How Protocol applies the Politico model to tech

Thanks to everyone who has sent notes and left reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks to Jrdoog, who called the podcast “essential for anyone working in the media industry.” Note for future guests: Jrdoog wants me to keep badgering you for numbers. Be forewarned. This week’s episode with Protocol president Bennett Richardson is brought to you by Audigent.

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Many publishers want to run the Politico playbook. What Politico managed to do is take politics and cover it like ESPN covers sports, attracting big enough audiences for a robust ad business, while focusing on narrower slices of must-have information on legislative minutiae to power a high-priced subscriptions business. It only makes sense that Politico itself would look to do the same, as it has with the two-year-old Protocol, which is applying the Politico playbook to the sprawling world of tech.

Tech has long since matured as a vertical topic, rooted in Silicon Valley, to a horizontal story of power and influence that spans industries, governments and societies. It also happens to have both deep pocketed investors and advertisers..

“The very core of Protocol was an extension of that same thesis, which is, can we use this similar influencer-focused, unbiased model that made Politico successful and made Politico Europe successful?” said Bennett Richardson, a Politico veteran and the recently named president of Protocol. “Could we take that out of politics entirely and bring it to a different power center in a different industry? Unsurprisingly, given everything that media and every other industry are going through, tech was the obvious first place to bring that thesis to.”

Protocol is currently 55 employees, with eight newsletters that collectively have 250,000 subscriptions. The site gets about 1.5 million visitors a month, Bennett said, adding only that Protocol’s revenue was up 150%.

Bennett and I discussed the Politico playbook, balancing consumer and specialized publishing, and why some ad categories like public affairs are booming. Below are some highlights of the conversation.

The power of influence

For all the downsides of the news business, there will always be a place for publications that can break through and serve the needs of elite powerbrokers. These audiences are simply too valuable. There’s a reason Axel Springer bought Politico for $1 billion, Axios has grown so quickly and upstarts like Punchbowl are making a splash. That’s also why the still-unnamed global news venture from Justin Smith and Ben Smith will target elites, promising “unbiased journalism,” and why upstart Grid secured $