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 say. Most people are probably already thinking about the holidays, so my initial idea discussing team centralization vs. decentralization is probably not what anyone wants. Yesterday was also my last day as Publisher at Morning Brew.

And so, as I sat in my home office (AMO HQ), thinking about what to write, feeling a little nostalgic, I thought back to my time at Morning Brew. What was the primary lesson I took from that company that—as I prepare to embark on building AMO full time—I could apply?

While thinking about this, a new reader replied to one of my onboarding emails. In it, I ask each new reader to tell me one of their big challenges (free ideation for content on AMO). And they said, “the haircut we got on traffic and affiliate after some of the recent algorithm updates has caused a lot of soul searching internally about what kind of future we’re looking to build for the publication.”

That got me thinking because a lot of publications have been forced to do that sort of soul searching recently. I have written ad nauseam about the death of traffic from platforms. It’s not going to zero. We’ll always get some amount of traffic from platforms—and new platforms will certainly pop up over time—but I think it’d be foolish to assume the numbers will remain what they once were. The game is changing.

Yet, in my three years at Morning Brew, I can’t recall ever having a soul searching conversation. The closest we came was back in 2021 when Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection. As a newsletter-first media company, the open rate was the most important number. We could confidently sell based on it and knew that our daily newsletter would have an ~40% open rate every single day. But when Apple announced MPP, there was obvious concern.

How would we be able to report to advertisers how their ads performed? How would we avoid being judged purely on clickthrough rates rather than potential brand building? How would we confidently churn out unengaged subscribers if we couldn’t trust open rates? If we didn’t do this, we’d have dead weight in our lists and it could hurt deliverability.

And so, we tried a ton of stuff to get people to click on things in the newsletter to ensure we understood who was actually an engaged reader. We put a big box in the newsletter that said, “click this to stay subscribed.” In the b2b newsletters, we got a bit more aggressive asking for the click over to stories on the site. We figured that if we boosted CTR, we would know who was reading and who wasn’t.

Fast forward to today and none of it really mattered. We got rid of the big box. We realized that 50%+ was the new 40% open rate. We developed new ways of identifying who should be churned. And business went on as it always had been.

As I thought about this, I finally understood why our “existential crisis” wasn’t so bad. Nothing about our editorial strategy changed. Everything we were trying was on the periphery of the content that our audience had come to expect and love. We never deviated from serving our audience. And that is the primary lesson I take from Morning Brew. By being audience-first, we knew we would be fine.

When I say audience-first, what I mean is recognizing that the reader is the primary customer at a media company. I look at customers as the people who are consuming our product. In the case of a media company, the product is content, ipso facto, the audience is the customer.

I get it… when most people think of customers, we think of who is giving us money. And at Morning Brew, that was the advertiser. But media companies have to be careful here. Advertisers are only spending with you because they believe you have the audience that is likely to care about their product. If you stop serving your primary customer—the reader—they will go elsewhere. And your advertisers will follow them.

Morning Brew always put the reader first. Our newsletters were clean. Our content was great. We didn’t throw crap ads all over our site. And our readers paid us back by being hyper-engaged, loving the brand, and clicking on the ads when it was relevant to them. Our readers never hated our ads. And I firmly believe the reason for this is because we prioritized the reader first.

This is what a lot of other media companies are going to need learn. If you cannot clearly articulate who your audience is and what they need, you are operating from an old playbook. The operation needs to evolve to serve loyal readers versus the flyby traffic that appears and disappears on a whim. And monetization will need to change as well. Readers will know whether you respect them or not based on the user experience. Polluting your pages with subpar programmatic ads will make them want to leave. And with it becoming harder to acquire readers, a lost user is very bad for business.

As you all spend time this holiday recharging and thinking about your businesses for next year, I would encourage you to do the same soul searching that the above reader is doing. Ask yourself whether your publication is truly audience-first or if you are taking advantage of their readership. It’s not easy. And it sometimes requires sacrifices.

But I can tell you from my experience at Morning Brew, it is so much easier to run a media company when you know your audience is going to show up. By delivering great content to them and not abusing our relationship, the business has been able to sustain itself. And that is the biggest lesson I am going to take as I continue to build A Media Operator. And you, the readers come first. The rest is so much easier after that.

I hope you all enjoy your holidays. Whether that was Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanza that are coming up, or just a week of slowing down and trying to relax. I appreciate you for being a reader of A Media Operator. And I appreciate you being on this journey as we try to make AMO the best resource for media operators. I’ll see you all in the new year. Cheers!