V-I-T dot com. Thank you so much to Kurv.
They've been great supporters, and I really appreciate it. There's a lot of boom and bloom in the air these days about the media business.
The pandemic bazooka of government cash into the economy and the era of rock bottom interest rates are in the rear view mirror.
And straight ahead is the prospect of AI living up to its billing as the most consequential tech shift since the internet itself, which, let's face it, didn't actually turn out to be so great for large swaths of the publishing industry.
So over the next couple weeks, I wanna highlight models that are working. And B2B is one sector that is emerging from the wreckage of the past generation of digital publishing.
Now, the business models in B2B are less flashy, generating leads for tech companies via webinars, white papers, and e-books, putting on vendor-driven events, and wading through complicated and even esoteric issues.
And to many, B2B is boring or even in some aspects unseemly, since trade publications, uh, were... always had a reputation that-- of having a cozy relationship with the companies and the sectors that they cover.
It was hardly thought of as the journalistic ideal of speaking truth to power. But I think that view is changing. Now, I've spent my career in B2B media, and I appreciate that you need to go narrow and deep in B2B.
Over the years, I've found B2B, B2B to be something of a sanctuary from the travails of the broader publishing industry.
There were tweaks to the models, but for the most part, B2B isn't about bold proclamations that you will reinvent journalism because it's broken. It is, at its essence, mostly about execution.
Last week, I traveled to Washington, D.C. to record a podcast with Sean Griffey, the CEO of Industry Dive.
I've known Sean and Industry Dive for a long time, mostly because two of its publications, Marketing Dive and Retail Dive, were in areas in which my previous company had publications itself.
Sean was also the rare CEO who would come onto my previous podcast and not rattle off a bunch of talking points.
Now, the big numbers he talked about weren't Facebook video views or Comscore uniques genned up through traffic assignment schemes. Instead, he spoke about revenue and, imagine that, EBITDA.
Industry Dive went on to be bought not once, but twice.
First, in a transaction to growth equity firm Falfurrias Capital in two thousand and nineteen, and then last year in a deal to events giant Informa that Axios reported put an enterprise value on Industry Dive of five hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
Now, to put that in perspective, that would mean Industry Dive was valued at over two Vices and five BuzzFeeds. What Industry Dive got right is something I've covered previously.
I was long impressed by Sean and Industry Dive's management's ability to stay focused and disciplined in their business model. In B2B, the pull to do events is strong.
That's because B2B doesn't have advertisers per se, but marketers. And B2B marketers serve to get their sales teams prospects. That leads many B2B publications to go heavily into events.
At one point during my time at Digiday, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget backhandedly described Digiday as an events company with a website. It bothered me because it was strictly true in the business sense.
Events were the overwhelming majority of revenue.
But Industry Dive skipped events because it was very good at building publications in high-value industries with tons of regulation and tech-driven change and acting as a critical marketing partner.
That isn't revolutionary, but it is hard to execute. Another aspect that impressed me with what Industry Dive did was that it executed its playbook not once, but across multiple industries.
It didn't wait until it perfected its playbook in one industry and then move on to another one. Because as Sean told me, you'll perpetually put off expanding because you'll never feel like you've nailed the first one.
Building a leading publication in a single industry is hard, and also has... but it also has fairly low ceiling.
If you're trying to build a big company, and I tend to think more people should be okay building a great company that's smaller, you need to do it again and again in other industries.
And Industry Dive was able to pull that off.And finally, I think there's something to be said about how Sean and his team went about building their work without the PR nonsense.
I hope that of the many things that are left behind from the previous era is the out-of-whack ratio between the sizzle and the steak. The fake it until you make it approach always struck me as a terrible strategy.
Ask Ozzy. That's why I think smaller media companies will emerge that are, for lack of a better word, more real. Not a bunch of puffery and smoke and mirrors.
Instead, they'll go about the hard work of execution because as Troy Young said in the People versus Algorithms podcast I also do, "Breaking news, guys, you don't deserve to have a media company just because you want one.
Instead, you have to work for it." I hope you enjoy this conversation with Sean. You'll have to excuse some audio difficulties we had in the beginning. These things happen.
And we thank Industry Dive for hosting us as part of a MACMA program. MACMA is an industry association. It stands for Media, Advertising, and Content Marketing Association that I'm on the board of.
This is part of the group's outreach. You can find out more about MACMA at the-macma.org. Hope you enjoy the conversation. [upbeat music] Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today.
I'm Lisa Pistilli, the president of the Media, Audience, and Content Marketing Association.
I am excited to present to you guys today a live recording of the Rebooting podcast with Brian Morrissey and Sean Griffrey from Industry Dive. I wanna thank you all for, uh, watching, and I'm gonna let them have at it.
Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Lisa. Cool. So thank you all for, uh, coming. Uh, thank you for hosting us, Sean. Of course. So I think this is our third podcast, right- Yes... that we've done. Over the years.
I mean, Digiday to the Rebooting to Rebooting two point O. Exactly. I didn't know it was two point O.
But so I, you know, over the years, I've done probably, like, hundreds of podcasts, and I have to say Sean is maybe one of my favorite podcasts. But there's specific reasons for this.
[chuckles] Because everyone come, would come on my podcast from places like Group Nine and from BuzzFeed and stuff, and they would talk about numbers, but the numbers they were always talking about were, like, views that they got, like, on Facebook or other platforms.
And then when I asked about revenue, they got very quiet. When I asked about profits, they just changed the subject.
But Sean would always come on, and he would talk about numbers, and the numbers he talked about were not about views or anything like that. It was about... You were very specific. It was about revenue and EBITDA.
I assume you're not gonna do this now that you're- Public company, so I've been muzzled, unfortunately. I do appreciate that because I think we're coming out of an era of publishing.
I know we're coming out of the era of publishing. This is, like, a long sort of end to this. I feel like this has been going on for a while, this end of a scale here.
And so a year ago, and I think it, it, it, it surprised, I think, a lot of, you know, people i- who, who were not familiar with B2B and with Industry Dive and not listening to the great podcast that Sean and I had done over the years, was that, you know, you guys were bought by Informa for approximately four BuzzFeeds.
It'll be six soon, but, [laughs] Keep going. It might be ten. At some point, maybe you'll, uh, you'll, you'll personally buy BuzzFeed. But I think it, like...
it is a testament to the fact that, that you, you had a playbook and you executed it, and we've talked about it on, on previous podcasts, but just give a quick overview of what the playbook was that that Industry Dive executed.
And the reason I want it is because I feel like a lot of companies, particularly on the consumer side and particularly venture-funded companies like BuzzFeed, et cetera, they didn't really have a playbook.
They just kept going from thing to thing 'cause their playbook was just grab audiences wherever they are. Yeah.
You know, so I, I, I always try to be a little careful that in the end you don't go reverse engineer the story to fit where you ended up, right?
'Cause we certainly made mistakes along the way, things changed, but there were core tenets that we believed in right from the start that, uh, proved to be the foundation that, that lasted.
And one for us, we, we launched in the BuzzFeed era, uh, and we launched when everyone was trying to get mass audiences. At the same time, people were trying to figure out, even at that time, how do we monetize this?
Can we, can we make money off of this? And the idea was, we'll figure it out. We just get a large number of them, we'll throw ads up, and we'll figure it out and just keep getting bigger.
We didn't really understand that game. And for us, what we understood was niche market, and we understood that there was real value and tangible dollars and profitable dollars in small niches.
But what was different about us, I think, than others is we, we also recognized that there's, you know, by definition, a niche market is a niche, right? And there's a limit to how big you can get.
And our view at the time was, if you wanna build a hundred million dollar company, a five hundred million dollar company, that means you have to be in a lot of niches.
And so we went out to build something that could scale, not in audiences, but in markets.
And we took, uh, a very disciplined approach about a product set, about an editorial strategy, uh, about the internal technology and data that we're collecting so that it could, could go not just in one industry, but it could go into thirty of them or forty of them and the rest.
I think that's the big difference. And so the other piece that we'd said was, there's a lot of people that say they're gonna be in ten industries, but they wait to perfect the first one. Right. So we're gonna...
As soon as I get done the first one, we're gonna go into the second one, and then they look up and it's been ten years and they're still on the first one. And so we launched five on day one, which was pretty ambitious.
And they were, they were, you know, I can say now, you know, twelve years later, they were crappy.
They were pretty, pretty bad sites, but we didn't wanna fall into a trap where we became a market expertise as opposed to, uh, industry expertise.There's always, uh, the next little thing you can do, and, and I think everyone in any business will look, and there's something that you wanna fix in your business every day, right?
And there's things that I wanna fix today in our business or I wanna get better at, and it's just, uh, y-y-you can work on it all, but you can't let that... You can't wait until everything's perfect. Yeah.
And the other thing I think that, that always stood out to me with the Industry Dive model is that there was a discipline there in that, like, you have to have discipline in that. There's, there's trade-offs, right?
So, like, you are trying to create, like, all of these, like, unique brands.
They're, they're gonna be unique, but, like, you knew that you had to be efficient, so you got one platform that it's Dive, you know, now- Yep...
CFO, you have a few others, but, like, it was like if we're going to be able to-- if we're gonna scale this, we're gonna have to simplify this. Yep.
I think a lot of publishing businesses when they are chasing every single piece of, like, revenue and, and in the market and trying to, like, appeal to, uh, advertisers that they overcomplicate in their businesses.
I don't know if you saw the Vice-- I mean, this is on the financial side, [chuckles] but, like, did you see the Vice, like, uh, corporate, like, in their bankruptcy filing, they had their, their sort of corporate tree?
Yeah. It's like, oh, my God. [laughs] And I, I was always wondering, like, I mean, Vice was, like, super complicated, like, in general.
But I think talk about how you have discipline 'cause, I mean, beyond that, like, with the brand, you, you had a lot of discipline with not getting pulled into different directions when it comes to potential revenue, and particularly in B2B, uh, it's ironic, and we'll get to it, that Informa bought you because Informa is, is mostly an events company, and you had the discipline to stay good at what you're good at.
Yeah. And I thought we were gonna gossip about Vice for a while, but we'll talk about Industry Dive still.
I think more than anything, th-th-a lot of people, my co-founders and I here view ourselves as operators, and there is an efficiency of what we're doing.
I think there's a real power in the same, uh, you know, the sameness of what we're doing, like, the same naming structure, right? The same products, and we saw real wins for that.
I mean, you know, our advertisers would come to us and say, "I suddenly have, uh, budget in this market. Do you have a Dive in that market?"
And, you know, being a scrappy startup, we're like, "Well, that was the next on our list if you'd like to be our charter sponsorship," you know?
Which is really, you know, retail is one of our biggest publications right now, and it was... It wasn't near the top of our list, but Sprint came and said, "We've got a ton of money to wire retail organizations.
Can you help us with that?" And it was like, "If, if you've got two hundred thousand, you can be the charter sponsorship of our new publication."
But that sort of-- The consistency is what allowed these advertisers to go and say, "I know what I'm getting in this. If you have it in this, I'll, I'll take it too."
And so we could add on relationships, and our biggest advertisers are in eighteen plus of our markets right now 'cause they just look at the audiences and say, "I like that audience too.
I like that audience too, and I know what I'm gonna get."
Conversely, we have audience people all the time that change jobs or industries and will, uh, change, you know, change the publications they read 'cause they, they just understand what they're gonna get from a content strategy, or they recommend it to their spouse or, you know, their kids when they enter the workforce and says, like, uh, you know.
We get emails that say, "I'm, I'm in the healthcare space, but, you know, m-my partner just got a job in utility. Uh, I recommended Utility Dive to him," you know?
Uh, and so that efficiency really helps on multiple levels for us.
In, in terms of staying with what we're doing, you know, I think one of the things that I was never looking for, co-founders were never looking for was style points.
You know, w-we weren't looking to add the extra twist, uh, you know, on the dive or something to get extra points.
Like, we were just trying to get from A to B, and for us, doing what we knew how to do really well more seemed just like the obvious answer than to try to go into something else or follow a trend or pivot and the rest.
And, and we always just told ourselves, "Be ready to be a fast follower. We don't need to be the first one into podcasts. We don't need to be the first one into video.
We don't need to be the first ones in any of this stuff." If it's great, there's always gonna be an opportunity to out-execute someone. So let someone else find the market first and then go in.
If it's so great, we'll just try to out-execute when we get there. So let's talk about distribution.
How-- We've talked about it a little bit because I think one of the lessons of the, the, the scale here is that publishers have to get control of their distribution, like giving, giving over your distribution to the, the viral and, and algorithms, you know.
Again, they-- people came on my podcast, and they talked about having a billion video views, and I-- it got to the point where I would always respond, "Is that good?" It's like, "I don't know at this point." Yep.
'Cause the numbers just kept getting ever bigger, and of course, they just then went down because the algorithms changed.
I think we're possibly even seeing this happen in search, which is always the most stable of the algorithm. Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm. Explain the approach that you took to controlling the distribution.
So I, so I think there's two things. O-one, with a lot of this, we'd stop and say, "Is there any money there?" Right?
'Cause, 'cause for a lot of publishers that did it, the money was there because they signed big agreements with the platforms to start with, right?
And so the video money was there because they signed a, you know, Facebook paid them to be there. N-no one was paying for an electric utility publication to come onto their platforms.
And so when people would talk about the distribution and all the views, it's so, like, so, so what's the mon- Like, where's the money?
And there was never a clear path for us for the money, and so that made some of it easy. The, the vanity metrics just didn't make sense, uh, because there's no money there.
You know, the other side of this is-We always focused on email first. I mean, email's got a, you know, its moment in the sun over the last couple years, right?
But we, we've been doing it for over a decade, and it was really a belief at the beginning that it is the one thing you can control, it's one of the only push platforms out there, and we're always looking for push platforms.
So we spend a bunch of time trying to f- not a bunch of time, but we spent some time trying to figure out, is there a notification strategy here that we can do? Can we get on the phone so we can do push notifications?
'Cause we're looking for something push so we get direct response. Um, but then there's a belief of email is the by far the best first-party data tool out there still. It's, you know, uniquely identifiable.
We can see devices on it. We can track, you know, across devices. You know, if you open an- open one of your emails on your phone one day, on your laptop the next, we can tie, tie those two devices together.
There, there's nothing better than email from a first-party thing, and so we just knew that that was gonna be valuable.
'Cause in our industry it, it's not, you know, in our part of the media world it's not enough to say we had a view and we think it's a 50-year-old female, you know.
We actually have to say, "This is their job title, and this is what they're interested in." And so we're always trying to build around that.
[gentle music] Yeah, it's really interesting with consumer publications now being, or just in general the more interest in B2B because the worlds are, are, you know, very similar, but they're very different in some ways in that I remember just like over the years never even really paid attention to like uniques or really even page views 'cause it didn't really do much for the business.
Yep. Email, spent a lot of time on email, and before everyone was talking about email, right? Most B2B businesses know, you know, you can tweet until like the cows come home, but if you send an email, things happen. Yep.
Absolutely. We, we sold a lot of tickets at Digiday just by hitting send on emails. Um- Well, I think you- I, I always love your thing. The, the math always says send another email, right? Which is a problem.
Which is a problem, right? It can be, yeah. So you, you stayed disciplined in not, in really sticking to email. Do you, do you have concern that we're at peak email? No. No, I don't.
I mean, I, I really wish, you know, we could talk about all the things that were gonna kill email and why it was gonna be bad over the last fifteen years, right? Slack was gonna kill it, social network's gonna kill it.
Like, everything's gonna kill email, and no kid is no, you know, my kid doesn't read email and doesn't email, and I'm like, "Wait till he gets a job and his boss sends him an email," you know, or a client sends him an email.
He's gonna be on email pretty quick, right? So, uh, until something destroys email as a platform, I think it is, you know, it is the number one interface for people's jobs.
You know, there are other interfaces, but it's the number one interface for the job. And so then it just becomes a question of, do you have something that's worth people's time?
And that is a question that's platform agnostic, right? Either email's gonna be that platform or not.
And so if you believe email's always gonna be around, and you believe you have something that's worth people's time, you're in good shape, you know?
And I don't care if there's a, you know, a hundred other, you know, electric utility emails out there. If ours is worth people's time, it's gonna do fine. Okay.
So y- for you it's just, it's execution versus like the macro environment you can't control, right? Like the fact that like- Yep...
so many people have woken up to like email as like, I mean, there's a lot of email out there. I send some email myself, like there's a lot. Yeah, but I don't think, I don't think...
So, and this is where I run the risk of, of just being an arrogant ass. Like, I don't think people truly appreciate why email's good, right?
I don't think they understand all of the things we were just talking about of the first-party data, of the segmentation, of the result. I think it's just a hot platform for people now, and that may change.
Uh, you know, that comes and goes. You know, the people who are rushing to email now are the ones who bounce around platforms all the time.
If they are incredibly w- if they become incredibly sophisticated about how they think of email, then I'll, A, I'll be impressed, and I'll, I'll, you know, be I guess more worried, but not really. Okay.
But, but you don't look at like diversifying from email as a distribution platform as a priority? No. It's an opportunity, but it's not a priority, right? I think email's still gonna be the foundation of what we do.
I think where we are now, there's more opportunities to, uh, monetize our audiences, to serve them in different ways than the rest, and we'll do that. That's always been on the horizon.
But, you know, this year we'll launch eight new publications with email, you know, email and web being the foundation of them all. And next year we'll launch eight to twelve more. Yeah. Right?
So what is the playbook for launching a new publication? You know, the, the biggest thing is to make sure you have, for our model, you know, it's, it's can we monetize it using our model?
And so there's a real buyer-seller dynamic and fit that we're looking for. And so there's a lot of work that goes into, do we believe in the buy- do we believe in the buyers and sellers?
Do, do they fit a marketing-supported publication versus it's better off being a subscription publication 'cause they're not buyers of anything, right? Except information.
And so we spend a lot of time with that more than anything. And, and once we have that, it becomes a pretty easy, uh... And I say that where there's people in the back of the room, they're like, "This isn't easy at all.
Like I- [laughs]... I do all this work." But, but it's part of the b- you know, it's, it's we've got a pretty well-oiled pos- process in terms of how do we spin up the, uh, website?
How do we spin up the marketing channels to drive audience? How do we create sales collateral and the rest at that point? But the really, the, where we make mistakes is if we miss on the market.
So do you look then for-- like, I mean, I, I-I mean, like, so do you take your existing audiences and look for, like, overlapping circles? Yeah.
'Cause I, I had this experience, like, when I was at Digiday, and then we, we did wait until we [laughs] thought we, like, you know, had gotten really good at one- Perfect. And it took, like, eight years.
And then we went into a new vertical, and we chose one based on the size of the opportunity, and it was in, like, fintech.
And if you look at, like, we were focused on media and marketing, put fintech next to it, it looks amazing, right? And it was too big, and the circles...
I would always say the circles were too far apart in that we didn't have any expertise in that area, and no one in our existing audience was in that world, and the publication totally failed.
And we did another publication almost at the same time, which was focused on fashion and ultimately, uh, beauty and luxury, but those circles were somewhat overlapping. Yep.
Can you go into, like, a totally different industry in which there's no audience overlap? We can and do, we just have different expectations for it.
So adjacent markets are 100% part of our screen, and we really like it when there's an adjacency there, and then we can build the audiences and, and build the advertisers.
Honestly, uh, you know, the advertisers will fit, uh, as... that's as important or m- maybe even more important.
Every now and then, there's a new publication that we just want to get after, and we know it's gonna take a long time. So we're launching an agriculture pub this quarter.
N-not much of an adjacency with any of the rest of ours, but it's a big market, and the technology, you know, is impacting it much more, which is one of the things we look for is, is the role of technology in there.
And we think, you know, four years down the road, this is gonna be a great publication for us.
Lot different expectations for us when I launched, we launched that than if I would launch one next to one of our current markets. Yeah. So you look at, like, for, for, like, an agriculture one.
Do you figure out then, like, what your, like, co- like, your CAC can be based on... Like, how do you model it out? Like, I'm a- like, actually really...
'Cause we've gone back and forth about, like, you know, you got a little hot with me that one time about it- [laughs] Did I? For you, yeah. I don't remember this. Well, 'cause about, like, you know...
Look, there's a lot of people in email who are able to, like, figure out their payback period for buying email and- Yeah... marketing, whatever we wanna call it. Yep. Like, I didn't mean it pejoratively. No, no, no.
Like where- Oh, that one. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Okay. So. See? Yeah. We gotta spice it up.
There's a whole weird view, view in media where people don't think paid audience acquisition has a role in building audiences, and it's this, like, pearl clutching of like, "Oh my gosh, how dare-" That's me.
That's my choice. [laughs] "... you know, how dare we, like, sully our audience by, like, advertising to them?" And it's like, it's the only industry in the world where, where, like, marketing is viewed as a bad thing.
You know? It's like, of course, we, we use paid marketing to reach audiences and to target audiences and to let them know our g- you know, we have a product and people don't know it. So yeah, I'm a huge believer in that.
We do spend time trying to figure out what is our acquisition cost for those and how do we evaluate different channels on the rest.
I don't spend a lot of time tying it back to the revenue, you know, the long-term revenue life. Like we, we have calculations, say what's the lifetime value of this audience and the rest.
There's some people that are much more disciplined about that than we are, candidly, and maybe we should be better at it.
But we do worry about the cost of acquisition, and we match that with w- you know, loosely with what we see with demand in those industries and the cost.
And there's some, some of our industries, you know, life science industries, if you want a drug developer, it's incredibly expensive to find one. If you wanna find a marketer, it's much cheaper to find one.
It just turns out there's a lot more marketers in the world, and they're a, they're a lot easier to reach online. And so we have to balance these differences across the industries, you know- Right...
pay a lot more on one than the other.
[gentle music] So let's talk on the monetization side, 'cause I think you're, you're also pretty disciplined on the monetization side and staying with what you're good at.
And the way I look at it is, I always think, like, when in B2B, there's like, there's two levels of leads that people... 'Cause everyone goes to leads. Yep.
They'll talk about thought leadership, and then they'll come back and be like, "Where are the leads?" And they usually look for leads that they can...
email addresses they can pour into their CRMs that eventually lead to, you know, a qualified customer, NQLs, and that. And then they really like being able to put a seller in front of an end market buyer.
And that's why, you know, my previous company, you know, was really a heavy events model.
Events were the overwhelming majority of revenue because if you can put a end market buyer in front of a seller, that's pretty good. That's a, that's a great lead.
It seems like you really specialized in getting those leads into the CRM. Is that fair? Uh, I think we're really good at it. I think we have products.
We, we talk brand to demand, and we have products across all of the life cycle. I think particularly in the early days, leads were a much more strong component of what we're doing.
And then, you know, in a, an environment like today, right, a macro environment like today, certainly there's more money for leads than there are for the brand stuff and the bigger pieces and, and content, but we, we play across all of it.
I actually think in our industry, we do...
You know, one of the reasons why we look for technology, we talked about technology as one of our screen in new markets, it's because the marketers of technology are pretty sophisticated with digital marketing.
And the SaaS people, uh, you know, almost doesn't matter what industry.
If there's a strong SaaS component, the digital marketers there are really good at what they do, more so than, say, marketers of heavy equipment, in which they're less digitally focused.
And so we-Specializing the leads, a long way to get to the lead kind of thing is 'cause we serve those clients really well, and the more sophisticated they are and the more they can monitor the results, the better we tend to do.
So we're actually trying to find, uh, buyers who are really good at this 'cause then they can see the value of what we're doing more than someone who just gets the name and throws them in a CRM system and then doesn't really know the value of how they performed once they got them relative to what, you know, someone else gave them.
And so, yeah, I love that sophistication. I don't mind the lead pressure because we have a pretty unique audience, so we, we fight for those guys. But you must...
I mean, so you're in so many different industries that I don't know at all, but, like, I think in, in the industries that I have experience in a lot, if not, like, the majority of budgets go to events, and so when you talk about screens, like, I would guess that's a screen, yet you didn't do events.
[laughs] Events are always, like, the next thing on our roadmap, and things jump them at times.
Uh, you know, now we're part of the biggest event company in the world, so I think, you know, don't be sur- Would you have predicted that when you weren't doing events? I didn't predict that they...
You, you know, honestly, if you would've asked me five years ago, I don't think it...
I would've said Informa doesn't appreciate digital audiences and first-party data as much as they appreciate a trade show, and they would never be the home for us because they're, they're not gonna really appreciate what we're doing.
I think the pandemic changed some of that, but I also think I underestimated how much they really were focused on niche specialist audiences and, and the, the overlap of what we're doing was much greater than I kinda gave them credit for five years ago, so shame on me, I guess, is the long, long way of saying it.
Mm. But, you know, ev- events in general, w- we just always felt w- we're really good at what we're doing here, and the processes we've built are built around these digital publications, are built around email.
The one thing I see with a lot of these event businesses is that everything stops when the big event happens, right? Yeah.
And for three weeks, everyone focuses on the event, and then, you know, for a week after, they focus on it, and we just never wanted to stop the motion of what we're doing, uh, to go after the event.
And I think there's a, there's a time now where and I always say it's like the, the walking two gum at the same time moment for us.
If the company's gonna be what we know it can be, we've got to be able to be m- more multi-threaded than we were in the past, and we have to do more with it, and I think that'll...
You know, that's gonna cause us to, you know, break things here a little bit. Like, we're gonna have to change some of the stuff, but ultimately that's the promise- Yeah... of the business now.
But you didn't have clients 'cause, like, m- I, I think the, the two publications of mar- o- of, of Industry Dive that I knew the best were, were Marketing Dive and Retail Dive- Yep... because they were in my purview.
Someone like... Something like retail, I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to shop.org or any of those things. Yeah. They're massive. You can, you can smell the money from, like, a couple blocks away.
Um- Yeah, pretty fantastic. I mean, Sho- Shop- [laughs] Shoptalk was our biggest advertiser for a number of years. We- That didn't push you into it?
[laughs] Well, I, I think that's one of the things that said, wow, they've, they've built a huge event, uh, off the back of our audiences. We should... You should think about this.
But no, I guess it didn't, and, you know- [laughs]... I'm... I never said I was the smartest person in the room. Oh. I just said that I- I don't know. I mean, eight to 10 BuzzFeeds, you're smart enough. We'll, we'll see.
Okay. So but you, you will likely, I mean, with Informa move more into events. Yeah. We, we, we brought over within Informa, we brought, uh, one of their, uh, event experts is embedded in us.
We're looking at opportunities now. I, I think we'll, you know... You should expect us to have some in-person events, and a more, you know...
We, we do a robust virtual event business already, but to your point, a lot of that is a lead-based kind of component, right?
The, the people, people that come to v- you know, the advertisers that come to us for a virtual event aren't looking for thought leadership. They're looking for specialist leads on a track within a virtual event. Yeah.
I mean, trade show businesses can be great. I mean, people line up at the end of them to re-up their contracts. That's a, that's a good business. They- That's what people tell me every quarter meeting now.
They scare me though if you've ever been to one. I'm like, oh, my gosh. [laughs] 'Cause it is. It... Like, events can suck up an entire organization, and it's hard to do...
My experience, it's hard to really be in events without being... turning your organization into an events organization at the end of the day. W- well, I think...
And I think some of that, right, is how, how for us you look at a classic event business, and it's like how do they sell digital and they struggle with it. Yeah. I think our sales team would struggle with selling events.
I think there's just- Yeah, same... a different motion to the conversation and different people, and so that's one of the reasons why we didn't...
We're like w- we didn't wanna do it is like, you know, the organization was built around one purpose, and I didn't wanna mess that up. So as I said, I, I feel like we're at the end of, of, of the scale era.
I think it was, it was ending before. It probably got a little bit with all the, you know, post-pandemic and the money that got flooded in the economy. It just was a little bit of, you know...
It elongated a little bit, but now it's, it's coming, it's coming down. I think a lot of people are wondering what's next. I know B2B gets a lot of, you know, niche maybe like, you know, quote unquote creators and stuff.
What are you optimistic about in the broader media landscape? 'Cause I'm trying to be optimistic and, you know, people are saying, "Oh, you're such a downer." [laughs] I'm not saying that, Brian. No, I, I actually, uh,
I think this is an incredible time to create, incredible time to build. It, it is, uh... You know, everyone
talks about AI as, you know, changing the landscape of everything, and I don't, you know, I don't know if it will or not.
Like, I, I think at some point we'll be, uh, we're already experimenting with things with it, but we'll be fast followers when people-Find things that work great. But I think any time something
levels the playing field, it's a tremendous opportunity for, uh, creativity and new models and new people to do things.
And so if you think that technologies and changes in, in people's behaviors levels the playing field for us, like it's never been a great, you know, better time to build something new.
You know, I think there's a lot of people who's like, "Oh, we missed the dawn of the internet age when all of these powerful, entrenched people came." That this could be the new dawn of a time to entrench something new.
[gentle music] Yeah, I mean, if you went back like pre-internet, let's say, you know, imagine trying to do Industry Dive with like print publications across all those industries like, that, that was the advantages the, of the incumbency, is how- Right...
hard it was to do. I mean, I, I, I've worked for magazines, and putting out a magazine is a, a laborious process. And just like events, it... With magazines, a lot of times, like it ends up being the organization.
I saw it at Adweek, you know, 80 to 90% of our, our meetings were about the magazine even though 80 to 90% of our audience at that point was through things like, say, email and on the website. Yep. Absolutely.
I, I couldn't agree more. The, the, the change now is something that we're gonna look back on and say, "Well, how did we miss it at the time?" Yeah. But I think it's the opportunity.
It's kind of similarly in that there is a lot of built-in advantages of, of organizations that are larger that are gonna end up being, in some ways, disadvantages, you know, going forward.
Because if you can use some of these AI tools to be way more efficient, eh, I mean, just like the internet enabled, you know, digitally centric organizations to compete with incumbents like that were far larger, I think the same thing is likely to happen, right?
Absolutely. I, I think there's a... Almost every big company has an agility problem, right?
You can try to set yourself up to be this agile, big company and disruptors and main, remain disruptors, but the people who do that tend to be ones who acquire the right company that gives them the edge there.
You know, the, the incumbents are gonna have a... You know, if, if there is a sea change, incumbents have a really hard time being agile enough to get there.
So how do you stay agile now as part of like the largest events company in the world? So it's a challenge. I mean, like, like that, that is one of the next challenges for us, you know?
And, and, you know, hopefully we don't have our fourth podcast three years from now and say, "What happened?" What went wrong? I love an autopsy. Yeah, what went wrong?
[laughs] So no, I mean, that's the challenge is not, not to do that. I, I think the, the, the best thing about Informa, and hopefully for the team here feels it, th- there's some tax to a bigger company, right?
There are things that we do that we didn't have to do before. But by and large, one of the great things with Informa is that, they, they buy entrepreneurial cultures, and they try to keep them intact as much as they can.
And so there's been a lot of effort of shielding the teams from the heavy lifting of that so that the teams can still be, uh, agile in what we, what they do, you know?
I think we still got some work to do on that, but our ability to launch things has actually only increased with the...
You know, they, they've been great about giving us access to things like data and audiences and the rest and not asking much in return.
And so, you know, in the early goings, like this has actually been really, really freaking great. Are there bad spots? Yeah. But overall- Yeah... it's been fantastic. Yeah. Re- I, I think it was like the other day.
You're, you're, you're a Twitter addict, right? Like- Mm-hmm. Oh, for sure. Okay, great. Um- A little bit of a troll... uh, that's... I, I appreciate that as, as a fellow addict. I've tried to quit.
I took, I took the app off my phone. I just- Did you put it back on? No, I just... I go to the website. It's terrible. It's like methadone [laughs] I guess. I'm in that phase. But you, you had tweeted about Vice.
You're like, you know, "What?" It was... This is actually... This was a really great idea. Like, it was the new MTV and all this.
And- Well, I, I think, and maybe I stole this from Rafat, so I, I have to apologize if I did, 'cause apparently he tweeted it the day before, and maybe I saw it and it shaped my mind. I don't remember it.
But I hate stealing other people's takes. But I do think there's this rush to...
We have a definitive conclusion why some of these media companies fail, and we on the sidelines can say, "Look how smart we are about what we're...
You know, how they missed it" and the rest, or, "We know how they missed it." And I actually don't know the inside of Vice, and I do think, you know, they raised too much money and they did whatever.
But, but maybe they were on the right track the whole time, and it was totally hubris and excess in spending that did them in. Yeah.
And that they, they had actually made the jump from a magazine to a website to cable, and they had all of the ingredients to build like a, a lasting brand. I mean, I...
That's the biggest disappointment of the scale areas. I'm not sure who built the lasting brand within there. Right. You know? And I think they actually had a chance, and I don't know.
I mean, maybe it was a wrong model, or maybe they just blew it, you know? Yeah. 'Cause I think at best there was only gonna be one or two lasting brands no matter how you did it, right?
Just like there was only a couple social media networks that, that win in any sort of given market or rest. There's only gonna be a couple of those brands that were destined to win no matter what happened.
Now it kind of looks like none of them may have won. But, um- Yeah. I mean, the, the sort of, you know, the traditional quote unquote legacy brands are looking better- Better, yeah...
in comparison at the very least in, in that there's still a lot of value in those brands. And I mean, if you...
The market says, you know, uh, BuzzFeed said it was gonna be the bell- bellwether of this sector, and that's not a very good bellwether when it's trading at well less than revenue.A lot of, like, things I think were wrong with, with Vice.
I mean, the, the number of SVPs at that, uh, company was, like, shocking. Like- Yeah... shocking, like, how bloated.
I think that really confused chart, like, really says a lot about how the company was run and, and I think a lot of this...
I think on the B2B side it's probably a little bit more straightforward, but a lot of this is e- is about, comes down to execution, and a lot of these businesses were poorly, uh, operated, and the execution was just missing, whether the idea was right, I think.
Yeah. I mean, a- and like I said, it's, it's easy for us to say the execution's bad, you know, having never actually sat in one of their- Yeah... meetings or seen anything and stuff, but definitely it was the execution.
I, I, I do think the thing that I like about Vice is I think they, they built some good components to the business inside it, despite all that, right? I mean, the, the...
I, I really like that they went to an agency route and they, at a time when the demographic was more, you know, MTV was about cool base, right? And trend base.
I think there was a demographic that Vice was going after that was more issue based in their view, and they had a, they had a real corner of that market.
And I really kinda wish you could go back time and, and say, "Maybe we shouldn't throw ou- around hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills in a casino and see what happens with this." Yeah.
You know, maybe that was the problem. Yeah. I think that was a big part of the problem, too. [laughs] I don't think we're going out on too much of a limb by [laughs] by saying that that was a problem.
But what do you think about BuzzFeed now, though? Because I think there's really strong assets within BuzzFeed, and I actually, I'll admit I bought a bunch of BuzzFeed shares at 50 cents a share, right?
Like, I, I actually think there's, you know, Complex is- Yeah... a really interesting asset set still, you know? And, and I think there's a real first party data play with what they're doing.
I, I almost think the BuzzFeed brand hurts them now more than anything, 'cause I don't think that BuzzFeed as a brand has the cachet it did with an audience that it had at the beginning.
But I think there's, like, cool things they can do still. Yeah. I think there's pockets of value within that and I'm surprised they haven't...
You know, it's funny because the answer when BuzzFeed hit a wall was that they were gonna just, like, roll o- that they were going to be, you know, rolling up, whereas the real answer is ultimately probably going to be picking apart, uh, the parts.
I mean- Yeah... Vice is the same way. They have, they have a good agency business within there. You know, Virtue is a good agency. Carrot, uh, is a good agency. They've got a good production arm.
You know, the digital stuff was never profitable. The news stuff was never profitable. But they have good assets. Yep.
They have a horrific, you know, capital structure that that's why they're in bankruptcy, and that will get unwound.
But I think it's, it's telling that a lot of these companies bet so much on scale, and their ultimate fate is probably to have to actually go in the opposite direction and have the most valuable parts taken out and not be encumbered by scale to some degree.
Yeah. Well, I look at, you know, I mean, the f- the funny thing we, we talk about reverse engineering the story, you know, Industry Dive's had a nice run and it's successful, and you go talk about it.
We got really lucky that no one would give us money. You know, part of our discipline and the rest was- Yeah... no one, no one wanted to give... I, I'm talking about lead gen to electric utility execs in 2012.
That was not getting a dollar of venture- But did you try to, did you try to, like, raise money? Uh- Like, did you go to- A little, a little bit. Yeah. You know?
I mean, there was a couple people I, I spoke to, and eyes glazed over as soon as I started talking about what we were doing.
And no one wanted to come home and I, you know, I bet on a company that's creating news for the waste and recycling industry, you know? Like, that's, that just wasn't, that didn't fit the narrative at the time. Yeah.
And so we, we got incredibly lucky that, that we still were ambitious enough to scale, like, want to find scale, but having to do it as a bootstrap I think was the best thing for us and, and that's one of those things that maybe, you know, maybe this go around when money's tighter, the companies that, that go now are gonna have a little bit more of that discipline at the front, and we're maybe, maybe this time we'll see someone make the jump from $20 million niche to an enduring brand.
[gentle music] So usually success stories end up having clones pretty quickly.
I mean, are we already seeing, like, the Industry Dive clones? I think, I think so, but, um- Workweek is a little bit of an Industry Dive clone to some degree.
I, I think they take, uh, they take a little bit of different model. I mean, they always twist. It's like the Uber for- Yeah... you know how it is.
I think Morning Br- It, it's interesting that Morning Brew is, you know, got, has a developed B2B, uh, they're developing B2B, uh, products in a way- Mm-hmm...
that's similar to what we're doing, but, but also in a way similar to what they did with Morning Brew, right? So I think they would say they're taking Morning Brew to a B2B market, uh, multiple markets.
I would say they're kind of doing the Industry Dive playbook, uh, in a different one. So I, I think there'll be s- some. I, I hope, I hope so. I mean, I hope there are. That's a sign of you build a good company, right?
Is there's other people that are trying to do it. If everyone still thought this was a bad idea, I don't know. Yeah. So you said, and just to wrap up on this, that you made mistakes along the way.
I don't want this to be all, like, you know, worshiping. I thought this was a, I thought this was an optimistic podcast. We're gonna talk about the mistakes? Well, I just, you know.
No, I mean, you guys did an amazing job. You're still doing an amazing job, and you should be proud of that, but, like, what did you get wrong then? I think some of it was just different.
If, if you go back and look at the 2012 Industry Dive, we were really trying to own mobile.As a differentiator. That was one of those as a startup, it was how do you get a wedge into something different?
And that was, you know, that was a time Facebook was going public. You know what I'm saying? Facebook was going public, and the big knock on them was like, are they gonna figure out how to make money on mobile?
[laughs] That was like, people don't remember. It's like- Yeah. I don't know, like this- I wrote a couple of those stories. Yeah. Like, it's like- Like disappeared.
Should you invest in Facebook because you don't know if they can make money on mobile. It's like, now it's like, of course they can.
But we launched at a time that, that we said, you know, one of our thesis was when the internet came to publishing, you know, there's one of two reactions.
People either ignored it 'cause they didn't know how to make money off of it, or they tried to recreate their magazines and newspapers in a digital format on the internet. We saw the same thing going with mobile, right?
You know, like, it's like all of a sudden the iPad came out and it's like we're gonna flip magazines again back on like the genie back in the nineteen, you know, eighty-nine bottle is coming.
And so we thought, particularly in niche markets, mobile can be a differentiator.
We were doing things, building a CPM calculator on your phone, 'cause I think we thought that thousands of people were gonna need to calculate CPMs at a hair's notice on their phone, you know, uh, on the rest.
And so we built apps, we built kinda tools for the phones and stuff. You don't hear me generally talk about that anymore in my l- you know, retro story 'cause it turned out not to be important.
Insight turned out to be important and the content turned out to be much more important. And so that's when, when we sort of moved away from that and invested more in the content, the trajectory of the business changed.
Okay, so give me like three media companies that I should pay, that everyone should pay attention to. Big, small, or whatever. Like, don't say The New York Times or something like that.
But like, that you think, you know, there's something there and, you know, I think that they have a chance of being like a significant company. Again, I'm trying to bring it, you know, end on an optimistic note. Yeah.
You know, so, so one that I've followed all the time is partially because, uh, Arsala and, and, and John Carroll, who the founders and I worked together, Endpoints- Yeah... in the life science space.
They were just acquired by, uh, the Financial Times, and I'm really interested to see where they're going next.
In many ways, you know, s-s-stat, who's a great company, you know, great component, got a lot of buzz when they launched, right?
And COVID came, their content was really great, and it boosted through the rest and, and I have a lot of respect for Stat, but I actually think if I had to bet long term on a subscription product in the life science space, Endpoints, I think has a, a way to do that.
We, we compete with them. I actually think our content, BioPharma Dive and Pharma Voice, you know, stacks up with everything they're doing, but they're going in a different direction, clearly with the Financial Times.
And so I'm, I'm really excited about what they're doing, uh, on that front, and we'll see where they go. So, so that's the, the easiest one. You know, the, the hard part is thinking of components.
I, I like, I like components of every, you know, most media companies, and I try to see, uh, I get excited to see what they're doing, uh, and the rest. Punchbowl, you know, is here in, in the audience.
I think I, I love the similarities to what they're doing to what we did in terms of coming out of an organization and trying to build something new and interesting, and so I spent a lot of time watching them.
And Semafor is one that, you know, I, I actually am really intrigued by.
Partially because I think, uh, Justin Smith has done incredible job at two organizations that I don't know if anyone else could have done as well, right?
The Atlantic had this incredible period when Justin was running it that it, it didn't after he left, right?
And you saw what Quartz became and then what it became as soon as he took his hands off of it, you know, and the rest. And so I think there's a lot of people that underestimate Semafor as what, uh, for what they can do.
I actually... I read their stuff and find that I'm reading stories that I don't get other places.
And so I think that's a really interesting thing that I, I know more international stories than I would the rest, and so I'm more optimistic about them than I think, you know, other people are.
And, and when I say that, I'm, I'm pretty optimistic about them- Yeah... to be honest.
And I think there's a lot of people, you know, have looked at them and said, "Well, well, now's a bad time to start a, you know, broad media company," but there's never a bad time to start a broad media company. Yeah.
I-- the messenger didn't- I don't-- I'm really curious to see how it goes. You know? That's not one that I'm betting on, but it's one I'm watching.
And it plays a totally different game than what I've played my whole life.
And so, you know, their, their superpower in SEO and traffic and the rest, you know, I think the cornerstone of our SEO strategy has always been like, "Let's just write a bunch of content every day and it'll make it really good, and over time, that's gonna work."
Yeah. You know? And that's sort of our strategy. If you, if you write about, uh, you know, this industry for ten years, eventually you're gonna win in SEO.
The fact that they have a strategy to try to win, I, I'm just gonna be really curious to see how it goes, and maybe I'll learn something. Okay. Cool. We'll leave it there. Thank you very much, Sean. Thank you. Cool.
That was fun. Can't wait to do this again. Yeah. I hope it's a positive podcast the fourth one. [laughs] Not, not the autopsy one. [laughs] Absolutely. Thank you, Us. And thank you all for listening.
Hope you enjoyed this podcast. I wanna thank Jay Sparks from Podhelp Us, who produces this podcast. If you are interested in a podcast, you should get in touch with Jay. You can find out more at podhelp.us.
And send me your feedback, would love to hear what you would like to hear from this podcast.
I did one the other week with Sarah Fischer and Peter Kafka that I got a lot of notes about, so I'm thinking about doing more of those and hopefully we can make that happen. So let me know what you think.
[upbeat music] Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode. [upbeat music]