It's like being a little guy getting into a bar fight. You gotta get the bigger guy on the ground, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I think it's true. It's true.
[laughs] I'm just telling you what my strategy is if we ever- Yeah... get into a fight. There you go.
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That's A-U-D-I-G-E-N-T.com. [upbeat music] So welcome back to a new episode of the Rebooting show. Uh, I think I'm nearing 10 at this point, so hopefully I'm knocking some of the rust off.
I wanna thank, um, all of the guests so far. Um, they've all been very patient with the various hiccups, and you too, the audience. I appreciate it. Big thanks to everyone, um, who has rated and reviewed the podcast.
I wanna particularly shout out MPM318, who says that this does not disappoint.
When you're in media, you become jaded 'cause you feel like you've heard most of the conversations before, all the talking points, all the PR clips, et cetera.
He also goes on to call me charismatic and an expert, but I won't read that part. But the important part is going beyond the PR clips, so that's you, Bennett. He is my guest.
He's not gonna rely on the, the PR clips and stuff. Bennett was recently named the president of Protocol, which if you don't know, which I'm sure you do, is the tech news publisher that's now two years old.
Protocol was born out of Politico.
Pennant-Bennett's gonna disagree with me on this characterization, but I'm, I'm sticking with it, and it is now, uh, part of Politico Media, which is itself part of Axel Springer, which paid a $1 billion, I believe, for Politico in the fall.
Bennett, welcome. Thank you for having me, Brian. I agree. [laughs] Super charismatic and a, and a great program. [laughs] Okay, wow. Long time listener, first time caller. Long time listener.
It's, it's only been around for a couple of months.
[laughs] So let's get into origin stories a little bit with Protocol, because you were at Politico for, what, six years, and, and were part of the launch team for Protocol.
Now, I've, I read up, we wrote about the launch and all that stuff back at Digiday. What was the thesis? Give me the hypothesis, if you will. Yeah, definitely. So thank you.
And so going way back, I mean, we started to expand Politico in a number of different directions.
Obviously, launched Politico back in 2007, launched Politico Pro, really high-end, successful, professional business model.
And then one of the big expansion experiences that I had was we launched Politico Europe, which was our first time taking that Politico model outside of the US political system and outside of that original context.
And so the big bet with launching Politico Europe was could we replicate the success of Politico in a different market entirely, in a different political system, in a different economy?
And Politico Europe's been tremendously successful. They've got more than 100 folks now. They're very profitable. They're, they're doing great, and so a mission accomplished there.
I think at the very core of Protocol was an extension of that same thesis, which is can we use this similar influencer-focused, insider, unbiased model that made Politico successful, that made Politico Europe successful, could we take that out of politics entirely and bring it to a different power center in a different industry?
Um, unsurprisingly, given everything that media and every other industry are going through, tech was the obvious first place to bring that thesis and to expand because givs-given the role, even before the pandemic, that, that tech is playing in all of our lives, such a dynamic, influential power center that we felt like it was something that, that the Politico style of reporting and style of media business could make an impact in.
So that was really the core original thesis and, and what... how we started thinking about launching what became Protocol.
So explain what the Politico playbook is because I think I know from the outside, but I'd be interested to hear the view from the inside. Yeah, certainly. I think it is a couple of things.
I think it's covering these industries and these stories for insiders first, like really not trying to cater to a mass consumer audience, but really say, "Who are the most important people in these industries, in these conversations, and how do we add utility to their daily lives," right?
That idea of being really actionable for insiders has always been square one for Politico and is really square one for Protocol too. So I think that's step one.
And then step two is not being so jargony about the way that you cover it, that it's still accessible to a larger audience.
We wanna make this not a really wonky trade publication, but something that's easy to read in, in plain language, it's well written, that may be written with those insiders in mind, but a larger audience of consumers, of news junkies could just as easily consume it and, and find it interesting.
So I think that balance of actionable and accessible insider focus is really important.To me, extremely important in politics, but equally important to what we're doing in tech, was for Politico not having an agenda, not having a partisan slant of really saying, "We are coming at this to call balls and strikes.
We're not coming at this to, you know, promote a particular political agenda."
That I think was especially important i- for insiders in politics and policy because they tend to know what they're getting from a lot of publications that have a political slant and need to unpack that to try to find the, the core actionable intel from within that news.
So I think that those pieces of insider focus, actionable utility for insiders, and really keeping an unbiased point of view is, was really key to that DNA. Yeah.
I understand the, the expanding to Europe and then also the state capitals effort they had, but this is a totally different industry, and, and I put industry in quotes in a way because I think tech has moved from being a vertical to a horizontal.
I think a lot of tech publications, and maybe you guys saw this, sort of hit a little bit of an identity crisis because when you're covering technology...
They, they were saying they were covering technology, but they were really chasing venture capital and big tech companies, and that story moved from a very San Francisco story to just tech is part of everything.
I mean, you're covering the auto industry, you're covering regulatory policy if you're talking about Europe, 'cause they're a regulatory superpower. And I feel, feel like the tech story has changed quite a bit.
Explain why tech was the area to overlay this model on. Yeah. No, and I think for all the reasons you just described, right?
Tech is taking over everything, and technology is, you know, A, number one on the both worry list and opportunity list of I think every board and C-suite in any industry.
And as you described, tech is no longer just about the tech industry itself, but it's about how different technologies are disrupting every other industry.
And so I think that transformative moment, that corner that you're describing that tech turned, really for us was about how tech has become this global power center, and how do we cover that, both the tech industry itself as well as how technology's disrupting other industries, and use that to add a lot of value at a professional level for executives, policymakers, folks in tech and outside of tech.
And I think that balance is really important. We are not covering this to be a publication just for the tech industry. We really wanna say, "How can we cover the cloud? How can we cover fintech?
How can we cover Chinese tech? How can we cover the future of work?"
All the topics that we're covering, but doing that for, for a balanced audience that's both accessible and actionable to that tech executive as well as that energy or automotive or financial executive that also needs to know just as much about tech to do their jobs.
Yeah. That's like a tough balance though, right?
Because I, and I go back to Politico a little bit too because I think what Politico got really right is that, look, there were, there was The Hill and Roll Call before Politico existed that covered the ins and outs of the legislative process, and they were little read, much feared.
And then Politico came around and said, "This is a bigger market. This is a much bigger market than just some trade publication that you find around the Hill in different corners." And politics has a particular...
It's particular as far as an industry. Does tech have those same dynamics? I think it does in certain ways. Obviously, the political apparatus is unique in a number of ways, right?
Given the geographic center, given the very clear pyramid of influence that exists with the different bodies of government. I think that tech does have a lot of similarities, though.
I think on one side there is that distinction between technology's influence itself versus the tech industry, right?
And I think that, like, breaking that down and trying to, as you said, broaden the opportunity and saying that we don't just need to write for people in tech, we can write for executives in business and folks working in policy, but who need to understand really expert level things about what's happening in tech to do their jobs, I think that that's a distinction that we've made that I think is an important one and is a big one.
In addition to that, I think it is about finding that right balance of neither just covering the big headlines, stocks, products, CEOs, the things y- you see dominate mass media, broader news about tech, but also not get so into the weeds on speeds and feeds and deals that you only matter to the folks working in the industry or the folks doing it every day, right?
There's... I think there's a spectrum there of the broadsheet coverage of tech on one end and the speeds and feeds and deal flow coverage of tech on the kind of niche industry end.
And there really wasn't anything in the middle that said, "We can be accessible and actionable.
We can cover some of these stories from both ends, but make it useful to people in and out of the industry, but still decision-makers."
I think that finding that right balance that's neither too niche nor too broad has really been about where we've tried to live and what's been, I think, a secret to our success. Yeah.
I think the other half of the Politico playbook was a really powerful business model that mixed some of the best of B2B with the best of B2C.
I think what everyone wants, 'cause I can remember when w- Michael Wolff took over at Adweek, which is a glorious time. I enjoyed it. I was there for six months o- of Michael's tenure.
He looked at Politico and wanted to recreate that for the advertising and media world, where you had the advantages o- of B2B from a business model standpoint, but you have reach of B2C.
That's when start putting celebrities on the cover of Adweek and stuff. I don't think the advertising and media industry is necessarily the same, but i- is that model how you're looking at Protocol developing? It is.
We wanna build that similar sustainable hybrid business model. We're in the first inning or two of developing that, right? We're two years old.
Before you launch Politico Pro, you had to build Politico, and so we're still in that same phase of saying, "Hey, we're"... We launched at the very beginning of a pandemic. We've got two years under our belt.
We've got, you know, quarter million newsletter subscribers, a strong multi-million readers on the digital side, building a really strong advertising partnerships business.
I still think we've got another year or so of really building that foundation before we can go and say, "Hey, here's our theory of the case of what the professionals in each of these sub-sectors that we're covering really need to do their jobs, and how we can credibly ask folks to pay pretty significant amounts for that kind of journalism and information and analysis."
And that's definitely on the roadmap for us, but I think it's still a little ways away as we continue to build that foundation. So I wanna get back to that, but let's talk about where you are two years in.
Give me the state of the state.Definitely. So we are, we are- And be specific, Dan. No, no- Oh... 150% up. You're two years old, of course you're gonna be 150% up. In the middle- There you go... of a pandemic. Exactly.
We are... Look, we've, we're 55 employees. We're- Okay... we've grown, I think we launched with a couple dozens.
We've grown pretty significantly over those two years, and we've got about a million and a half readers a month, uniques, little over 200,000 newsletter subscribers over a family of eight newsletters.
Got a couple more that we're launching in the near future. Um, not gonna be specific on the revenue side- [laughs]... so sorry to burst your bubble there. But look, multi-million dollar business. We feel- [laughs]...
really good about the growth. Our aim, as we talked about before, is to build a Politico scale, Politico size media company with Protocol, and I think we're well on our way to doing that.
And the way you do that is by more than doubling the business a couple of years in a row to really start to create that momentum. So, um, feeling really good about where we're headed there.
The business itself, I think, is really healthy and diversified.
Doesn't look a lot like a lot of other media businesses, which I think is a little bit of a sign of the times, and would love to, to dive in there a little bit.
About a third of our business is content, is brand content, either syndicated or, or custom, which is a lot compared to a lot of other media publishers.
But a third of our business is brand content, a third of our business is newsletter sponsorships, and obviously a lot of those two things are related, and then the last third is
a combination of digital sponsorships and advertising events and other pieces. Okay. That's a good split, right? I would guess, like, it changes because you're gonna want subscriptions to be a third.
[laughs] Yeah, so, or a half or something in the future- Or a half... certainly.
But I think, yeah, no, I think it was interesting for us to see content becoming such a big piece of the puzzle so quickly, and I think that was for a couple of reasons. I think on one side- Well, let me just jump in.
Sure. What, what do you mean by content? Just sponsored content.
So either brand content, either syndicated brand content that folks are, are developing and, and we're publishing and promoting, or custom brand content that we're, we're co-creating with advertisers.
So that traditional advertorial native content is- Mm-hmm... about a third of our business, and that has been for a couple of reasons.
I think on one side, we have really, like Politico did in its early days, Protocol has grown from the top down. We have a really strong C-suite decision-maker audience in tech business and policy.
In launching in a world, we launched February 5th, 2020, literally a month before South By got canceled and everybody started working from home. Yeah. In that world- Great timing. Great timing. Yeah, great timing.
Great timing. But, um- It's good for the comm. Exactly. You can always, uh, compare, like, "Well, tw- we're up from 2020." There you go. Exactly right.
[laughs] I think an interesting piece though is that year, everybody got their entire conference schedule wiped clean- Yeah...
but there were still big thought leadership and T&E budgets around that executive speaking tour that folks needed to figure out how to deploy, and I think that we really benefited from that- Yeah...
in that folks would, would say, "Hey, put up an event." [laughs] 'Cause you didn't have a bunch of, uh, in-person events people that, like, you know... That, that was the problem was- No...
a lot of companies had the infrastructure in place to do tons of in-person events. So those budgets still existed, and they got redirected- Yeah...
but that infrastructure, unfortunately, a lot of people ended up getting furloughed and whatnot, but that- Yeah... was always a big challenge. No, for sure.
There was- Yeah, I remember us talking about that, that you said, like, you were actually seeing a lot of interest in the virtual events.
Ton of interest in the virtual events, and in the, the more thought leadership side of brand content. The- Mm-hmm...
executive Q&A, the help me profile this big new piece of business that I won that might have been the subject of my keynote that at this conference that I sponsored next quarter.
There were a lot of those d- different parallel paths that were real thought leadership success areas for us that made a huge part of our business be really focused on tech and business thought leadership that I think was related to trying to find a home for a lot of these thought leadership programs for a lot of executives during the pandemic.
So I know when you guys launched, it was very much, no, this is not just the Politico offshoot. It's totally different. We have a different management team. We have a different tech stack, all this stuff like this.
Is that still the case? I mean, 'cause again, there's a lot of efficiencies to be gained from just sharing a tech stack and stuff like this. I'm just wondering if, is it still all separate?
Yeah, I would say it's still pretty separate. We share a few things on the back of house. We share a finance team. We share benefits. We share a handful of those kind of fundamental operational- Yeah...
structures, which I think, like you said, are, just make more sense to do as a group. Purchasing power, efficiency, all that good stuff.
I think on the product and tech side, we're in year two, couple million readers a month. We don't need the same package that a 30, 40, 50 million unique platform does, right?
And we, and our c- if we were even to just to take off a piece of some of those, our costs would just get way out of whack, so there's a lot of places where we have the, the, the small publisher plan where the Politico and, and other folks- Yeah...
have the extra large publisher plan, right? And so there's, I think there's a healthy amount of separation there.
And look, at the end of the day, no company wants to have the tail wag the dog and have to have their product or innovation strategy become beholden to a tech stack or become beholden- Sure...
to decisions that somebody else made. And so I think we've gotten the r- exactly right amount of independence there and, and stayed- Mm-hmm...
pretty insular and pretty separate so we can build what we wanna build- Mm-hmm... and move where we wanna move. But the partnerships, the sales is separate. 'Cause I can see a lot of overlap.
Look, I mean, it doesn't take a genius. You don't have to read that many things to know Facebook is dumping a ton of money into the, "Hey, no, we want regulations" ads. They're everywhere.
Facebook, if you're interested, I, I'll run one. But y- are you doing, like, the cross sales, like, across the portfolio then? A little bit. On occasion. It's not a significant portion of either of our, our businesses.
I think we, we have a great relationship with that team and collaborate a good amount. I think a lot of times we are a part of a different slice of those buys than someone like Politico is. I'll give you one example.
The Facebook regulatory campaign you mentioned, you've seen that on, on Protocol. That's something that we've been a part of. That's on the- But I was quoting it from, from Protocol. That's where I saw it. There you go.
But then on a, as a separate example, we also work with Workplace, with Facebook, now Meta's B2B collaboration productivity tool, right?
We, and that's, that is a...Enterprise software reaching enterprise software purchasing decision-makers, very, you know, traditional B2B digital marketing campaign. They're doing some really cool content around- Yeah...
how people use Workplace. That's something that we're gonna be launching in, in the next little bit.
That's an example of a fundamental SaaS enterprise B2B marketing campaign that would not make sense to run with someone like Politico, but when you're reaching essentially IT business decision-makers that are a big part of Protocol's audience, it makes a ton of sense.
Okay. There's a lot of overlapping logos- Yeah... but in a lot of places we're getting a, a brand-new tech marketing side of, of the, the- Right... pie that is just nowhere near the work though. Yeah.
I think of those as endemic for what Protocol is, but the... I... What are they called? The stuff that, that runs across Axios and Politico, and call this like, you know- Oh, kind of public affairs marketing. Yeah...
public affairs marketing. Talk about an over-covered area. I'm sorry, but we do not need any more politics-focused news organizations, and I understand why they're popping up is because it's the one area of advertising.
All these tech companies are pouring tons of money into it. There's only so much lobbying they can do. [laughs] So there's a lot of other places they can tell their story like that. Exactly.
And I think it's interesting to see that though. I don't think that trend's going away anytime soon. Like, that regulatory environment- No... is only gonna continue to heat up. I think you're- Yeah...
gonna see crypto and fintech hit some of these same regulatory headwinds in the course of the next year- Yeah... that you're, you've already been seeing in big tech, and so I think that you'll see more of that too.
But I think all of that's been interesting for us. I think that there's a need to do some similar internal and industry comms the same way that you're doing this kind of public affairs and policy comms.
And so I think that having that same message about being a good corporate citizen into the industry and into your own employees or your prospective talent as well as out to policymakers has been something that we've seen, I think is one- Mm-hmm...
of the other reasons that we end up being a part of those campaigns and conversations as well. Yeah. Are most of your clients B2B? Yes.
The, the majority is B2B by far, and even the, what would be closest to B2C is a s- is still an enterprise business solution, right? You might be buying a software or a, or a, you know- Mm...
product, but it's still for the business professional. So yeah, it's overwhelmingly B2B, majority tech companies.
We also work with a, a bunch of fintech and financial services, retail, professional services, some folks in energy, some folks in, in a handful of other industries. But yeah, primarily B2B and primarily tech.
There's a lot there, especially at this intersection of thought leadership and a lot of these enterprise solutions, right?
If you're looking for any kind of enterprise software, any kind of cloud storage memory, any of those kinds of solutions, there are so many options, and it's only continuing to explode.
And so all of those brands, both in enterprise tech, in fintech, in all these different places, they've raised a lot of money. They've got ambitious growth, you know, goals, and they wanna stand out, right?
They wanna figure out how do, how can I become the household name for this slice of software, this slice of storage?
And we've had a lot of success telling those stories and helping folks make a real progress towards becoming that household name in their segment.
What, what's something that was part of the hypothesis that you had to change course on over the last two years? Well, I'll actually build on exactly what we're just talking about.
I think that business side of tech is more central to, to Protocol today than maybe we thought it would be before we launched Protocol.
I think that the, what I'll call the broader like tech and society beat, and there was a lot of gig worker conversations happening in early 2020, even before the pandemic, that obviously dominated a lot of conversation during the pandemic too.
So I think that maybe when we started out, we were a little more heavily weighted in that direction. I think during the pandemic, two things happened. One, everybody had to work from home, right?
Like, we, we launched a workplace vertical in June of, of, uh, 2021.
Sold out everything we had to sponsor, events, our brain trust Q&As, our every week of the newsletter before we even launched it because there was such an appetite in just telling that story of how different kinds of different brands were helping folks with this transition.
So that happened, and then digital transformation.
I mean, businesses that had r- still relied on heavy in-person kind of slower processes all of a sudden had to figure out how to be distributed and digital first overnight.
And so both of those two things happening essentially at the same time, I think was a huge opportunity for us because we were just, we were naturally covering those stories.
Those naturally became dominant parts of our coverage, of let's show how companies are going digital first overnight.
Let's show how companies are moving to remote work, moving to these hybrid situations, and still making it work, and sometimes making it work better.
Um, and so I think that those transitions really because of the pandemic were, are, make Protocol a more kind of tech and business-centric publication today than we probably thought it would've been two years ago. Yeah.
Let's talk a little bit about the approach too because I think with Politico, like when you see those bias charts, it gets put somewhere, but it clearly tries to occupy the center, and it's really difficult to occupy the center of politics these days, and I find increasingly the same is true for tech.
Because if you look at the, the sweep of like tech publications, like the early days it was all cheerleading, and it was all just, "Oh my God, this disruption, everything is just gonna be changed.
It's gonna be wonderful. We're gonna have these flying cars," and it was totally suck-ups. And then all of a sudden things changed.
I don't know if it was Theranos or whether it was people getting sick of being lied to or something like this, but I almost feel like the, the tech coverage has gone too far, but the pendulum never swings perfectly in the middle.
It always [laughs] goes from one side to the other. But it seems pretty clear that tech has become this lightning rod in which people have dumped a lot of...
And this is, does not absolve Facebook and Google, et cetera, for many misdeeds, but it's become this dumping ground for any ill for society or any outcome of an election people don't agree with.
H- how hard has that been to, to try to occupy a thoughtful center?Look, it's super important, and it's super challenging, and I think that fairness is something that we care a lot about.
And I'll, I'll call back to a moment that, that, that I had during AWS re:Invent in that brief blissful period we were still going to in-person conferences before the holidays last year.
And we were at a cocktail party, and I was with one of our reporters and a executive who-- whose company we had covered fairly critically, fairly recently.
And they said, "Look, you guys were extremely fair, and you guys knew what you were talking about."
And I think that there's something heartening about that, about even someone that you're criticizing saying, "You knew our business, and you knew what was happening technologically enough to criticize us accurately."
That was one of those kind of backhanded compliments. But I don't think they were psyched to see critical coverage, but they felt like we did it in a really fair and, like, expert-level way.
And so I think that balance of how do you cover...
You don't take potshots, you don't just look for the clickbait opportunity, but really say, "We're gonna cover this, whether it's positively or critically, we're gonna cover this as, as fairly as we can," has been super important to us, and I think one of the reasons we've had a lot of success and, and growth.
Yeah. And it's a moving target. I just know from over the years. So people claim you're being unfair, and you're like, "Uh, I think I'm being fair. Why would I wake up and decide to be mean to you?" No, no. Totally.
But there is this new activism that h-had always been told that you have to check it at the door if you're gonna be a journalist.
But I feel like more and more people are leaning into journalism as a way to enact change, and sometimes that can move into nearly activism. There's, there's clearly publications that cover tech with a critical lens.
If they don't, they just happen to constantly be finding critical things. Yeah. That is everywhere.
And I think for us, we used to talk about it i-in my Politico days, that on any given day, you could have somebody on the right saying you were skewing left, and someone on the left saying you were skewing right, and that was a good day.
If you had people gonna- Yeah... both sides thinking you were going further the other direction, then, then that meant you were mixing it up and keeping it balanced enough to, to keep it healthy.
And I think there's some of that at Protocol. I think on any given day you could probably find a story that you feel like was pro-tech, and you could find a story that you could feel like was harsh on tech. Yeah.
And f-finding that balance is I think what's keeping, uh, us successful, and is also what's attracting talent.
Because I think you're right, there are a lot of places you can go to have a more activist point of view around tech, around business.
Um, but if you're trying to cover this in a way that's really useful for people actually making the decision in these industries, you need to orient yourself a little bit differently.
And so I think that, like, finding that balance through the lens of, "Hey, we're covering this for the most important people in these industries," that does, I think, allow you to check those perspectives at the door a little bit like you, you were describing.
Yeah. I wanna ask just a quick broader question because recently Justin Smith and Ben Smith said they're gonna start a new publication. It's a little vague what it is.
They both have great track records, so I think they'll, they'll end up figuring it out. It's, it's gonna be in English. We know that much. It's gonna be in English. English speakers.
But it's also gonna be targeting these college edu-- basically elite people globally, right? And I-- don't you think that we, we could be in a situation where...
Because there's big money i-- to be made if you can accumulate an audience of elite people, influential people in whatever, uh, field, and there's a lot of effort going into that.
Now, I think that there is some real criticism to be made that there's a lot of underserved areas because the money is simply not there, and the money is usually there if you can find an elite influential audience.
There just is. Yeah. But definitely.
I think about that a lot with the rush to paywalls right now, and how I do think we are warping society a little bit if we end up at a moment where all of our best journalism is behind a, a paywall, either a consumer or a professional paywall.
'Cause I think the, I think you do create a bit of a classification almost of you have a class of people who can afford to access the most quality news and quality journalism, and you have a class of people who can't, and I think that can be problematic just for society and democracy writ large.
Which is why I personally, I've always, you know, loved the fact that Politico itself was free to air and ad supported, and then you had the professional side was supported that way.
BuzzFeed News was a great example of this with, you mentioned Ben, that was quality free news. And so I, I think that is-- I think that it's important to find a balance there.
I think you've got a lot of folks obviously experimenting with a lot of different diversified business models that allow them to support free content and free journalism.
We will certainly continue to try to strive for that balance even as we go into a, you know, Protocol Pro type future one day.
I think we'll still wanna make sure that our core coverage is still accessible to, to everybody. Yeah.
I think that's the ideal is that you have broadly available content for everybody, and then you have a very professionalized product that you can charge a lot more than two hundred dollars a year for. Definitely.
Definitely. [laughs] 'Cause I do think at a certain point, and I, a friend tweeted about this earlier. Was, uh, said something like, "I love all of you.
I wanna subscribe to everything that all of you write, but at a certain point, it's getting a little expensive." Right? And I do think that that chicken is gonna come home to roost at some point.
There's only so many ten and twenty dollar monthly subscriptions that a single even relatively affluent person [laughs] is going to want to sustain.
And when you can subscribe to something like The New York Times for the price of two Substacks, how do you start to, to balance that in your own budget, in your own wallet, right?
I, I think it'll be, be interesting to see how that, uh, balances out after a lot of these, like you like to talk about often, the promotional cycles die down- Yeah... and some different, different paywalls.
But it's also, it's just, again, it's that pendulum thing. Like, everything just swings too far. And it just is so strange to me that 10 years ago just about everything was ads. It was all ad supported.
And, like, it was just the default. It was e- no matter what the category, it was gonna just be ads. And now it's almost like when someone launches, "Well, what about the subscriptions?
It-- Shouldn't this be subscriptions?" And my God, why would... Like, you can't all go to one thing.
Well, to your point, and this, and the pendulum is, is going completely the other way, there are-Great ways to support content and journalism through advertising, right?
There's the old kind of adage that people don't hate advertising, they hate bad advertising. Yeah. And I think that's super true, and I think that honestly, the work that you do is a great example.
The ads that you have are actually useful and relevant to the media operators that are reading- Yeah... your newsletter and listening to your podcast.
Majority of the stuff that we're doing is the same way, like, these are actual tools that the people reading Protocol might wanna use, and might already use.
And so I think finding that actual symbiotic relationship where your advertising is high quality enough and useful enough to your readers that it, it can actually improve the quality- Yeah...
of the experience, not just take away from it. I think that's the key and the hard part is improve, not detract from the experience.
'Cause obviously we've all had the experience with advertising that has made a lot of websites barely usable. Your browser starts smoking and stuff. Yeah. And I always joke about Forbes.
I'll have Forbes on at some point to ask them about this, but if I see the link on, like, Twitter, I'm like, "I really gotta wanna read the story to click on it, 'cause I'm not sure what's gonna happen to me."
[laughs] Yeah. You get the pop-up and the pop-down. You've got your nice inch of, of reading. Yeah. I gotta prepare myself.
I gotta, like, mute everything and get ready to limber up to be able to close all the different- Yeah... invitation windows and stuff.
But actually- There's a lot of, there's a lot of business publications like that, though, right?
That have, have built a significant amount of traffic and want to find dozens of ways to monetize that traffic and add additional ad units and things like that.
Candidly, we've grown a decent amount fr- from advertisers of those kinds of places, because they're- Yeah...
looking for a tech-centric business, executive-centric audience, and probably a better experience for their content and for their ads. Yeah.
And also, by the way, like, the numbers for a lot of those publications, they're all just search traffic that is built up over the years.
If you exist for a number of years, you're gonna get a ton of search pa- uh, traffic, and it's not all that's gonna be- Authority, right? It's not the, the factor they call it in the algorithm.
It's the search authority, 'cause you've been around for so long. Yeah, but it's not business decision-makers. Give me a break. You can't have 150 million uniques a month of business decision-makers.
It does- That, that's just not reality. This is true. Um- This is... Th- th- the decisions that were being made would be fairly small. But I do think the- And judging all those people that way. I don't know.
I'm sure in starting a, a new brand, I mean, it is a little bit frustrating because you're always fighting with one arm tied behind your back when it comes to the scale.
Because if you've existed for long enough, you have a certain amount of scale. Definitely. And you talked about this with Sarah, uh, Fisher on your, your podcast earlier.
That's why I think subscribers and focusing on quality newsletter subscribers as a doorway into the community has been really important to us and really important to a lot of newer media companies.
Because that search authority and that search ranking and traffic will come with time. Yeah.
But if you can focus on actual individuals, I know there's a group of VPs and C-suite in this industry, and I can penetrate and I can get a decent amount of those people to, to subscribe to my content, then I know I'm making progress.
Like, literally subscriber- Yeah... by subscriber. Yeah. And that's, that's the... But the... Exactly. That's why newsletters are great, because it's, it levels the playing field a little bit.
Not totally, because there's so many distribution advantages that le- legacy publications have over new publications.
But if you can get the fight to be about engagement and true quality of the people you say you're reaching, you got a much better chance. It's like being a little guy getting into a bar fight.
You gotta get the bigger guy on the ground, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I think it's true. It's true. [laughs] I'm just telling you what my strategy is if we ever get- Yeah... into a fight. There you go.
There you go. Honestly, though, I think the thing that's been interesting for us talking to advertisers in these first two years, when we're able to talk about the engaged, influential audience that we're reaching,
that we're reaching huge amount of C-suite executives with policymakers distributed across tech, business, policy,
engaged with us, strong open rates, strong time on page, we oftentimes don't get into these tit for tat conversations about, "Well, why doesn't that newsletter have 45,000 subscribers instead of 41," right?
And I think that there's quality there, and I think that's what- Yeah...
brands are realizing they need, especially now when they don't have that in-person connection at conferences and things like that, is how do I reach the actual quality audience that I need?
What data do you use to show that? We use a handful of things.
We, we've done a lot of first party data, so we've done reader surveys pretty frequently since we launched, and we've got all of our MailChimp and things like that data fr- you know, internally.
And then we're also, in terms of the profiles, we've also matched it up with different third-party resources, making sure that we're enhancing all of our email lists to know, know as much about as many of those readers as possible.
We've got a couple million readers a month. We're not big enough to have a massive DMP stack or have- Right... a massive Comscore ranking or things like that. Yeah.
And so it oftentimes ends up being just more communication with your audience and getting them to, to give you more information about themselves.
Yeah, it's funny, I do some consulting, and everyone sheepishly at some point admits that they're running their entire business off spreadsheets and MailChimp as their DMP of sorts. And I'm like, "Don't worry.
It's fine." There you go. Everyone do- Yeah. A lot of people do it. [laughs] Exactly.
When you're dealing with individual influencers, when you can really say, "I've actually talked to a lot of these people, and they've replied to us"- Yeah... "and we...
They've subscribed to things, and we can tell you that 30% of this email list is in the C-suite and is founders, because we know that," that can oftentimes become more valuable than getting that vague Lotame score of, "This group is- [laughs]...
10 times more likely than any internet user ever- [laughs]... to be a business leader." Exactly. Okay, so I'm gonna wrap it up here with the what are your three priorities now.
You were recently named the, the president, so what are the three top priorities for 2022?Yeah, great question. Three top priorities. The first one is expansion, and so we've got a bunch of things underway.
We just launched Protocol Entertainment, which is a kind of a combination and growth of our streaming, gaming, AR/VR metaverse coverage, so excited about that.
We're about to launch Protocol Policy, so we're gonna have a deeper look at tech policy, really catering to the industry.
So we've got a three days a week to policy newsletter launching, and then we've got the, the biggest of those three as well, Protocol Climate, so really getting into climate tech and covering that from a tech-centric perspective, not just the policies and the commitments.
We're really getting into what is the innovation happening that's pulling, pulling things out of the air and helping folks- Yeah... achieve these climate commitments. So that's launching, uh, next month.
So that's, that expansion and rollout is a big one. I'll, I'll give that kind of one and two. And then other than that, honestly, it's really about clearing a path.
As I think about it as a executive, like you've got a couple of roles, just how do you help make some big decisions, but also how do you help your, your team be able to do their best work?
And so the drum that I've been beating is what meetings can we cancel? What meetings can we consolidate? How can we just work better? What are the tools you need? What are the tools you don't need?
And really just trying to fine-tune the way that we operate. Are you going back to the office? I'm in the office right now. We are- I know you are- Yeah... but I don't see anyone in the background.
[laughs] No, there is... We, we are, we're pretty quiet right now. No, and obviously with Omicron- [laughs]...
we've tried to be super optional and relaxed with our in office policy because at the end of the day, you don't want people to be risking their health just to go sit at a desk.
But the way I see it is we want it to be a benefit, not a burden. There's a lot of folks like yourself probably earlier in your career living in a small apartment in a city,
maybe with a roommate, where having an office space is super useful and actually a much more productive place to do work. And so we've got offices in, in San Francisco, New York, and DC.
We've got another about quarter of our staff fully remote in other places like London and Seattle and Portland. And so it's a mix and it's a balance, but we've got great offices that are here for when folks need them.
Let me tell you, many years ago, living above a Brother Jimmy's in the Upper East Side, going to the office was a real break. [laughs] You didn't like smelling all those ribs and margaritas all day long?
[laughs] Exactly. All right, Bennett, we're gonna leave it there. Thank you so much. Appreciate you, uh, taking the time. Thanks for having me, Brian. Really appreciate it. And thank you all for listening.
We will be back next week with a new episode. [outro music]