WEBVTT

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While brands are really important, they're kind of secondary to us at Future, and again, that's quite unusual in a media company to say that. We are content first, brand second. So talk to me about that. Yeah, yeah.

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'Cause that, you don't hear very people say that. No, I know. It's still controversial.

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I'm like, wow, it's very in- infrequent that I hear something on a podcast where I'm like, "I haven't heard that from a guest before." Yeah, I know. That is actually the first. [laughs] Super controversial.

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[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.

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Each week, I speak to those who are building sustainable publishing businesses.

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You know, I've often thought that there tends to be a drumbeat of bad news [chuckles] about the publishing industry, and usually for good reasons, 'cause there's no doubt it's a tough business.

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The truth is there are many success cases out there, and their paths to success are often different, and that's why I love talking to people about how they got there.

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'Cause the playbook for something like Barstool is totally different than somewhere like Dotdash Meredith.

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But I think that one of the sort of underrated success stories is what's gone on at Future, and that's why I'm very excited to have Zilla Bing-Thorne, the CEO of Future, to talk about h- how she and her team have engineered, like, a pretty remarkable turnaround for what was formerly known as a magazine company.

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And w- we'll get into what it is now. But Zilla, thank you so much for joining me. The pleasure to be here, Brian.

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I was in New York last week, and I was meeting with one of your peers at a large publishing company, and Future came up, and he said, "Zilla's a force of nature." So... [laughs] I'll take that. It was a compliment.

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I'll take that as a compliment. [laughs] It was a compliment, Zilla. It was very much a compliment, okay? Yeah. And so let's go back, 'cause some people in the US don't know Future that well.

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And just to be clear, Future is worth nine times what BuzzFeed is. I've written and edited a lot more stories about BuzzFeed in my time [chuckles] th- than Future, I have to admit. But you joined Future in 2014, right?

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That's correct. And you came from Auto Trader, which is also another sort of underrated story that I think people in the US don't know.

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So let's just actually talk about Auto Trader first, and then go into, like, you joining Future, 'cause I think it probably affected how you looked at the business. Sure, no problem. So you're quite right.

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My, my background actually w- is not traditionally in media, and I went into Auto Trader, uh, which was predominantly digital classifieds.

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Uh, and it's a fantastic business, and I think the key things that I took away from the Auto Trader days was the importance of market leadership.

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There's definitely a flight to quality with, from an mar- advertising perspective. The really importance of being unafraid to cannibalize yourself, which I think a lot of media companies are afraid to do.

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So Auto Trader started out as a magazine company in the UK.

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Um, we basically set our sales team up against the magazine team to sell digital, which felt like heresy at the time, but it really helped us drive forward in those early days, that transition from print to, to online, which if had we not done to ourselves, someone else would've done to us.

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And so you've gotta be prepared to disrupt yourself. And then you've also gotta be really clear about that you're delivering on your promise, so are you delivering on your promise to your consumers?

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Are you delivering on your promise to your clients? And so that was a key part of Auto Trader.

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So I left there a- and joined Future in, in 2014, and really kind of took a lot of those learnings across into where we were at Auto Trader, so think about, you know, how could we be a market leader?

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How could we think about digital a little bit differently? And how could we make sure we, we're delivering on our promises to our customers? Yeah.

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But, like, when you joined Future, like, 'cause I feel like in, in a lot of publishing businesses, there are a lot of publishing businesses that are not, I, in my view, like, aren't, like, really well operated.

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I've heard this, like, repeatedly from, like, market leaders out there, and I think there have been so many cases where I'm meeting with people and they're like, "Well, the assets really weren't managed that, that well."

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And w- when you got to Future, it was a different company, right? I mean, first of all, it was way smaller. But what did you see there? Because I'm interested in you coming from...

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Y- you weren't, like, steeped in, in media your whole life, like you said, right, your whole career.

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And what did you see as far as a business and as far as the potential that wasn't necessarily being realized at the time? Yeah. So I think you're absolutely right.

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The business is completely different today from what it was 10 years ago. And Future itself has been around for, like, 40 years. And at its very heart, Future was about disrupting media.

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And f- little known fact, but Future was actually founded by the guy who'd founded TED Talks, Chris Anderson. Yeah.

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And it was all about how could we redis- disrupt magazines to bring added value and, you know, really, you know, be premium in, in our mindset.

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They had got a little bit caught up in the kinda original dotcom bust boom, and then had a bust on the back of that.

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And one of the dangers of being a public company is you're always chasing a number, and they'd got a little bit caught up in, "We've gotta keep hitting our forecast," rather than, "How do we deliver to our customers?

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How do we go deliver to our clients?" And so when I joined, the business had come on the back of a 10-year downward spiral and, and as you said, was much smaller.

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And what I spent that first year doing was really kinda thinking about would you invent this business today? Why do we exist, and what's our right to exist?

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And as I went through that process, what was really clear to me is we had this unique asset, which was this content which helped people make decisions. We were expert in giving buying advice.

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We're expert in teaching them how to do the things that mattered to them, and we had trust, and we had followership.

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But what we hadn't worked out was how to make money from it, and we'd got a little bit bound up in this whole print-to-digital transition and, you know, h- how do you manage that?

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Now, because the business was financially in such a difficult place, we were pretty much going bankrupt when I joined, I had the ability to create a burning platform, so that allows you and gives you permission to do a lot of things that are harder to do in a- Yeah...

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normal day-to-day environment. But that allowed us to kinda reset how the business was gonna work.

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But the key thing for us was-Recognizing the value of the passion of the people in the business and the content they wrote, and the fact that we had audiences who trusted us, and then focusing on making money from our content not be a dirty word, which sometimes in media is what it feels like.

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You know, a lot of people don't wanna talk about the fact they wanna make money from the content we, we, we provide. I totally agree. But back then when you joined, it was primarily a print magazine business, right?

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I mean, and most of the revenue was in, I assume, was in- Yeah. 80, 80% print, half of which was in paid copy sales and half of which was advertising. 20% digital, and about 70% UK. So it's kind of the- Okay...

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exact opposite. Uh, right. So you were, like, managing the transition to a digital business for these, like, print. But, like, we saw is, like, and I think because, you know, Future has a lot of, like, specialist titles.

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We would call them enthusiasts probably here. And those are, you know, things that people go to that they're already identifying that they're interested in something or that they wanna get something done.

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And I think nowadays, you know, we call it, like, intent and stuff [laughs] like this, but it's, like, it's really powerful because people are signaling an interest in something, right? Is...

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And, you know, the business models have really evolved because now you can do commerce and things of that nature.

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Explain how you got to, like, a playbook, because it's very clear, at least to me as an observer, that you guys have a playbook and a strategy that you are running.

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Like, and a lot of it is, like, organic growth, but a lot of it is M&A, too. Yeah, sure. And so

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when you're very bootstrapped as an organization, and because shareholders have lost a lot of money, anything we did, we had to be able to afford ourselves. So you had to afford all your own growth.

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So we had to think about how did we build revenue streams that had different sources of cash and that were low cost to invent.

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So we'd started to think about, well, could we bring some events into the portfolio because people were highly enthusiastic. There was a lot of intent. Could we get hands-on with some of our materials?

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And the nice thing about events is they pay you upfront for those, so you have cash ahead.

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We had a subscription business and we're like, "Well, that's brilliant," because you get cash in advance on subscribers, so you can then reinvest that in your growth strategy.

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So we think, we started to think about, about moving more of our magazine copy sales to subscription rather than just on the newsstand.

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And then we thought about our digital content and we were thinking, well, these people out here are reading our reviews. They wanna know what's the best laptop. They wanna know what's the best golf driver.

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Why don't we help them make a buying decision? Which was pivotal from Auto Trader because when I joined Auto Trader, people used to go to Ford dealerships. By the time I left, they went...

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The people went to less than one, 'cause they already knew what car they were buying, having done their research- Yeah... on Auto Trader.

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So if you took that experience then to what was happening for golf drivers or laptops, we... I was like, "Well, why are we not helping them make the buying decision?

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Why are we doing all this hard work and then you have to go off and find out where to buy it and what the best price is?"

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And so we built some technology which was proprietary us, which allowed us to then provide commerce as an affiliate, which in those days was really early stage. There wasn't a lot of other media companies doing that.

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And so that kind of allowed us to then bring in a secondary revenue stream to digital.

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So suddenly we had this playbook of three or four different revenue streams that worked together with each other in terms of how we thought about our business model. And that's where we are today.

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We're, we're one-third affiliate e-commerce, we're one-third, one-third advertising, and we're one-third content direct monetization from the consumer.

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So it's, it's quite a well-diversified business today because of that kind of desire to want to, you know, be able to fund your own growth.

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So you saw this working with the existing assets, and then I'm sure you said, [laughs] "There's other assets out there that we can acquire, bring on to, like, our tech platform, run the same playbook," right?

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Yeah, exactly. So one of the things that we'd had this kind of existential question in the early days about were we a media company or a tech company? And this was at the time a, a lot of the stuff- Yeah...

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was going on in the Silicon Valley about big tech and big media. Yeah. And I was like, "Look, we're definitely a media company-" You guys do have- "... historically born tech."

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You do have a fancy name for some of your tech platforms. I did notice that. [laughs] Yeah, I know. Exactly. [laughs] There was definitely, there was a few people who wanted me to come out and say we're a tech company.

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But fundamentally, you know, the thing that we do is content. So I was like, let's not forget, this is a content company. We're a media business, but the technology is pivotal too.

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It really underpins what we're doing, so we've invested heavily in a one-platform approach. So as we then started to think about how do we grow, I was like, "Well, hang on a minute.

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We're very UK focused, but the US is five times the size of the UK, and it's the same enthusiasms. It's still video gamers. It's still golf players. So why are we thinking about this market differently?

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Why are we thinking about geography when the internet doesn't have a geographical divide?" People find content globally on the internet.

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And so what we said as a organization, "Well, let's stop thinking about boundaries and borders, and start thinking about our enthusiasts, our, our audience.

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And let's write content for wherever they are within the English-speaking domain." And so we built our plat- platform to allow us to find audiences globally, and then started to focus on a North America strategy.

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And, you know, I'll use consumer electronic, consumer tech as the best example. You know, in those days we were probably number 15 in Comscore in terms of market share in the US.

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And I'd said to the team, "Look, let's just have a crazy goal. Let's imagine we can be in the top five in the next five years. What would it take to do? What would we need to do to achieve that?"

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And so then they came back with their ideas. But in that was, well, could we buy some small companies who maybe aren't running as well, who might bolster our position, and that we could use our technology?

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And so that's what kinda led to the strategy around acquisitions. And so initially we bought a couple of small businesses, kind of flexed the muscle to learn how to do it, it properly. Mm-hmm.

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We integ- we integrate fully, so I know some of our competitors don't all integrate fully. But for us it was really important that it's one Future, it's one tech system, it's one sales team, it's one way of working.

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Um, and then pivotal for us was when we acquired Purch in the US, I think back in 2018. Yeah. Because that really accelerated our position in the US.

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In f- With that acquisition we went to number six in Comscore, and then, you know, today in terms of the overall network, we're number one. So we kind of, you know, used that to build the organic portfolio around that.

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And that's exactly- Mm-hmm... the same as what we're doing today in-Beauty with the acquisition of Who What Wear, which combined with our existing assets, gets us into number six in the Comscore numbers.

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And so what we've tried to do is complement organic growth with acquisitions where we can kinda turbocharge the strategy. Yeah. Do you disclose how much of your revenue is US-based?

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'Cause while we all speak the same language, like money has to come from somewhere. Yeah.

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Yeah, we- I would guess that the future, future i- is increasingly in the United States just because, as you said, it's just so much larger.

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100%, and we do disclose it, and at the moment it's about 45% US, the balance is the UK, but that's because we bought two large businesses recently who are predominantly UK businesses.

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And so if you go back two years, we were 60% US, 40% UK, uh, and we think we end up at kind of 70/30 US is the objective.

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So we're very focused on, you know, if you're gonna win in English-speaking markets, you're gonna win in the US. Yeah. What gave you confidence?

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'Cause I, I know a lot of, you know, over my career, like there's a lot of companies from the UK, you know, I, the US, we, you know, culturally very similar in many ways [laughs] but, like we speak the same language and this market's so, so much bigger, so I understand that.

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But the track record is a little bit checkered because this is like it is a big market, but it's an incredibly competitive market.

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What gave you confidence that the playbook you were running and succeeding at in the UK could do it in the US too?

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Yeah, it's a good question, and I think that while we speak the same language, I do think that we are culturally quite different, and we have to recognize, even within the US, there's a lot of cultural differences there.

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So, so being aware of that, I think is a start- was a starter for us. But the confidence comes from going back to what we do. We talk to people who care about subject matters globally.

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So our business model isn't about being American or being British.

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Our business model b- is about identifying as being a gamer or someone who really cares about fashion and beauty or someone who really identifies as a classic walk fan.

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And so that audience doesn't see the boundaries that we see corporately, and therefore, when we start to think about putting our content wherever that audience was, wherever we could reach them, that made us really think differently about it.

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And it was that what gave us the confidence to go into the US. But it wasn't we went into the US, it was just around how can we move...

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So simple things like having the UK team change the time they post our content to US hours.

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It's really subtle, but even that makes you have a mind shift, which is you're thinking about your US audience much more than your UK audience.

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Making sure that we cover U- US public holidays and being aware of the terminology around that allows us to then, you know, b- lean into that mindset.

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So a lot of it was actually about being more culturally aware of the differences. We have a team in Australia as well. Yeah. We have leading positions there.

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So it's mostly about really giving your audience what they need. One of the things in going through the portfolio, particularly with the M&A, are you looking for specific verticals?

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'Cause you have a lot of different verticals. I mean, you're in a lot of different categories from B2B to, like, house and home to tech, you know, some of the more obvious ones, and now getting more into fashion.

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How do you think about that, or are you mostly opportunistic and looking for an asset that you think is maybe under-monetized or u- a-and that you can bring on the platform and make much more successful?

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Yeah, so we definitely have specific assets that we're looking for in terms of characteristics. So the first thing w-we wanna look for when we buy stuff is that is it in a vertical where people ask a lot of questions?

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So they're looking for help or they're looking for information. And then the second one is, does those questions quite often lead to a buying decision? And you...

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So for example, you could buy a political journal, which people ask a lot of questions about, but it doesn't often lead to a, a physical purchase of something. And so for us then- Yeah...

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that wouldn't necessarily meet the characteristics of what would sit with our business model.

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So if you meet both of those characteristics, then what we're looking for then is the content largely expert-led and authoritative.

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And so, so as long as you've got those characteristics, it's something we would probably want to buy. The other thing we think about is can we buy capability?

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So because we have this platform that works across the entire organization, can we buy a business that has a way to monetize content or distribute content which we can put across our, as the verticals.

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S-so for example, a couple of years ago we bought a business called SmartBrief in the US, which is a, a newsletter company. Yeah.

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SmartBrief produced B2B newsletters, but they had built proprietary technology to allow them to create newsletters in a really s- clever, smart way, which we then use in our consumer portfolio to allow us to have a direct communication with our audience.

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So something that allowed us kind of like scale across the whole business. So we're looking for capability.

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When we think about categories, however, you know, the legacy business was all about games and consumer electronics, which have been brilliant, and I think we've got, you know, really good positions from a market perspective there now today.

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[sniffs] When we think about where we've been focusing over the next three to five years, fashion and beauty, ho-homes, as you mentioned already, wealth and investing, so, you know, financial advice, savings advice.

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We recently bought Kiplinger in the US. We see that as a very prestigious brand, so thinking about that as an area. We're not particularly big on health at the moment. That's a potential opportunity for us.

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We're not particularly big on the older generation, and we think they're not particularly well-served as a population, so we see that potential as an opportunity.

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So there are different targets that we look at, but the characteristics largely have to be the same. Yeah. I'm gonna ask you the comparison question. We'll see if you'll do it.

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Because when I think of the competitive set or the comparison, I would go to Red Ventures, Dotdash, maybe Recurrent wants to be in there. There's some a little bit of, like, Penske in there. And I...

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To me, like these are businesses, you know, they're different, but like some of them are very search-based, you know. When someone types

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something into a search box, it's the database of intentions, as John Battelle called it so many years ago. Ziff Davis too. Do you think that's fair, and how do you think your approach is different?

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It doesn't have to be different. You just have to like win on execution.Yeah, no.

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Look, I, I think it's absolutely fair, and when people ask me who do I think are my competitors or who do we admire, and who's our peer set, I don't think there's anyone in the UK who we compare to.

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I see it very much as so- across the Atlantic a- and in the US. I think that the Dotdash guys are really talented. I have a lot of respect for what they do.

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It's slightly different from what we do because we came from a magazine heritage, and w- I think we're, we're more holistic in our approach, but there's a lot of comparison there.

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I think Ziff Davis is, again, you know, a rec- did a brilliant job in term of where he took that business over the years, but they don't integrate truly, whereas we do, so that we're much more a one media company mindset in terms of our approach.

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But we definitely look to them to think about things. Red Ventures, I know that Rick doesn't... insists he's not a media company, so...

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But, uh, there's definitely comparisons there a- as you say, uh, and we, again, we look at them.

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But I also think, yeah, I think what the New York Times is doing is pretty clever and the, the, you know, their approach thinking about subscriptions and consumer monetization.

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And the, the difference with Future is we started off with a, a very significant revenue base, which was cu- customers buying our magazines, and that was the lion's share of our revenue.

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So we've got this old heritage in consumers being a part of the revenue stream, which a lot of digital natives don't necessarily have in the same way, and so that's why for us thinking about how can we make sure we continue that relationship?

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And therefore, you look at The New York Times and think, "Well, how can we learn from them?" Or, "What's happening on newsletters, and how can we think about that as an approach?"

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But you have no interest in going into news, right? I mean, like, news news. Yeah. So I- Like Trump news. [laughs] Yeah.

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So I'm quoted as saying we would never buy a, a newspaper, and then I had to then kind of said, "Well, I never said never," 'cause you never know what's around the corner.

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[laughs] And I think that, you know, New York Times bought Wirecutter and, and that was a smart move for them. So it's unlikely we would buy a, a news news business because I think it's fundamentally different.

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But I also think that modern media today has to constantly compare to reap it, so. Yeah. And I think co- core to our DNA is this kind of disruption mindset, so I, I don't know for sure. Yeah. Okay.

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So one of the things of the disruption mindset and that's changed quite a bit is commerce being a big part of publishing.

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Like, I can remember when it started, you know, Wirecutter was like, oh, you know, there's this guy who is a journalist. He lives in Hawaii.

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He surfs every day, and he writes about products, and he makes a nice living off of it, and then, you know, The New York Times bought it and stuff like this.

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But, like, it's become a more than incremental revenue stream at a lot of publishers that have that intent, right?

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And look, there's a lot of people who are overdoing it, I think, because they have news brands that have authority in Google, and they try to slip in a catalog, you know? And we all see it because it's very effective.

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But tell me, how does that change the sort of organization?

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Because I think when you move from thinking about CPMs to thinking about GMV, like, it changes the organization to some degree because it focuses the mindset in my view. Yeah. I- it is. So it's interesting.

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So I think, and I'm with you absolutely on the newspaper stuff. I think for us it was all about, I hate to sound boring, but what does our audience want and what does our audience need?

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And so if you're coming to us for advice about what's the best TV screens, then, you know, you, we should help you then make that commerce purchasing decision.

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What we have is quite a big, and it's always been really important for us, is quite a big division between the content and the audience and the monetization in terms of how that's fulfilled.

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And so because we built technology which actually puts the links on the pages itself, it's all very automated for us. The editorial folks don't worry about how we're monetizing it.

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They worry about giving the best review. What's the best TV based on this criteria? Which is what they were gonna write anyway.

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Y- you know, I go back to my original slide deck when I took the business over, you know, eight, eight, nine years ago,

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and, you know, it was this very kind of basic, but we'd put, you know, just two content types, how-tos and reviews. Now, today you call that intent, but that was what the magazine was.

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If you took the magazine apart, basically that was what the features were in the magazine. We were just doing that online in a different way.

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And so for us, keeping that separation so that editorial write about- Mm-hmm... what's the best thing to do, what's the best thing to buy.

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The commercial organization then, you know, ha- have those relationships around h- how best we, we monetize that. That really helps for us. So our primary metric isn't CPMs or GMVs. It's audience.

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And to paraphrase someone else, we have this belief, which is if you build it, they'll come. So if you build the right audience, you'll make money from it.

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So focus on building the right audience, not focus on chasing the dollars, and that's kind of philo- philosophically how we think about our organization.

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And we think about being, having the biggest audience but also having the most valuable audience. Mm-hmm. So in some of our categories it's a s- very small pop...

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Particularly B2B, it's a very small population, but if you can find that one person who really wants your information, then that's really valuable.

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And so we very much have organized ourself around audience, which it brings onto then brand because we, while brands are really important, they're kind of secondary to us at Future.

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And again, that's quite unusual in a media company to say that. We are content first, brand second. So, so they- Talk to me about that. Yeah, yeah. 'Cause that, you don't hear v- very people say that. No, I know.

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It's still controversial. I'm like, wow. It's very in- infrequent that I hear something on a podcast where I'm like, I haven't heard that from a guest before. Yeah, I know. That is actually the first.

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[laughs] Super controversial.

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It's not when you think about it, but I think one of the reasons why lots of businesses, media companies struggled with this kinda whole print to media thing was, how do I move my brand online and stay true to my brand?

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And what's the constraints within that? And it, it comes back to the earlier o- opportunities.

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Whereas what we think is, all right, I've got this brilliant article about how to improve your golf swing, and it was published in the magazine. But actually, in order to maximize that audience reach, the golf

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website isn't that strong.

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So what we better to do is to kind of cover that from T3, which is a much bigger website, and talk about-You know, under golf, you know how to improve, you know, in men's lifestyle, how to improve your golf swing and what that might look like.

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So what we're thinking about is where can you find the maximum audience for this piece of content who would be interested in it?

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And because largely online for us, people find us through SEO, not, it's not the entire market, but it's the largest driver. People find us 'cause they, 'cause we're answering their question.

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So your focus should be on does the piece of content reach the audience- Yeah... not does the brand. And so a lot of our brands that are magazines don't exist online today. So TechRadar does- isn't a magazine brand.

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It's an amalgam of all the technology magazines that we had to allow us to kinda maximize the scale of TechRadar online. Yeah.

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And I think that's a great point, because it, it really depends on the, on, everything depends on the business model at the end of the day. But I feel like in this area, the role of brand is different, right?

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Like, because you look at like y- I'll look at like tech like Dotdash and stuff like this. They created a lot of brands, but they're like plausible brands.

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They're not like, you know, no offense, Neil, but like you sort of made them up. Uh, they didn't have a long heritage. Now they have like the other brands that they've acquired. Yeah.

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But the role of brand is different when you're looking down a, a bunch of search results. Like it's just, it is different. Yeah. And it's more towards answering that question with a plausible brand.

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Like, if you're searching for a golf swing, and, you, you know, this example you used, and the brand is like, like XYZ or something like a food brand or something like this, well, then no, there's no alignment.

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But you need permission, right? That's exactly- That's what the brand does... and that's the word we, that's what we use all the time, is have we got permission to write about this content? And if we don't- Right...

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we need to either find a brand that does, or we don't cover it. Because you got, it's gotta, gotta have some cognitive resonance within the brand that you've created. But exactly to your point.

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So we, we own Marie Claire in the US under Liza, now that's a brand in the traditional sense of the word, right? And, and that brand is really important. But, you know, it's, and we want to have leading brands.

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You know, it's very important as a tech, Tom's Guide is number two in Comscore as a brand. But fundamentally, we start off with how do we get the content to the audience? Yeah. Yeah. It's totally...

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So I think one of the things particularly, let's just stay on the SEO last point, is, look, a lot of people see this, and we all go to search results, and I think Google is seeing this because, like, there is like things that work.

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You can be sure that 1,000 people are [laughs] going to start doing it. That is the story of publishing and probably everything. Yeah.

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And so Google's coming out with a new update, 'cause I think a lot of people who are just trying to race to like page one of these search results for high-value searches- Yeah...

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they, they don't have the permission necessarily. So how do you see, how, do you see these changes that are going on with Google right now as potentially beneficial to you, or is it a risk? Yeah.

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So I, I think that we should never be complacent as publishers, especially when part of your audience strategy depends on someone else's platform, and that is part of our audience strategy.

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But what has made us successful to date ha- is, has been, I'm gonna sound like Neil now [laughs] being expert, uh, being authoritative, having the best tech, having, you know, good ad systems i- in terms of w- what, what we will and w- what put on there, and having fast, fast loading pages.

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And so that, if you continue doing that, and you generally have expert people who write expert content, who get hands-on, then a lot of this kind of proliferation of the gold rush falls away.

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A- and you're left with the, you're left as being the authoritative person who has the right to win there. And so while it ebbs and flows and sometimes you see some publishers coming in and out, I think fundamentally

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through time we believe that we'd be bec- we continue to be beneficiaries from that.

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And we definitely see when we buy businesses, we put them on our tech platform, 'cause a lot of people don't think about the technology impact of SEO and, and that Google looks a lot about the quality of the site.

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We quite often see significant audience uplifts as we move onto our tech platform. And so we definitely think that is a, an enabler. However, a- as a CEO, I've gotta be risk averse.

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I've gotta have a plan if that doesn't work, which is one of the reasons why we looked at newsletter and why we've been thinking a l- little bit more about subscriptions, and it's one of the reasons why we bought, we, we did buy SmartBrief.

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And two years ago we bought a video production company, which we, we rebranded Future Studios.

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So we've been thinking about how can we make sure that we have content that can be accessed in other formats, such that if the world changes, it's not a surprise.

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Yeah, I'm building a business that we want to endure, and so you have to build a strategy which endures beyond one search engine and one algorithm. Yeah.

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And like everything, like the story of like technology is things come and go, right? Yes.

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Everything seems permanent, like when we're in it, but like, you know, I can remember when Yahoo seemed permanent as the homepage of the internet. And maybe Jim- Yeah...

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maybe Jim Lanzone will come on the podcast and tell me it still is, but I don't think- [laughs]... most of us would say it's not.

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Uh, and like, I don't know if TikTok is really gonna become like a search engine for a lot of people. I know it's like a sexy story to write, so it's written a lot.

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But I think in some categories you're definitely seeing that, and I think the food category is one.

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Like, the way that people discover recipes has absolutely changed, and some of that I think is due to how people have treated recipe sites.

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I joke with Neil that like, you know, one of his great lifetime achievements is, is making like a recipe site that's not a horror show to actually use. [laughs] Yeah. Um- Totally agree.

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Okay, so I wanna actually just leave it there. I really appreciate you taking the time, Zillah, and I think it's been great to hear about, like, how you're operating this business.

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'Cause I think, you know, again, like people go into the doom and gloom. There are a lot of like about very successful and thriving publishing businesses out there. [upbeat music] Future's definitely one of them.

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Fantastic. Thanks very much for your time. Thank you for listening this week. We will be back next week with a new episode. The Rebooting show is produced by Podhelpus.

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