The things that we build, we can build on top of. It's a, a notion of kind of Lego blocks. We're getting complicated here. Great. DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations.
They're like the nudist colony version of LLCs.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show.
I'm Brian Morrissey. Thanks for, uh, joining us again. Uh, this is our second episode of the year. This is a little miniseries we're doing with a look ahead to the big themes of twenty twenty-two.
Hopefully you heard the episode I did last week with Sarah Fisher from Axios. I thought it was quite a good conversation. These episodes are brought to you by Audigent.
If you're making bets on a word of the year in digital media in two thousand twenty-two, identity is a good candidate.
The nature of digital advertising is changing as the industry transitions away from the third-party cookie as a key audience identifier.
Identity, both on the page and across the digital media ecosystem, is an evolving and complex component to publisher monetization.
Audigent's Hadrian ID serves as a cookieless container solution, delivering cookieless solutions at scale while being fully interoperable with other ID systems.
It's simple to deploy and instantly enables end-to-end cookieless programmatic buying while delivering addressability.
Audigent is transforming how clean first-party data powers the programmatic landscape by putting the control back in the hands of publishers and advertisers. To find out more, visit audigent.com.
That's A-U-D-I-G-E-N-T dot com. [upbeat music] And now we're going to get into the episode. As I said, this is the second in a series of podcast episodes devoted to the year ahead.
This week, I am talking to Troy Young, longtime digital media executive, who was most recently the president of Hearst Magazines.
I've known Troy a long time, and I know him to be very thoughtful about the media business, so I was very happy when he launched his own Substack, which is called People vs. Algorithms. You should check it out.
You can find it at peoplevsalgorithms.com. That's V-S for versus. Troy, I'm happy that we get to do this on a podcast. So fun. Love it. Yeah. Well, let's-- It's only, it's only two, two minutes in.
I mean, we just barely got out of the ad, so we'll see how it goes. [sniffs] Okay.
All right, let's start with what you've been up to, advising and consulting, a-and then y-you've decided to create competition for me with a newsletter? [laughs] Yeah, I mean, that was...
The, the newsletter thing was a little surprising, actually.
I don't know, I, I felt like I had some things that I needed to put down, and one afternoon, I opened up Substack, and I wrote some things that were on my mind, and I pressed send to ten of my friends or colleagues, and I had-- I didn't really realize at the time that I was making a commitment to doing it.
I think at the time I said I would do it weekly, and I, I didn't have a really good sense of what that meant.
But it went out, and people said, "You should keep doing it," and I felt good about it, and like most people will tell you that write things, it's like being a photographer or a writer.
It forces you to look around, and I thought that was healthy for me, so I kept doing it.
[laughs] So in the intro, you, you talk about looking for patterns, and, and you do, and I think that's interesting because y-you do have to look around to the world around you, and I think sometimes people get a little myopic with whatever business they're in.
B-but all businesses operate in a broader context. So where do you end up looking for these patterns to figure out where the media business is going? It's an incredible time to be a curious person.
There's so much to learn. And there's, there's so many... And, and, and I'm g- I think I'm gonna write about this a little bit this week.
There's so many people are not part of what is a sort of classic media ecosystem that are writing and making and talking about things that there's really an unending source of inspiration and inf-information if you look for it.
One of the things that I f- I found interesting in creating the newsletter I send out is that I never wanted it to be an aggregation or just a pointer to a bunch of other people's thoughts.
I, I wanted to try to put something coherent together every week. And I guess that sort of in my, you know, second one or third one, I kinda made that a, a goal of mine.
And that's really hard to do because what it means is that by Saturday or Sunday or Monday, you have to have a thesis.
And so the reason I, that I highlight that is that thesis is essentially a kind of a pivot point to look at the world, right?
So if your thesis is the, the notion of measuring impressions and, and paying for media with impressions is, you know, is changing dramatically, then you go out and try to put, you know, make some sense of that and look around and see what people are saying about it.
So every week, I move forward by creating an idea or a thesis that I chase and, and, and then I just look around and s-see how the pieces fit together. But there's so much good stuff on Substack.
There's so many good podcasts. There's amazing stuff if you know how to look around on Reddit or Twitter and stuff. So it's an, you know, and it's an incredible time to be curious.
So, so that's how, how I look for patterns. Yeah, I agree.
I think that's one of the great things with Substack is that a lot of people-- It forces, like you said, it forces that discipline of thinking and then putting together, like, a coherent argument. Now, [laughs] I think
the hard part is doing it week in, week out for years, so we'll see how that works out. Not, not for you. I, I, I feel like you will, you will be able to do it, but that's always the hard part.
I always know when people are running out of original ideas, when they start looking on Twitter, and they got a lot of embedded tweets that they're reacting to in their newsletter. [laughs] It's never a good sign.
Or it's, or it's when, or it's when you're writing it and you feel, oh my God, I've said that before. I keep saying the same things about media and commerce and all that shit.
Yeah, but that's okay because you're the only person-Who has read every single word and somewhat remembers, uh, uh, it all.
I, I always thought that-- I, I would always find reporters who would come to me, and I would say, "Well, we should do a story about this."
And they'd be like, "Ooh, one time three months ago, we mentioned this thing in the seventeenth paragraph."
And I'm like, "Do you really think that if we go deeper in this and bring something original that people are gonna be outside protesting because, like, one time we mentioned... " You know what I mean?
I think you have to repeat things to some degree. That might be a controversial take.
You know, I would say I'm hugely guilty of that because I think that a piece of content, like an interaction with another human being, by the way, it took me a really long time to, to learn this, and I certainly haven't mastered it, but it's about a feeling.
It's not about this perceived intellectual process where you understand every word that I'm saying, and it makes sense to you- Mm-hmm. -and we communicate that way. It's about a feeling.
I want the content to be about important observable things and patterns and insights and all that, but I also want them to have feeling. And so I don't wanna be purely personality-led.
Guess you've, you know, kind of pushed me to have the personality be part of what I do. Well, I think that's important. It's a side dish for most people, but it's an important side dish.
It's like, uh, broccoli or something like that. Mm-hmm. But maybe a little bit more exciting than broccoli.
So I wanna talk about the Web3 crypto stuff, but first I wanna g-get your t-take because I think sometimes people don't start there.
Just give me the macro view of the role of the media company 'cause I think sometimes people leap ahead without actually thinking what media companies do. What is the function?
'Cause it does-- A media company-- A media business does a bunch of different things, right? Right. And I don't think people s-tend to think systematically about that. Right.
First and foremost, I think it's probably a brand that sets expectations, that gives the audience a sense of what they're to expect.
Through that brand is, is a lens, it's a point of view at best, I think, that you gather a bunch of writers or content creators that fit inside of that lens. It has an industrial function.
The way I think about it, the middle of a media company has a lot of work to do in terms of taking that information and making it available to people, creating monetization mechanisms, selling the media, doing PR around the media, organizing the logistics of distributing the media in all ways, whether you're, you know, a digital media company or you do physical things or whatever.
The middle is, is about distribution and monetization and, and managing a roster of content creators.
I think that executives at media companies, the best of them really understand the role that that media plays in the lives of-- in culture, in the lives of the audience, in terms of what the brand means and wha-- how it evolves over time.
And the greatest media brands are ultimately communities, so they connect lots of people together with an idea or point of view. Right. So how is that changing, do you think?
'Cause I think over the last decade we've seen...
And I think it's one of those things that it's been going on for forever, but now it's been more obvious, the shift from institutions to individuals, and I think that's happening in media to a degree.
I don't mean, like, media companies are going away, but as you said, an essential function of a media brand is making a promise about quality, about a point of view, a lens on the world, and aggregating a bunch of talent that is going to express that in a, a monthly, weekly, daily way.
We're seeing that obviously in, in some cases, and Sub Stack is one example, unbundle to a degree because people tend to, to trust other people, and it's also easier to have a coherent point of view it's-- when it's a person, frankly, than a bunch of people.
[chuckles] What's the role of a media company in a world where individuals are media companies? Oh, I think it's-- I think it affects-- It, it, it impacts them, in short.
I think that if I look at the most important sources of information personally, there's still lots of professionalized scaled media brands in my media diet, whether that's the FT or The Wall Street Journal or The Information, et cetera.
But increasingly, I would say I spend more and more time with individual creator media brands, whether that's something like Ryan Broderick or Casey Newton or there's tons of them. But the... or the content you create.
So I think that this sort of hybrid expert journalist role, um, has become much more important to me.
Uh, i-in, in terms of, I think, the, uh, in many, in, in many ways, you know, the expertise that somebody's sort of operational exposure has afforded them and therefore, you know, having a, a real sense of how things work.
Um, in terms of... You know, I think there's a kind of new writing style emerging, which, you know, is more conversational, and I find it, um, really effective.
I think you see that a lot in Pop, um, which is my sort of favorite new media brand, um, which is a collection of, you know, really well re- you know, resourced and, and, and super connected, you know, writers across four different beats.
And they, um... It's just an... It's a... I just find it to be a really satisfying media experience. So to me, there's a new class of media. It's certainly anc-anchored in individuals.
It's, you know, in many cases, expert-led. You know, typically, you know, these folks are sort of on the hamster wheel of content creation. They have...
They're, they're extremely well connected in, you know, in their industries or have, you know, a depth of operational knowledge that, that makes them really useful to me. Yeah. So where does that leave tra-- 'Cause I...
You know, you've written and obviously you were, you were operating, you know, a bunch of magazine brands and, and you like magazines. I like magazines too, because they're- Love them.
They're well-curated, um, media versus other forms of media that are, to my mind, just a little bit more random.
Um, and I think there's a lot of stuff to learn from magazines, um, going forward, even, like, if it's a newsletter. I think a lot of newsletters are s-similar to magazines to some degree. Um- Right.
But what does that mean for these kind of brands? 'Cause, I mean, you must have seen that at Hearst, the, the role of some of these, uh, brands. You know, they were coming in competition with almost individuals, right?
I mean, call it creators, call it influencers, um-How does- Yeah. [laughs]... a, a institutional brand, um, adapt?
You know what, I mean, the one thing that I didn't mention about the role of, of, of the media brand is packaging, by the way. Yeah.
And I think that's important because the packaging of information-- And I, and I point to this because I think that magazines did this wonderfully, and the best of them, you know, made it a real art form.
So I, for example, love the design of a great feature, of a cover, of, you know, a well-executed, you know, display face or, or, you know, just the, the things that are the art of making magazines.
Having said all that, I gotta... I, I, I've thought a little bit about this, Brian. I, I don't think that Web3 makes any of it any easier for those guys. And I think that at worst what you see
is old magazine brands that have a little bit of domain authority that are totally hollowed out, that become a vessel for, you know, a, a, [chuckles] an affiliate effort by a new owner.
Um, and so, you know, we see that kind of thing.
You know, I think that on-- at the high end, you know, particularly when the content is highly differentiated and unique, you see them building good, good subscription businesses.
But, you know, in the middle, you know, lifestyle publishers have a really hard time.
I think they get addicted to, to forms of digital monetization that are very contrary to the needs of, of users or audiences, and, you know, so we see that all over the place.
Web-- The web is a mess, and monetization on the web is a mess. And you see it in local news, you see it in a lot of m-magazine brands. And, and by the way, we're talking about media pretty narrowly here.
We're talking about publishing, you know, the world that I came out of.
But it's, it's pretty hard to see how a kind of, you know, middling, you know, traditional magazine brand competes with the clarity, authority, cleanliness of a weekly Substack, to be honest with you. Yeah.
Well, also the lower cost base, right? That's important, too, 'cause you suck out a lot of the costs by just having a newsletter. There's very little-- Obviously, there's a lot of sacrifices to it.
So let's talk about the Web3 stuff because you gave me a stern talking to outside of your station wagon in Soho and told me I needed to stop snarking about it and learn about it. And I did, to a degree.
I think I have a 101 understanding. Let's talk a little bit about the Web3 stuff. Um, you turned me on to this, um, and I've been reading up and trying to understand it as much as I can.
And I do think th-the narrative of it, I love. You know, I do understand the sort of criticisms of the excesses of it and the, the, the ex-eccentric characters and whatnot. Um, and the lack of, like, actual use cases.
But de-define for me, like, what you think of as, like, Web3. Uh, I mean, I think it's a shared database. I think it's-- that, that people can build on. I think it is, uh, identity that you can own.
I think that it's largely defined by ownership, which is a base motivator for, for most people.
I think it's, um, it's remarkably about this, this kind of dis-distributed system that, you know, keeps all of the parties aligned so that you don't need big intermediaries to, to manage things like, you know, financial transactions or, in many cases, contracts between individuals.
I think it's, it's, you know, a really am-interesting system of kind of relationship programmability so that we can agree to things in advance, and we can write those into a contract, and those get executed essentially on, on, on a, on a computer.
I think that the Metaverse writ large is, is really about interoperability of, you know, digital things and environments and, and, and all enabled, of course, by, by the blockchain.
But, you know, I mean, I think it, it, it, it enables, uh, among many things, and we can talk about what some of the obvious use cases are, new types of collaboration, new types of, you know, ownership, uh, streamlining a lot of kind of financial relationships, and, uh, it's just incredibly powerful.
Like, I mean, having witnessed, you know, just the, the, the potential and optimism, you know, in the late nineties around the early internet, you know, there was a lot to get excited about.
Even the idea that, you know, you could republish basic information, or we could think about what it might be to mean to sell something on the internet or to send a piece of communication, you know, over the wire.
I, I, I think that this is just, like, a complete game changer, to be honest with you. Yeah. And, and, and I don't wanna get...
You know, I'm not actually the-- I mean, I can get excited about things, but, you know, without adding a lot of hyperbole that this is fucking huge. [chuckles] Yeah. There's plenty.
There's, there's plenty of hyperbole in it. But you, you were around for the original internet hyperbole in Web 1.0, right?
So a lot of what Web 3, 3.0 to me is, is promising is try-- is kind of a do-over and to, to fix, um... Look, there was a lot of optimism in Internet 1.0 and then subsequently in, in what became known as Web 2.0.
Um, but a lot of the stuff did not really come to fruition. Uh, some of it did, but there was a lot of bad stuff that ended up, uh, coming out of it, too. And to me, this is, like, kinda going back and fixing it.
There's a lot of discontent, um, with how the internet writ large is, is operated right now.
There's obviously just a couple of, of big gatekeepers, and so when people are talking about decentralization and stuff like this, what I hear is we gotta stop.
You know, Facebook and Google and Amazon are running all of this, and so this is a way to... You can't-- Like, to me, like, you can't fight that. Like, there's no-- Even governments can't stop it.
So, like, this could be a new paradigm to something better to come back.
Do you think it's more than just trying to fix the problems that, that have, um, arisen from how the internet has developed?Well, I mean, it's good to define what those problems are because, I mean, obviously let's, let's constrain them to, to discussions about media.
But what it means- Misaligned incentives. Right. Misaligned incentives. Good. Let's go on digital media. The incentives of media companies are completely misaligned with employees.
They're misaligned with their, uh, with their audiences.
I mean, it's a game I always joke about it's like a game of how much mayonnaise can you put on the sandwich before someone takes it back and says, "I can't eat this."
Um, ag-again and again, the collection of, of data, the overwhelming power of Google and Facebook, whether that's from a quote unquote, "censorship perspective" or whether that's over the monetization function of the internet and on and on.
Mm-hmm. Well, let's face it, monetization on the open web never really worked that well
outside of, uh, the datasets scale and buying interfaces that enabled Facebook and Google to sweep up the long tail of advertisers and take-- therein take over huge amounts of that ecosystem, including everything from the magazine business to the Yellow Pages.
So, uh, I would agree, and I think that, you know, after years and years and years in investment and, and incredible actual achievements in, in ad tech as an example, where in a millisecond we can size up a user, uh, put them into a bucket and target a piece of advertising to them, which, you know, is, is actually an incredible accomplishment and auction them off.
You-you're right, incentives-- the incentives are, are, are broken.
And, and but, but there's an important thing I think to, to recognize here is that in the old days when things like the magazine business were oligopolistic, there were a handful of players, there was a lot of stability, people had long lunches, you know, editors were famous and had tremendous amount of power and all that stuff, but there were huge barriers to starting that kind of magazine because it-- or because it-- starting that kind of media entity because it took a huge amount of up-upfront investment.
Now what happens is anybody can start one, and what happens then is, you know, you have to fight, you know, for your right to exist.
And the kind of process of weaning out the good from the bad happens in, in a kind of mode of execution, right? As opposed to, "No, you can't be in this business.
There's a bunch of, you know, gatekeepers at the beginning not letting you in." Now you can get in. Some people then make it. It's messy. People complain about not being able to monetize, et cetera, et cetera.
And, and so, you know, I don't think that Web3 changes any of that. The fact is, is anybody can still publish more people than ever. There's more people creating content than there ever was.
There's more surfaces to monetize. Like, none of that is gonna change.
And so, you know, I, I, I think that if, you know, people inside of media companies are looking for, you know, Web3 to, you know, change the fortunes of legacy media, I, I just don't think it's gonna happen quite. Yeah.
But also, like Web 2.0 didn't w-w-wipe away Internet 1.0, right?
I mean, if it [laughs] if anything, it's funny because for all the hype of Web 2.0, like a lot of Internet 1.0 brands like soldiered on and now are just as strong as they- Lots of them make tons of money. You know?
And it's like everyone went to, to Facebook as the new distribution.
But if you were gonna bet on an algorithm, Google's algorithm ended up being a better algorithm to bet on as a media company than- It was easier to write to. It was more stable. Yeah. Yeah.
So but I mean, you see a lot of these like SEO brands, uh, uh, companies are, are thriving, um, and they're actually, uh, become consolidators. Um, so let's go through some of the key concepts in crypto, Web3.
I don't even know. I, I use them interchangeably, to be honest with you. Um, a-and explain to me from a media perspective why, why they matter or they-- how they can become applicable.
One I think is very clear, which is transparency. You know, things written to-- on the blockchain, it's transparent. How important is that concept to where media possibly goes?
Um, I think it's gonna take a while, but I think it's important, and I'll give you a couple of examples.
So if you were an ad tech practitioner, and you could imagine a new sort of cross internet identity system where, for example, the targeting technology could point at someone's location on the blockchain and say, "This is the profile of that consumer, and this is, you know, how they wanna be, uh, you know, communicated with," um, one could see a way where the consumer could be in control of a media transaction in a way that would allow them to get more of the fruit of a media exchange in a reward from...
In, in, in the sense that they would be-- they would benefit from some type of interaction. So your wallet becomes an identity mechanism you-- that moves, you know, across multiple endpoints on the internet.
That becomes something that, uh, you allow companies to use as a basis for targeting, and you benefit from that. And, you know, I think that's really powerful.
I would be-- I would just kind of point the audience, you and the audience to something that I think is really interesting right now, and that is something called ENS. Do you know what ENS is, Brian? Yeah, I know that.
It's like the Ethereum Name System or something. I don't know what it stands for, but basically, like I have my MetaMask wallet set up. Let's get into like specifics.
Like, so you buy Ethereum, let's say Ether, and you transfer it to a wallet like MetaMask. You've got this MetaMask wallet, and it's got this incredibly long string that like is basically like an identity, right?
Like I would see-- I could see going to a website and being like, "Log in with your MetaMask," versus like your Facebook, which is like, "Oh my god, do I really need to log in with Facebook?"So I think that's right.
And I think it's-- you can see, if you squint, you can see the beginnings of something incredibly powerful. So it's their domain system. It's the Ethereum domain system.
And what it means is that you can go and you can get, say, Troy Young or Brian Morrissey dot eth, right? And it, it- Yeah...
it's a-- And, and that was-- that string of text would point to your hexadecimal sort of homestead or address on the Ethereum blockchain.
Now, when you hit that, and by the way, if you wanna look at anybody's, it's a very popular thing to do on Twitter right now, is to put your eth address. You can type in name.eth.xyz, and it will point you to a page.
And on that page, you will see everybody's, uh, or that person's, um, collection of NFTs. You will see the, uh, including the domains that they've registered and a-anything that you would store on the blockchain, right?
And if you just look at that, it looks like an early MySpace page, right? It's pretty interesting.
Now, you could imagine a bunch of tools that would get built around it, would allow you to curate it, that would allow you to weave content through it in different ways, that would allow you to show some things and not others, that would allow you to connect it to your friends, and suddenly you have the kind of seeds of an open social network, right?
And then a, and, and a broad-based identity system that complete-- that is owned by the consumer and that isn't controlled by anybody because it's part of a decentralized database. I think that's incredibly powerful.
So just on that, 'cause decentralization is obviously an important part of this, explain to me why decentralization is, A, important, B, is even something people want.
Like, the, the internet was incredibly decentralized. Uh, uh, let's just use internet publishing, was incredibly decentralized. There was like a million, like, websites that were running, you know, advertising.
Before the IAB, there was something like a thousand different banner ad specifications. Like, decentralization typically has lost to centralization when it's put in front of consumers.
There's an argument that people tend to gravitate towards centralization because-- and I know it's going to improve the tooling or whatever. I, I love how this word tooling has become very popular.
But right now it's a total mess, and, like, typically people have looked at decentralized systems and unless they're hobbyists or CB radio type people, they just go to the easiest, simpler stuff, which is generally centralized.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I, I think there's a couple things that I would use to challenge that slightly, but first I would say that really what you're talking about is user experience, and that ranges from the simplicity with which a functional system is presented to a consumer, i.e.
using Instagram, very simple. The buttons work, it's clear, it's user tested, all that stuff, to call center support when something breaks or you don't know how to use something in it.
So I think that organizations will still play a really important role in making all of these things useful.
But the decen-- the notion of decentralization is about, is about ownership of data and about, you know, controlling the base layer of the internet.
I would also add that one of the key concepts of Web3 is something that I, I think they call composability.
And, and I think that broadly speaking is, is an embrace of open source technology writ large, which means that the things that we build, we can build on top of. It's a, a, a notion of kind of Lego blocks.
When someone builds a system for managing identity in the blockchain that somebody-- that's open source code. Someone could take that and improve on it and then fork it and use it in different ways.
So I think that the benefits of decentralization mean that, you know, more can get reused, people can build on top of other people's work, and your data is of your sovereign territory.
It, it's not that companies won't emerge that centralize aspects of access to the blockchain. They will.
Because you need the, the, the sort of organizing power of a central kind of org structure to, to, to make those things usable by consumers. Now, one thing I will, will add, and this is an example.
I think that this will be something really interesting to watch, which is how do DAOs actually function when things get complicated? Oh, we're getting complicated here. Great.
DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations. Do you wanna give, [laughs] like, the quick explanation of what the hell they are? I mean, basically it means in some ways- They're like the nudist colony version of LLCs.
Right. They're like a populist cap table, right? Yeah.
Everybody owns a part of it, and everybody has a vote, and there's usually a mechanism for people to collaborate and to, you know, to give input, whether that's, you know, a Discord or, you know, shared documents.
And, you know, people, you know, would con-conceivably manage organizational functions and a set of assets through a mechanism like that.
So th-that sounds all conceptual, and I apologize for that, but an example is this LinksDAO thing from the last couple days. Did you see this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes. I'm not a golfer, but I'm, I'm, I'm curious about it.
Right. So- I wanna do, I wanna do a counterDA-DAO for runners to buy golf courses and turn them into running parks. Right. So y- we're at a time when you see these examples and you're like, "That's fucking crazy.
That's never gonna work," or whatever, like ConstitutionDAO, right? A bunch of people put forty million dollars together, try to repatriate the Constitution. Some rich guy comes in, buys it instead.
I mean, really interesting, but precedent setting. And now this, starting December, I think, fifteenth, a couple of guys said, "Let's raise some money and put together a sort of constitution around golf club membership.
We'll raise the money. We'll create a set of rules with the community. You can buy into that as a, you know, golf lover. We'll go buy a, a prestigious golf course soon, and you'll have a piece of that.
You'll be able to vote in terms of how we manage it, and you'll get certain access privileges to this club. And if it works, we'll buy more of them."And it's pretty fascinating.
Now, lots of open questions like, what does it mean to be the manager of the golf course when your bosses are a bunch of people on the internet? And- What could go wrong? [laughs] What could go wrong, Troy?
[laughs] So it, it's pretty wild, and I, I think that there's gonna be a, a, just a huge number of experiments with these kind of collective ownership concept.
So yeah, that, that's the other thing, which is ownership, and I think the-- I think DAOs are fascinating for the idea of ownership because there's obviously a lot of drawbacks to how ownership has been structured, and I think a lot of-- There's a lot of discontent out there wh-when it comes to that, whether it's ownership of data or whether it's ownership of...
There's obviously been a lot of fights over, over ownership of IP. And frankly, who benefits the most from value created? I don't think it's necessarily in a lot of cases been apportioned properly.
I think one of the interesting things i-is the shift from the sort of institutional brand to the individual and the creator as far as the power dynamics go.
Like, I think that there is a moment of time, and we see this across media, where the actual creator of the content which creates the sort of value that is then mined is getting more of the upside.
So is this just an economic fight at the end of the day, like, as far as who divides, uh, the pie? Sure. Yeah. Who gets a bigger slice, I guess. I don't think it's just an economic fight. I think it's about economics.
It's about who benefits. Yeah. But it's also much broader. Like, this is about industrial structure. Well, the corporation is completely out of date, right?
If you think about the return to the office and stuff, like, everything about how work is organized seems like it needs to be rethought because it's getting pretty aged at this point. Right.
So D-DAO is a starting point, right? And then we have... Y-you, you ask yourself, like, what happens in this world to the kind of dominant oligopolistic structures like a telco, right?
So there's, there's some new technology out that apparently is kind of like open source software controllers for mobile networks that could, you know, dramatically, you know, uh, change what it takes to provision a, a mobile network, the kind of hardware you can use, how you control it with software, all of that, which would start to challenge telcos in interesting ways 'cause they're dominant, massive companies.
Now let me just go on from there.
We are all tired of seeing GEICO and Progressive ads, but one wonders if the insurance industry isn't a time for a little bit of a rethink because it's entirely dependent on advertising gags, right?
Meaning there's not a lot of value being created anymore, and all of the value created is about who can be more savvy at buying media and making thirty-second jokes.
Now, '22 is the year where a lot of people would say we start to see cracks in the credit and payment systems, right? So Visa, MasterCard are seventy to eighty percent gross margin businesses.
They've been incredibly stable with huge market caps for a long time.
Increasingly, as we can move money around in much easier ways and we can pay for things in much easier ways using the blockchain and crypto, et cetera, we are going to see those organizations and financial organizations more broadly be challenged in a lot of new ways.
Remember, this is just beginning. Was it Chase? Chase made forty-five billion dollars in profits in 2021. Are we gonna see the effects of this kind of democratized financial system start to challenge?
These are things that are gonna be really interesting to watch. So it's not just about how we change media, Brian. It's sort of like- Yeah...
how do all of these concepts change the way we, you know, use credit cards, the way we lend money, the way we insure products, the way we do rights management, the role of attorneys.
All of that stuff is included in the innovation potential of blockchain. That's why I was reading, like, a history of money book 'cause the Web3 stuff obviously springs from crypto.
I feel like you have to understand how crypto's been applied to finance in order to have any idea of how it might apply to media. So I guess those are Lego blocks you have to put together, at least from my standpoint.
Yeah. But one of the concepts that's important that I wanna talk about is smart contracts 'cause that seems pretty foundational to crypto and Web3. It's kind of the code-- It's the code level, right?
It's everything, right? It, it- Yeah. When we talk about a programmability and programmability of relationships and, and ownership, it's all about the smart contract. Yeah.
And that's basically you program in the arrangement ahead of time so that governs it, so you can't just all of a sudden change the rules. A good example is the deplatforming, right?
A lot of these social networking platforms have rules that they change from time to time. Mm-hmm.
And people of different political persuasions might not like one politician or the other politician, but even the people operating these companies admit to discomfort at this, and smart contracts I think could get around some of that maybe.
To the extent that they govern how we work together, yeah. They're just like any guiding document like a constitution or a framework to set up a corporation or anything else. Yeah, for sure.
People talk about smart contracts. You know, I think the, the first use case that people got more-- most excited about was really about downstream rights for IP, right? So if Picasso sold a piece of art- Yeah...
for a thousand dollars, but it was then resold ten years later for a hundred thousand dollar, Picasso or his estate would've been entitled to a percentage of the re-- the, the resale of that piece of art, right?
Seven percent- Yeah... eight percent, something like that. Look, the, the internet has seen a lot of value accrue to derivatives of original content, right?
Right.I saw, I don't know, some tw- it was, like, about the MrBeast. And I do-- I know you said, like, you gotta pay attention to the MrBeasts of the world, and I agree.
But he remade the Squid Game, and I was like, yeah, it's very easy to do derivative work than to do original work.
You can derive a lot of value out of derivative work or aggregation or whatever you wanna call it 'cause it's cheaper.
Well, I think reselling a Picasso is different than processing culture in the case of r- like, a kind of version of Squid Game. But, you know, I... Okay, fair enough.
[laughs] But let's actually start on that because the art industry is an interesting bridge case 'cause I think sometimes the financialization aspects of it, it can be kinda difficult.
But then when you get into the art market, because crypto's moved into that with NFTs, the non-fungible tokens, and I think that's closer to media, right? Yeah. I mean, I would say look at the art market.
The art market, two, two spaces become really important to how we work and how we think, and I would say it's art and gaming.
Art is important because art is fundamentally about notions of ownership, appreciation, and, and the management of IP. It is also an example of the intense power of gatekeepers.
So the art world discovered the- Which I had no idea, by the way, until Art Basel. I went to some dinner, and I just decided to...
I had nothing to talk with these people, so I just decided to learn about how the art market is structured. Guess who doesn't do well in the art market? [laughs] That was my takeaway. The artists.
[laughs] Well, the artists lose a huge amount of value through the process, but, like, you're anointed by galleries and art consultants- Yeah... and it's a whole structure, and someone says that you're important.
And then the collector community, which is a very small number of people, embrace you, and they drive up the price of your art, and then it makes its way into institutions.
There's a whole structure, and th-that, I think, is being challenged. And a lot of people taking a piece. Oh, definitely. Definitely. [laughs] So I, I, I think that's interesting.
The other one is g-gaming, and I think that's o-one of the reasons why, uh, cr- the, the crypto watching thing is so hard for folks because, you know, I'm not a gamer, although, you know, early in my life, like, around early Xbox, you know, Halo, that kind of stuff, I was a bit of a gamer.
But, like, I didn't do the f- kind of Fortnite, League of Legends thing. Yeah. But, like, understanding loot boxes and buying, you know, digital goods in those environments and, and, you know, shit talking, you know.
It, it-- I mean, I used to listen to my son, like, sit on his computer for hours up in his room and, and, you know, interact with his friends where gaming was essentially, you know, a social activity.
And so I, I just think that- And now he has a leg up, and now he has a leg up. You thought he was wasting time, and now he has a leg up. Absolutely. And it's totally true. [laughs] But it's not just that.
It's, like, understanding the if/then consequences of a smart contract.
Like, for example, if I said to you, "Well, we're gonna auction off something, and you can have access to the real good if you burn the NFT," what does burning the NFT mean? Well, you destroy it.
Oh, then I can get the other thing, the physical thing? And then if I get the physical thing, you get another NFT? Like, it's all these sort of if/then mechanics that I think in some ways are natural- Yeah...
to a gaming mindset that are really kinda foreign to media thinking, to be honest. I was in Roblox this weekend because my eight-year-old nephew in Switzerland, he's like, "Meet me in the bee swarm thing."
And I'm like, "How are we gonna find each other? Aren't there gonna be, like, hundreds of thousands of people there?" But it was very interesting to be in the Roblox experience.
I didn't know how to move at first, but some-someone else helped me. It was very helpful. It was very nice. I had this thought. I have a bunch of thoughts where I, I think cracks are appearing.
As opposed to predictions, I'd like to frame them as cracks or fissures. But my, my son walked up to me last night and, and he said to me... I, I wrote it down because it, it kind of... I thought it was humorous.
He said, "Hey, Dad, you should become a meme." And [laughs] I was like, "What are you talking about?" He goes, "Gary Vee is a meme." And, and I... "Do you know Gary Vee?"
And, and then I go, "Did you know that he's a meme? Do you know him?" That dude's intense.
And then he breaks into this parody of Gary Vee talking about some, like, garage sale arbitrage scheme that he worked on between garage sale and eBay or something like that.
And I'm as-I'm assuming it was something he saw on TikTok. I thought it was really weird. Let me just fast-forward to another little anecdote.
And it's Jeff Bezos wearing that hideous silk shirt with the heart sunglasses this weekend. The, the, the sort of New Year's photo? That's apparently an $1,100 shirt. Yeah, it's $1,100. But he's totally jacked.
He's not the nerdy Jeff Bezos that I love. You know, he's-- he, he looks... It's very strange. And, and then Elon-- Oh, my God, I love Elon. You know, E-Elon said something. Elon is on the, the inimitable, uh, podcast.
You know Lex Fridman's podcast? Two hours- I didn't until he was on it. Yeah. I mean- I saw the Twitter thing of his, like, 21-second pause before an answer. Yeah.
And, and I guess that when I just put those, those three things together, I think there's many more, but you've got Gary, Jeff, Elon things, and these guys are all... I guess they're memes in the metaverse. Yeah.
And I guess it used, used to be Trump. And there's lots of micro ones and stuff, but these are big ones.
And their stories unfold across, you know, Twitter and TikTok and Page Six, and they certainly have more mind share than politicians and many celebrities. And, like, these are the characters in our weird metaverse world.
Like, it's not coming, it is. And- Yeah... um, it's just... It, it's pr- it's pretty strange. These are the characters of our metaverse. Yeah.
Do you underst- I always remind myself 'cause, like, it's like in memes in general as a communica- Like, I'm not good at them or, like, really understand it, but I, like, understand why they're important.
And I think it's interesting when you get to middle age to not, like, clo-- It's really hard not to close yourself off 'cause, like, when you're younger, you saw, like, older people who did it, and you're like, "I'll never be like that."
And then you, you naturally become like that.
And I almost feel, uh, uh, as someone had said, like, with a lot of the Web 3.0 crypto stuff, that a lot of it is just, like, people who are, like, Gen X or something like this have gotten to the age where they're just dismissive of new stuff, which happens to everyone.
But you gotta, like, guard against that, I feel like.I think that will be-- that's part of every backlash cycle. I think you're totally right. Yeah.
And what happens with crypto and blockchain is it's so dense and so complicated and so otherworldly that peop-- it will play to natural instincts to reject.
And it is in that rejection that we will have a little bit of a reset because people- Yeah... will just be like, "This is too much."
And, uh, and then we'll get, you know-- But things will carry on because it's way too important a technology- Yeah... and eventually people will start to understand it. Yeah.
I just go back to internet one point O, and after the... I didn't see really the run up. I started working in like r- after the NASDAQ crashed and l- but I was covering internet businesses.
And I remember once the crash really happened and picked up pace after September 11th, like a lot of people just dismissed the internet, um, because they looked at the NASDAQ price and, and whatnot.
And, you know, they didn't see the innovations that were taking place, and they just looked at it as an excuse to dismiss what they had already dismissed. People are binary.
Like Gideon Lichfield, the editor, uh, in chief, I think he's editor-in-chief of Wired, uh, maybe might be edit-editorial director.
But like he talked about this binary mindset we, we, we tend to fall into now with, is it good or is it bad?
And I feel like crypto is in that, and this is gonna be the year where there's gonna be enough evidence for the people who are dismissive of crypto to write it off entirely.
And all these technologies are gonna mature, the tools will improve, the user experience will improve in the background, but people will focus on whatever happens to the price of, uh, Bitcoin. That's my prediction.
Y-you know what? I think that's smart. And, and I think if we were to create a parallel between that crash and the, and, you know, the coming crypto crash, you heard it here first.
The, the difference this time is there's now a financial system that is-- and an ownership system that's part of what we've created in this chapter that didn't exist before.
So for sure, the first wave had stock market consequences, and we all felt them, and that changed investment and all of that. But now currency is native to the environment we're in.
And, and so I think what will happen... Th-this is a, a thought that I had. You can tell me if y-y-you agree or disagree or think it's crazy.
But I think that watch for a time when value reference points shift from fiat to crypto. So if I said, "Oh, how much was that whatever, that car, that thing, that NFT?"
You would say, "Well, it was two Eth, and that's about, today, that's about seven thousand dollars." But when...
You know, the more we use these references, the more we won't even say that that two Eth is s-seven thousand dollars. We'll just say it was two Eth.
And at that-- And, and that's one of the conundrums for regulators, I think, which is it's really hard to step in and do what China did and say, "No, no, no more crypto.
This is going away now," because there's too many stakeholders. And increasingly, it's gonna become part of popular culture.
I remember during the run up of Robinhood pre-IPO where everybody was like, "That's not investing, that's gambling."
And that's g-- I mean, like I think that we are moving into a time where investing is completely detached from rational behavior, where investing was defined by its connection to future cl-cash flows.
That's how it works. And obviously, that's still how we'll value things if we buy companies, et cetera. But there's going to be so much investing behavior that's caught up in the cultural value or importance of a thing.
I know. It's kinda, it's kinda crazy though. It, it's insane. It's good because I can't analyze balance sheets. I think I had my best-- I did like some of the Robinhood investing and stuff like this, like everyone else.
Yeah. How'd that go? [laughs] But like I did the thing.
Well, like I invested in some companies that I, I feel like I know like about, but then like I invested in like something like Cloudflare because it had like its ticker symbol was net, and I figured a lot of like the meme people would just see that- That's a good...
Yeah. Way to go... and they would see cloud. That's new thinking. They would see cloud, and they would see net, and they would just like pour money, and it was like up forty percent.
[laughs] So like, I'm like I have no idea what I've... I'm like index funds and like meme stocks 'cause any of the stuff I don't understand, it just like it shit the bed. Yeah. All right.
Final thing, 'cause then we're gonna wrap it up, is, um, this is a big picture question, but what do you think like a modern media brand l- should look like today if you're building one?
Something that's gonna be relevant and powerful in five or ten years. What does it look like? What does it-- H-how is it different building a, a media brand today versus if you were doing it, say, ten years ago?
The first thing that
comes to mind is prob-- is kind of unchanging, and, and that's that you need to create a, a r- you know, a tighter and tighter lens around what the needs, preferences, points of view, sort of characteristics are of your audience.
So
by that measure, I would say that, um, vertical media categories, you know, things like B2B media, whether that's, you know, banking or real estate or, or subsets therein, or scientific community or whatever, are, are very interesting to me.
So, so I, I think that, that getting... It could, it could be a qualitative lens or, you know, kind of a point of view, view on the world or something that's more, uh, uh, domain specific.
But I, I, I would say that, that, that that would be the first thing. The second thing is I, I would... I think that John at Puck is right about, um, making really kind of virtuous contributors
stakeholders in the business. Yeah. And, um, so, so if I was gonna create a media brand, I would do it as a, as a kind of a, a way of kind of putting a structure around, you know, distinguished contributors.
Um-I think that sub-- the subscription... And, and, and, and what I'm about to say might be contradictory s- 'cause I've never... You didn't brief, you didn't brief me on this, so I'm just making it up.
[laughs] But, but, um, I, I think that, you know... I, I think the sub thing is still possible, and I would r- I would run at that as a, as a dimension of my monetization strategy.
But I think that subs are getting really hard, Brian. And, uh, unless you have tremendous uniqueness and a very strong value proposition, I think that scaling subs is getting very difficult.
Reference things like, you know, Whoppo. But I, I, I j- I think...
Now, the only thing that is gonna counter that, I think, is taking friction out of the system with more native, you know, micro payment systems that make it easier to pay. But I, but I think there is fatigue.
Although, by the way, I'm, I'm adding to my paid sources on Substack all the... I mean, I added, for example, Every is a collection of writers on Substack. Um, it's, to me, it's worth 160 bucks or whatever it is.
So, uh, definitely that. I would be... I think affiliate is really important because to me, affiliate is the, the first true native ad experience on kind of open web publishing, right? Meaning, like, it doesn't get...
Like, not native. Fake native is turning a piece of display into something that is formatted with the type rules of the site. That's not native to me. It's just an ad. And so the real native thing is affiliate.
I think affiliate is really important because you can measure it, you can... You know, it really is tied to GMV.
Now, having said that, I think there's way too many people running at keywords in Google, and that worries me. Yeah. So, you know- But ads-... there's people, too many people competing for, like, best rice cooker.
So I, I, uh, I'm concerned about that. Ads, um- Yes. But what, um, what about ads? 'Cause a lot of this crypto Web3 stuff seems to be like, "Hey, ads suck.
We gotta get rid of the ads," which, by the way, ads are always gonna be with us. They're gonna be in the metaverse. Sorry to, sorry to break this to you, crypto people. Ads are here. You know, I'm disappointed with it.
[laughs] You know what?
As a guy that spent a huge amount of time trying to find the perfect display unit for a f- or, or, or, or, you know, the best way to monetize p- a page of content on the open web, I'm disappointed that I, I never made more progress, to be honest with you.
And- What did we... What did, what did you call your, like, overlay, the YouTube bar thing? The one you used to make fun of all the time? Yeah. What did you call it? You had some, like- You know, I-...
funny name for it back at Say Media... one of my pr- one of my proudest moments, I was just talking to the guy I did this with, this br- brilliant guy named Alex Schleifer, who was creative director at Airbnb.
And him and I, we made this video where there was a bird, and that was the character of Video Egg, right? And there was CPM, three big letters, C-P-M.
And the bird comes out and pushes the M up onto its side, and it says CPE. Ah, yeah. And it was for cost per engagement. And what we tried to do is make brand advertising...
We fit it into a performance construct, so you only paid for the time that, you know, would be- Right, yeah... engaged with your ad. Right. So it was a good idea. You shouldn't make fun of it.
No, no, no, but, like, I did make fun of it just because it was, like, an overlay on video. But, um, I was watching TV the other day, and you know what they're running? They're running basically banner ads.
They're basically running the exact same thing but with a QR code because, like, people are, like, flipping the channel or whatever or going on social media during, uh- Right... the commercial breaks.
So, like, I think the fut- Oh. I'm, I'm like... The... I didn't get the photo of it, but they were basically- And we were the first ones to create that... the future of TV advertising is, like, banner ads.
That lower third ad- Yeah... um, we... on a video player was the only way I could find a compromise between all the money we were spending to serve videos at Video Egg and an audience that wouldn't tolerate pre-roll.
And, um, I remember taking that format to the folks at YouTube then saying, "We should do this together. We should create a standard." They of course- Oh, Troy-... didn't really wanna... Yeah.
[laughs] Anyways, and I, I remember taking it to Randall Rothenberg and saying, "We should make this a standard," and he was the CEO of the IAB at the time. Troy, give me your three... Give me three predictions.
I'll do a few. Okay, here's one. Web3 doesn't solve media's ills. It makes them worse. Ah, shit. Oh, boy. Second, expert content creators steal my chair. Yeah. Okay? We can qualify that. We already talked about that.
Sure. There's something wrong with Instagram, point three. There's something wrong- What's that?... with Instagram. It's just, like, it's too... It's a mess. It's too much about, you know, people, their own shit.
It's not as... Instagram is on the decline. Uh, a personal space takes shape on the blockchain. I think that's important. Right. That's the DNS thing- Okay... we talked about, right? Yeah.
Investing is no longer a rational behavior. Uh- All right. One last one? Let's do one last one. Um, a value reference point shift from chia to crypto. All right.
Well, I don't think that's gonna happen this year, but we'll see. We'll see. [laughs] I could be wrong. No, it was broader. It's not gonna happen this year. [laughs] All right. Troy, we're gonna leave it there.
Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you all for, uh, listening this week. We're back next week with a new episode. [outro music]