Episode 184
Publishers need to go back to basics
This episode is sponsored by Piano
The essential challenge for publishers is similar to most businesses: find a way to control their relationship with the customer.
That means going back to basics, argues Trevor Kaufman, CEO of Piano, and giving people reasons to come directly to publishers. Too often published have chosen audience development tactic — fish where the fish are, etc — over sound business strategies, Trevor told me on the Rebooting Show ahead of this week’s Piano Academy in Paris.
“Fundamentally, creating a loyal audience that shows up at your front door; that’s the business of publishing. And we get too distracted with a pivot to video, or apps, or Facebook, or AI, instead of asking what it means to be a subscriber, a member of this brand.”
Other issues we discussed:
- The “original sins” of publishing: giving away content to Google for free and letting intermediaries seize the advertiser relationship
- Why publishing is near the top of industries ranked by “complexity per dollar” of revenue
- How Piano has evolved into managing the entire subscriber journey, from ad-block prompts to newsletters to bundles.
See The Rebooting's recent "total monetization" research report done in collaboration with Piano.
Transcript
Welcome to the Rebooting Show.
Brian:I am Brian Morrissey.
Brian:I'm in Paris this week for the Piano Academy, which gathers top publishers from Europe and beyond.
Brian:I'm speaking about rebuilding trusts in a world of infinite content, which to my mind starts with focusing on what won't change at a time when.
Brian:Everything is up for grabs in the AI era.
Brian:in this week's episode, I am joined by piano, CEO Trevor Kaufman, who I've known since his digital agency Days when he founded and ran Schematic.
Brian:We talk about that a little bit.
Brian:Piano has worked with publishers for many years to power their direct revenue operations.
Brian:I used piano myself in my last job.
Brian:in this conversation, Trevor and I get into how piano has.
Brian:Evolved far beyond being quote unquote paywall software into an audience and revenue platform.
Brian:Why publishing carries so much complexity per dollar and the costs of giving up distribution to platforms.
Brian:we also get into a back to basics playbook, for now.
Brian:that starts with great homepages testing the bundle, as a product and putting product in revenue teams, on one scorecard like arpu.
Brian:we also talk about our, total monetization research and what it says about aligning ads, subscriptions, and commerce, as well
Brian:as subscription fatigue versus at least the perception of, of subscription fatigue versus what the reality is in the numbers.
Brian:and also I, I get, Trevor to talk about different patterns he's seen, across US and Europe because piano does have a global,
Brian:Customer base as, as well as a little, trip down memory lane, to talk about micropayments because piano really began, you know, its life.
Brian:I know, it, it went through a few iterations, but its TinyPass and.
Brian:I don't know.
Brian:I think that the time for micropayments might be now.
Brian:I think I, I really do.
Brian:And so we talk a little bit about that because the infrastructure, is there to pull it off.
Brian:So we'll see.
Brian:if you haven't already, be sure to check out the total monetization research report that The Rebooting completed in collaboration with Piano.
Brian:We surveyed, revenue leaders at 65 leading publishers to understand how they're crafting revenue strategies in this More With Less era.
Brian:I'll leave a link to the report in the show notes, and you can also find it on The Rebooting's website at therebooting.com.
Brian:Now onto my conversation with Trevor.
Brian:Trevor, welcome to the podcast.
Trevor:Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian:Okay, so we've known each other many years.
Brian:Go back to Schematic.
Brian:but I wanna talk a little bit about like, the evolution, of piano.
Brian:before we talk about, this total monetization, approach and, and the, and the research that we, that we did together.
Brian:I think a lot of people.
Brian:You know, and I like would, it's like, yeah, I'm working with piano that is like, oh, you know, the, the paywall, the paywall people.
Brian:but you guys are more than that, you know?
Brian:I think of it as like an audience platform at the end of the day, but how do you describe it?
Trevor:well, the, the business problem of publishing right is of course, more complex than the moment somebody buys something.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:I, I remember, the really early days of e-commerce, people used to call e-commerce software, shopping cart software.
Trevor:'cause their whole experience with e-commerce was, you know, you put stuff in a shopping cart and Shopify's a lot more than a shopping cart, right?
Trevor:it's content, it's recommendations, it's identity, it's in, in e-commerce, it's inventory.
Trevor:And the same thing's true with piano, right?
Trevor:I mean.
Trevor:We worry a lot about user data, about behavioral data.
Trevor:We're using that information to segment audience and decide the right moments to show, the right content and the right offers to different people.
Trevor:we talk a lot about helping sites make the most of every single visit, right?
Trevor:And so that longitudinal journey of the first moment you see an article on social and you click on it and you explore a site.
Trevor:And maybe you come back and we recirculate you with content recommendations and we ask you to turn your ad blocker off and we try and get you to sign up for a newsletter and then eventually we try and get you to pay and to retain you.
Trevor:There's a lot of customer experience in that.
Trevor:and there's a lot of financial complexity in that.
Trevor:So, you know, particularly with big multi tit publishers who are bundling certain things or might have.
Trevor:Print and digital, and then you go on vacation and you want to pause the print, but not the digital.
Trevor:And you know, there's a, just a lot of, you know, gifting site, licensing, promo codes, refunds.
Trevor:There's just a tremendous amount of complexity around managing a subscriber experience.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:so piano is built over 10 years to help publishers with all the aspects of that.
Trevor:And of course most of our clients, some of our clients use us for absolutely everything.
Trevor:And then others use us for pieces of what we do because they have some platform, either a legacy thing or a new thing they're excited about, and they use us around the to, to be the, the mortar between the tiles on that stuff.
Trevor:Okay.
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:And, and you also work beyond publishers, right?
Brian:I mean, so.
Trevor:Yeah.
Brian:And I think that's interesting because like, and tell me if I'm wrong, like publishing seems to me to be a really complicated business for a whole bunch of different reasons.
Brian:And a lot of what I have seen just over my career is that complexity leads to a raft of issues, just internal issues and just simple alignment issues.
Brian:is that somewhat unique or, or just, you know, more extreme in publishing or, or do you see that in other
Brian:industries too,
Trevor:Brian, that's a great question.
Trevor:I, I mean, if, if we were to rank industries by complexity per dollar, right?
Trevor:Like how difficult is it to run the operations of the business compared to, you know, for each dollar of revenue?
Trevor:I, I think publishing's probably pretty high on the list.
Trevor:When, when you get inside a retail bank or you get inside a airline, there's a lot of, there's a lot of complexity there
Brian:But they're flying and landing planes.
Brian:Like I also think that, I mean, nothing against, I've, you know, look, I love publishing, you know, webpages, like sending newsletters and whatnot, but like, it's not the same as operate.
Trevor:It is definitely not the same and but, but there's a lot more money in aviation than there is in publishing too, so you
Brian:Yeah.
Brian:Well, and there's also the fact that, you know, they make, they, they make more money as a financial services company than they do actually with the, uh, moving people
Trevor:flyer cards.
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:I think some of that's overblown, but yes, absolutely.
Trevor:so, so look, I mean, I, I think it is a very complex business.
Trevor:I think, publishers are trying to streamline it.
Trevor:I think a lot of publishing staff.
Trevor:Hold onto that complexity because it's justification for a lot of roles within the publisher, right?
Trevor:but, but you know, what you are doing and what a lot of other people are doing to, to create, you know, small, successful publishing businesses.
Trevor:In effect content businesses, I think are making a lot of publishers rethink the complexity that they layer into their organization, right?
Trevor:So.
Trevor:We're trying to crusade for a lot more simplicity on a lot of this stuff, even though that, that complexity leads to software and software fees, it's not good for the client.
Trevor:That's.
Brian:Right.
Brian:So when you talk with publishers, is there like a, a thread of sort of what.
Brian:Kind of ails publishing at this moment.
Brian:Like, I mean, there's a raft of challenges and there, there, it's, it's always been a tough business.
Brian:Always will be a tough business.
Brian:some of those are more heightened now because of the distribution challenges.
Brian:And, but what, what is the sort of common thread that you come away with in your discussions with, with pub publisher leadership?
Trevor:you asked a slightly different question at the beginning, I think, than the end that they're both good ones.
Trevor:The, the, the first question is you were asking sort of what, what ails them, right.
Trevor:And.
Trevor:An interesting exercise is to say to a publisher, what do you think the original sin was?
Trevor:That led us to a point where the publishing business is as hard as it is, and sometimes people will say it's that we gave all our content to Google and let them index it and you know, didn't take any money from that.
Trevor:or it might be that they say.
Trevor:It's that we let all these ad tech vendors, particularly Google, get in between us and the, you know, the relationship with the advertiser or lots of other things.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:But,
Brian:Those are the two big ones.
Brian:If you lose control of your distribution and you lose control of your ad rights, you lose control of your business.
Trevor:Yeah, yeah.
Trevor:And, and look, the, the losing control of distribution has lots of episodes along the way.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:It might be that you.
Trevor:Let people index you and you know, they make, can make money on search and you don't, it might be answers that appear on the page,
Trevor:you know, as famously as we trend towards Google Zero, it might be that you give your content to Facebook or to Apple for free.
Trevor:There are all kinds of moments, or it might be where you give your, you know, you do a cheap short term licensing deal with open AI in exchange for them having all your content right.
Trevor:All these things weaken the distribution of publishers and what, what I think publishers a mistake.
Trevor:You know, I love publishers too.
Trevor:The nature of this is we're gonna talk about a lot of mistakes in
Brian:There's a butt coming here.
Brian:I, I know.
Brian:I know when a butt is
Trevor:to land.
Trevor:But if you give up the point of distribution, right?
Trevor:One thing that drives me nuts is publishers say these, things that are well-meaning and sound good, like we're gonna reach people where they are.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:That's good.
Trevor:Right?
Trevor:That's an audience development tactic, but it's not a real bus.
Trevor:It's a, that's a marketing tactic.
Trevor:It is not a sustainable business tactic.
Trevor:So, you know, when you are publishing on YouTube or Facebook or you know, an or any one of these other sites.
Trevor:You, you are getting distribution, but you are paying for that in, in losing your point of distribution.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:As being special and critical.
Trevor:And I think publishers think about audience and people without being as precious as they should be about safeguarding their own ability to distribute content.
Trevor:I remember I had a meeting at Medium when Medium was a different thing than it is now, and, and they were saying.
Trevor:Look, should you know, should the San Francisco, should, you know, should the Boston Globe have its own website?
Trevor:I mean, shouldn't they just publish through us?
Trevor:We are really good at making websites.
Trevor:They're not, which I thought was very arrogant for me.
Trevor:I'm gonna say.
Trevor:But then, you know, they said also too, like, and over the long term, won't people go just directly to content.
Trevor:You know, the creators of content and reporters, and we don't need the editorial organization, which was this giant, you know, San Francisco's not a big editorial town, frankly, in, in the last several decades.
Trevor:And as a result, people don't understand the role of in investing in journalism and how much it costs to properly report a story or the role of an editor.
Trevor:Right?
Trevor:They confuse commentary and reporting.
Trevor:And so there was, there's this disaggregation.
Trevor:That everybody tries to do in two media companies, and too often they're, they're good at it.
Trevor:They go, here's a, a, you know, $500,000 this year in exchange for totally changing the value of your, of your editorial organization.
Trevor:I mean, this is a up for debate, but personally I don't think, and you know, again, this is controversial.
Trevor:Like anybody should be able to write for Forbes, and that means Forbes is just as authoritative a voice as it was when it was a sort of, you know, more traditional editorial organization.
Trevor:I feel that stuff hurts the brand, right?
Trevor:But it certainly resulted in a lot more traffic, And so I, I just think that short term thinking.
Trevor:Has resulted in a lot of problems.
Trevor:And to me that's the, the two biggest problems are the two hardest ones.
Trevor:Short term thinking, which, you know, ails a lot of businesses in a lot of sectors.
Trevor:And then the other problem is there's a lot of legacy thinking about how competitive publishers are.
Trevor:When I hear a publisher say that they're competitive with another publisher, I'm like.
Trevor:You know you are right.
Trevor:If I read The Atlantic, I feel like I'm more likely to read the New Yorker.
Trevor:If I'm reading Newsweek, I'm more likely to read time, not less.
Trevor:They may fight over an RFP for an advertiser, but for audience attention.
Trevor:It's not a zero sum game.
Trevor:They're taking people away from Netflix, right?
Trevor:Or away from the gym or coffee or something like that, which is what, what they should be doing.
Trevor:And so that kind of.
Trevor:My thinking may be antiquated 'cause I've gotten really old while I've been doing this, but fundamentally like creating a loyal audience that shows up at your front door.
Trevor:That's the business of publishing.
Trevor:And like we get too distracted with a pivot to video.
Trevor:Oh, apps are gonna come over the hill and save us.
Trevor:It's Facebook, it's ai, it's whatever.
Trevor:As opposed to saying, what does it mean to be a subscriber, a member of this brand, and there there's not enough attention to making the site great.
Brian:I think that's right.
Brian:I mean there, there's, I think there's always been this tension of charitably to like following, you know, the, the trends of like consumer behavior and how consumer behavior is changing.
Brian:But at the same time, there's an element of, you know, chasing whatever is the shiny object or the shortcut of the moment and, and not, you know, focusing on the basics.
Brian:It does seem like we're on, in a bit of a. Back to basics moment, like, you know, to use Silicon Valley, like Argo, like sort of what would, what would be a first principles approach to publishing now in 2025?
Brian:And we can all talk about the original sins.
Brian:I think there are, unfortunately it's hard to have one, there's many original sins.
Brian:separating the audience data from the media impression.
Brian:I think that's, that's, that's got, that's a candidate.
Brian:What do you think is, what would a first principles approach to publishing now look like?
Brian:There's, there's tons of tech and organizational debt with within these organizations, but how would you counsel, like starting anew?
Trevor:An easy way to do this right, is to do what everybody does, but doesn't do enough of, which is, look at the New York Times, right?
Trevor:Meredith Levine is everybody's hero, and you know, the homepage of the New York Times.
Trevor:Remember, we were like, the homepage is dead because social traffic links deep links into the site.
Trevor:Well, the most valuable people are the people who type the URL in directly, or who bookmark the homepage, right?
Trevor:The homepage is, is great.
Trevor:So like that's where I always think people ought to start, right?
Trevor:Organizations feel like the article is their product, right?
Trevor:The article's not the product.
Trevor:It's the bundle of everything that's the product.
Trevor:I think direct relationships with advertisers are so critical, you know, I think people lean into programmatic, overly so, right?
Trevor:And that being able to set up special programs with advertisers is everything.
Trevor:It's so much more money and it's easy to say.
Trevor:But this is the blocking, tackling and competitive stuff you have to do, I think a compelling subscription proposition, right, that has lots and lots of benefits on one end of the scale, right?
Trevor:You're either a subscriber and you get everything and it's incredible or you're not.
Trevor:I think that is a, is a, I mean, and there are lots of less for less and more for more strategies that you can layer onto a mature subscription business, but you have to start.
Trevor:Establishing the value and uniqueness of that thing and the community around it.
Trevor:You know, really, really critical.
Trevor:So I think, you know, you touched on sort of creating the organization and I think publishers need really strong product teams, you know,
Trevor:'cause it's a product and that those teams need to be in a really advantageous place, partnered with that editorial as opposed to.
Trevor:You know, subservient to them, and I think they need really strong, revenue generation teams that are looking at the same metrics, right?
Trevor:That are evaluated in the exact same way as as everybody else, right?
Trevor:And so if everybody's looking at one set of KPIs across the organization and rowing in the same direction, if they treat it like a product, if they're thinking about user experience as much as they're thinking about.
Trevor:You know, articles and content reporting that, that, that's what I think is like kind of the recipe for a strong, you know, publishing organization.
Brian:Yeah, in the research that we did, you know, we found that, I mean, it wasn't, it didn't totally shock me, like the lack of like, alignment particularly around just common sets of metrics.
Brian:you know, I, I think it was good to emphasize that because, the complexity of these organizations leads to the inevitable silos and, You know, different groups being at
Brian:cross purposes, you know, they have their own, their, their own KPIs that don't, that sometimes work against each other.
Brian:And I think in some ways the divide between, Subscriptions and advertising is probably, you know, has always been the, the most acute, like, I, I remember starting like memberships at Digiday with piano, I should add.
Brian:yeah, immediately the ad sales team was like, wait a second, this is gonna cut down on the number of impressions we have.
Brian:And I'm like, but you,
Trevor:I mean,
Brian:haven't sold 60% of the impression, so I'll make more.
Trevor:look, I mean, y you know, I'm friends with Nick and I think Digit a's an incredible organization, but like, how much revenue is ads on digiday.com driving for that company at this point?
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:I mean, it, it's very hard.
Trevor:I mean, the, the insight that that started piano was, you know, advertising has with the possible exception of the broadcast monopoly in the eighties.
Trevor:Advertising alone has never supported any medium.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:And you, you asked me a question in this, you know, our prep for this at one point, which was, how do you think about, or how do you balance business metrics and editorial metrics?
Trevor:And my immediate reaction to that was, what's an editorial metric?
Trevor:Right?
Trevor:Because if you think about every other content form, music, television.
Trevor:Books, movies, right?
Trevor:You go, that movie had a $40 million opening weekend.
Trevor:You go, that's a gold selling album.
Trevor:That song's at the top of the charts.
Trevor:He wrote a bestseller, right?
Trevor:These are, these are, everybody thinks about revenue as their key metric, except some people in publishing in a crazy way, right?
Trevor:So look.
Trevor:It's an, it's very simple.
Trevor:It's a very simple math problem.
Trevor:If you are capturing the right data to go, okay, I have this user coming in.
Trevor:They're coming in from X or SNAP or Google or whatever it is, they're in this geography.
Trevor:They're on this device, they're reading this content.
Trevor:They are worth this much in advertising dollars.
Trevor:To me.
Trevor:They have this propensity to subscribe and to return to the site.
Trevor:Therefore, I'm going to give them this.
Trevor:Experience, right?
Trevor:And I'm gonna tally up all the money that I made from people who looked at various pieces of content or came in through my newsletter and read that newsletter.
Trevor:And I'm gonna put a value on every single activity that I do and optimize that.
Trevor:And that's what like sometimes when people have advertising and, and subscription working in cross purposes, I just think you're not looking at the right data.
Brian:Right.
Brian:you know, in this report we talked about like ARPU as like a unified metric, like average revenue per user.
Brian:I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to implement like a clean, like a lot of people talk about like a North Star metric.
Brian:and it's really difficult just because the.
Brian:The number of activities that across publishers they do in order to make money are, are, you know, so many, talk, talk to me about like, is it, is it realistic to have like a single unified metric that, that everyone is working towards?
Trevor:So, so I've gotten in a lot of trouble internally and a little bit externally for advocating for ARPU as as one North Star metric.
Trevor:And the reason is not because it's non indicative.
Trevor:It's, sorry.
Trevor:It's not indicative.
Trevor:It is.
Trevor:And, and to your point about lots of revenue streams.
Trevor:There aren't that many, right?
Trevor:There's an events business and that is an offline business and it's, it is somewhat more difficult to track, but, well, affiliate's pretty easy to track, right?
Trevor:Affiliate revenue is pretty easy to total up, right?
Trevor:So you have subscription, affiliate, and advertising, and that's.
Trevor:90% of 90% of the media companies in the world's business, right?
Trevor:And those things you can assemble into a average revenue per user number on a cohort by cohort basis to help you figure out what to do.
Trevor:Okay?
Trevor:I've been banging the drum at piano and making everybody across the organization, the professional services people, the, the client success people, the product folks focus around delivering against our poop, right?
Trevor:What I've gotten is a lot of pushback because they've said, what period of time are you looking at?
Trevor:Don't we care more about lifetime value?
Trevor:And the answer should be yes.
Trevor:The problem is a lot of our users are anonymous, right?
Trevor:We're making money off you from the first moment before you've registered, before you've subscribed, and, and cookies are have a, you know.
Trevor:often a short lifespan and people are on multiple devices.
Trevor:So for the anonymous audience it can be hard to say this is all the same user and therefore, I mean there's just no, no magic on the web to do that.
Trevor:And therefore, you know, you gotta look at RPU for that audience and say, I like to look at RPU consistency consistently.
Trevor:Really a lifetime value metric would be better, but that's also a lot harder and, and my.
Trevor:What I advocate for is an average revenue per user metric is just much more accessible and indicative and available now and measurable
Trevor:now versus kind of anything else, and certainly much better than page views, which really don't correlate to revenue at all.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:So yes, more pages theoretically means you're showing more advertising, but there's, you know, one ad can be worth 400 times what another ad is worth, and one user can be much more likely to subscribe than another.
Trevor:And the value of a subscribed user is astronomically higher than the value of a, an anonymous user.
Trevor:Even someone who registered as much, much higher, about eight times higher than someone who hasn't.
Trevor:So, you know, there's stuff you can measure.
Trevor:We should be measuring it now.
Trevor:We should have one number, not 20.
Trevor:And I think everybody in the organization ought to be aligned around it.
Trevor:And so that's what I keep trying to push clients into and, and to, to what you were alluding to.
Trevor:I think some people want to keep editorial very sacred and free of some metrics, and I understand that desire, but I don't think at the end of the day it really means the editorial's gonna be better.
Trevor:'cause we don't expose them to performance metrics.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:I think, you know.
Trevor:I think that's a, a decision that smart executives can make about what they want to publish and, and what makes them money.
Trevor:and both matter, right?
Trevor:One really matters for the brand and for the world and the other matters to keep the lights on.
Trevor:And I think they can make that decision on their own, hopefully in a smart way, right?
Trevor:But, but having one thing that people measure, I think is really critical, even if it doesn't capture these kind of really important lifetime value aspects.
Brian:I do.
Brian:I would say sometimes, and by that I meant like.
Brian:You know, sometimes the, the, like you talked about, like the bundle, right?
Brian:Like I, I've seen like organizations, and this was previously that were looking at like, almost like last click attribution.
Brian:And so they were organizing editorial yes.
Brian:Around metrics, but the metric was, did this piece of content on a unit economics basis lead to a conversion Y or N And you're trying to get people to subscribe to a bundle and my.
Brian:Problem with that was always the fact that different pieces of content do different things and you're not, you can't like isolate it into, you know, did you produce a subscriber, like black or white because you're losing,
Trevor:I could not agree with you more.
Trevor:I mean, and, and by the way, you, you'll, you'll notice this in your own behavior, right?
Trevor:But what, what people think is that we stop people with a paywall and they go, Ugh, I guess I'll subscribe.
Trevor:Now, that doesn't usually happen.
Trevor:What happens is you stop people a bunch of times from reading these things they want to read, and then they say, you know what?
Trevor:I've been one, I really want to do something good for myself, and I wanna subscribe to.
Trevor:Rebooting, right?
Trevor:And then they go and they click the subscribe button and they subscribe there.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:But the idea that just like, oh, I want to read this article and I have to pay, so I'm gonna pay Now that, that it, yeah, it can work, but
Trevor:guess what?
Brian:of content.
Brian:It was like things like, like how much money people make or like pitch decks.
Brian:It was like, I need this, this
Brian:literal, it was like cotton candy of the
Trevor:but those people churn.
Trevor:Those people churn.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:The only big reason those people don't churn is if canceling is too hard, which is a,
Brian:Well, then you like, you know, that's what you add in.
Brian:You got a call between three and 3:15 PM uh.
Trevor:yeah.
Trevor:No, I, I think, look, I mean, at a certain point, you know, we have all this sophisticated logic for like when we stop people with a paywall, right?
Trevor:And other companies are like, our logic is better than pianos at when to stop people and.
Trevor:It does make, like knowing when to do that does make a difference, but at a certain point I'm like, if we stop people on the second page view or the third page view, is that really gonna change the business that dramatically?
Trevor:Right.
Brian:be like, you
Trevor:so,
Brian:I used to always say, and this is very simplistic, I was like, people need to see locks on the homepage to tell 'em that there's stuff they're not getting and then they need to hit walls
Trevor:Right, but, but accept, except we, we do that.
Trevor:Not based on the content you're looking at, but based on you.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:So we can't put locks on the articles, but I understand what you mean.
Trevor:Look, people find out soon enough, right?
Trevor:And I think the discovery of, like you go to the Wall Street Journal homepage and there's tons and tons of interesting stuff and you try and read it and you can't.
Trevor:You go, oh, maybe I can read something else.
Trevor:You can't read that either.
Trevor:And you go, I guess if I wanna read this kind of stuff, I should be a Wall Street Journal subscriber.
Trevor:Right?
Trevor:And then you click to find out more about it and you find there are a ton of other benefits and you can gift articles and all this stuff.
Trevor:And that's a great experience.
Trevor:You know, most of these things, they're so expensive subscriptions, sadly, but they really are mostly very inexpensive for the value that they're delivering.
Trevor:And so I, I think there will be, we will get better over time.
Trevor:We've gotten a lot better over the last 10 years.
Trevor:And we'll get a lot better over the next 10 years at figuring out models that make it less onerous to subscribe for people and make the publisher more money.
Trevor:And that's gonna be a happy day.
Trevor:And we're working on that literally every single minute at piano.
Trevor:And, you know, but, but in the meantime.
Trevor:there are definitely cases where I'm like, God, these guys have a great product and they're not making enough money.
Trevor:And that's because they have a marketing issue, or they have a staffing issue, or they're letting too many people in the front door.
Trevor:But for the most part, some of these fantastic editorial products do very well.
Trevor:You know, there are a lot of really good editorial businesses out there, and I, I think the.
Trevor:The days when you could have a magazine about pretty much anything and get tons of ad pages maybe never existed in the first place.
Trevor:But people have that idea, right?
Trevor:I mean, Tina Brown, who's a lovely person, goes around talking about the good old days of publishing and Gray Carter published his biography and I think everybody wishes that.
Trevor:Like they, yeah, they could ex, ex expense everything, you know.
Brian:Nobody, nobody took care of people's mortgages, in B2B publishing.
Brian:let me ask you this just quickly on, since we were talking about subscriptions, because you guys, you have, you sit on the data, right?
Brian:Like I, is the idea of like subscription fatigue, a, a myth.
Trevor:so I don't know where I got this stat, and so I don't know whether it's true, but it sounds true to me in the heyday of magazines before the internet.
Trevor:If you were subscribed to any magazines, the average number you were subscribed to was eight.
Brian:Okay.
Trevor:look, I think subscription fatigue is a thing because there are so many things, not just editorial products, but there are so many things, apps and lessons, and you know where you go.
Trevor:I'm subscribed to masterclass and ukulele lessons and.
Trevor:This, you know, vitamin that shows up and all this stuff.
Trevor:Like you can be subscribed to so many things now that I think that kind of freaks people out and it can be too tough to cancel.
Trevor:And you tend to find out just when you were billed for the next year and you've got a whole year to wait to remember or you've turned it off on a renew now.
Trevor:It's very confusing and like all the time, you know, we have people try to subscribe to things that they're already subscribed to 'cause they've forgotten.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:So I do think that's a real factor of contemporary life now, but I don't think that that's a reason that publishers shouldn't develop oil audiences and gonna
Brian:Oh, no, no, no.
Brian:I'm not, I'm not.
Brian:That would be a very counterintuitive
Trevor:Yeah.
Brian:no, no, no.
Brian:I would not.
Brian:I I just, I guess I was asking because like, I feel like for years now there's been the prediction of there people can only have so many subscriptions and so this, you know, that.
Brian:The growth, particularly the people saw when Trump first came into office with the news publishers and when it was kind of new.
Brian:The reality is like there's so many different subscriptions, that are out there now.
Brian:Amazon's trying to push you into like the face cream subscription and, and paper towel subscription and,
Trevor:By the way, your skin looks great.
Brian:yeah.
Brian:Thank you.
Trevor:yes,
Brian:I, I guess I, I just, to me it's like always it's vibes based and it's not like data based, like this, this idea that there's, there's, there's a ceiling of subscriptions.
Brian:It makes sense like in the abstract, but I don't, I don't know.
Brian:I don't think that the data necessarily proves that
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:Well look, I think that there is an interesting, the, the great thing about media is also a terrible thing, which is we're all consumers, right?
Trevor:I was talking about.
Trevor:You are working the bank and airline business and everyone, when you start talking about a bank or airline business, people say, well, in my bank account, or the last time I took a flight, like, we're all consumers too, right?
Trevor:And all of our media taste is different.
Trevor:So I might be a New Yorker subscriber, an Atlantic subscriber, and, you know, when I was, many moons ago, when I was trying to raise the money to start the company, people said, well, how many publications in the world can charge for?
Trevor:Access to content.
Trevor:Is it even five?
Trevor:I mean New York Times, wall Street Journal,
Brian:Right.
Trevor:I don't know.
Trevor:times of London, FTE, there's not more than 10, right?
Trevor:And they didn't say, well what about Women's Wear Daily and Billboard and Variety And Hollywood Reporter, they didn't say, what about America's Test Kitchen or the New York or the Atlantic?
Trevor:Or what about foreign policy or foreign affairs?
Trevor:And like there's just, my media mix is different than yours.
Trevor:And so I might have BBC Plus or CNN plus Proud New, you know, recent piano customers and you might not, right?
Trevor:And, and so we each have our kind of media bias, but, but that isn't that wonderful, right?
Trevor:Like, isn't that great that there's so much rich content out there?
Trevor:So sometimes, like when I've subscribed to something.
Trevor:I just go, why didn't I do this before?
Trevor:Like it's 30 bucks and like now I have all this amazing, like, I don't know.
Trevor:The, the experience of being able to get through the web in an unfettered way is really important to us at piano and, and one of the things
Trevor:that I lament about the ways we need to make publishers successful is that we need to fight sometimes against what I call the unmolested web.
Trevor:Where you can just surf around and look at anything without anybody stopping you.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:And you know, all, all of
Brian:like kind of, that's kind of gone, isn't it?
Brian:Almost like, I mean, I feel like the, the, the modern, I mean, first of all, I don't even, I just hope the Open web survives,
Brian:but like the modern experience of it, it reminds me of like Phoenix where you just like, you're always in a cul-de-sac.
Trevor:look, I, I mean, first of all, like this, the Open Web survives thing.
Trevor:Is such a, I mean, talk about Troy Young and arguments that I have with him.
Trevor:I mean, the, the, you know, he was convincing me that everything would be WeChat in the US or Facebook Messenger 10, 10 years ago, right?
Trevor:So, I, you know, love to Troy, but that's not happening.
Trevor:The open web is like a miracle of the world.
Trevor:It's not going anywhere.
Trevor:I mean, meanwhile says the guy who publishes on Substack.
Trevor:Oh, it's the Open web's going away.
Trevor:The open web is this tremendously.
Trevor:One thing I do at conferences is I'll ask some questions like, you know who car industry is huge.
Trevor:Who in here bought a car this month?
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:Okay.
Trevor:Home improvement.
Trevor:Who's spending money improving their house right now?
Trevor:That's a big industry and like a couple people raise their hand.
Trevor:And then I say, who in here read an article today?
Trevor:And every single person raises their hand.
Trevor:The article economy is massive, and whether it's Google Discover or Apple News, or the Open Web, which is your discovery mechanism around that, it's not going anywhere and it's a wildly ingrained behavior.
Trevor:If anything, I'm worried.
Trevor:About the fact that we can't wait for an elevator anymore without pulling out our phone and starting to read the beginning of some article, right?
Trevor:So I, I don't shed too many tears
Brian:Okay.
Brian:So you're not, you're, you're
Trevor:the death of the
Brian:okay.
Brian:You're, you're not, you're not, you're not figuring out your outfit for the funeral,
Trevor:Yeah, I mean, you know, piano manages about 4 trillion events a year or something like that now.
Trevor:Most, certainly not all of which.
Trevor:There's lots of other types of customers on our platform, but a lot of that, I mean this, a small media site does a lot more traffic than a big e-commerce site.
Trevor:Like there's just a lot of volume of people looking at this stuff.
Trevor:Do we monetize them well enough yet?
Trevor:No.
Trevor:Do we need better ways to enable them to contribute to the value that they're getting?
Trevor:Absolutely.
Trevor:We will get there.
Trevor:I'll think of it and do it, or somebody else will in some garage somewhere right now, but.
Trevor:But that experience of sharing information about the world is fantastic and it's not gonna go anywhere.
Brian:Yeah, it, it seems like an emerging sort of theme of how these businesses will need to evolve.
Brian:I guess there's a few.
Brian:One is needing to be.
Brian:Very audience focused.
Brian:This sounds like very obvious, but, you know, I think in the past, a lot of times these strategies got to where they're trying to serve too many masters at once and understanding your audience and having a.
Brian:Ideally, like as direct of a connection as possible with them is, is the best.
Brian:I think one of the other realities is just this idea of more with less, you know, there's a lot of publishers have.
Brian:Less like traffic in volume, right?
Brian:Because of search changes.
Brian:But you need to make, you need to make more money off of, off of less audience basically.
Brian:So it seems to me like you can't rely on having, it almost goes from volume to value to to a degree.
Trevor:I think that's right.
Trevor:I think that's exactly right.
Trevor:I mean, look, your audience, right?
Trevor:I mean you, Brian Morsey.
Trevor:It's incredibly valuable to a lot of companies, including ours.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:And you've done that very deliberately, right?
Trevor:And, and that is a level of intention that you've put around it because you are not, exact.
Trevor:I mean, while it's great, you're not a general interest, you're not trying to appeal to everyone in the world.
Trevor:You're trying to appeal to a very specific type of person, right?
Trevor:Like for example, me, right.
Trevor:But, but you know, my, my wife is not gonna
Brian:I can walk, I can walk down the street without, without, without being stopped.
Brian:If that's what you're saying.
Brian:It's it.
Trevor:Well, not for that reason, but, but, that that's a really valuable.
Trevor:I mean, you've created an asset, right?
Trevor:And lots of publishers have done that, and that's fantastic.
Trevor:And yes, they can do that with a kind of incremental investment.
Trevor:I mean, yes, legacy media businesses have it hard because they have to change what they're doing so dramatically, and the economics changed and the, the source of money changed.
Trevor:And, and meanwhile, you know, around the world.
Trevor:60% of the magazine revenue that of the circulation revenue from our clients in magazines is from print.
Trevor:70% in the newspaper business.
Trevor:Like they're still getting a ton of revenue out of the print operations and so they can't let that go.
Trevor:And that's very difficult for a business is the drag that some legacy things that they don't really know what to do with have on it.
Trevor:And then you have, you know, racket starting a print thing very successfully and then you have.
Trevor:Atlanta Journal constitution, dropping their print entirely, right?
Trevor:Everybody's trying different stuff to do what you're talking about, which is identify and appeal to the audience, build a great product, and that all those changes, while they're very
Trevor:stressful for us internally at piano, when it's like Gatehouse bought gannet, or you know, vice goes outta business, or whatever those things are that are really, you know, difficult waves for.
Brian:by the way.
Brian:I don't know if
Trevor:Yeah, I've heard, I've heard those are, uh, well, I mean the Shane Steel conversation, a whole other,
Trevor:that's a, that's a different
Brian:It's for
Trevor:but
Brian:Digiday Pro subscribers.
Trevor:that, that's the, the digit day after dark.
Trevor:Uh,
Brian:so, so but on on, one of the other, the, the other things that I wanted to get into is, is just whether there's differences.
Brian:'cause you guys are global.
Brian:I mean, do you see differences in how, how say like European public, even big European business, how European publishers are adapting their businesses and American publishers?
Brian:'cause I always think, look, being.
Brian:Being born American, having a company that is in the United States.
Brian:It's such a massive deep market.
Brian:It's a, it's a tremendous advantage that you have and that, you know, just in European markets, you don't necessarily have when you go to like the UK versus the US there, Just the, the test budgets there are like just minuscule compared to it.
Brian:It leads to a diff different types of businesses in Europe and just the audiences are smaller, because you know, it's a more fractured landscape.
Brian:There's only so many
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:I mean, so, so Brian, Fir.
Trevor:First of all, the behaviors in European countries are different, partially because the politics are different.
Trevor:We don't have quite the idea of newspapers lined up along the political spectrum from left to right as they
Brian:Uh, we could, we, we will see.
Brian:No, I know, I know.
Brian:I just mean like in market dynamic.
Brian:When you see how they're internally like adapting to changes in the market, are you seeing any differences in how European publishers or, or
Trevor:I mean, again, it's pretty similar.
Trevor:I think the shift from print to digital has been somewhat faster in the US than it has been in Europe.
Trevor:but it's different by market.
Trevor:I think people's perception of willingness to pay is different market by market.
Trevor:So if you're in Spain, no, everybody in Spain says no one in the country will pay.
Trevor:If you're in Germany, people say no one in the country will pay, but of course they will.
Brian:the Norwegians Pay.
Brian:the,
Trevor:the nor the, the sw, the Swiss and the Scandinavians have it a little bit easier than everybody else.
Trevor:But, but no, honestly, look, the, the.
Trevor:piano's Global so's the Trade Desk, SOS Google.
Trevor:I mean, their advertising dynamics are exactly the same globally, right?
Trevor:The, the, the print revenue dynamics are very similar.
Trevor:The, the reader revenue of digital circulation revenue dynamics are pretty similar, and so clients will ask me a lot.
Trevor:In ways that are awkward.
Trevor:'cause I don't always know all the tactics of the, you know, 500 or so media clients that we work with.
Trevor:They'll sit me down in Japan, they'll say, tell us all the things that are working around the world.
Trevor:Right?
Trevor:And, and you know, it's different in different places and for different publications, but I think there's more similarity between.
Trevor:you know, the things that ESPN might try and the things that kicker and Germany might try, you know, like that, sports publications and financial news publications, those tend to be
Trevor:more distinct categories than, Hey, it's totally different in Denmark than it is in Poland, than it is in Argentina, than it is in the states.
Trevor:Like those things, the, the national boundaries matter less than the content categories.
Brian:Right.
Brian:So, I wanna talk to you about, micropayments and, and mostly because like you, I, I remember, I, I, I had alluded before, I think, you know, I, we first met when you were running
Brian:Schematic, which is a, an early, digital content agency, that WPP bought and then you were running possible at WPP, but then he left to do Tiny Pass, which is a time tiny pass.
Brian:And it was around micropayments, micro transactions for content.
Brian:And I remember running into you, I think it was at a, I think it was at a Digit day event.
Brian:And I was like, oh my God, Trevor, what are you here for, Trevor?
Brian:And you're like, oh, I'm doing this, company Tiny Pass.
Brian:And I was like, what is it?
Brian:It's like micro transac.
Brian:I was like, ah, never work.
Trevor:Yeah.
Brian:which is one of those things I'm like, obsessed with, with micropayments because like I'm convinced they will work.
Brian:I'm also convinced I'm right that they, they never work, but like I'm also convinced that at some point they will work.
Brian:I just don't know if I'll be alive to sue,
Trevor:Well, don't let me, don't let me un convince you of any of your will and won't work ideas.
Trevor:I, I, I think,
Brian:but that was what the company originally
Trevor:absolutely.
Trevor:So we originally were like a micropayment wallet.
Trevor:Where you would fill it up as a consumer and then spend out of that.
Trevor:Right.
Trevor:I think we have very different ideas now about how micropayments work and because we have a big internal effort, which we haven't announced, I'm more than happy to talk to you about it.
Trevor:Just not yet.
Trevor:I, I, I think
Brian:Philosophically is the time, like eventually
Trevor:philosophically so, so let me support the idea of philosophically there is definitely a massive difference that has only been growing in terms of.
Trevor:Lots of people are willing to pay something like they understand that editorial organizations need to make money on some level, but they, they don't want to go through either the friction
Trevor:or the cost or the ongoing obligation of a recurring subscription that costs a lot of money that they might forget about, that is hard to cancel and that they might forget to use.
Trevor:I mean, the pay as you go model.
Trevor:Is, is just much more conducive to the way people consume content, I think, than the subscription model and the numbers.
Trevor:If we have a lot more people paying, but they're paying a much, much smaller amount, that's great for everybody.
Brian:Look at the video game industry.
Brian:It works.
Brian:It, it's, it's very lucrative too.
Trevor:Yeah.
Trevor:Well, depends on what part of, if you think about mobile gaming, yes.
Trevor:But like, you know, switch to games cost $90.
Trevor:So.
Trevor:You know, but, you are right.
Trevor:I mean, the model fundamentally makes sense and I think there's some questions about how the money flows in and how the money flows out and what the user experience is like.
Trevor:But, and by the way, every six months there is another micropayment startup that somebody will say, this company wants you to have a partnership with them.
Trevor:And I'm like, I'm sure they do.
Trevor:Right?
Trevor:Troy, I mean all the, the joking about Troy aside, Troy was really instrumental in my thinking about this in that I talked to him when we were doing the Micropayment thing and I was like, Troy, we've got this idea.
Trevor:People pay a little bit for little article.
Trevor:We've already been testing it with Grainger, who's the editor of Esquire, and we sold this article.
Trevor:It was great, and now we want to run, do it more broadly.
Trevor:And, and Troy was like, look, I mean, the numbers are still small, but my problem is not that I can't charge micropayments.
Trevor:My problem is that here at Hearst, we don't know where users are.
Trevor:We have one pocket of people in print.
Trevor:It's totally different than the pocket of people we have in digital.
Trevor:Those two things don't talk to each other.
Trevor:We can't administrate this properly.
Trevor:And it just dawned on me that what the, what publishers needed.
Trevor:Before we, they could experiment with models was like agility and for lack of a better word, new plumbing.
Trevor:And I've spent the last 12 years, I mean not every media company is a piano by a long shot, but I've spent the last 12 years relatively
Trevor:substantially replumbing the media business so that there is a lot of agility there and building a lot of relationships with.
Trevor:People who, you know, we we're not like, not deeply integrated with our clients' tech stacks and organizations.
Trevor:And so now we have a lot more trust and, and just a lot more contractual and technical ability to make, to experiment with that kind of stuff and make that kind of thing work.
Trevor:And so I, I'm still very excited about.
Brian:yeah, it would make sense, right?
Brian:Like, because I mean, if you, you, there's, there's people who you're ne you're not gonna convert them into like, recurring revenue subscribers.
Brian:But like, it makes sense to like, you know, if you're basically using a bunch of data in order to understand what to put in front of these people, whether to block them or what, you know, and it's like.
Brian:That it seems like it would make sense as like a one as part of the toolkit.
Brian:You know, if you're looking at, how can I maximize my rpu?
Trevor:and there is a lot of complexity of how does that dovetail with a corporate site license?
Trevor:How does what, if you want to share an article with me, what if you spent a micro payment and didn't mean to what, if, what if, how, you know, does, like, you don't want to take a percentage off of that.
Trevor:So how do you motivate a sales team to work on, like, there's a million bits of
Brian:I guess that's why it doesn't exist now,
Trevor:And that's right.
Trevor:And that's why all these things fail, right?
Trevor:And, and look the, the friction to say to you, Hey, you've gotta go put your money in this wallet.
Trevor:And there is an incomplete list of publishers that you'll then be able to spend that on.
Trevor:And every time you go to one of those articles, there's this like cognitive friction of like, should I spend X sense to view this?
Trevor:Like, that's no good.
Trevor:So there's a lot of reasons that this fails over and over and over again.
Trevor:But again, with all hubris and arrogance, we think we're, we've gone a long way towards
Trevor:solving a
Trevor:lot of
Brian:plumbing, I mean there was some like Y Combin inter coming a couple years ago.
Brian:I remember coming to me, it
Trevor:Oh dude, there's a hundred of these things.
Trevor:There's
Brian:okay.
Brian:I was like, I've heard this before.
Trevor:and there's, and by the way, one thing that's been a privilege is meeting a lot of smart people behind these.
Trevor:Jim McKelvy from Square launched a thing called Invisibly that was really interesting for a little while.
Trevor:Alexander Clopping from Blendle was really fantastic guy.
Trevor:Cosman, and I'm gonna get his last name wrong, Ian, who does, did later pay, I think it was called, and now has another thing that he has a Google integrating, I think
Trevor:with, so there's lots of people trying this, which is, the, the guy from Waze, who, an Israeli gentleman whose name I'm forgetting.
Trevor:It was great.
Trevor:he and I talked and he that became posted or whatever.
Trevor:Kevin Strom from Instagram, all these guys have tried some kind of like, I'm the Messiah and I'm the savior and I'm gonna come in and have a new model.
Trevor:Our good friend Tony
Trevor:Hale, right,
Brian:into Tony, I was walking by the, the West Village yesterday.
Brian:I
Trevor:I mean, these are these guys.
Trevor:These are the smartest guys in the media business in my view, and like.
Trevor:Everybody's tilted against this windmill.
Trevor:we will do the same thing and you know, someday somebody will get
Brian:I know somebody's gonna do it.
Brian:Awesome.
Brian:Thanks so much, Trevor.
Brian:It's really fun to catch up.
Trevor:Thanks, Brian.
Trevor:Great talking to you.
