Articles
Healthy Subscription Businesses Focus on Acquisition and Retention
There’s a saying in the ad business: “CPMs don’t pay the bills; revenue does.” I knew a guy once who would brag…
B2B Media Showing More Resilience Than Consumer
With what everyone writes about the state of the ad markets, you’d think that the world was coming to an end. And…
Niche is the Future of Scale
Despite BuzzFeed pumping over 300% last week on the news that it would be creating quizzes using ChatGPT, it would be hard…
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It Was All a Dream
The post-pandemic hangover continues to play out as companies in the tech and media spaces come to grips with the fact that…
When Quality Leads to Profitability
In Spielberg’s The Post, bankers sit around a table with owner Katharine Graham in the middle, discussing taking The Washington Post public.…
Lots of M&A Talk, But Will Anything Happen?
There has been a lot of coverage about possible media acquisitions over the past couple of weeks; however, whether anything closes remains…
When Lead Gen Becomes a Subscription Business
Over the past five years, developing a subscription product has been a primary focus for media companies to diversify away from advertising.…
Growth of Ad-First Platforms Demonstrates Subscriptions Have Limits
Any operator will tell you that having consumers pay for content is the ideal relationship, especially with subscriptions turned on and auto-renewing.…
Is AI The Future of Content Creation?
Technology and content creation can often appear at odds with each other. The printing press probably put a real damper on scribes,…
Should Bloomberg Go After Dow Jones and The Washington Post?
It’s been a few weeks since the mid-holiday break scoop that Mike Bloomberg was considering an acquisition of either The Washington Post…
Good Operators Focus On Inputs, Not Outputs
Looking at data can be incredibly illuminating. You see how things are performing, how much revenue you’re bringing in, and how well…
Looking Ahead to 2023
I sat at my keyboard a year ago, thinking about what would happen in 2022. I wasn’t terribly controversial with my opinions—events…
Crypto Media Can’t Beat Its Built-In Cycles
Any media company focused on a specific topic or industry can find itself at the whims of cycles. Few industries are as…
Even More Focus on Cash Flow When Economy Turns
The first thing many operators, CEOs, and CFOs, do when they turn on their computers is to check their cash flow. How…
Media Companies Looking to Get Out of Software Business
Once considered a viable way to grow revenue, media companies are rethinking whether they want to be in the software licensing business.…
There’s Less Investment And What To Do
When I was in college, one of my favorite blogs was TechCrunch. Every time a company raised a round, I read up…
Building General Interest Media Companies is Very Hard
Building a media company is challenging and a lot of work. No one can say otherwise. It takes a lot of time…
A Pivot to Subs Requires Full Company Buy In
We’re seeing some companies rethink whether they want to be subscription businesses. Unfortunately, these businesses are not paying off as expected despite…