Episode 131

How AI will impact publishing

This week, we are wrapping up a series on The Rebooting Show that examines the role of product at a time of distribution and monetization shifts. The twin themes that emerged are that publishers are increasingly focused on direct relationships with audiences and are in a back-to-basics mode of focusing product resources on critical business objectives, which often rely on loyalty. And the looming question: How will AI be used to make these businesses more effective while not losing their distinctiveness in a sea of artificial slop.

Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, discussed with me how AI’s impact on publishers’ day-to-day operations will be felt first and foremost on mundane tasks that end up eating up a lot of resources. The early efforts to embed AI within the publishing process were predictably ham-handed. Using ChatGPT to create AI slop is hardly innovative – and unlikely to be very effective. I’m very skeptical of creating much value out of using AI to churn out tons of aggregation newsletters, for instance.

The most immediate opportunities in the content process lie in areas like tagging, inserting links to related articles, testing headlines and the like. As Brian warns, there’s no point in using AI in a way that eliminates the competitive advantage of having a distinct voice.

Some highlights from our conversation:

  • On the site as a requisite for an independent path: "If you want to be around in five years, I think so. Don't you like why would you has nobody ever learned that building up and like no offense to any of these, you know, what I call bastard gatekeepers that take your audience away from you."
  • On where AI’s impact will be felt: "People probably overestimate the amount of things that AI is going to help them automate of what they do today. They underestimate how many things they're just not doing because it's so hard that AI is going to let them do."
  • On AI’s use within the content creation process rather than creating content: "Some parts of that [process] can absolutely be handled by modern generative chat, GPT-style, LLM AI."​
  • On distinctiveness in an AI era: "Be remarkable, No. 1. That's how you'll stand out from a sea of junk."
  • On being product-minded vs a tech company: Publishers “should be product minded. They are creating a product for people to consume. They should have product talent. If you are the New York Times, you have a thousand product people. If you are somebody else, you have 10. But no, they shouldn't be a technology company."​
Transcript
Brian:

Welcome to The Rebooting Show.

Brian:

I'm Brian Morrissey.

Brian:

We are wrapping up our recent series on product development of publishers.

Brian:

this was sponsored by WordPress VIP, which works with publishers to have enterprise level versions of the ubiquitous WordPress content management system.

Brian:

I have spent a fair bit of my professional life inside a WordPress CMS, and the CMS is still the locus of digital publishing businesses.

Brian:

In this spotlight episode, I speak with WordPress CTO Brian Alvey about the current state of product to publishers.

Brian:

The rebooting and WordPress VIP recently completed a research report that found something of a back to basics trend at publishers where flashy projects have given away to those that serve critical business needs.

Brian:

And as Brian says in our conversation, he's not here to build a website.

Brian:

But to build a business and throughout the sessions we did at the media product forum, several of which you've, you've heard in previous episodes on this podcast, I heard how, that starts with an audience focus and the website's role is morphing to a degree, but it's still the critical way to understand an audience.

Brian:

You can publish to social platforms all day long, but you are not going to get much in the way of audience data back.

Brian:

And the industry has shifted decisively.

Brian:

To value direct relationships above all else.

Brian:

We also get into the role AI is playing today in publishing operations, and how it will be used for efficiency gains, no doubt.

Brian:

And a lot of the initial opportunities for AI aren't in the sexiest areas, but they're also incredibly critical to making these businesses work.

Brian:

I really enjoyed this conversation.

Brian:

nearly 25 years ago, I submitted my very first story in journalism in a CMS that Brian Alvey built.

Brian:

So it was fun for us to reconnect.

Brian:

Hope you enjoyed the conversation.

Brian:

Brian, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Brian:

Brian A.: I'm excited to see you again.

Brian:

Yeah, it's been a little while.

Brian:

actually we saw each other, last week, but, for those listening, Brian and I worked together in my first job in journalism at the late great Silicon Alley, RIP.

Brian:

Brian A.: Go New York.

Brian:

we don't have to do the, the down memory lane thing, but, we worked at a literal sweatshop.

Brian:

Brian A.: Oh, right.

Brian:

All right.

Brian:

Yeah, that was good.

Brian:

That was over on, by the New Yorker Hotel.

Brian:

yeah, it was in the garment district when it was still the garment district

Brian:

Brian A.: Well, it was a garment district building.

Brian:

I had a startup near there, like afterwards where there was a basic, basically it was a tiny little bunch of us in the back doing web stuff.

Brian:

And the rest of the floor was a furrier.

Brian:

And there was this like mob kind of guy who'd ride the elevators down with us at night.

Brian:

And he's like, you know, I have a gun and a million dollars of merchandise up there.

Brian:

And we're like, okay, we have a million dollars worth of web IP, which means nothing, you know, anyway,

Brian:

it was the tail, I feel like it was the tail end of the New York, New York.

Brian:

there was still like, you could still get run over by like racks of fur coats, in the garment district.

Brian:

Brian A.: from our windows, you could see into other, you know, whatever, not offices, but like things in that building, the building we're in.

Brian:

And there were people in sewing machines.

Brian:

There

Brian:

light industry, light, definitely people getting on that elevator were going to like work, work, not laptop work.

Brian:

anyway, and here we are podcasting.

Brian:

So last week we did this event together called the Media Product Forum.

Brian:

I thought it was great.

Brian:

I hope you guys did too.

Brian:

Brian A.: We had great feedback.

Brian:

Yeah, thank you for hosting, at, your offices, which will soon be no longer,

Brian:

the old Tumblr

Brian:

Brian A.: the nice thing about it too is I mean, I don't know if it's the, the people on stage that you, that there was something that was a draw because usually we set up a line, a bunch of chairs, you know, I don't know, a hundred chairs and that's it.

Brian:

And people watch the little stage.

Brian:

They wrapped around the corner when I got off stage and I was trying to hear who was on next, like I couldn't see them.

Brian:

So I couldn't pick them out in the crowd later because it was a, it was a hit.

Brian:

Yeah, I think it was me.

Brian:

but that's, that's, we're going to have to go into the data, but, you know, in conjunction with that, we did this report, which was basically the state of product.

Brian:

And so we, we surveyed a lot of product executives, at leading publishers to understand where they see, the product function at, At their organizations, you know, these things always, you know, yield some kind of mixed reviews.

Brian:

But I think one of the things that really I took away was this idea of a back to basics in that, you know, the product organization, it's less about coming up with, you know, some, Really crazy.

Brian:

Never, never been done before.

Brian:

Future facing, you know, tech implementation, but more getting, getting the basics, in place.

Brian:

But what do you think are, obviously we're in a time of tremendous change and I would love to get your impact on, you know, the essential question of what should publisher product organizations even be focused on at this time when there's a lot of unknowns out there in the market.

Brian:

Brian A.: Yeah.

Brian:

And so, I mean, the answer is going to be kind of simple.

Brian:

I don't know if it's boring.

Brian:

but back to basics, right?

Brian:

So in that same spot where we had the event, maybe a year ago, a little over a year ago, we had another event, which is my second favorite event.

Brian:

Now yours is my first really was the people were great.

Brian:

I haven't written so many notes about who I've met, who had conversations with and I didn't even reach all the people.

Brian:

It was, it was very good.

Brian:

but then when we had last year, We had, this is before Vox is a customer and they were there, like old friends of mine were there.

Brian:

It was a really good event and the person we had on stage was the CTO of Fortune.

Brian:

And he gave, we were, you were telling a story about him joining.

Brian:

How did you get there?

Brian:

Why do you work with VIP when you're so good at DevOps and like you can kind of run circles around anybody.

Brian:

Why do you hand that off to us?

Brian:

Right?

Brian:

Like literally, why do you even, why do you even pay us?

Brian:

it was a cool question to ask on stage, ask a big customer.

Brian:

Why do you even use us?

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

But his story that my favorite part of the story and the part that stuck with me for the year since then, that I've talked about a lot.

Brian:

Is, you know, he said when they brought me in, this is kind of like a bold, I don't know, like brassy kind of thing to say.

Brian:

He's like, they brought me in and they're like, so tell us about the website you're going to build.

Brian:

And he goes, I'm not here to build a website.

Brian:

I'm here to build a business.

Brian:

You tell me what your business is and I'll tell you what kind of website I'm going to build.

Brian:

I was like, Oh, and everybody in the audience is like, Whoa.

Brian:

You know, like, Oh my gosh, you can't, but seriously, like what's the point of a website?

Brian:

So I've actually been spending time.

Brian:

Thinking about that sort of deconstructing, why do you have a website?

Brian:

You know, why do you have a CMS and the gold?

Brian:

The reason you have a CMS is so non technical people can update your website fast and safely and not break things right and changing your website grows your business.

Brian:

But only if you tie what your website does to your business.

Brian:

So I look at a handful of different verticals.

Brian:

That, that WordPress should support at the enterprise level that WordPress VIP should support.

Brian:

And one of them is media, and there are very specific conversion goals, very specific kinds of businesses that media companies run.

Brian:

There's ad support, there's subscriptions, there's, there's a certain set of things that they do.

Brian:

And all I care about is, the point of it is the content's the product, we don't need to reinvent how articles show up.

Brian:

I mean, you can, you can do something interesting.

Brian:

But really, if you're not connecting that to how you make money, I have a website.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

And that's, that came through in the research really is when I sort of summarize it as back to basics, it's back to the basics of the business, right?

Brian:

I mean, these are businesses.

Brian:

It's not about winning awards for the next snowfall.

Brian:

Remember the snowfall era.

Brian:

Brian A.: I do.

Brian:

It was like years ago.

Brian:

And that was, you know, to me, I mean, that's how I used that in the lead of the report, because, it was indicative of how a lot of publishing organizations were viewing, like, how they presented their content and they wanted to reinvent.

Brian:

And I, I think there's, there's room for that, you know, you're just mentioning, Vox, you know, there was this period of time When there was a bunch of publishers who were masquerading, in my view, you don't have to say it, I'll say it, as technology companies for, for reasons, you know, optics reasons at the end of the day.

Brian:

And some of them believed it, right?

Brian:

They believed that they could create a tremendous amount of competitive differentiation on the basis of, Of their CMS.

Brian:

I mean, they gave them, a lot of fancy names and, Daniel Halleck, who was in the audience was like, were you trolling me by mentioning like three, like CMSs that I was part of,

Brian:

Brian A.: was talking to me before I went on stage.

Brian:

I'm like, I'm writing notes.

Brian:

I'm trying to like , get stuff going.

Brian:

But,

Brian:

what was with that era?

Brian:

that's over, right?

Brian:

I mean, like Vox is, is, is moving.

Brian:

I don't like, I don't hear about it as much.

Brian:

and I think part of that is just the investment levels needed are just,

Brian:

are not

Brian:

Brian A.: So, you said that some of the people who do this.

Brian:

That it came from a good place.

Brian:

you know, they, they, they weren't doing it to,

Brian:

I'm

Brian:

trying to be charitable,

Brian:

Brian A.: no, no, no, but no, but you're right.

Brian:

I think a first crop of people did it.

Brian:

And then the next crop of people were like, oh, we have to tell our investors, we're a product company.

Brian:

We have a, we get a SAS multiple instead of a media multiple or a services multiple or something like that.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

So instead of one X or six X, we want the 32 X.

Brian:

That like an air table would get right that we want the, the, the SAP multiples.

Brian:

We're a product company, but I don't think they were, I think the first ones though.

Brian:

And if you just take Vox, I mean, I worked at Bankoff, he bought two of my companies.

Brian:

One of them was a, a publishing, you know, a bunch, a bunch of blogs.

Brian:

And one of them was a platform.

Brian:

And when he did a Vox, so the Verge and Polygon and, SB nation, all those things, I said, Oh, I've got a CMS you can use.

Brian:

And he said, no, no, no, no, no.

Brian:

I don't need you.

Brian:

I don't need your crowdfusion CMS.

Brian:

You know, I don't need you because I learned from you and Jason, build your brands and your CMS hand in hand.

Brian:

I've got my own brand.

Brian:

The quote from him was like, I've got my own Brian Albee.

Brian:

His name is Trey, Trey Brundette, like I don't need you.

Brian:

And I'm like, Oh, well, that's really sad.

Brian:

Cause I like bank off and he seems to be good at what he does and I'd love to work with him again.

Brian:

And I thought, Oh, well, that's, that's, that stinks.

Brian:

And I'm, I'm the reason that he's not going to use my new company.

Brian:

He learned this from me.

Brian:

Like that's weird, but he did.

Brian:

He took our playbook, added a few zeros to it.

Brian:

He is really good at what he does.

Brian:

Collected a bunch of really like legendary brands.

Brian:

And so 18 years ago, building a CMS yourself, tightly coupling a platform with the, the brands you have and the types of things you want to do, you know, for audiences, your audience experiences made perfect sense.

Brian:

18 years later.

Brian:

Okay.

Brian:

It doesn't.

Brian:

And in between, I do think you've got a lot of people who just said, Oh, we're going to build, we're going to be a media company and a product company.

Brian:

And here's, here's the, to your point before it's hard to be a media company.

Brian:

It's really hard to be one company and do it well.

Brian:

Why try to be two, right?

Brian:

And I think the reason everybody's going back to basics right now is because, one, media has always been hard, right?

Brian:

Newspapers have been dying since before we were born, right?

Brian:

it's always like that.

Brian:

And then two, the economy went bad.

Brian:

Over the last few years.

Brian:

And so, yeah, it's like it's all it's gonna be a back to basics moment.

Brian:

Oh, wait, we can't waste.

Brian:

We have to focus on maybe being profitable.

Brian:

And yes, you get back to basics.

Brian:

So I think those things hand in hand.

Brian:

no, that's totally right.

Brian:

so this, maybe this is a little too much into the semantics, but that's, you know, I'm a writer.

Brian:

So that's, that's how I go.

Brian:

But, explain to me the difference between being a technology company and being a product company.

Brian:

Because to me, you know, product is, you know, It's so amorphous, and particularly when you get into a media environment, like you had said earlier, the content is the heart of the product.

Brian:

It's not just how you present the product and how you distribute the product.

Brian:

my mind, publishers have to be product companies, but they should not be technology companies.

Brian:

Or is

Brian:

Brian A.: Sure.

Brian:

I would not split it like that.

Brian:

And I was wondering where you're going with the question, but I understand it now,

Brian:

I hopefully I landed it.

Brian:

I don't

Brian:

know.

Brian:

Brian A.: it should be product minded.

Brian:

They are creating a product for people to consume.

Brian:

They should have product talent.

Brian:

If you are the New York Times, you have, you know, a thousand product people.

Brian:

If you are somebody else, you have ten.

Brian:

And there's a, there's a little range in between, or one.

Brian:

And there's a range in between.

Brian:

But no, no, they shouldn't be a technology company.

Brian:

And I think that one of the differences is, which I think was probably a flaw in all the companies that were gonna rent out their own CMS, was that they were gonna sell that technology to other people.

Brian:

But they're gonna sell that technology to their competitors.

Brian:

So I think, yes, be product minded, actually be great at product.

Brian:

I, you know, again, they have large product teams are doing good things.

Brian:

I think you build a product for people, but I think that it only scales with authors, so it's more of a services kind of business, right?

Brian:

If I want to double my output, I have to double my editorial team.

Brian:

It's not something that scales like Dropbox does where just millions of people can sign up and nothing changes.

Brian:

You know what I mean?

Brian:

So there's, there's kind of that.

Brian:

so I think being a technology company means you're going to rent that technology out to someone else.

Brian:

And I think there's that weird flaw of, you know, Coke thinking that they're going to sell stuff to Pepsi and like, why would Pepsi give money to Coke?

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

To kill them.

Brian:

I mean, this actually did happen with Coke and Pepsi.

Brian:

Pepsi went, uh, a bunch of restaurants and changed them all to Pepsi.

Brian:

And then those, the people, the Coke people went to all the other restaurants and said, why would you buy Pepsi for your restaurant because Pepsi owns the restaurant that's trying to put you out of business.

Brian:

So these weird, like you got to draw a line and say I'm either the provider or the consumer.

Brian:

And I, I just don't think it's, I don't think that if I had a CMS and I was a publisher that all my competitors would want to buy that from me.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

feel like that was a period of time and it was a period of time when there were a lot of venture capital funded, publishers, not a lot, but there was, they were sucking a lot of oxygen out of the air and they had to, Justify some of the valuations that they were getting.

Brian:

And the only way you could justify it is with SAS like multiples, because it's very, very infrequently that this happens.

Brian:

I always go back to a quantitative was the only on the agency side, they were able to pull off, an amazing trick.

Brian:

They start, they had an agency business in Avenue A and they build an ad server cause they needed the ad server and they spun it out as Atlas.

Brian:

And they did license it to their competitors, but, and they were able to get bought by Microsoft and depending on how you look at it, it was one of the worst tech acquisitions ever.

Brian:

Or if you were the seller, it was one of the best.

Brian:

Brian A.: You're an agency.

Brian:

That's, that's heroic,

Brian:

yeah, no, the 6 billion acquisition.

Brian:

You don't get that for for an

Brian:

agency

Brian:

Brian A.: I, friends.

Brian:

friends.

Brian:

that run agencies and they come to me and they go, I can't scale.

Brian:

I can't double my revenue without doubling my team and I'm constantly having to face this.

Brian:

if I have a hundred people and only 80 of them are working, I'm losing money, right?

Brian:

It's like, how do we balance this stuff?

Brian:

And I go, that's services business.

Brian:

That's that's tough.

Brian:

that's a really hard thing to do, but they all want to take something they've done and productize it because that's the dream is I can then go and get my 32 X multiple on my, you know, if you sell a services business, you get 0.

Brian:

8 to 1.

Brian:

2 times revenue.

Brian:

Like there, there you go.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

And if you sell a, you know, SAS 8x, 32x,

Brian:

So one of the things you told us in the report was that everybody has to be more scrappy, more tactical, and do more with less, and I could not agree more.

Brian:

How does that then translate into what you're seeing with your client base and how they approach product?

Brian:

Brian A.: I think they, I don't know.

Brian:

I think they get a bit more sober about what they're going to do themselves.

Brian:

And what they're going to outsource.

Brian:

So I see, I see a couple of things going on in there.

Brian:

one is there is that like the, you know, really, really, really smart guy from fortune who is amazing at DevOps and running servers and doing all this like sysadmin stuff.

Brian:

He goes, you know, I'd rather WordPress VIP does all that.

Brian:

Even though, he probably thinks he's better than us and he might be right.

Brian:

He's a really smart guy.

Brian:

He's very talented.

Brian:

But he goes, if I outsource that to you and I can trust you to do that piece, I can do cooler things.

Brian:

I can do fun stuff.

Brian:

You know, I can work on AI.

Brian:

I can work on, you know, whatever other thing I want to do.

Brian:

And then, so that, that's one piece of it.

Brian:

And then, I don't know, just, just, You can't do everything.

Brian:

So, so it's, it's the other thing too is vendor consolidation.

Brian:

So you take that, two years, we just had this terrible economy and there isn't a business out there that pays for eight services who isn't looking to just drop that to three.

Brian:

And if a person isn't, their boss is telling them like, cut this down to three.

Brian:

And so as, as a vendor, we look at this all the time.

Brian:

We look at this side of it, you know, with sales forces, our biggest investor, right?

Brian:

And automatic and WordPress VIP, we deal with enterprise.

Brian:

So we look at their trends and we look at our trends and we get reports from them.

Brian:

And it's really, really nice being related to them, but across the board, everybody, top to bottom, everybody sees this, which is, Oh, we have eight vendors.

Brian:

We need to cut that down to three.

Brian:

The three they're going to keep are the three that do the most of those eight things.

Brian:

So the more that you can do that maybe some other vendor does, the more I can say, actually, we've got a feature that does that, or we've got a product that does that, or don't worry, because there's a way we can handle that.

Brian:

That's huge.

Brian:

So you want to be that you want to be on the list of three when they go through the eight, they get rid of five.

Brian:

Okay.

Brian:

So you see a winnowing, you always want sort of best of breed and that's why I always say like a publisher's tech stack gets, even if any moderate size gets.

Brian:

Pretty extensive, like just to run the business gets incredibly extensive.

Brian:

and you're seeing that consolidation.

Brian:

I mean, you guys bought, bought Parsley a while ago and in any industry, there's a lot of, of, features that aren't necessarily products and then products become part of platforms.

Brian:

and, that always happens.

Brian:

There's always point solutions, right?

Brian:

Brian A.: It does.

Brian:

It does.

Brian:

I mean, and over time, none of the, I mean, I was at the computer, one of our teams that I meet up in San Francisco.

Brian:

So we went to the computer history museum on the corner of Mountain View where

Brian:

Oh, I've been that I've, I've, I've gone to an event there.

Brian:

Brian A.: Okay.

Brian:

Well, so, so I hadn't been, and I've lived in the Bay Area for nine years, right?

Brian:

Came from New York, lived out there.

Brian:

I'm not going to be there forever.

Brian:

we got one more kid in high school, right?

Brian:

And then we're free to go wherever.

Brian:

so I was very happy.

Brian:

I got to go to this place, but so, so first it's amazing, right?

Brian:

Here's the stuff they did with the, you know, the Enigma machine and Turing and all this stuff in the war.

Brian:

And then tubes that became transistors that became, you know, wireless.

Brian:

And so seeing that as amazing, but the other thing too is groundbreaking stuff in the eighties that was like the biggest thing and changed the world.

Brian:

In the nineties, people, other people built on it and it's forgotten.

Brian:

And the two thousands and the 2010.

Brian:

So anything we're doing, the fact that you can make a, an app, an app on your phone to hail a car and pay with a credit card, like there's so many things, payment processing, GPS app store.

Brian:

There's so many things that went into that so much history that that year, that decade, that was groundbreaking, you know, multi billion dollars worth of value.

Brian:

It's irrelevant now, very few, very little of that survives.

Brian:

So I forget what your question was, but the visit to that place was very sobering.

Brian:

You know, we're building on the shoulders of giants and we feel like giants now.

Brian:

And will we be remembered?

Brian:

Are we, are we doing something remarkable or not?

Brian:

It's an interesting question.

Brian:

So when you're thinking about what WordPress is going to be doing, you know, you asked me three years or five years down the line, How does the CMS job change?

Brian:

I mean, it's it's the central location to publish content that reaches an audience, right?

Brian:

And historically, that's been very tied up in the article page.

Brian:

Right, the web page, and there's a lot of threats to the web page.

Brian:

If you think about the threats overall to the open web, I mean, is the web page have a central role in five years time?

Brian:

Brian A.: Oh, so it has to.

Brian:

Well, well, it does for the businesses.

Brian:

No, no, no, no, you're right.

Brian:

No, it doesn't.

Brian:

If you want to run a business and not have a website and not be here in five years, don't have a website.

Brian:

Like go, go to town.

Brian:

No, if you want to be around in five years, I think so.

Brian:

Don't you?

Brian:

Like, why would you, has nobody ever learned that?

Brian:

Building up and no offense to any of these, you know, what I call bastard gatekeepers that like, take your audience away.

Brian:

I know

Brian:

How could that, how could they be, how could they possibly

Brian:

take offense to that, Brian?

Brian:

Brian A.: way.

Brian:

But you think of like, Facebook convinced everybody like, don't put mcdonalds.

Brian:

com in your commercials.

Brian:

Put facebook.

Brian:

com slash

Brian:

mcdonalds.

Brian:

And it's right.

Brian:

No, but no, but let's get 10 million people into a stadium.

Brian:

You know, and then lock the door and then charge McDonald's to get access to them when McDonald's paid to build that, that audience.

Brian:

Right now, again, I get what they're doing.

Brian:

no, that's a great, you know, great business, whatever.

Brian:

No offense.

Brian:

You know, I love, love Instagram, love all this stuff, but I love react is what I really love.

Brian:

but if you, if you do that, like at some point you go, Oh, I don't have a direct relationship with my audience, where can I have a direct relationship with my audience?

Brian:

There are only two places.

Brian:

One is the web, the other is, I have your email address.

Brian:

Those are the two.

Brian:

And even then, there are still middlemen.

Brian:

So if I want to send you an email, Gmail and Google are kind of in control of what you see and don't see a little bit.

Brian:

it should be 100 percent delivery, but oh, there's the promotions folder, and there's this, and there's that, and whatever, right?

Brian:

And some things don't render, or you can't, whatever.

Brian:

Okay, great.

Brian:

And, then you look at the web, and you go, I can eliminate the middlemen.

Brian:

All the middlemen between me and my customers and have this very direct, natural relationship.

Brian:

Oh, except 90 percent of that is in Google's browser, you know what I mean?

Brian:

like at some, at some point they're the ones that are always going to be in between you and your audience.

Brian:

It's a funny thing, but why would you want three other hops in between you and your audience, right?

Brian:

Why would you, I get you can build an audience on TikTok.

Brian:

I get that you can build an audience on Twitter or Instagram or whatever.

Brian:

And people do that.

Brian:

I think the The, what is it, gallery media, the Vaynerchuk company has like a bunch of basically, Instagram magazines.

Brian:

It's like Instagram.

Brian:

com slash cars, Instagram.

Brian:

com slash wine.

Brian:

They're beautiful, but you are building like on somebody else's planet and that planet may go away and you don't own the audience.

Brian:

You don't have a direct relationship with the audience and at some point they'll be like, sorry, there's just too much stuff to show.

Brian:

If you want it to be seen, you got to pay.

Brian:

And I get that, I get the mechanics of that, the math, there's 3 million things.

Brian:

If I, if I open the Facebook app right now, there are like 3, it used to be 30, 000, used to be 3, 000.

Brian:

There are probably 3 million things it could potentially show me based on every TV show I've liked, every friend I have, all the, all the photos my friend CK posted, you know, all this stuff.

Brian:

There's tons of, I have to show a little bit.

Brian:

So if a brand wants to get in there, you have to pay.

Brian:

I understand the math, totally, totally with it.

Brian:

But that's not a direct relationship with anybody.

Brian:

Direct relationship with people is, I have, I have a website, you come to my website, I have your email address.

Brian:

I send you email.

Brian:

Those are the two.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

But increasingly, I mean, you could say like with with web pages, Google is the one that distributes most of the majority of the traffic to those pages.

Brian:

You know, look, some people are able to make the homepage work and get direct traffic, but a lot of this industry has, has been built and is sustained on indirect traffic and, you know, that's going through its own changes.

Brian:

So I would, I would assume, you know, long term the having that, That home is, is going to be probably more important maybe than less important.

Brian:

Brian A.: Yes, which I think was what I, which I think was how I was trying to answer your question is it's never been.

Brian:

So five years from now, what does a website mean?

Brian:

It means it means you weren't, you weren't one of the fools that said, I'll build my audience on some platform that doesn't exist anymore or that took it away from me.

Brian:

You know,

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

And this, this showed up in the research.

Brian:

We asked people what their, to rank their top priorities for product development.

Brian:

And as far as the top priority goes, the website won out by far, 55%.

Brian:

AI was a distant second.

Brian:

So we got to talk about AI, right?

Brian:

so how do,

Brian:

Brian A.: person.

Brian:

Oh, and yeah, we could talk about Iverson.

Brian:

I would love that.

Brian:

Brian A.: So before I do that, I was showing an app once to the Sacramento Kings and they were telling me how technologically savvy they are of all the NBA teams.

Brian:

They're the best, like they adopted VR and all these things.

Brian:

And in the middle of all this, I just got, I got kind of sick of the guys.

Brian:

Like they were just like, so excited about what they're doing.

Brian:

Cause they're like kind of a last place team, even in their own state.

Brian:

and they're, they're so high on, on how technically savvy they are.

Brian:

They're a billionaire tech, you know, Silicon Valley, owner guy.

Brian:

And, I just said.

Brian:

I said, you know, you, the 76ers were the first team to use AI to reach the finals and like the whole room went just like, did you just make an, an Allen Iverson joke about AI?

Brian:

Yes, I did.

Brian:

that was actually when we were at, at Silicon Alley Report, I remember it, it's 2001.

Brian:

so anyway, great summer.

Brian:

unfortunately it was like right when the dot com, industry

Brian:

was in complete collapse and, and ended up leading to the end of Silicon Alley Report, but we won't dwell on that.

Brian:

so we got to talk about AI and how, but you know, how publishers can use this to move forward their, their business goals.

Brian:

I mean, this is something I kept asking, like on stage, how are you using it in practical terms?

Brian:

Not, let's not talk about theoretical and let's leave gen AI aside and who knows what's going to happen there, but how are you applying AI to drive forward business goals?

Brian:

Cause it would seem like.

Brian:

AI is perfectly positioned in a more with less era to allow publishers to be more efficient.

Brian:

This, came up in the, research.

Brian:

We asked people, what's the biggest impact do they think that AI is going to have on, on their business?

Brian:

And the number one answer, was efficiency by far.

Brian:

it was 35%, personalization was a distant number two.

Brian:

But then we also asked like how prepared.

Brian:

Are you for the changes that, that AI will bring?

Brian:

And, the overwhelming answer was no, they're not prepared.

Brian:

how should, how should publishers be thinking about applying AI in a very practical manner to do more with less?

Brian:

Brian A.: The simple answer is if you have a good handle on what you're doing, right?

Brian:

That back to basics thing that what what in product what you call jobs to be done, right?

Brian:

There's a loop that when you get up every day or when you do certain things, there's a loop, you know, pre publish, publish, whatever, you know, there's a cycle.

Brian:

Everybody's on.

Brian:

and if you know what that is.

Brian:

Then you can use AI to do that loop faster.

Brian:

And so sometimes if it's like an eight step process, AI is not going to do the eight steps, especially the AI we're talking about.

Brian:

So when people talk about AI today, they're talking about open AI and chat GPT and LLMs and so language models.

Brian:

So really it's artificial creativity.

Brian:

It's artificial language.

Brian:

It's artificial.

Brian:

It's, it's a writing based thing.

Brian:

It's a creativity, creative based thing.

Brian:

So I kind of, joke that, you know, everybody thought, AI was going to take all the, like the entry level jobs that AI was going to drive cars and stock warehouses and stuff, and it does.

Brian:

But chat GPT doesn't drive cars and doesn't stock warehouses.

Brian:

So there are two different things, right?

Brian:

The AI for the first set of tasks is completely different than this, this new AI.

Brian:

And this new AI is just, it's artificial creativity because it writes things and it convinces people in it and then hallucinates, etc.

Brian:

So if you look at that, No, that can't do everything.

Brian:

People are like, oh, we'll take it and we'll train it on this thing.

Brian:

It depends on the job.

Brian:

So depending on the job to be done.

Brian:

So when I look at features, products, things that were, that were releasing, I go, what are all the steps?

Brian:

Okay.

Brian:

Step one, we have to get this data.

Brian:

Step two, we have to do this with it.

Brian:

Step three, we have to send it back to this.

Brian:

What are all those steps of those eight steps?

Brian:

Maybe two or three should be AI.

Brian:

Maybe the rest are algorithms, right?

Brian:

It's not all AI and there's things that AI is, is good for.

Brian:

And so when you talk to somebody about an AI product.

Brian:

You go, well, where, what's the A.

Brian:

I.

Brian:

Doing?

Brian:

Usually it's like, oh, well, when you type into the search box, it's doing the, the language parsing to figure out what you're talking about, it's translating that into sequel queries and stuff like that.

Brian:

Okay, great.

Brian:

That's like a thin layer on top of something.

Brian:

If you take your documentation site and you throw a chat bot on top of it, that's an AI documentation site.

Brian:

But the AI part is only translating the question into, you know, finding the right information and all the rest is not AI infused or AI powered or whatever.

Brian:

So anyway, I think, I think the, the simple answer is if you know your job is to be done, you understand what the, what the pieces, what the steps in those things are, what the eight step recipe is from here to, you know, increasing your conversions.

Brian:

Some parts of that can absolutely be handled by modern, generative, jazzy BT style, LLM AI.

Brian:

Yeah, I'm often talking to people with technology products that I've only used in passing or not at all.

Brian:

I have spent a lot of time in CMSs.

Brian:

I have.

Brian:

Over two decades, I've spent a lot of my life inside of CMSs.

Brian:

And, and there are a lot of steps to, to accomplish the job.

Brian:

It's not just a place you, you dump content.

Brian:

there's a lot that needs to be done.

Brian:

how are you applying AI, to cut those 10 steps down to like four.

Brian:

and I felt this as an editor, like I always saw it like when reporters, it's anytime I would ask, A reporter where their story was, they were always quote unquote, just dropping it in the CMS or like looking for art or something or adding links.

Brian:

And it was always like the last thing.

Brian:

And, and they were like marathon runners and the last like mile.

Brian:

and they were fatigued.

Brian:

so how are you using it to, to, to speed up and make more efficient?

Brian:

just the basic publishing process.

Brian:

Brian A.: So that is, that's actually product manager research first, right?

Brian:

Research driven.

Brian:

So that is back to those jobs to be done.

Brian:

I think of, you know, when I, when I got to VIP, we kind of had two products.

Brian:

One was the platform for launching sites and the other was Parsley, which they'd acquired.

Brian:

So an analytics platform, it's an amazing real time dashboard for newsrooms, right?

Brian:

Two very different things.

Brian:

One is a platform and one is like a.

Brian:

Real time Sass app in a, in a browser, right?

Brian:

we're, we're, we've realized, well, not that we realized, I think they made a conscious decision before I got here to say like, we're going to leave WordPress alone, whatever your, you know, whatever, Conde Nast, New York Times, New York Post, whatever that Rolling Stone, whatever your team builds for the people.

Brian:

That's what, that's what Brian Morrissey shows up to write.

Brian:

That's what he gets, whatever their developers did.

Brian:

We're not going to have an opinion.

Brian:

WordPress is WordPress.

Brian:

That's changed.

Brian:

So now we're saying actually VIP's WordPress should be radically different.

Brian:

So now we have a different kind of set of product lines and now in that CMS one, the role that we're looking at, you know, if you, if you deploy code, that's your developer.

Brian:

If you, if you make content, okay, you're an author.

Brian:

If you do these analytics and growth stuff, you're, you're, you, you deal with conversions and funnels, right?

Brian:

So those are the three roles we look at.

Brian:

So you're asking specifically about authors.

Brian:

If I'm making content in a CMS, how do you help me do my job better?

Brian:

And the answer is all three of those people are on a loop.

Brian:

You know, if you're a developer, you like, you know, build, test, you know, deploy, whatever.

Brian:

There's a whole loop and then you do it again, right?

Brian:

think about it, you know, pseudocode, you know, and you're on a loop.

Brian:

Authors are too.

Brian:

The, the interesting thing is there's not one big author loop.

Brian:

A lot of people look at it and they think, Oh, so content is like somebody ideates it.

Brian:

Somebody drafts it.

Brian:

Somebody puts photos in it.

Brian:

Somebody edits it.

Brian:

They publish it.

Brian:

They promote it.

Brian:

They measure it and then start again.

Brian:

Come up with a new story.

Brian:

And that's the loop the content is on.

Brian:

That's not the loop the people are on.

Brian:

That's not the jobs to be done.

Brian:

That's the, that's the life's life and death cycle of content.

Brian:

And you know, five years from now, 10, 20 years from now, you're like, you archive it, you put it out the pasture, right?

Brian:

Like that, there's a, that's the content journey, not the same at each one of those steps, the ideation phase, there's a person on a loop, like pitching story ideas, they don't write them.

Brian:

They don't find photos for them.

Brian:

They don't edit them.

Brian:

Their loop is look at what's going on in the world, cope with ideas, pitch them, get to a place, whittle it down, and then assign, and then wake up the next day and do that.

Brian:

So you have probably at least a dozen major people whose jobs are on that conveyor belt that the content is going through to like do their little part over and over.

Brian:

Each of those people is on a tight loop.

Brian:

So if you are the photo team, you don't care about the headline.

Brian:

You don't care about SEO tags.

Brian:

You care about.

Brian:

Here, I've got a bunch of photos, I need to weed them down, I need to find the stories that match, I need to commission stuff, I need to get an illustration done, whatever that is, and I'm gonna add the graphics and the photos to this piece of, content, and then the content leaves, and a new piece of content comes in, and I add graphics to it, right?

Brian:

So it's really actually looking at the human part, those human loops, not the content life cycle, the content journey, and looking at those people and saying, how do you take, okay, now, great.

Brian:

Where's the person getting the photos from?

Brian:

What else do we need them to do?

Brian:

Oh, we need them to tag them at the end.

Brian:

Great.

Brian:

Here are great places where AI can help.

Brian:

Absolutely can look at a photo and give you tags and have a human, you know, go, no, go, you know, accept or reject them, right?

Brian:

approve them or, or kick them out, but save them the time of the five minutes of looking at the photo and thinking of the right words or whatever, like, great, we can do that.

Brian:

How do we find the pieces?

Brian:

So, so there are parts in each of the individual's loops That you can automate, sometimes it's an algorithm, sometimes it's AI.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

whether it's an algorithm or AI is sort of, I mean, from whatever, it's however, however

Brian:

it gets done.

Brian:

Brian A.: really care.

Brian:

but yeah, that's true.

Brian:

but I, I think about like, you know, the basic things, so, If, if people are going to be more self reliant in some ways with, they need to, to build loyalty, right?

Brian:

They need to build depth for the most part, depth, of a relationship with the people there.

Brian:

I mean, that means that they can't just be someone comes in 87 percent balance, like with, you know, one page.

Brian:

And so you got, you know, things like backlinking, things like, you know, having, having related all of these.

Brian:

All of these aspects to me should become both more effective and more efficient by using whether it's AI or algorithmic technology.

Brian:

Brian A.: Yeah, no, it absolutely should.

Brian:

I mean, there's no, there's nothing more important than serving that person the right experience, the right content.

Brian:

And there's a lot that goes into it.

Brian:

And, and actually I think people probably overestimate the amount of things that AI are going to help them automate of what they do today.

Brian:

And I think they underestimate how many things they're just not doing because it's so hard that AI is going to let them do.

Brian:

So you just talked about, like SEO hygiene, good backlinks, things like that, right?

Brian:

You mentioned that.

Brian:

I think people think the AI is going to write my title, write my story, make a photo, find the photo, tag it and do all of that.

Brian:

I think it will do some of that.

Brian:

I think that's the one where they overestimate AI is going to help.

Brian:

I can, I mean, we, I, it was one company that eliminated 600 journalists.

Brian:

A year ago, because they were so high on the promise of a I and what is going to do for their business and they were going to get out ahead of the curve.

Brian:

There's a, I don't know, Google, 600 journalists fired for a I, I think they overestimate that.

Brian:

I don't need journalists and I, and that part's going to be become a I driven.

Brian:

And I think the underestimate.

Brian:

All the stuff that they're not doing.

Brian:

So the examples I use are like you did about the, the SEO links, right?

Brian:

So the story I'm writing, I, you know, I'd love to go back and link this to other stuff or even better take old stuff and link to this new thing.

Brian:

But it is so hard to go find the documents, find the articles, the stories and find the top, the top ones that are getting traffic, find the ones that have links Two, two stories on this topic that match the topic.

Brian:

So if I'm writing about, you know, some, some political rally, maybe something happens at a political rally.

Brian:

So I'm writing about that now, where are all the other times that's happened, right, where I can go and send links and traffic to the new thing.

Brian:

But then when you go in, there's like already five recirculation links to internal content.

Brian:

So how do you find the least performing one?

Brian:

ah, that's another, that's going to take me another 30 minutes to like go through traffic charts and figure out which link to get rid of.

Brian:

So I don't have links with, you know, documents with hundreds of links in them, or excuse me, articles with hundreds of links in them.

Brian:

So that whole process, you, I can, I can describe and in three hours of work for a story, that's not being done for every story as you published, it just can't be done, but now it can.

Brian:

So I think you, I think people overestimate how much work they're going to save of things they do today, and they underestimate how many things that they are going to be able to do that they were never able to do before, that are also just best, best practice type things.

Brian:

These aren't

Brian:

Yeah, I think it's because we're obsessed with the Jetsons and, and, and getting our own robots.

Brian:

we keep like anthropomorphizing these technologies and, and, and reality, you know, yes, we get the, we get the robots, but they're in like warehouses and we don't see, you know what I mean?

Brian:

They're in, they're in factories, gigafactories.

Brian:

They're

Brian:

Brian A.: thing about those robots that are in the warehouses?

Brian:

Is one, you don't need lights, right?

Brian:

So they can be in there in the dark and two, they can move at like ridiculous speeds, but they slow them down to not scare people.

Brian:

So when people are in the, in the place in the Amazon warehouse, it's like picking up a box moving it over here and doing whatever, when they're not there, these things are whizzing around doing

Brian:

stuff.

Brian:

That's yeah.

Brian:

And the lights are out.

Brian:

It's like a completely, there's a different world.

Brian:

Robots don't need that.

Brian:

They will slip.

Brian:

They will like, Oh no, they're look, it's building a car.

Brian:

And it's like, and it's just

Brian:

like the idea of like robots after dark, it's like, okay, you know, now we, now we can be our full robot selves.

Brian:

Brian A.: the take off, take off the, yeah, exactly.

Brian:

Take it off the sheets.

Brian:

Same thing.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I

Brian:

yeah, no, I, I, I think when we talk about more with less and we talk about, you know, that back to basics, this is exactly it being able to do these basics in a much more, effective and efficient way.

Brian:

Thank you.

Brian:

that's where it's at versus replacing what humans are.

Brian:

probably best positioned to doing and a lot of the trying to replace the person who's Creating the content in my view is and maybe i'm biased about this is probably not the best place to start There's a lot of in between layers and so That is probably where you want to apply this, this technology first and foremost,

Brian:

Brian A.: mean, there's, there's a reason people show up for certain TV shows or show up for certain news shows or show up for certain content.

Brian:

And it's usually, there's a person, a personality, there's somebody you love.

Brian:

I mean, all of talk radio, all of, you know, every, political channel that's just filled with these personalities, you're there for that.

Brian:

You, you know, you can't really replace that with

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

And I think that, you know, one of the other questions that I wanted to ask you about was how you maintain your distinctiveness in an AI era.

Brian:

I don't know if the AI slop, quote unquote, problem on Facebook is, is overdone or underdone because I'm not spending a ton of time on Facebook and I don't have good data that

Brian:

that shows, but let's just assume there's a healthy amount of AI created slop out there.

Brian:

the cost of creating content Is, is basically zero at this point.

Brian:

you can churn out a ton of AI generated content.

Brian:

I think, you know, Google is, it has a major, major challenge on its hands, with sorting through that.

Brian:

But, I've got faith in them.

Brian:

so how do you end up maintaining.

Brian:

Your distinctiveness in a world where AI is going to be used to create so much synthetic content.

Brian:

I mean to me like being human is like one way, but what it would like, how would you encourage publishers to think about?

Brian:

Brian A.: there's, there's two things there.

Brian:

One is it's the responsibility of the platform, right?

Brian:

To weed out this junk me as a person contributing to the platform.

Brian:

I'll go somewhere else if you can't weed it out.

Brian:

So there's an incentive for the platform to weed it out.

Brian:

We'll talk about that in a second.

Brian:

The other is, is just.

Brian:

The age old, question, goal, whatever of being remarkable, I mean, what makes one comedian, you know, sell out an arena when the rest don't being remarkable being somebody newsworthy, being somebody worth being talked about being somebody that does something that resonates with people.

Brian:

So, so I think if you're looking at just publishers, yeah, having a brand.

Brian:

And a voice and content and experience for me as a reader that like helps me and makes me feel smarter and better and helps me, you know, something I'd rather see than what somebody else does.

Brian:

So, so be remarkable number one, right?

Brian:

That's how you'll stand out from a sea of junk.

Brian:

and then number two, it's on the platforms.

Brian:

And I mean, there's, it's not just, you know, Google results are full of a lot of crazy algorithmic content.

Brian:

I mean, this happened on, on Spotify, right?

Brian:

They're just like, Oh, you need to generate songs.

Brian:

And, and cause there, so this actually goes back to something.

Brian:

I, I don't know, I've been

Brian:

but to be fair you don't need like I an AI generated white noise I'm, like fine with I don't know if

Brian:

it's

Brian:

I I would guess it might be fine

Brian:

Brian A.: No, no, it's, it's not about, well, so if, if it takes away money from like another artist, because the pool is split, it goes back to this thing, which is like anything worth paying for.

Brian:

Being gamed will be gamed,

Brian:

Well, yes that then i'm aligned on you

Brian:

Brian A.: That's the thing.

Brian:

That's what they're doing, which is, Oh, look, there's a pool of money going to big artists and little artists and I think that I can get in there.

Brian:

You know, it's like a Sopranos episode.

Brian:

I think we can go in there, crack some knees, go in and like, take our vig, take our cut, get a piece of that.

Brian:

I think 20 percent of that is going to go to my family.

Brian:

Right?

Brian:

You know, my crew.

Brian:

That's crazy.

Brian:

But that's what they're doing.

Brian:

There's something worth being gained.

Brian:

There's a lottery.

Brian:

There's a thing.

Brian:

There's whatever.

Brian:

There's something somewhere.

Brian:

And I want to get in there and get a piece of that for me.

Brian:

So that's what they're doing.

Brian:

That's, you know, on not unnecessarily the white noise thing.

Brian:

you know, there are other goals.

Brian:

Sometimes it's oh, if you leave this playing overnight, we donate money to some, you know, charity, some relief fund or something.

Brian:

Like, I get it.

Brian:

There's a, that, that's maybe less crummy, but still kind of scammy and weird.

Brian:

And it's, it's a, it's a misuse of what the platform's there for.

Brian:

Which is, big and little artists put up their songs, people listen to them, and then we split the money between all the people.

Brian:

it's

Brian:

Do you have faith in the platforms being able to handle this deluge?

Brian:

Brian A.: so, on a platform by platform basis, I don't have faith in them.

Brian:

I have faith that, ultimately, if Spotify, let's say that was a problem on Spotify, I don't know that it is.

Brian:

Let's say that's a terrible thing, and it's actually causing problems, or on Twitter, or on whatever service you have.

Brian:

I think that ultimately the, that the market will vote and move to a new platform.

Brian:

And yes, it will work itself out.

Brian:

So I think either they will figure it out and fix it, or people will say, Oh, this stinks, I'm going to SoundCloud or I'm going to, you know, whatever new thing comes out.

Brian:

No, I think it works itself out.

Brian:

I'm an optimist.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

I think the thing that I get concerned about is particularly around Google and it not being incentivized by keeping the open web a healthy and resilient ecosystem.

Brian:

you know, they're, they're keeping a lot more traffic to themselves.

Brian:

They've been doing this over the years with zero click searches.

Brian:

and they obviously have a lot of different economic interests now.

Brian:

And, you know, it was always an uneasy bargain, but it was a bargain and we saw Facebook just simply walk away from news altogether and in many cases publishing and, for Google to do that would be really a bigger challenge.

Brian:

It is the nervous system of the open web.

Brian:

And I think that is, to me, the big, the scary thing.

Brian:

Brian A.: there's a different twist on that, which is WordPress has been around 20, 21 years now.

Brian:

Right.

Brian:

you know, Matt Mullenweg's company Automattic is about 20 years old and I'm now at that company, I've been here two and a half years.

Brian:

But I did not spend my career doing WordPress.

Brian:

Like I joked that I'm the Ted Lasso of WordPress.

Brian:

I just showed up and like, don't ask me what the, what the pitch is or how, what offsides means.

Brian:

I don't know, you know, like I just got here.

Brian:

but that's because I was doing CMSs for, you know, almost a decade before WordPress existed.

Brian:

so I don't have This thing where like I'm here because I have a WordPress tattoo and I, you know, I believe in open source.

Brian:

I love working with giant, famous, high, high traffic websites, right?

Brian:

Big brands, important brands.

Brian:

That's kind of my thing.

Brian:

when I look at automatic though, automatic and Google both fit that thing you were just talking about, which is they have a lot of power.

Brian:

WordPress powers a half, half of the web and it could power the other half.

Brian:

And they have a lot of responsibility and Google has a lot of responsibility.

Brian:

They're your browser.

Brian:

They're your analytics for everybody.

Brian:

There are all these different things.

Brian:

They're your search engine.

Brian:

They give you the traffic.

Brian:

They charge you for traffic.

Brian:

They take the traffic away.

Brian:

They control how people see websites, like literally if they wanted to, they could just shut you off in the browser, right?

Brian:

It's, it's, it's crazy how much, and, and all of our email that we sent to each other before this call was probably all through Google.

Brian:

So.

Brian:

They kind of own a lot of this stuff, and I would hope as an optimist that they really aren't going to be evil, that they're not going to decide that, oh, we're going to put a nail in the coffin for all the publishing.

Brian:

that's not cool.

Brian:

I know, on the other side, Automatic has, and again, I've learned a lot about what they do for open source since I got here, because it just wasn't, wasn't my thing, like build something amazing and give it away.

Brian:

I think that's weird, right?

Brian:

But they're like, no, build something great and give it away.

Brian:

And what I've seen is because they do that, because they open sourced WordPress, there are other giant companies that make a lot of money off of WordPress, you know, the go daddies of the world and these other, you know, WP engines and all these things, all these other companies that are kind of,

Brian:

a reason why you can sell a hundred year WordPress plan because it's probably not going to go away if, if automatic was greedy, And did what you're saying, we're worried about Google doing, and they said, we're just going to like, pull it all in together and own it all and just absorb all of that.

Brian:

I don't know how long WordPress would last, the last 10 years,

Brian:

it's not going to be gone in three,

Brian:

that, that's the ecosystem, right?

Brian:

I mean, you need to build an ecosystem and you need to have healthy parts of the ecosystem.

Brian:

And that's why I say, if you look at the media ecosystem, the publishing part and particularly the news part of that is obviously the most challenged part of the ecosystem.

Brian:

And I think there is, to me, hopefully there is alignment in that.

Brian:

If, if the publishing part, obviously it will never go away, but if it, if it goes into like, you know, serious decline, it will have just like any ecosystem, the overall ecosystem will be less healthy and less resilient with the, without that part being, healthy to a degree.

Brian:

So,

Brian:

Brian A.: Yeah.

Brian:

well, so that goes back to what are what is news and what do people, what are they buying it for?

Brian:

And, I constantly remind, the younger people who work with me that, you know, the New York post, the website isn't that old.

Brian:

Like we power their website, but newspaper was like, was it Alexander Hamilton 200 years ago?

Brian:

I mean, that's old.

Brian:

So I would like to think that outside of maybe a, you know, London phone hacking scandal or something where a hundred year old paper just vanishes in a week, right?

Brian:

outside of a few weird things like that, these things are going to last.

Brian:

And when, you know, I remember when Snapchat, a friend of mine was, running their, I think it's their Discover screen.

Brian:

They're just, right.

Brian:

And so it had all this stuff.

Brian:

All the things in there were like Sports Illustrated and New York times, like real, real publications.

Brian:

Like there's, there's a value to having that brand be what tells you the news, even if it's telling you it in six second stories in video format.

Brian:

You know, I don't think that that trusted brand part goes away.

Brian:

Okay.

Brian:

So final thing is what's one piece of advice you would give to, to those who are leading product organizations and publishers.

Brian:

Brian A.: Yeah.

Brian:

It's the stuff we discussed at the beginning of the call, which is zero in on the business.

Brian:

That thing that, Jonathan rivers, really smart guy from a fortune said, I'm here to build a business, not a website.

Brian:

So always business first, and then second, none of this works.

Brian:

If you are building things that are not part of someone's job to be done, that loop that you are on all day long, that you repeat all day long, then what you're doing is a nice to have the features you're adding or cute, the features you are adding are not indispensable.

Brian:

And I think in a bad economy, you need to make yourself indispensable in a good economy, still a good idea to make yourself indispensable.

Brian:

Yeah.

Brian:

Brian A.: So that's the advice that we give.

Brian:

Words of wisdom.

Brian:

Thank you, Brian.

Brian:

Appreciate it.

Brian:

Brian A.: Thanks, Brad.

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