Articles
The Return of the Publisher and Decentralization
If you haven’t filled out the recent state of ad markets survey, please take a moment to answer it. It’ll be good…
What’s Next for The Messenger?
It’s now the second week in the new year, which means we should all be back at work by now, right? Good,…
Business Media Should Move Away From Monthly Subscriptions
When first starting A Media Operator on Substack, the supposed “best practices” was to offer a monthly rate of $10 and an…
BuzzFeed Has 336 Days to Figure It Out
Welcome to 2024. The last couple of weeks have been incredibly restorative for me, especially as I transition from having a day…
If You’re Audience-First, You’ll Be Fine
This is the last piece of 2023 and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted to…
Axel Springer Makes an AI Deal
Welcome to the very last Tuesday edition of A Media Operator for 2023. I suspect no one is going to care about…
Pivot to Subscriptions Is a Pivot to Being Smaller
Today’s a fun issue for me to write because I have quite a bit of AMO-specific news to share with you. But…
Avoid Cost Synergies That Rob the Future for Today
Imagine this scenario… you’re running a media company, seeing nice growth, audience is happy, and revenue is up. You happen upon another…
Active Interest Media Acquires The Taunton Press
Like I said in my email yesterday, all the content from the AMO Summit is now available. If you attended the event…
Should Media Companies Go Subscription First?
One of the core theses of A Media Operator is that the vast majority of media companies are going to get smaller.…
The Rapid Rise of Synthetic Content
Just a reminder that you have until the end of the day to get 25% off an annual subscription to AMO Pro…
BuzzFeed Shuts the Door on Scale
I’m particularly excited about today’s newsletter because halfway down, I’ve got a rare op-ed. I think it’s a great read digging into…
The Case for Buying GCN From Warner Bros Discovery
This is an op-ed written by Rameez Tase, co-founder and President of Antenna, a market intelligence firm focused on streaming. He’s also…
When Diversification Can Hurt The Business
One of the oldest pieces on A Media Operator in August 2019 is about the importance of diversification. Pacific Standard had grown…
Will G/O Media Be Dead Soon?
If the last few months have been all about asking you to buy tickets to the AMO Summit, now the ask is…
Using Third Parties to Backfill User Data
In media, being able to break down your audience into specific segments increases your ability to monetize. For example, if you are…
Building for a Loyal User Base
If you’ve read AMO for any extended period of time, you know the thing I talk about more than anything is 1st-party…
Who Buys Big Private Equity Owned Media Companies?
When private equity acquires any asset, an invisible clock appears above that company with a countdown. At some point, the private equity…