[upbeat music] I think right now publishers are thinking about how can we use AI to better tag videos, come up with maybe some headlines, restructure stories a little.
But I think most publishers are afraid of, like, actually having an AI bot write an article at this point. Yeah. Well, except for some local news publishers. I think a ton of people already are- Yeah. Right?
Some bullshit content is good.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey. This week I'm doing a bit of a state of the industry show with Axios media reporter Sarah Fisher and Vox's Peter Kafka, host of the Recode Media Podcast.
We go over lessons learned from the end of the scale era, what's next for BuzzFeed and Vice, the new austerity era in streaming, and whether AI is coming for our jobs.
Along the way, we also find some reasons for optimism, I promise. [upbeat music] This week's episode is presented by Impact.com.
Impact.com recently sponsored a research report with Digiday, focusing on the state of commerce content. I've come full circle now with promoting Digiday reports, but here we are.
The research surveyed sixty premium media publishers globally over the course of January and February two thousand and twenty-three.
You can read the findings on Digiday's website, but a few data points that stood out to me. One is that eighty-one percent of respondents said that commerce content plays an important role in their business.
And also that forty percent of respondents expect to dedicate at least twenty percent of their budgets to commerce content in twenty twenty-three. I mean, that shows that it is growing and growing quickly.
So if you wanna find out more, check out the report. And also, if you wanna find out how Impact.com can help you with your commerce business, reach out to Jared Grimm.
He is Jared, J-E-R-R-I-D, @impact.com and tell him you came from the Rebooting podcast. This will help to prove to Jared that he should continue advertising in this podcast. But anyway, thank you to Impact.com.
They've been wonderful supporters, and if you do have a commerce or content studio business, you should talk to them about how they can make these operations more efficient and effective. Again, that is jared@impact.com.
J-E-R-R-I-D. Thanks again, Jared and Impact. Now here's the conversation I had with Peter and Sarah. [upbeat music] All right, we're gonna try something new this week.
It's a little bit of like a round table with two of the people who I rely on in order to figure out what the hell is going on in the media industry. So Sarah Fisher, Peter Kafka, welcome to the podcast.
Appreciate you taking the time. We're happy to be here. Okay. [chuckles] Peter's speaking for Sarah here, if you didn't know. Thanks, Brian. I thought Sarah would go first. That's why I paused. [chuckles] Yeah.
All right.
The first topic that I wanna go through, I wanna go through like four or five topics, but I think we've all done, like, in our own different ways, like, our end-of-the-era posts following BuzzFeed News' collapse.
And then, of course, Ben Smith had his book, Traffic. I read parts of it, not the whole thing, and I refuse to do a podcast with Ben 'cause he was on every podcast. But also then, obviously, Vice took place.
Let's just start with going backwards. I mean, Sarah, you've been, like, reporting on all of this. A lot has been said about this, but what are your sort of three takeaways from this end of the era?
Well, I think one is we used to, as digital media companies, raise a lot more money than we do now. I mean, Vice raised more than one point six billion dollars. Now that would be unheard of.
I think two is that there seemed to be this moment of arbitrage where it was all about accruing as much traffic as you could, as quickly as you could, relying on social platforms to do it, and the era of arbitrage seems to be mostly over.
And then three, I think we have always known this to be true, but niche media is thriving in an era where generalist media seems to be declining.
So companies that launch with a little bit of money, but in a targeted way, focusing on one specific thing with authority, tend to build incrementally and more sustainably than companies that try to do it all at once up front.
Yeah, I think that's pretty right on. I mean, if you think about, like, five years ago, you'd think that Industry Dive would be the most valuable of, like, the set of, uh...
Maybe not the, the most valuable, versus a Vox or a BuzzFeed. Peter, you had on... It was a fascinating podcast. I got a preview of it when I saw you at Ben Smith's party. Yeah. I thought it was a great podcast.
With Nick Denton, with Ben Smith, with Jonah, talking about that era of publishing. And I think the thing that kept coming up to me, I wrote a little bit about misalignment.
I don't know if the choices made then were necessarily bad choices because that was the bet, like, that you were going to amass these massive audiences.
What, if anything, do you think is being missed a little bit in, in some of these postmortems? I think we, we all have a pretty good sense of what went wrong. I think the thing I wanna underline is
the fact that the Vices and Voxes and Buzzfeeds and Mikes and Mashables, et cetera, raised all that money. That was an anomaly. It wasn't like we've always funded media companies with tons of venture capital money.
That wasn't happening up until that era, and the reason it was happening is because venture capitalists had convinced themselves that media companies were tech plays.
Specifically, they were gonna be tied to, to Facebook. And so that's why they were justifying putting that money into the first place. It's...
And so everyone sort of acts like, oh, there, there are these media companies, and then venture capitalists went ahead and pumped too much money in them.
They existed basically because they were supposed to be attached to Facebook or, in Vice's case, Google, but attached to these big platforms. And so it, it was anomalous that they raised that much money to begin with.
Venture capitalists are famously averse to media companies 'cause they're difficult to scale, and so what we deluded ourselves into thinking was that we'd solve that problem or that Facebook was gonna solve that problem for us and we'd sort of tag along with it.
And in retrospect, it's very easy to understand why that wasn't the case, and it was reasonable to ask questions about it at the time. I remember asking about it at the time.
People talked to me like I had an extra head on my shoulder.Hiya, handsome
But you looked around and said, "I, I don't know, seems, seems like everyone else is doing it, we ought to do it now," and, you know, that never usually works out well.
Yeah, I mean, it was always like step one, do something. Step two, question mark. Step three, make lots of money. And like step two, the question mark was always the big problem, 'cause, you know, the numbers got up.
But I think Nick Denton had said that, you know, they were focused on uniques, right? Yep. And that the ad agencies wanted uniques.
You know, media reporters wanted uniques, and that's how you raise money, getting attention and whatnot. But like really, they should've been looking for... I mean, he said page views. It's really depth of engagement.
I think, Sarah, you're, you're basically talking about that with the move to niche areas. So paint a hopeful picture for what comes next.
Yeah, I think that in the era for scale, we saw a lot of, quite frankly, crap content come out of it. Some of it was really fun and buzzy and engaging. You know, quizzes and all that kind of stuff.
But a lot of it just felt like it was meant to just be clickbait. And I think in the new era of internet publishing, clickbait stands less of a chance. Intentional content is the path forward.
And so the challenge becomes, okay, if you're gonna become a niche outlet, and you're going to put out thoughtful content that is meant to capture a specific audience attention, what are the audiences that are up for grabs or ripe for disruption?
And I think there's a couple of different routes. You have the Axios' of the world, the Industry Decks of the world that are...
The Punchbowls of the world leaning into professional content, like what we see as our audiences, people who are opinion leaders, people who may even get their office to comp a subscription to those outlets.
But there's a vast world out there of people who are willing to pay and engage with niche content who aren't necessarily professionals. I think about beauty content. I think about certain aspects of sports.
And I think the professional niches are starting to feel pretty saturated, and where there's, I think, gonna be a lot more opportunity is some of these passion media interests. I think about companies like MeatEater.
I love MeatEater. Yeah, me too.
Like, those are the types of companies where they serve a very passionate niche audience, but it's not a professional audience, it's an enthusiast audience, and I think there's a lot of opportunity to grow there. Yeah.
I used to joke it was goop for rednecks. [chuckles] Yeah, so that's always existed, right?
Like business publications, business newsletters have always been a business, and they used to be literally something that you printed and mailed out, and now they're something digital and that really mo- that model has not changed much.
And there's always been enthusiast publications, and now you're moving online, and it seems pretty easy to me to imagine that you could find a niche that you're personally interested in and build a community around that and charge a little bit of money for it.
The problem will be someone will inevitably want to figure out how to scale those things- Oh, no... and, and can you aggregate them and c- and create some sort of, you know, all, all the standard traps we all fall into.
And I th- and by the way, those used to be successful, you know, Bonier Publishing or something like that, had lots of that stuff. Is it Bonier or Bonier? I, I don't know. I don't know. I'm, I'm glad you called me on it.
So I think the problem will be when people start trying to do these roll-ups of these aggregators. Yeah, no matter what- Which will inevitably happen... roll-ups will always happen.
There's always gonna be someone who's gonna try a roll-up. And Recurrent is trying it, and a few others are trying it. Like, it's a bumpy path no matter what.
But I think, like, to me, like what I wonder is, is it all kind of like dull?
I mean, I say this as someone, I like professional content and stuff like this, but I, I just, I wonder if there is even a path to building, like, culturally important digital publishers, right?
Like, w- we're at this era where it seems like the traditional [chuckles] publishers have won. What, what traditional publishers have won? Well, I mean, won by not losing as much, right?
I mean, maybe Vox will eventually become like the new Condé Nast, right? I don't know. The New York Times obviously triumphed in general news. But take the Times out of this, right?
And then it's very hard to find traditional publishers who have won. Condé Nast is not Condé Nast anymore. Time Inc. has been bounced around and is now a part of Do- Dash, right?
It's a part of a Barry Diller, you know, leftover thing. Yeah. I think the traditional publishers have suffered along with everybody else. Yeah. This isn't a hopeful picture, Peter.
[chuckles] I, I agree with that, and I also think, to your point about being culturally relevant, there was an era, you know, in the Condé Nast peak where the ad market was so flush that it was much easier to be a flourishing, profitable company, and as a result, you could take big swings at making big cultural moments happen.
I think about Condé Nast in its heyday had developed these, like, incredibly significant brands, and now there isn't this easy answer anymore for making money in publishing. It's not like we're all flush with ad revenue.
Now we're all scraping to diversify and, you know, build these businesses, and without that sort of big, hefty sum of cash, like, I think people can't be as imaginative in some ways.
In other ways, they actually are being forced to be more creative. But that makes it harder to build one of these massive culturally significant brands. The cash is not as flush as it used to be.
Yeah, and that's why I think, like, the future is, you know, [chuckles] by necessity, smaller. And I don't know, I, like, I parted, like, curtailed ambitions like, uh, a couple months ago.
I got some, like, pushback from like Rafat, 'cause he always gives me shit. But I'm like, "Look, it's, like, the reality."
Like, I mean, there's lots of money still to be made, but the companies are gonna be smaller, and their impact might be big, but they're gonna be in smaller areas, and therefore, their aggregate impact is gonna be smaller.But that's also, like the Internet has done that to- Yeah...
the whole world. You know, like everyone has niche interests that they can explore now because of the Internet in a way that we never used to be able to in the analog world. Sorry, Peter, I cut you off. Yeah. No, no.
I was just gonna say your exact point.
I mean, it's, it exists everywhere, and it's the reason why, you know, the networks are talking about pulling back on prime time programming 'cause they can't make the numbers work, and they're still serving millions and millions of people.
It's just they were built to serve tens of millions of people. Now, if you have tens of millions of people, that's a breakout unheard-of hit.
So it's not just ad money being tough to come by, and I would imagine there's as much ad money as there ever was.
It's that it's very hard to gather lots of people's attention in one place, and so that's a challenge for the ad model. It's a challenge for people who want to get their voice heard, breakthrough, and command attention.
I don't think it's a problem for consumers in any way. It's great for them for the most part.
You know, it's just people who couldn't remember what the monoculture was bemoan that, and they bemoan that 'cause they knew how that worked, and they knew how to make stuff for it, and they knew how to make money for that, and those things are gone.
[upbeat music] So let's just get into the players of this era because, like, nothing ever, you know, they're still, like, out there.
First of all, the Vice news. Vice is heading towards bankruptcy, but it's, you know, bankruptcy is weird.
Like, I think we, we tend to think of bankruptcy as like, oh, the company ceases to exist, but it's just a, it's a legal thing to reorganize. What is the future for, say, Vice, Sarah?
Well, either they'll file for bankruptcy or they'll get bought out by some of their lenders, and they can try to, once they hit that point, again, sell some of its pieces.
Like, some of the pieces of Vice are profitable, some of them are not. I think the thing I keep hearing from people over and over is that the big challenge that Vice faces is this debt problem.
After the pandemic, inflation made
interest rates really high, and so trying to restructure that debt has become way more expensive, and that is a challenge if you're, even if you're, you know, if you're a buyer, of course, but for the company.
I don't know what will become of these brands.
You know, like, I reported that when Vice bought Refinery29 in twenty nineteen, they were saying they were gonna have, like, upwards of a hundred million in revenue in a year.
Like, it's less than half of that now, I've heard. Yeah. So I don't know what they do. They, do they try to just, like, pick them off for pennies? Who knows?
I mean, they don't even mention it in press releases, so that's not a good sign. The ongoing question for Vice for the last couple of years was, does someone buy all of it or does it get sold off in pieces?
And I'm always confused about what the value is of the individual pieces. I mean, there's stuff we know is worthwhile, right? Like, they've got cable TV distribution deals that still generate money.
They're never gonna get those deals again, so that's just an asset that you have to, to milk while you have it.
The people who used to manage Vice up until a couple months ago would tell me for the last six months that, and they would say it's in a fake, condescending way to me, they'd say, "Uh, you're not gonna like this, but the emphasis is gonna be on video, um, because it's, you know, it's, that's where the audience is and that's where the money is, and so that's what we need to push our people to be doing, is to be making video."
Yeah. Which seemed like what, that's what Vice was always doing.
But yeah, this has been in a slow motion decline for a long time, and lots of people believe there was a deal getting done last summer/early fall, and when that didn't materialize, that- Yeah... that's a terrible sign.
I mean, a lot of it's like, I mean, they have valuable assets, like you said, Sarah, right? Like, they have an agency that is worthwhile. Like, they, they have a good agency. Like, the agency can exist outside of Vice.
Same for their production, right? They've got a problem with the digital stuff doesn't make sense. And in fact, it was never really a digital company, really. Oh, wait, we didn't get the BuzzFeed.
Is BuzzFeed an independent company by the end of this year? Ooh, good question. [chuckles] I mean, Jonah will tell you repeatedly that this is a publicly traded company and that he wants for it to remain publicly traded.
I'm gonna take a look at where BuzzFeed's share price is today. We're all doing the same thing. I mean, I think- They're gonna have to do, like, one of those stock splits in order to stay trading. Fifty cents.
The company's valued at seventy-seven million dollars, which to give you a sense, is, like- Oh, my God... less than a fifth of its revenue from last year.
So Wall Street clearly does not believe that this company has a plan for the future. I think the question is, like, who would want to come in and buy BuzzFeed?
There were some reports that folks would wanna buy Complex, which is the company that it bought for three hundred million dollars when it went public.
I think Complex is a really interesting asset, and I think that when they combined and went public, if they had just renamed the company Complex, they might even be trading better because Complex has, like, a lot of cultural zeitgeist still with Hot Ones and things like that.
Mm-hmm. But other than that, when you take a look at its assets, HuffPost now is, like...
You know, Jonah says it's profitable, but it's a combination of some old Huff- BuzzFeed News employees and HuffPost, which they acquired, I think, in twenty twenty-one.
They have Tasty, which is that food social media channel, which they're now outsourcing like seventy percent of that content to creators.
So if someone were to come in and buy it, I assume it's that they want Complex, but it sounds like there are people who wanna buy just Complex, so we'll see what happens there. Yeah.
It's time we have a r-return of Rich Antonella. Rich, buy it. [chuckles] Rich seems very happy. He's got a nice wine collection. I wanna have an explicit podcast for Rich to buy it.
You have to go arrange it so you can tape it in his wine cellar that he's always posting about. Yeah, exactly. We'll do it. We once did a live podcast at Cannes on the beach. I saw that one.
It was delayed, and Rich kept, like, going and giving me, like, rosé, and I was like, "Should we do this?" Like, [chuckles] "This is a lot of wine."
[upbeat music]All right, Peter, do you have any take on BuzzFeed or should we move on to the messenger?
Uh, I would like BuzzFeed to either stop being a publicly traded company or have its multiple increase a lot 'cause it's killing the rest of us. Well, Jonah said it was a bellwether of the industry.
I don't know [chuckles] - Yeah... if that's a good sign. It's a real problem. I want this to be a hopeful podcast, and you had said with my topics that it was, like, uh, too much of a downer. But look, hope...
No matter what in media, this is the thing, people are gonna still start media companies just 'cause it, it's media and people love media, and particularly rich people. They think that they can do it.
So let's talk about the messenger. It's gonna be debuting, I think, next week, right? Yep. May fifteenth. All right, Sarah, I can't run it anyone who thinks that this is a good idea. I keep asking.
Maybe I'm talking to the wrong people. What is their case for it? 'Cause I haven't talked with Jimmy or Richard about this.
Why is this in two thousand twenty-three, yeah, this is gonna work, not like in two thousand twelve? I'll give you the case that they put out there publicly and then what my gut thinks it is. Okay.
You know, out there publicly, they're saying that there is never been a time where trusted media is lower, that there's a wide space to be won for people that come at news down the middle, and for people who focus on passion point media, to our conversation about niche verticals earlier, and do it well.
My read between the lines is Jimmy Finkelstein, who was the previous owner of The Hill, and his right hand, Richard Beckman, who's the president of the Messenger, Jimmy is the owner, they were able to sell The Hill at a three X multiple on what I call, like, an arbitrage model.
You know, they really jumped on news quickly, for the most part down the center, were able to generate an enormous amount of traffic, far more than their Beltway competitors, and, you know, they did about, I think, around forty million or so in revenue and sold at three X.
To them, that was a success. And so if you think about where they're at now, I think in their minds, like, why wouldn't the arbitrage model still kind of work two years later?
And there's an argument to be made that the social platforms don't distribute news in the same way, and they're gonna have to do things differently. I think that's one thought process.
And the other is, if we just hire the best of the best in these passion point media verticals, like, there's a lot of money to be made doing things we already know how to do, which is, like, selling pre-roll for shows on their sites and on social and doing events.
And so I think these are two operators that think they can operate their way through this. Mm. But who knows if they are being too ambitious. So you had a chart in one of your stories.
I think Axios made the chart, and it was, like, the tenth of the decimal point for the amount of traffic in a year for something that doesn't exist already. How does that work exactly?
Like, how would you know to the tenth of a decimal point how many million people will go to your politics channel? You don't. These are estimates that you are [laughs] making to guide you.
I will say the one thing about the Messenger is I've seen so many pitch decks for media startups. These guys seem to have at least thought through a lot of stuff. Okay.
Like, if you ask them, "Okay, well, how are you actually going to monetize this?" "Well, these types of verticals and this type of information could be programmatic. This is what we think the CPM could be like.
But for this type of stuff, we could sell it direct, and these are the types of buyers that we think would buy it direct." Like, they seem to have a plan. Okay.
Now, whether or not [chuckles] that plan works and makes sense, you know, we'll see. But I've covered other media startups that it's very arbitrary. And by the way, this is what Ben Smith says of BuzzFeed News.
Like, "I wish I thought through a plan for monetizing it." Like, these guys are not trying to build this big vision without thinking about how it will make money.
I think the question is, can it realistically make that much money? Yeah. Peter, why don't you get in here?
I know you're very bullish on this, um- I, I think it's great to be smart about how you wanna monetize the business. I think the part about building the business seems f- created from some other era.
I don't believe that there is an audience that's salivating out there for straight down the middle news. I think anyone who says that is lying to themselves or to the public. I don't think there's any demand for that.
And if, if the question was, if you had a bunch of people reading something, how would you sell ads against it? Uh, could they do a good job of it? Sure. Let's stipulate that.
But yeah, I don't know what it is that they're building that people are going to flock to.
And like we've been underlining throughout this whole conversation, the era where you could inflate those numbers by juicing it with Google juice or Facebook juice, that's gone. So, you know, God bless.
I wish them all success, and I wish people who- Yeah... are hiring journalists continue to do that, but I don't know how you get that balloon inflated at all. Yeah. I think anytime when I hear...
Like, like, it seems like the Unix model, right? Like, and we're just at- But you have to make something that people want to read, and I haven't heard how that's gonna happen. Right.
And I think, Sarah, you talk about, like, arbitrage, right? And a lot of publishing has been arbitrage, let's be real, and it seems like one maybe not so [chuckles] hopeful. Like, arbitrage will always exist.
Any time there's markets, there's gonna be inefficiencies within those markets. But it's not, like, really inspiring. [chuckles] I don't think hopeful- But again, even arbitrage, you have to have something to arb, right?
Yeah. You have to start off with a thing, then you can exploit, you know, some inefficiencies and make money that way, but you can't do it from zero.
So I just don't know what is the thing that we're all gonna read on Tuesday when they launch. You know what it is?
They're saying it's this non-partisan, down the middle news, and what you're saying is you don't believe that lane is really as big as they believe it to be. No. And by the way, it's already totally filled by- Yeah...
Yahoo News, which still is a thing, and all these, uh, free portals and TikTok. And, like, people who don't care [laughs] about their news are getting plenty of it.
So now you're just competing against huge things [gentle music] that already exist.And I think news is going to go into secular decline, and it already is.
And the Trump thing was just, it was a bizarre time and, like, people overconsume news. Culture became overly saturated with news.
Remember, like, I don't know, when I was growing up, it was always about, like, when I was growing up, it was about how people were tuning out of politics.
And now I feel like for society's sake, people should consume less news. Like, they should consume less political news, and there's too much political news out there, not Axios. [laughs] Agreed about political news.
I just think that the thirst for information about the world isn't going away, is what I'm trying to say.
I don't think we're just all becoming, you know, mindless entertainment suckers, where all we wanna do is watch, like, serialized content.
Like, I do think people wanna understand their world a little bit more, but I agree, it's not gonna be the same level of political news, at least not for the foreseeable future. Yeah.
I have this theory that news is basically for most people, particularly political news, is just a different form of entertainment.
And particularly, like, and people, like, view it as, like, being completely more elevated than, like, reality TV or something, but you know, I think, like, Trump proved it's just, like, another form of entertainment for people.
'Cause a lot of what's going on in the news has nothing to do with anyone's day-to-day existence. It's like reading a nonfiction book versus a fiction book. It's just a way to pass the time.
I don't know, that's my theory. Yeah, I agree with that. [on-hold music] All right, let's talk a little bit about streaming, 'cause this is an area I...
Like, the strike is going on now, and I think it's coming at a very interesting time, because again, I wanna be very positive, but we're coming out of this period where it was all about growth, okay?
And there's all these zero-interest rate phenomenons going on, and I think the streaming wars, seems to me, likely will go down as one of the zero-interest rate phenomenons.
And the question is, you know, what is the next phase of this? Sarah, you wanna start off with that?
Well, I think there's a lot of legal battles ahead between, like, how we think about AI and copyright, how, you know, these [laughs] contracts get negotiated between the Writers Guild and the streamers.
I think we're gonna have to suss a lot of that out in the short term.
Another weird short-term trend, you know, obviously the subscriber growth is slowing compared to, like, the blockbuster numbers that we saw during the pandemic, but I think also we're gonna see a lot of these streamers consolidate even more.
I mean, Discovery just said they're bringing, you know, Discovery and HBO Max together.
So I think you're just gonna have fewer of these, like, big subscription services, more of these free ad-supported services, and streaming will continue to dominate more of the time that people spend in terms of consuming television.
But no longer is it plausible that everyone can just launch a subscription service and think that they're going to take meaningful market share.
I think we're just devolving into a world where it's gonna be, like, three or four subscription services, and everyone else is ad-supported. Yeah.
I mean, a-again, I think there's a parallel here with the BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox stuff, which is that the idea that we were gonna have all this new content made for us and we were gonna pay nothing or next to nothing for it, that was never...
That was not the natural state of content.
That was always, even when the people who were funding it didn't expect that to continue forever, they would all say publicly and more emphatically privately that they expected consolidation, and they weren't planning on funding these huge projects forever, and they could be more efficient once there were fewer players.
So that was always gonna happen. It's still entertaining to watch Wall Street go from growth to profit, profit- Yeah... you know, in a matter of a minute.
But this was always gonna happen, and, you know, I f-feel bad for the writers who last time out were trying to get their head around YouTube, and now they're trying to figure out streaming and how to get comped for it.
I do think that- And this is the worst time. This is the worst time to be, because, like, of course the, the streamers are gonna, like, dig in their heels because, like- Yes... they're rewarded for that by Wall Street.
Yeah. I do think the AI stuff is a total red herring, by the way. Of course, the studios don't wanna foreclose their rights to use AI, 'cause who knows what that could be. Yeah.
But if you notice, all the coverage is all about writers sort of imagining worst case scenarios. And there was a big Time story about will a bot write the next "Succession" and- Yeah...
I don't think there were any studio people quoted in it, and, like, the one thing was, like, a Netflix, like, boilerplate bit of- Yeah... language about using AI rights. Yeah.
The real issue here is the studios would like to pay less, and the writers would like to get paid more. Yeah. It's straightfor- It's very straightforward.
I mean, to me it's like, yeah, the AI, who knows where it's gonna go, but anytime there's a question headline, as in the old cliché, that the answer is no.
But I do think it's perfectly reasonable for the studios to let the writers get themselves spun up about AI. This is how I would play it if I was running a studio.
I, I wouldn't budge on AI for a long time, and eventually I'd agree to, like, "All right. We'll have a rule here that says a bot cannot write 'Succession.' " Yeah. "You happy?"
I think the bigger problem is, like, the shorter seasons and de-risking, and, like, just the fact of the matter is that a lot of jobs are becoming kinda gig economy jobs to some degree.
And this sort of leads me into the last topic I wanna talk about, which is around AI.
I, I think this technology, and yes, we can talk about it's been around for a while, but it's arriving at a different time when we're conditioned to think differently about technology advancements and to go to their dark sides.
Whereas when social media was starting, everyone was just like, "Oh my god, Tahrir Square- Yeah... it's gonna link us all together. It's gonna be amazing.
It's-" We got taught by social media, but also we've all had our... We've all thought about AI for decades, right? Yeah. Because we've all seen movies with robots and computers, so you don't have to make that leap.
We've already made the leap in our head to imagine what the dark side of sentient computers could be. Yeah.
But then even if you think about, like, if the sharing economy, in quotes, like, started now, a lot of the hard questions would've been asked from the start, right?
Like, a lot of that stuff was just getting around regulations and taxes and the regular stuff. This was not about sharing. It was just unregulated taxi services and unregulated hotels. But AI is, like, happening now.
There should be a big societal discussion about these things. I mean, when the godfather of AI is, like, sounding the alarm, I start to pay attention.Right. Yeah.
But there's a lot of like near-term stuff beyond the end of the world, and I'm interested in how it's gonna be applied to publishing. What are you seeing early on with the applications?
'Cause I mean, people are experimenting a little bit with it, but the reality of a lot of these publishing businesses is they need to get smaller, and they need to get more efficient.
And this is a tool that should drive productivity. Some people will not like that because, you know, sometimes that's a code for like eliminating jobs.
I think a lot of media companies are gonna think about how to use it to be more efficient, and that doesn't necessarily mean to start on the editorial side, you know, trying to figure out anytime you have a human that's doing manual labor in an Excel sheet, how can that be replaced by a bot, whether that's billing or ad optimization, anything like that.
In terms of integrating it into the newsroom or editorial processes, a lot of companies are taking different approaches, but the hesitation continues to be like how to maintain cover that your works will be covered by copyright law, and the copyright law currently only covers human work.
So if you start to integrate AI, you don't want that to be a slippery slope.
I think right now publishers are thinking about how can we use AI to better tag videos, come up with maybe some headlines, restructure stories a little, but I think most publishers are afraid of like actually having an AI bot write an article at this point.
Yeah. Well, except for some local news publishers. I think a ton of people already are. Yeah. Right? We already saw the, what was it, NewsGuard report, right?
The people making garbage websites at volume has existed for a long time. This just supercharges that. I do think a lot about this breaking Google.
It'll become nearly impossible to find anything that isn't AI generated- Yeah...
'cause it'll just swamp Google with it, and that's a problem for everyone r- because we're still relying on Google for referral traffic and the idea that people might find our articles there.
And I think whether or not you use AI, you're, you are going to be swamped by the tsunami of bullshit, whether it's good or not, frankly, content made by robots.
And even if every publisher and every trade group in America agrees to not do it, it doesn't matter 'cause we're, it'll come from all over the world, and that I don't know how you put a happy face around. Yeah.
I like that you qualified the bullshit content, whether it's good or not. Some bullshit content is good. Google only cares, right?
You know, when you try to fix your iPhone and you Google, you know, problem with your iPhone calendar, and, you know, h-half of the first page responses are just Google dreck that maybe have some bit of information in there, but it's all just SEO, and Google is perfectly fine with that.
Imagine what happens when everything is written by bots and, you know, puts the iMores out of business, but puts everyone... puts strain on everyone else at the same time.
But let's be real, like a lot of, quote-unquote, "premium publishers" rely on a lot of bullshit SEO content. Yeah.
The obvious stuff that we've stopped doing for the most part is what time is the Super Bowl, but we've got lots and lots of pages that are pretty much built for a Google search crawler and not really humans.
Which goes back to the question of like, does the arbitrage play still exist? The fact that we're still even optimizing a little bit tells you- I know... it does to an extent.
But the interesting thing is when you talk to publishers, particularly premium publishers, I think they have a lot more leverage in this fight than they did in the social media fight, in part because when it came to distributing stuff on social media, I don't think that the platforms felt as much pressure or onus on elevating the most authoritative thing in news or whatever relevant news.
They didn't want anything to do with that.
I think where you could run into some issues is like Google does want to be useful to people, like that's their business, is being useful to people, and if people feel like everything they get on Google is garbage, it won't be useful to them, and that messes with Google's business model.
And so Google is gonna have to figure out how can it, through a trade agreement or a licensing agreement, leverage real quality information to train its algorithms.
And I do think that publishers know that, and they're coming to the table with a little bit more confidence. You know, if someone Googles, "What do I do if my kid swallowed a bottle of nail polish?"
They need to know like what the poison control numbers are, what the steps are to be taken. Is that something that they're gonna get on Verywell, which is, you know, one of Dotdash's properties or some AI-driven bot?
I think Google has incentive in that scenario to get its algorithms trained from the right types of publishers. So I think that they're more likely to come to the table here.
I just don't know in what shape or form that's gonna be.
[upbeat music] Yeah, and I wonder if this will just accelerate the attempted decoupling of a lot of publishing from advertising dependence, right?
It's hard for me to come, again, with the conversations where people are really excited about like ad-driven publishing models. There are exceptions, and they're rare.
There are things like, you know, Axios and Politico and getting some of those, what, uh, corporate affairs budgets or even over in Hollywood, there's a nice pot of money to be had for for your consideration ads.
But overall, it doesn't seem like many people are super excited about like ad models at all.
Yeah, I think that's true, especially because it used to be that publishers commanded attention, and so they could sell ads, and now anything can command your attention. Yeah.
You know, Uber sells ads, and Instacart sells ads. Any mobile app on your phone sells ads, and so the pie of who's fighting- Yeah... like Peter was saying, the ad market's not getting smaller.
It's just that the pie of who's fighting for them is getting much, much bigger.
I do find this mantra that's picked up in the last couple weeks, Jonah was saying it during my interview and others as well, you know, the homepage is back. Where the- Yeah...
homepage is newly important, like that seems like a fantasy to me.
That seems like it'd be, it'd be great if people came to your homepage, and saying, "We wanna make our homepage popular," is great, but you have to make that happenBeen, and I, you know, frankly, I think the AI world makes that even less likely that we're gonna end up on your homepage.
If you're going through a ChatGPT for an answer, it's even less likely you're gonna end up on a publisher's page, regardless of whether it's a homepage or anything else.
I think what Jonah might be getting at, and 'cause I agree with you, Peter, is that familiar brands will have more equity in the era of AI because there would be so much unauthoritative new outlets and sources that people will flock to brands that they've heard of before.
That's why I think he says it's, like, to his advantage to have been founded when he was. And, you know, you kind of see that already- Yeah... with, like, a lot of foreign investors trying to buy Forbes or Fortune.
It's because they wanna be able to tap into that brand equity and put it on conferences or buildings or whatever it is.
I think in the AI era, if you have an existing brand before the AI era, you have a little bit of an advantage, not because I think people are gonna come to your homepage, but because people might be more likely to, you know, buy a good from a BuzzFeed-endorsed list than they would a random list.
Yeah. I mean, that's why, like, old magazine brands don't die. They just, like, go off to, like, the SEO glue factory. I got on a plane the other day, and I was looking at the side of the plane. Yeah.
It had a huge ad with all the accolades they'd gotten from all these different publishers, and lots of them I did not know existed or barely existed. But it was, like, US News and World Report- Yeah...
ranked them number two. Newsweek ranked them. All these things that, like, only exist now to, like, be slapped on the side of airplanes. But that's still better than having... Oh, Points Guy was a newer one. Yeah.
But all these other, they're just ancient brands, and you can still milk something out of them. But that is not an upbeat future of media. [laughs] I mean, it's a future.
[laughs] We're trying to be, we're trying to be very optimistic here. All right, so then let's just wrap it up with what you are optimistic about in media right now.
Gi-give me something that you're optimistic about, Peter. I still think podcasts are good. Nice. I, I sound defensive, but again, like, there was over-investment in it. Thank you, Spotify.
It had, you know, everyone knew that it was a bubble. I don't think people are listening to less podcasts.
It will be harder to monetize with the same ad pressures that we all have, but I think that Vox Media, it's still a growing business, so I'm going with that. Yeah.
I like it, 'cause I was thinking about writing this for Thursday about ambient media, and that's the thing about podcasts that, like... 'Cause I think media in some way, and publishing will go in that direction.
Like, I mean, I think Axios, like, with the bullet points and stuff like this is, like, totally right on, and that, like, it's, like, this stuff is too long.
And particularly in, like, a ChatGPT era, like, where people are just used to getting answers, I hate to say it, like, as someone who writes a lot of words, but I think that trend is only gonna go more towards, like, I would bet on bullet points over paragraphs.
But I think, like, where podcasts win is what Jon Steinberg was, like, talking about Cheddar being ambient media. Like, you know, in the background, and you get something out of it.
And, you know, pod-podcasts are driven a lot by relatability and- They're deeply engaged- Yeah... with the audiences that are l-- I mean, the problem is, just like everything else- Small...
you know, any network has a couple huge shows and lots of shows that are smaller, and how do you figure out how to make that a network?
The Crooked Media guys, I don't think they would get this valuation now because they did the deal sort of the last end of the podcast era. But their last deal put them around three hundred million dollars.
Here, that's a scoop for you. I don't think it's been publicly reported. Nice. BuzzFeed would love to have that valuation, and that's really a very small operation with a couple huge hit shows.
You can make that work really well. Max at Semafor had a piece about podcasting and whatever, the Shonda Rhimes, the big, the Michelle Obama deals, like, were kinda dumb 'cause podcasting, I like it.
It's getting back to its scruffy roots, like Don and Drew, 'cause it's cost efficient.
I know with Serial, there was this thought about going super high-end and whatnot, but- Yes, and every podcast producer wants to make Serial, and they- I know...
turn up their noses at talk shows, and they disdain them with j- they're, they find them disgusting. They're cost efficient, you know? But that's what people like. Yes. There's a reason Joe Rogan's so popular.
People just like to hear other people talk who share their worldview for the most part, um- Who are charismatic and engaging, right? Yes. Like Peter.
That's why- Who are charisma- Yeah, he sells a lot of socks because- I mean, look at me. I miss my Mack Wildons. [laughs] You alway- you wore them. I think you, you- I did. And on a ZipRecruiter. [laughs] ZipRecruiter.
But you know, it's interesting, like, to your point, on your podcast, Peter, like, one thing that podcasts definitely do have is staying power. I've been listening to your podcast for many years.
Brian, now that you're doing this, I will continue to be listening for many years. Thank you.
You know, there are a lot of blogs I don't always follow for very long, but, like, podcasts, because you get to know the person behind it, you listen to their voice, it becomes a part of your routine in this way that I don't think people fully appreciate.
Yeah, and I don't think there's moats in pretty much any field these days, but I think that we are definitely entering into a time of, like, ephemeral brands, and, like, it's really difficult.
I don't think we'll have the staying power, I guess that's my point, of, like, traditional media in that, like, at least traditional media brands could be sent off to the SEO glue factory.
Digital brands are just gonna disappear, like, overnight, and they're gone, and people mourn for them for, like, an afternoon usually on Twitter, and I think that is gonna be more the norm. I don't think that's a blip.
In some ways, the creator economy stuff is really interesting to me, and it's a bad term, but, like, individuals, but I think that is the same thing. It's like Joe Rogan and stuff is the exception.
I think a lot of individuals have wear out. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. [laughs] That's the other thing that we've learned from the past couple of years. There was this huge boom in the creator economy.
Everyone wants to be a creator. And then you take a step back, and you realize, like, being a creator as a full-time job is a really difficult thing to do.
Jonah, one of his predictions is that creators will partner more with media companies. Like, I actually, I do agree with that.
I think there will be more media companies that rely on them to outsource stuff, to be authentic, and they're gonna rely more on media companies for that brand and that familiarity. Brian? Yeah.
My answer to your question of what I'm optimistic about- GoodUh, this is gonna sound like so cheesy, but it's honest, is the DEI thing.
Like as more of these big media brands get consolidated, you know, they sometimes get hit for not prioritizing DEI in this way that they should. I mean, Warner Brothers Discovery is facing a lot of challenges with that.
Mm-hmm. But creators are finding more places than ever before to find the content that speaks to them, like in a way that they never could get from established media brands.
You know, how to do a certain type of hair, there's a million TikTok creators who will tell you that. You got a kid with disabilities, there's a million YouTube videos on how to teach them to write or read.
And so to me, like that is so exciting. There will continue to be much more niche content for people who don't feel like they've been heard or seen, and that's like the best thing about the internet.
By the way, the, one of the things I really liked about, about Ben Smith's book is that every couple chapters he stops and says, "So this is what BuzzFeed and Gawker were doing.
Meanwhile, here's some kook from the right wing that, you know, small time grifter who then takes the BuzzFeed and Gawker playbook literally, and then creates a much more successful version of it." Yeah.
So when we are hopeful about diversity on the internet, you have to remember that awful people are gonna use those same tools to make content that will also be popular for awful people. Okay. All right.
Let's leave it there, Peter. [laughs] There we go. This was fun. Thank you, Brian. Good to see you, Peter. Cheers.
We tried and failed to have an optimistic podcast about the future of media, but thank you for giving it your all. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you both. Good to see you. Thank you so much for listening.
Again, please do send me your feedback. My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. Thanks a lot to Jay Sparks, who is producing this podcast.
If you're thinking about doing your own podcast, and again, they're hard to grow, but the depth of engagement is amazing, so don't let that scare you off. Get in touch. Jay can help you out. He is at podhelpus.
That is podhelp.us. [outro music]