[on-hold jingle] The specifics don't add up. They don't even come close to adding up, and yet there we were defending ourselves against being unregistered agents of the Chinese Communist Party.
And I think that it's just part of the tension in the air, and I will use the word xenophobia because we have the word China in the name of our company.
We have a lot of Chinese people working for our company, and it's very easy in the kind of current environment for that to get swept up into being a Chinese company, you know, even though they're just, like, totally unrelated things.
[on-hold jingle] Welcome to the Rebooting show.
I'm Brian Morrissey. Each week, I speak to people building sustainable media businesses.
This week, I'm speaking to Bob Guterma, the CEO of The China Project, a publishing business focused on explaining China to policymakers and other influential people.
But before we get to that conversation, a word from our presenting sponsor, KERV. KERV and the Rebooting are partnering to bring the new attention economy to Cannes Lions.
From June nineteenth through the twenty-first at the KERV Café, we'll be hosting a series of discussions from noon until three PM.
Come and hear folks like Group M CEO Kurt McDonald, Semaphore's Ben Smith, Puck's Liz Goff, The Athletic's Sebastian Tomich, Group Black's Bonin Bough, Twitter's-- Or Twitter, excuse me, Twitch's Sarah Bear, and more.
Who knows? Maybe Elon Musk from Twitter will show up. Find out more in the link at the show notes.
You know, one of the topics we'll be discussing at the event, and I imagine it will be the biggest topic in Cannes, is AI.
I feel like there are multiple AI conversations going on all at once, but one important one is how to use AI within existing processes.
KERV does this by tapping AI and machine learning to granularly identify objects within videos. This allows them to create shoppable and immersive experiences that meld entertainment and commerce.
For instance, KERV worked with NBC Universal to create Must Shop TV on Peacock. This allows viewers to buy knives used in Top Chef, for instance. It's a cool technology, and I suggest you check it out.
I'll drop a link to Must Shop TV in the show notes, and you can also find out more use cases and information at kervit.com. That is K-E-R-V-I-T dot com. Thanks a lot to KERV for their support. Always appreciate it.
Now on to my conversation with Bob, where we talk about why the China Project moved off Substack, pivoting to a subscription model, and the difficulty of having a publication focused on China in a very tricky geopolitical climate, to say the least.
[on-hold jingle] Bob, thank you so much for, uh, joining me on the podcast. It's great to be here.
I'm a longtime listener, and always get the tingle of joy to be on the podcast that I, I like listening to, so thanks for having me. Okay. Well, I'm glad we got a little tingle, tingly feeling.
So the China Project, I've mentioned in previous podcasts that I really think there's always, like, really good media brands to be built at intersections, and it can be intersections between industries, it can be, like, fashion and technology, i-intersections and all kinds of things.
And I think, you know, being a... Serving as a translator is really important, and there's literally the rise of China is one of the stories of our time, and I think it's a different story now than it was five years ago.
But I want to first just get into your-- how you arrived at this, 'cause you're not, like, a media lifer, so, like, you're still spry. [laughs] I still get tingles of joy is what you're saying. The rest of us are crispy.
[laughs] I'm on my way. I'm drying out.
So I started studying Chinese when I was at Georgetown doing my undergraduate degree because my father, who was a builder in Florida, had been sending me newspaper and magazine articles throughout high school and early college saying, "China's gonna be the next big thing, and, you know, you need to study Chinese, you know, if you're so inclined."
And I took him up on that. I thought he had a point.
Th- In hindsight, you know, it's easy to say, "Well, no duh, China's gonna be the next big thing," but at that time, I mean, there was nobody else at Georgetown studying Chinese. I mean, very few people at least.
Well, it's very difficult. I think, [laughs] you know... I mean, I don't know. I, I don't know what Georgetown was like. I went to Providence College, but, like, I, I...
Not many of my classmates or I would've been like, "Yeah, totally. I'm gonna go out to Olde Eagles on, on Thursday night until, like, two o'clock in the morning and get up for Chinese class."
I mean, you can practice Chinese at bars too. I would point that much out. [laughs] Not Olde Eagles. Maybe not that bar. No. [laughs] Yeah. Well, so I started studying Chinese. I studied abroad in China.
I, you know, had an internship when I was out there, came back, finished my degree, and basically went right back to China.
And I spent the first four or five years of my time there working at a British risk management consultancy called Control Risks, doing corporate investigations, so due diligence, fraud, conflicts of interest, all kinds of things on behalf of multinational companies and investors that were operating in China.
Many of my colleagues were journalists or, you know, reformed journalists.
The work was, in many ways, very similar to investigative reporting, and I had a lot of fun doing that and learned more about China and business in general than I think I probably could have doing almost anything else.
After those years, I moved to a company called Capvision, which is an expert network, a la GLG- Hmm... here in America. Basically a, you know, consider it like a private version of LinkedIn that companies pay to access.
Interestingly, Capvision's been in the news a lot in the past two or three weeks because they got wrapped up in a big legal kerfuffle in China, so I've actually done a lot of interviews [laughs] in my time there recently.
Hmm. But, you know, a-at a headline level and not related to Capvision, it was an investment research company.
So I spent the next four years of my life doing investment research for the China market.Two of those years were in China, and then two of them were in Germany.
Capvision decided to expand globally, and I led that effort for them. Yeah. Moved back to America, did a couple startups, you know, hit some single double base hits, but nothing worth talking about startup-wise.
Certainly no home runs. And then I met the China Project, which was then called SupChina.
And SupChina had been founded in two thousand sixteen by our founder and our still chairperson and original CEO of the company, Anla Chung.
She is a New York-based businesswoman, investor, philanthropist, and saw a dearth of interesting or unique reporting on China at that time, twenty sixteen, and also functionally, the need for there to be an aggregator and curator of China news.
Because at the same moment as there was not any interesting reporting, there was also a lot of information, and to sort through it all every day meant going to a bunch of different newspaper websites and stuff. And so
SupChina was born from her personal need for this type of information, this type of coverage.
Fairly soon after launching, she hired Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo, our editor-in-chief and Sinica podcast host, respectively.
They had been running the Sinica podcast independently from Beijing, but they both wanted to move back to the States or move to the States, in Jeremy's case, he's from South Africa.
And they basically joined forces with Anla, and, and that's when the company really began to grow. Jeremy had built and sold an independent media company in Beijing back when that was actually possible to even do that.
[chuckles] Mm-hmm. He sold it to the FT in two thousand thirteen, and things kinda got going at that point, started leaning more into our own journalism as opposed to just aggregating others or commenting on others.
Eventually, we launched conferences and events, and by the time I met them all in twenty nineteen, there were, you know, ten employees.
I became the chief operating officer at that time, and I was made CEO last fall, so still kinda settling into to that role. But it's been- Okay. -four years I've been with the company.
So the company was starting, I mean, a lot of companies start with curation, aggregation, and then move into original, like, reporting. You know, that's the story of Business Insider, really. But it was consumer-focused?
Yeah. Like, I mean, who is it for? Yeah. So that's a really good question, and in some ways, we're still answering that because China is such a huge topic. I mean, it's literally- It's a big one.
[chuckles] -five X the number of people as America.
In some ways, you could say more dynamic in terms of their historical trajectory is so fast that there's, like, simultaneously people living the same as they did a hundred fifty years ago, and there's people living in the Jetsons, you know, all in the same country.
So it's a big story. It's a big beat to cover. Who is our audience? I think it- Yeah. -definitely did start more consumer-focused, and as time's gone on, we've become more business or decision-maker-focused.
To be more specific about that, about two years ago, we made a formal business model shift from B2C to B2B.
What I mean by that is not that we're abandoning individual subscriptions or the individual audience member per se, but when it comes to our deliberate effort and our growth, it's mainly coming from B2B subscriptions, companies, universities, government offices and departments, think tanks, et cetera.
The reason for that is twofold.
One, on a kinda audience attention level, as much as I think China's the biggest story of our times in-- other than, you know, I guess, America's story, most people aren't sitting at home thinking about how to cultivate better knowledge of China, and they're certainly not sitting at home ready to spend money on that.
Whereas any organization is l-literally, in many cases, sitting around saying, "How do we get better information and perspective," importantly, perspective, not just information, "on China? How do we get that?"
And they are willing to pay for it. So at the kind of spiritual level, organizations are more receptive to the idea of a dedicated platform focused on China. On the financial- Mm-hmm.
-and just business level, individuals churn, and you gotta go find new ones. Organizations, you know, for us, it's been an astounding experience.
Our retention rate on our B2B subscriptions is, like, ninety-eight percent. I mean, it's really- Yeah. I, I honestly can't even remember the last B2B customer that churned.
[upbeat music] When did the shift happen to subscriptions?
How long has the China Project been doing subscriptions? You, you mentioned that the story of China is different now than it was even three years ago, let alone five years ago. Yeah.
And I think that it might be a good summary of why we changed the name of the company. When we were started, everything was good. It was pre-Trump, pre-trade war- Yeah.
-pre-pandemic, pre-everything, and China was ascendant, and we were down with that. Everybody was benefiting, and there was some levity in the air.
Fast-forward a couple years, none of that's true, and our work has evolved. We went from being an aggregator to a serious journalistic outfit, so serious that we've been attacked by both- Mm.
-the Chinese and US governments for, you know, working for the other, supposedly. We're having an impact, and the name SupChina didn't really convey the seriousness of the work we're doing. Yeah.
And so we changed the name in twenty twenty-two. The subscription program began in late twenty eighteen.And we had a free newsletter for a while. We had awesome engagement metrics. We still do.
I mean, our open rates are way over sixty percent on anything we do.
And we threw up a paywall essentially on the daily version of the newsletter and kept a shorter and more occasional one free, and instantly had, you know, a thousand subscribers just, like, next day, kind of core, core audience type people sign up.
Yeah. And we did that on Substack at the time.
This was before we had a fully-fledged media website, and so we did that on Substack, and we ran it on Substack for at least a year, maybe two years, before, you know, inevitably we needed to evolve beyond Substack.
And I say inevitably because as I alluded to in our emails before the episode, you know, I've got- Yeah... views on Substack. Yeah, no, I wanna get into it. We can dive into that in a minute, yeah.
Let's get right into it, 'cause, I mean, I publish on Substack. At this point, it's not holding back my business. I don't really feel like building a website.
I have built websites before, but I don't [laughs] really feel like doing that right now, as I'm, like, booking, like, 40 speakers in Cannes and all this other stuff.
But talk to me about that decision because nothing is perfect for, like, everyone. I mean, I always say this with people who sponsor these podcasts or the newsletter.
It's like, "Yeah, I'll introduce you to different people, but different people need different solutions at different points." It really depends on their business context, and n- not everyone is the same.
So walk me through the sort of decision-making you had, 'cause I think it's one that a lot of people inevitably come to with Substack as a provider. There's a lot of upsides, but there's trade-offs to everything in life.
Yeah. There's some specific reasons from the time that come to mind, and then there's, like, even more reasons that have come to mind since then. The bottom line is that Substack is very focused on a use case.
There's a certain kind of writer or voice that is germane to newsletters, mainly newsletters, and not a lot of, like, stuff beyond newsletters.
And there's a certain type of audience relationship that specific type of writer develops, where it's one-to-one, and it is talking directly to them often, although not always, in, like, a personal voice kind of vibe.
You know, you are hearing from the person. And financially, things are usually pretty simple in terms of, you know, the different options and the customer experience and lifetime journey and all those things.
It's not one size fits all. There are ways to customize Substack as you go along, but it's really built around this one experience of a paid newsletter. And for us, there were a couple things that happened.
One is we were already, and just only became more and more as time went on, not just a newsletter. We had a lot of content on our website- Right... that wasn't even in the newsletter. We had conferences and events.
We had all kinds of other things.
The second is we have always had, and continue to have, a meaningful social media presence, so there's a lot of sharing and virality and a lot of vectors, if you will, for how people discover us and engage with us.
And Substack isn't really set up for that either. And then thirdly, there were just a lot of specific features that were missing, especially as we began to focus more on group sales, B2B. The ability to do- Right...
site licenses or IP whitelisting and things of that nature weren't even possible on Substack. So we weren't able to keep going there.
But I think another thing worth mentioning is that if you're really building a brand instead of your own personal voice, Substack also presents a little bit of a challenge because you know it's a Substack.
[laughs] From start to finish, it's a Substack. Mm-hmm. You know? It's got this flavor to it, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I think if you're trying to build a brand- Sounds like there might be something.
[laughs] Well- But again, it depends on what you wanna build. I cringe anytime someone calls me a Substacker. I mean, it's, I guess, marginally better than being called a creator, but, um, marginally.
Yeah, I know what you mean. For the solo media person, to try to find a new term than Substacker. For the solo media person- [laughs]...
the economics are great, but if you're trying to build a business, you know, parting ways w- what is it? Seven-point five or ten percent or something of your revenue.
Yeah, it's ten percent, and then it's another, what, one-point-five or, or whatever the stripe is. The payment processing, yeah. You can usually do better- Yeah... in other ways if you have the energy and resources.
Through various experiences that we were having as a company that was trying to grow, Substack just wasn't working for us.
The reason why I say inevitably is I just feel like for other people, if you're reaching a serious level of financial success, you're just gonna wanna grow whatever you're doing beyond what Substack will enable you to do.
And so as a phenomenon, as a movement, as a specific tool for many types of people in many situations, I love Substack.
But as a business, I'm never really convinced by it because it seems like they're just there to gestate certain clients to a certain level, and then when they hit that level, they inevitably wanna go do something bigger, better- Yeah...
and have to move on. That doesn't sound like a great business to me.
[upbeat music] I don't know if this is the case necessarily, but it sort of reminds me of WeWork, and, like, my last company we started in WeWork.
Had a lot of experiences in WeWorks, and, you know, my doubts about the model were, like, from the day I set foot in there because I don't think any business where your customers celebrate the day they fire you is necessarily a great long-term business.
[laughs] Like, it just doesn't... I didn't go to business school. It just doesn't seem that way.
And, you know, with WeWork, literally a milestone in the company timeline at the time when everything was offices and stuff, was when you got your own office and moved out of WeWork. Mm.
And that is a challenge, you know? And I think they've tried to, like, add all these services and stuff.But trust me, I'm in WeWork. No, it's not working. And we've seen this in publishing quite a bit.
You know, there was this company, Federated Media, during the blogging days, and they were providing the publisher functions, you know, ad sales, marketing, like, all the stuff that you have to build, the infrastructure, and they were providing it to the blogs of the era that were then small, like TechCrunch and Mashable.
Mm-hmm. Mm. Well, guess what? They used it to get enough revenue to hire their own sales team to not give forty percent or whatever Federated was taking.
Compensate your sales team fifteen percent, you're saving a lot of money.
So I think that is definitely a challenge, and we'll see if any of these publications that are more, like, what you're saying, like, institutional brands, did I say? You know, multi-author, regular publishing brands.
You know, the Free Press is trying to do this. The Ankler is one. I'm not sure if they can have a use case beyond that specific one. I mean, Dispatch moved off of them. Yeah. The Dispatch is great.
I talked to someone there years ago because we use Piano now for our paywall and subscriber management, and they were interviewing to use Piano.
I don't know if they went with Piano, but in any case, they were thinking about moving off Substack years ago, and they finally did. Mm-hmm. Yep. Announced on this podcast, by the way, Bob.
Announced on this pod- It was announced on this podcast, yes. I read the newsletter that you put out on the same topic. Heck yeah. I didn't listen to the podcast episode- [laughs]... but I should go back and do it.
That's fine. I love what they do, by the way. [laughs] I mean, on a couple different levels, not least of which is their success in building a subscriber-centered business. I mean, they've really crushed it.
They're a admirable player to watch in this space. Yeah. And I think also you can piece things together, and I don't think you have to have the website as the center of everything you do.
But the reality is no media business exists to make money one way. Mm. I, I tell those Substack people this nonstop. I'm like, "I'm sorry, like, I don't make this up."
It doesn't happen for a reason, because ultimately you're gonna have multiple ways of making money. This is not some profound thought I came up with. [laughs] It's just common sense.
We've got multiple different sources of revenue. Every time I think I know which one is growing the strongest and fastest and is surely what's gonna save us- Yeah... the other ones pull ahead or something.
And you wanna de-risk. Yeah. You wanna de-risk. Sometimes- Yeah... I mean, subs are great because subs are consistent and, you know, it's recurring and all the other stuff.
I get it and everything like this, but there's a room for ads. Yeah. There's room for events. My favorite thing about subscribers is they guarantee a relevance to what we do.
One of the first things I did when I took on my role here, because I hadn't come from the media space, is I went to the Information's Media Business Bootcamp.
They used to run these in-person, full-day conference bootcamp workshop things in New York. And I went there, and- Yeah... it was Jessica Lessin, Nick, what's his name?
He used to be at Wired and now he runs The Atlantic, Nick Thompson. Got it.
And a bunch of other people like that, basically walking you through the media industry and how to build a company and operate a company in that space.
And one thing that I left there that day thinking about was that subscriber relationships force you to be relevant, because they're giving you money, and they're not gonna keep doing that if it's not working for them.
And so this is something I, I always pitch to my team and to our investors and really anyone who will listen, is that by having this subscriber relationship, we know what we're doing actually matters to people and is being engaged by them.
Okay. Give me a sense of how big the business is. I mean, you've done equity fundraising, so you can actually be somewhat open to it, 'cause I'll just go and check. So don't lie, because I'm just gonna go and check.
[laughs] Yeah, right. I mean, that, that's the cool thing- [laughs]... is I can't lie or I'll probably get sued by my shareholders for lying to them or something.
So we've had an interesting path, and for many years we were run as the passion project, essentially, of our founder.
And then we did some family and friends fundraising, and then later we did a Reg CF that went pretty well. We raised one point six million dollars through Reg CF about two years ago.
Explain that a little bit for those who don't know Reg CF, like me. Sure. Reg CF stands for Regulation Crowdfunding. Oh, that one. Yeah.
And it basically means that we can directly sell and market, importantly, advertise the sale of shares in our company directly to the public. Consider it like a mini IPO. Oh, this is like what Substack did, or different?
It's exactly what Substack did. Okay. And our second Reg CF, which we're still in the midst of, we've raised about a million this time, we've done on the same platform that Substack's doing, which is Wefunder.
That's been our pathway to date. We can come back to that in a second and talk about why I actually don't believe media companies should be externally funded in this way- Yeah, sure... and why we are.
But I wanna answer your question- [laughs]... about sizing the business. So if you look at our financials for- Yeah... twenty twenty-two, which we just filed recently, we did a little over a million dollars in revenue.
That's about flat overall from the year prior, which is not good. On the good side of things, however, though, our conferences, subscriptions, and consulting work were all up, like, forty, fifty percent each.
And we had a business line, a different style of event we were doing in the past that we stopped doing because it, it wasn't really scalable. And so that's why the revenue's flat, even though our core- Mm...
operating areas grew the past year. We've got sixteen, seventeen employees and, you know, of course, dozens of contributing writers all around the world.
And kinda unpacking what I just said a second ago further, I think that media companies are ideally not receiving equity funding from investors because they've got such a strong founding vision that they can kinda go straight to cash flow and grow from there.
And if you look at a lot of the very successful subscriber-supported businesses, they exemplify this. I mean, the Information is the one that comes to mind the most for me.
They knew what they were doing, and they did it from day one, and it worked. [laughs] And we did not have that experience, because with the exception- Mm-hmm...
of our editor-in-chief, no one else in our company had been involved in a media startup before.
And so there has been a lot of learning that's had to happen over the years as we go along.And you asked earlier, who is our audience? Is it the individual? Is it the business? Is it a decision-maker? Mm-hmm.
And the answer is, it's sort of all of them, and that's not always to our benefit, [chuckles] although it's true. Yeah.
And so we've had to do a lot of learning over the years, is what it comes down to, and the last two things I'll say on this is we have a pathway to profitability.
Our revenue is growing forty to fifty percent year on year. I foresee us becoming profitable, hopefully. This is not a guarantee of future performance to any shareholders who are listening.
But I foresee us probably becoming break even by early twenty twenty-five, and I believe it's incredibly important that we do what we're doing on a for-profit basis.
A lot of people ask us, "Hey, why don't you just be a nonprofit? Your mission is to help the world understand China better." And the reason is because donors only fund things they agree with. Oh, yeah.
And if you're talking about world hunger or climate change, that's pretty easy to align. But when it comes to reporting on China, nobody agrees with us all the time.
Even our controlling m- shareholder, our founder, doesn't always agree with the editorial work we're doing, to be totally honest. But there's a respect built in there, so it's not a problem.
But if we had like, let's say, ten major donors and we had to go back to them every year, they would surely have an opinion about what we're not doing or what we sh- you know, should stop doing, et cetera.
Customers don't care, on the other hand. Customers are paying you for the value that they get from your product, not because they agree with it all the time.
So there's a lot more leeway to tell them things that they might not wanna hear. Yeah. Depends. Well, you put me- I, I think it depends. I would push back a little bit on that.
[upbeat music] A lot of things have changed in the last, like, five, eight years. The New York Times has changed absolutely with its subscription model. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
It has absolutely shifted it. Now, it can be good, it can be bad, but it has absolutely shifted it. Mm. Anytime its coverage veers out of lanes that its subscribers want, it needs to course correct. Mm.
And I'm sure people at The Times would disagree with me on this, but no matter what, any media business model is gonna have conflicts. And if you are gonna be a, quote unquote, "nonprofit," guess what? You got conflicts.
Right. The money's coming from somewhere. If Pierre Omidyar is funding you, well, he's got interests. Yeah.
I was at a media accelerator in Ukraine before the war, and I would say most of the independent publications there were partially, if not majority, funded by USAID. Mm-hmm.
Now, very easy for them to lose credibility in that market because USAID is funding things for a reason. Totally. So I don't know.
To, to me, it's just like you have to manage your conflicts, but I think you bring up, like, I mean, obviously there's more now with China, you know, because it is...
You know, and it's always been, you know, the rise of China has, has been like an issue of our times, but, like, our relationship, governmental relationship with China is a little bit different these days. Yeah.
You know, and I think, you know, Trump was not an aberration, I don't think, in that, like, in that, like, there's very few things that, quote unquote, "both sides a-agree on," but one is seeing China as at best a rival, if not, like, an enemy, to be honest with you.
And you guys have been caught up in, in some of that, right? Astute, astute question. Yeah, you- That's why I p- that's why I picked it.
[laughs] Yeah, that one, that one, it started soft, but it ended with a truck running me over. Yeah, no, great, great question.
And I think, you know, just to wrap up the last section, I mean, yeah, everybody's getting your money from somewhere, and whoever that money's coming from has an opinion, implicitly or explicitly.
I guess paying subscribers are the least opinionated or the most flexible, so long as your products... I mean, again, that's the thing is we have a product mentality. Yeah.
New York Times is really like a spiritual platform almost. We're really focused on a function.
We are helping decision-makers understand China better, and they're willing to pay us for that, even if we veer left or right of their personal beliefs from time to time.
If we were wholly opposed to their beliefs, if we were just going the total other direction, what I'm saying wouldn't hold. But I think as long as we're- Yeah...
directionally moving the right way, then customers are very forgiving. Donors wanna call you every time they see an article or a headline they don't like.
And so for us, we need to pursue this mission on a for-profit basis. Yeah. All right, let's get into the fun stuff. But we c- we're not gonna do thirty minutes on the f- Transitioning to, yeah, I'm dr- I'm delaying now.
Yeah, the government, the government action. So as a starting point, I'll say that our mission is to help the world understand China better. That does not mean to like it more, and I don't think...
It definitely doesn't mean to like it any less. We are neither pro nor anti-China. We are also not pro or anti-America, or any other country for that matter.
We adhere to, as much as we can, the age-old and maybe slightly naive or impossible idea of being fair and balanced and in the middle and describing things as they are, providing cultural, historical context where appropriate, trying to help people understand what's going on in China, not just what we see from here, which is what a lot of the mainstream media is doing.
That's our mission, and we seek to fulfill that mission in three specific ways.
First, when we're addressing the big, complex issues that drive the headlines, we seek to bring an expert's perspective to bear, really diving deep on what this means, how we got here, how China got here, not just how we got here, we being the Western world in some way.Really bringing an expert's perspective to bear and avoiding sensationalism and incendiary headlines, et cetera.
The second thing we do is we seek to humanize and de-other China by going beyond those big complex topics and also talking about art, society, culture, history, education.
You know, there's a lot of other stuff going on in China that has nothing to do with Taiwan or semiconductors.
And the third thing we seek to do is we seek to platform and elevate writers of different backgrounds, specifically Chinese and Chinese American.
China's a global issue, not just an America issue, and most of all, China's a- Mm-hmm... China issue. And there's no way to have a serious conversation about China without featuring more Chinese voices.
So those are the three things we do.
Now, somehow we get in a lot of trouble for doing this, and last March or April, we were attacked by a brigade of Chinese nationalist media properties that were then boosted and amplified by the cyber administration of the Chinese government for being CIA-backed anti-China forces.
I'm sorry, is The China Project blocked in China? Oh, well, yeah. I guess I skipped that part 'cause it's so foundational is that, like, we've been blocked in China since 2018. You know, like- Sure...
like, there's no real way to be a media property outside of China and access China as an audience or a market.
So that ship sailed a long time ago, and we derive a de minimis amount of our attention of any variety from within China. And when we do, it's usually bad, [chuckles] like situations like the one I'm describing.
And it was pretty intense.
I mean, it wasn't wholly surprising, and it didn't really bother us the fact that it was happening, but some of the specifics were harrowing in that, you know, a few of our team members who still have family in China were getting doxxed, and nothing came to pass in the real world, so to speak.
But, you know, it was dicey there for a while. The moment eventually passed. Uh, it was a little bit surprising to us, I guess, at the same time because we're not pro-CCP.
We don't boost China per se, but, like, we do give them a fairer shake than a lot of the rest of the English-speaking media world will.
And so the fact that they would just kind of come after us, it was like, man, if you were gonna have any friends anywhere, [chuckles] you know, we might have been friends, you know? And now we're not.
So that happened, and then about six months later, there was a report published in Semafor.
It was like Semafor's third week in business, and they published an article essentially repeating the allegations of a complaint letter that had been filed with Congress by a former employee of ours that accused us of being unregistered agents of the Chinese Communist Party.
Now, the newsworthiness of it was supposedly underpinned by the fact that Marco Rubio and a couple other senators had provided comment on it, and that they cared about it, and that's why it was newsworthy.
At the same time, the claims were without merit, just flatly speaking. The employee had been here a handful of weeks before moving on because it just in no way, shape, or form had been working out professionally.
The points in her complaint letter were basically personal observations or stories. You know, there was no actual allegation or specific allegation. So why did all this happen?
And it was just obviously we're a lightning rod. You know, this whole idea of being a China-focused media company just instantly somehow got confused with being a Chinese media company.
And that instant confusion, I think, points to the tensions or the sensitivity that's endemic to covering China in these fraught times. One way or another, what happened to us was probably gonna happen.
As it did happen, it was from this complaint letter.
Now, what really blew our mind about it was the reporting around it from Semafor, a platform that is, you know, out of the starting gate was very proudly claiming that they're gonna be transparent and show you how the news gets made and take down the veil of reporting.
We were presented with the allegations ahead of time.
Remember, these allegations, they're publicly available, are all things like, "I was in a conversation once, and they wouldn't let me publish this story, therefore I think they work for the Chinese government."
You know, that's basically the summary- Yeah... of, like, what the complaint letter said. There were no allegations that we took money or have, like, secret late-night phone calls with Beijing.
It was just like, "I worked there for six weeks, and I didn't agree with everything that happened, therefore they work for China."
And this got picked up by Semafor, and we provided Ben Smith directly, the editor-in-chief there who wrote the article, actual email records and Slack chat records disproving every single claim in the employee's complaint letter.
And none of that made it into his reporting.
The original allegations were very much featured in the reporting, and the whole thing just kind of made no sense to us that these super weak allegations could somehow become so well reported in the press.
[gentle music] You can jump in here, but it gets worse in a way because there's a deep irony that developed a few months later when Semafor announced its own partnership with a think tank based in Beijing that is actually controlled directly by the Chinese Communist Party.
Oh, yeah. Right. And they even say in their announcement that we're doing this partnership so that we can be allowed to have our conference in Beijing, AKA trading influence for access. Yeah.
Well-I mean, you would know better than I do, but like, I mean, to do business in China, you're ultimately going to be in business almost with the government.
Like, I mean, 'cause the government controls- That's a true sentence, but I think the irony is that here we were getting dragged- Well, 'cause I think, I think this complaint, full disclosure, I've read through this.
I do not know one way or the other. I would just say, like, one of the things it seems to be that, again, when you go back to, like, ownership, it's like that your owner has interests China, and, like, there...
A-anytime you're going to get beyond the specifics of the ex-employee, I think ownership is always going to cause questions. Correct, and that's where things get even worse. As things were getting even worse- Right...
our, is that our ownership is entirely American, is all US citizens, lifelong US citizens. Yeah. Our founder's family is originally from Taiwan, not mainland China. She's never lived in China once in her life.
She's ethnically Chinese, and I think that's where a lot of the confusion came in, is that if- Oh, I thought it was, like, 'cause Ben, like, had quoted this foreign policy, like, deputy editor saying that Cheng had, like, financial interests in China and was looking to- She had an investment fund there many years ago, but it was small change compared to the rest of her career and the rest of her life.
Her husband's a New York-born hedge fund guy, white American, you know.
And you're right that a lot of the reporting left it ambiguous about where our ownership is and the backgrounds of our employees, and I think that's kind of the third point here is that, like, the specifics don't add up.
They don't even come close to adding up, and yet there we were defending ourselves against being unregistered agents of the Chinese Communist Party.
And I think that it's just part of the tension in the air, and I will use the word xenophobia because we have the word China in the name of our company.
We have a lot of Chinese people working for our company, and it's very easy in the kind of current environment for that to get swept up into being a Chinese company, you know, even though they're just, like, totally unrelated things at their base.
Yeah, I mean, there is some... I mean, look, it's, I-- Again, like, I mean, we've gone through, you know, some of this, you know, before with different outlets.
Like, depending on where the US political climate is, certain outlets get the business that other ones don't, and I think this is obviously a very fraught area, right, because it's so intensely geopolitical.
I mean, usually Marco Rubio, he doesn't comment on, like, the rebooting or anything, so. [laughs] I, I mean, you hit the nail on the head there. He's not coming after you. Marco, if you're listening, let me know.
The good news is media-wise, it actually worked out to our advantage in the end. We got a lot of coverage, a lot of attention, and there's nothing bad to find there.
We go full kimono with anybody all day long, and, you know, the outpouring of responses from across the media ecosystem, especially on Twitter, was, you know, unequivocally positive, and it really worked out in the end.
But again, the kind of just flimsiness of the original reporting and allegations, yet catching enough wind to be a thing, really points at the tensions that we face.
And at any rate, the fact that within six months we were come at by both the Chinese government and the US government means we may actually just be doing what we said, which is towing that middle line and just calling the shots as we see them and not supporting one side or the other.
So just to wrap things up, what makes you sort of optimistic? I try to be optimistic a little bit, like, on these [laughs] lately 'cause some people have been like, "You're too pessimistic."
I'm like, "No, I think I'm just a realist." But yeah, this is a tough business. There's easier ways to make money, I believe, than the media business. What makes you optimistic of finding these sustainable models?
Like, 'cause I think, look, if there's any sort of safe haven, I don't think there are many, you know, niches are certainly one.
It doesn't mean that there are not challenges because, like, if you're in a big niche, like, China is massive. You know, I don't even know if it's a niche, right? Like, I mean, it's still kind of a niche. Like, right?
So, like, you're... I guess it seems like, you know, when you're talking about influential people and then the intersection with China, then you've narrowed it down. It's not like China exactly.
But it's still, it's massive because you only have limited resources.
You know, that's 16, 17 people, and you gotta figure out where to deploy them to have an impact and provide the kind of meaningful, valuable coverage and intelligence that gets people to ideally pay you.
But what makes you sort of optimistic about media or anything? Sure. Well, I think there's a couple things that make me optimistic.
First is that I think the subscription movement, if we can call it that, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, subscriptions weren't talked about the way they are today, and it's really become a thing, both at the large scale, New York Times most famously, their subscription program is just doing so well, and then all the way down to little old you and me with our smaller- I'm not charging yet, but I'm gonna definitely register your credit card at the end of this.
[laughs] I will show up. When you should all... When I do memberships, I wanna do memberships, though. I will sign up. 'Cause I have wonderful partners like Curve who are sponsoring this. Thank you, Curve.
I think that the subscriber movement is very encouraging to me because it shows that people are taking a vested interest in their sources of information, and I think that's gonna gain importance- Yeah...
as AI, you know, and other things. And not even AI, just like the internet continues being the internet, you know?
Like, [chuckles] knowing your sources of information and taking them seriously is as important or more important than where you source your food, and we've all cared about that for a while now.
The example I use is in the dystopian sci-fi films, they're always tuning in on the last working radio to the last human voice coming in over the mountain.
And I think that if the internet becomes even more flooded with, you know, unreliable content, maybe due to AI, maybe just due to people, that people will value a voice they trust even more than ever before and be willing to pay for it.
So that's one thing that gives me encouragement. Two, for my own business, I mean, as you said, is China a niche? I don't know.
I like to say that there's three things that are gonna define the next phase of human civilization, the environment or climate change, artificial intelligence or something like it, call it the digitization of all things, and China, or how its rise interplays with America.
You know, those are kind of the three things that I see determining the outcome for us here, which is to say China as a topic is never going to be less relevant than it is today.
So that gives what we're doing great staying power.
And the third thing is, as you mentioned, diverse sources of revenue, or we'll call it, you know, the ability to improvise and evolve over time.So one example I can give you there is we started off free.
We'll never do the traffic to be ad-supported, so we launched a subscription program.
We kind of plateaued on individual subscribers because it turns out the universe of people dedicated to cultivating China knowledge is actually fairly limited. So we pivoted to B2B. That's growing very solidly.
And now what we're doing is we are mining that vein further, specifically by creating higher level value add products and charging even more.
So we've got MVP versions of two database products that we're actually already post-revenue on, but way before scale.
And we're looking to solve more systemic gaps in information between the US and China, so corporate ownership structures, news tracking on industries and specific companies and topics- Mm-hmm.
And building tools that really deliver value to the people who already get the most value out of our news reporting. Yeah.
And so what I'm saying is that for people who are here to stay and have a real focus area that has staying power, you can build a business on top of an audience if you're focused enough. And for all the Vox- Yeah.
Uh, Vox has had a lot of trouble, although they're still around. But for all the Vices and Buzzfeeds, et cetera- [laughs] Yeah... I like to point out all the success stories.
Axios crushed it, Politico crushed it, Axel Springer is gobbling everything up. Nick Hay, which bought the FT, is still highly acquisitive globally. Morning Brew obviously got wrapped up in that very happily.
The Information is just, you know, as I've said a few times, just doing so well.
If you know what you're doing and you have a clear vision, you can hit the ball out of the park just like in any other space at any other time.
And there was a lot of big mistakes made, too, but that's not that surprising. I think it's just more surprising in the media space because we get to see it happen and, you know, right before our eyes, so to speak. Yeah.
We'll see if The Messenger joins them. I'm rooting for them. I want it to work. I'm super bearish on The Messenger. I just don't see how that massive VC funding stuff works on media. Yeah. It corrupts, man. It corrupts.
Like I said, the subscriber relationship forces us to be relevant, and raising fifty million dollars before you've done anything almost guarantees your irrelevance.
I mean, nobody has such amazing vision of the media landscape and what people want that with a lot of money they can just build it properly. You need that, like, scramble to find your audience connection- Yeah...
to make sure you're doing it right, and they won't have that until they're already out of money. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, cool. Bob, thanks so much. Really appreciate you taking the time.
It was a great conversation. Thanks so much for having me. And thank you all for listening. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. I wanna thank Jay Sparks from Podhelp Us, who produces this podcast.
If you are interested in a podcast, you should get in touch with Jay. You can find out more at podhelp.us. And send me your feedback. Would love to hear what you would like to hear from this podcast.
I did one the other week with Sarah Fischer and Peter Kafka that I got a lot of notes about, so I'm thinking about doing more of those, and hopefully we can make that happen. So let me know what you think.
[upbeat music] Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode. [upbeat music]