Publishing as a sales tool

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This week, I spoke to Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights, about how it uses its popular email newsletter as a customer acquisition tool for a software business. Also: Where Quartz went astray and how access is a subscriptions driver.

More companies than ever are intrigued by building their own publishing arms, seeing an opportunity to lower customer acquisition and marketing costs. After all, in an age of “going direct,” why should companies not build media arms?

As was once said to me about communism, great on paper, messy in reality. Time and again, companies have talked a big game about building their own media arms only for the initiatives to peter out, flame out or just languish. The latest cautionary tale comes from Netflix, which drastically cut staff last week at its ambitious (relatively speaking) publishing site, Tudum, which only debuted in December 2021.

The cuts come six weeks after Netflix CMO Bozoma St. John departed the company – and at a time when Netflix is shockingly talking about reining in spending as subscriber growth hits a wall and goes in reverse. But in truth, Tudum was likely doomed from the start, despite hiring top-flight talent and promising them editorial freedom with tech company pay. One media exec responded to my text of the news of its demise this way: “Who needs this?”

That’s a basic media question that marketers often don’t ask. And most of these forays into brand publishing come out of marketing departments. Finding recaps and cultural takes on TV programming is not hard. Sure, you can personalize Tudum with your Netflix credentials. That’s not a ton of added value.

Publishing can be very useful for subscription services as both a customer acquisition tool and marketing vehicle. On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights, which uses its 800,000-subscriber daily email list in order to fuel a high-priced data subscription service that often goes for $60,000 per year. What CB Insights has learned:

Be realistic. CB Insights doesn’t claim it wants to take down The Wall Street Journal. It isn’t trying to build out a massive newsroom. (Anand says it has “0.5” employees devoted to it.) Instead, its goal is clearly to introduce people to the CB Insights brand and give them a taste of what its private-company data insights. Compare that with Coinbase claiming it was going to “combat misinformation”