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The Next Level Of Niche, With Puck’s New CRO
00:50:38
Forget the well-worn narrative about digital media publishers always on their back foot, says Liz Gough, the newly minted CRO of Puck and also one of its co-founders. Puck, which launched in 2021, is proving that there’s a place for long-form,...
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- [00:00]
Liz Goff
Foreign welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:32]
Allison Schiff
I'm Allison Schiff, this is Ad Exchanger Talks and my guest this week is Liz Goff, a co founder of Puck and also its newly minted CRO. Puck is a relatively new entrant on the digital media scene. It was founded in 2021 to cover the intersection of media, politics, business and culture with an insidery perspective and sharp analysis. It has a journalist centric model which Liz will explain, and in just a few short years it's grown rapidly and expanded into newsletters and live event. We'll talk about Puck's advertising strategy and its approach to monetization overall, including Programmatic, which isn't on the agenda right now. But before we get into it, allow me a quick plug we just finished a super fun Programmatic IO in Las Vegas in May and we're already in planning mode for Programmatic I o New York. We promise it's going to be a good one, maybe even the best one yet. Yeah, it's slightly early. Progio is September 29th and 30th in New York City, but but you might as well snag your tickets now because you can save 900 bucks if you do it before June 13th. On top of that, podcast listeners get 10% off by using the code POD10. So whatcha waiting for?
- [01:47]
John Kelly
Hey Liz, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:49]
Liz Goff
Hi, thanks for having me.
- [01:53]
John Kelly
I should say though, bienvenue sur le podcast. Although you'll have merci. Excuse my accent, which is is mered. I did take French in high school, but rather pathetic what I retained. But from your LinkedIn I saw that you speak French, which is excellent.
- [02:12]
Liz Goff
Je su hate. I wish I still spoke French. I did it in high school and I got a minor in it in college, but College was nearly 20 years ago, so unfortunately I haven't retained nearly as much as I would have liked.
- [02:26]
John Kelly
Well, my my one phrase that I really remember for some reason is ou a la pobel, which I think is where is the garbage?
- [02:34]
Liz Goff
Yes, and we probably had the same French curriculum. I remember that too.
- [02:39]
John Kelly
I remember thinking when I learned that phrase, but I won't understand the response. I'll be able to ask where the garbage is and then someone will tell me and I won't be able to understand where the garbage is. But anyway, so I usually start out this podcast by asking people for one thing about them that not a lot of other people already know. But I saw that little fun fact on your LinkedIn, so I thought I'd bring it up. But let me ask my question now. Yeah. What is one thing that something people couldn't find out about you just by taking a look at your LinkedIn profile or doing a little Google search?
- [03:17]
Liz Goff
Well, I love that question and I've heard many interesting answers on your podcast from other guests. I would say a few people on my team at work know this, but I love concerts and live music and since COVID I've actually started doing what I call concert tourism where I'll anchor a long weekend trip around going to see a band that I love or that I want to see at a new venue. So most recently in January, I went to see Snow Patrol in Paris and at Lolympia and it was incredible. And I love the late 90s, early 2000s indie rock. So that was my concert tourism of 2025 so far.
- [04:01]
John Kelly
Snow Patrol. That puts me in mind of Keen, which I love back in the day. Hell yeah.
- [04:08]
Liz Goff
Same genre.
- [04:10]
John Kelly
I want to talk about your background for a bit because you did a brief stint on the buy side at Warby Parker around like 2012 into early 2014, which is very cool. And then you spent the majority of your career basically in love with publishing, right? Like Vogue magazine, PopSugar, around WebMD, five years at Conde Nast WebMD. What is it that appeals to you about publishing? Like, what does it for you? I know what my answer is, but I'd love to hear what you have to say.
- [04:43]
Liz Goff
I love everything about media. I think it is extremely high energy. I think there's a lot of really smart creative people and one of the things. So my first job out of college, I worked in Consulting at McKinsey and it was an incredible training and learning opportunity. But I really wanted to work in a creative industry and I had no idea what that meant. But I followed one of my project managers to WebMD back in 2009 and they were an early digital media company that survived the boom and the bust of the dot com in the turn of the century. And I just absolutely loved publishing and that was healthcare publishing. I felt like I worked with people that were both really business savvy, but also creative and like to think about big ideas and brainstorm and that basically set up the rest of my career. On the publishing side, I think one of the things that has been most exciting for me as a theme throughout all of the publishers that I've worked for is that you get to work with so many different brands and you're constantly Reframing how you think both about the brand that you're representing, but also all of your brand partners and all of the different marketing challenges that they're working on. So I found it very intellectually stimulating, but also fun and creative.
- [06:03]
John Kelly
What I like about journalism as a career, but also writing about the business of journalism is that it's such a strangely forgotten aspect. I mean, not something that you would ever forget about because you are the CRL of Puck. But it seems like publishers sometimes there's too much of a separation of church and state. I believe in the separation of church and state religiously, but there's almost like an aversion sometimes that I find among some of my colleagues to the money side of things and an obsession, just the purity of pure journalism. And I believe in that too. But I think the business of journalism deserves a lot more attention because the stories can't survive without the money to support them.
- [06:55]
Liz Goff
Yes, I think that's an incredible. Thank you for saying that. And I think it's an incredible segue to giving a little bit of our point of view on Puck's business. And I'm actually the co founder of Puck with John Kelly and joined started working on the business full time with him back in the spring of 2021, and then we launched in September of 2021. So we're coming up on four years in business. But if you think about what we believe about Puck, we were really starting from a very simple premise that we felt that journalists are the original influencers in American society. Society, if you think about the expertise, the access, the clout now in the last decade, plus the social media following, and yet journalists have never really been treated like influencers. And Having spent almost 20 years in publishing, I've lived firsthand that journalists were viewed as this cost center. And journalists were often the first people to get let go when the business model and media was consistently changing. And so we said, let's build a media company where journalists are at the center of the revenue model. And that every single thing we're doing is thinking about how we're aligning those incentives across church and state. And we believe very, very strongly in high quality journalism. And our whole business is built around it. But we believe that it's possible to have that high quality journalism while also having deep partnership between the editorial side and the business side. And at Puck, we do that in a number of different ways. It starts at a very basic level where all of the journalists and all of the employees in the company are equity holders in the business. So at a foundational level, there's alignment and incentives. But then when we think about growing a subscription business, a podcast business and events business, we're also aligning incentives across the church and the state. So there's bonuses for the journalists based on subscribers that they bring in subscribers that they retain. If they do an event with an advertiser, they get bonused on that. And we think that this model and this partnership across the church and state is something that is part of our model for sustainable journalism and a sustainable media business.
- [09:16]
John Kelly
I mean, I love the word sustainable that we try. Very important. It is wild to me that there's this notion and it's absolutely the case that journalists are a cost center because it is the high quality content that feeds the machine. I mean, we see it ourselves at Ad Exchanger and all of our sister publications. We make most of our revenue. Although the mix is changing somewhat from events, we now make also a lot of money from advertising. There are other products too. There are newsletters and webinars, all of that stuff. But the way we attract speakers to events and the way we're able to feed other parts of the business is by producing for our niche audience what we hope is quality content. And you know, I, I almost paused there because I, I use the word content and I, I kind of hate using the word content to describe journalism, but I find myself doing it sometimes because it feels a little dismissive. It's not content like sausage. It's, you know, it's well reported, built on relationships, and you need it if you're going to have a business otherwise. Like, what is the business?
- [10:33]
Liz Goff
Absolutely, I, I love the word content. I love, I think, I mean, it's our product and it's, it's your product too. And I think when done, there's good content and there's, there's bad content. But I think that in, in Puck in particular, we're hyper focused on providing content that actually our subscribers cannot find anywhere else. And we have a paywall business. It's a firm paywall. But there are ways to experience Puck before you become a paid subscriber. So you can listen to our podcasts, you can do a two week free trial, you can sign up as, you can give us your email and sign up as what we call a lead, where you're in our system and you're receiving a number of different emails, but you don't get the full experience. And because we're asking people ultimately to pay and become subscribers, there's a really high bar for us for making sure that we're providing access to the inaccessible and giving our readers that view inside of the boardroom or inside of a conversation on Capitol Hill that you aren't able to read in one of any other publications.
- [11:44]
John Kelly
So this is a good moment to take a step back for a second because I want to make sure that our listeners, I'm sure they are, but are familiar with Puck's reason for being the mission is really interesting. Like you just alluded to it. So covering the four centers of power in the U.S. silicon Valley, Hollywood, D.C. and Wall street, and then doing it in a way that feels like very insidery, very clubby, like you're there at the table or like sitting, I guess, you know, two seats away in the coffee shop while someone's having a conversation. That would be fascinating to you. Fly on the Wall style. Like I've seen you guys described as like the Vanity Fair for the substack era, which I feel is a pretty accurate sound bite for, for what you do. But my question would be how, I guess how you package your, your audience for advertisers, like, with the type of content that you produce in mind? Because Pucks reader would, to my mind, be a specific kind of person.
- [12:54]
Liz Goff
Yes. Thank you. So you're absolutely right that when we launched the business, we were hyper focused on covering what we saw as those four power corners of America. Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Part of the reason for that initial focus was that we had seven founding partner journalists, and those were the areas of expertise that those trailblazing entrepreneurial journalists covered. But also because we felt at the most senior levels of power in America, that those were the four corners that were constantly overlapping at the upper echelons. There's really no difference, as we're seeing in the last six months between Silicon Valley and Washington and Wall Street. They're all sort of one and the same at the highest levels. Since then, we have expanded into a number of different power corners in America that we also think are very related to those initial. So we. Our first expansion back in early 2023 was into the business of fashion with Lauren Sherman and Line Sheet. We've subsequently expanded Line Sheet to also cover the business of beauty and the business of retail. We have entered the business of sports, we've entered the business of art. And earlier this week we announced that we're launching into the business of AI and we've hired a new journalist, Ian Kreitzberg, who was the editor in chief of the Deep View, which is a Beehive that had almost 450,000 subscribers. So we're very, very excited to welcome him to Puck later this month. But what we have learned through our business model and really the model and the strategy have not changed since day one. So our first journalist was Matt Bellamy, who covers the business of Hollywood. And not only does he cover it, he is the expert on covering the business of Hollywood. If you watched the studio on Apple TV over the last several months, he's played himself in multiple episodes. But we started the business with about 300 emails that were Matt Bellamy's contacts, friends and family, and contacts from the industry. And since then, through the founding partner journalists and the additional ones that we've grown into, Ian will be our 18th journalist. We've built a group of hundreds of thousands of very active leads, including paid subscribers as well. And we build our ad business around those people. So it's really a virtuous cycle. If you think about these journalists that have really inside access to these different power corners of America and they have this entrenched following. Some of our subscribers follow and know multiple Puck authors. Others are really here, passionate readers and followers of one. So we have the journalists, they're bringing in their followers about 1 in 3, 36% of our subscribers, our C suite board member, senior executive inside of their organizations. And we build our ad business predominantly around those people who are the business and political elites and decision makers in their industries. So I can tell you a little bit more about all the different industries and ways we work with brands. But at a high level, it's really simple. It's our journalists attract these really incredibly hard to reach audiences and. And then we build a direct ad business around them.
- [16:30]
John Kelly
And it's a direct ad business only. Right? I mean, there's no programmatic necessarily. Well, there may be programmatic direct, but nothing open auction.
- [16:39]
Liz Goff
Correct. And at the moment, there's no programmatic. About 70% of our commercial business is actually in newsletter form. And so all of that is actually first party served as well, which is very common inside of the newsletter newsletter economy. But we have no plans at this point, anytime in the near future to enter the programmatic space because our inventory is already quite limited. And we're really focused on building those direct relationships with the brands that are going and associations that are going after the audiences that we have at Puck.
- [17:18]
John Kelly
And what would change your mind? Would it be, I have more inventory to sell, or would it be the programmatic supply chain cleaning itself up? Because it's not always the most savory place to engage, despite it being what Ad Exchanger covers primarily, to be honest.
- [17:38]
Liz Goff
It isn't really something that the team has spent a lot of time looking into. I think from day one, we've been very focused on telling Puck's story directly to the agencies and brands in all the different markets that we play in. And we've had a lot of success. Last year we had over 100 AD partners. We have a very small team, but we've had a lot of success. And we have very premium rates because we know our audience is so hard to reach and so deeply engaged because of the paywall. So we haven't really spent much time considering it. But I don't. I would rather spend my time meeting new clients right now and telling Puff's story to more people that don't know us yet. Thank you. Really focusing on on different ways of.
- [18:26]
John Kelly
Going to market and going back to subscriptions. How much of an appetite is there for subscriptions and what behaviors have you noticed? Somebody visits for the first time, they come in through whatever channel, and they exhibit XYZ behavior before becoming a subscriber and becoming more loyal.
- [18:53]
Liz Goff
So I don't oversee the subscription funnel at Puck in my current role, but I can say that we had really strong growth in 2024. On the subscription side, our paying subscriber audience grew over 30%. And when we we've both been investing, as I said, in finding new journalists to build around existing franchises. For example, as we've expanded line sheet from just Lauren to Lauren, plus two other journalists. And then we've also been growing by entering some of these newer power corners like the business of Art last year or the business of AI coming up. And so we're able to do both new category growth and also growth within the existing. So we have a very sophisticated consumer marketing team that is working on thinking about how we find these business and political elites to continue to grow our subscriber base and also continue to then have this really premium audience that our varying ad categories are interested in reaching. One other thing to just quickly note on the ad business that I think makes Puck pretty unique is that about 80% of our ad business is B2B. And so when I'm meeting clients for the first time, one of the things that I often say when I'm if it's someone who's less familiar with our content is that we're trying to own a bit of a position that I think we made up. I haven't heard anyone else say it called a glossy trade where to your point earlier about Vanity Fair for the substack era, which I believe was a New York Times quote about the business when we were first getting it off the ground. But it's. We have very entrenched professional readership and professional advertisers trying to reach people in their professional capacity. But the read of Puck is fun and dishy and it is a lean back, entertaining read while still being very serious. And that's where we've come up with this sort of loose, glossy trade discussion and some of the ways we're familiarizing new potential ad buyers with where Puck.
- [21:08]
John Kelly
Fits in, with that dishiness, that playfulness in mind. The origin of the name Puck is that like a Midsummer Night's Dream reference?
- [21:17]
Liz Goff
It absolutely is. Good job.
- [21:20]
John Kelly
Excellent. All right.
- [21:22]
Liz Goff
Yes. I mean, the character in A Midsummer Night's Dream, devilish, mischievous. Very. Knew everyone, was friends across everybody, and therefore knew everything. And part of our editorial promise is delivering that inside story. And so the name just made a lot of sense. And then also, I don't know if you have seen it, but there was, there was actually a Puck magazine in the late 1800s, early 1900s, that was.
- [21:55]
John Kelly
That from history class.
- [21:57]
Liz Goff
And they sort of invented the political and cultural cartoon. So we have their vintage covers all over our office downtown.
- [22:06]
John Kelly
That. That is excellent. Yes, I distinctly remember that. Coming up in. In an AP history class in high school, I'm having all these AP class flashbacks.
- [22:19]
Liz Goff
I'm so happy to be your guide there on this Thursday morning.
- [22:24]
John Kelly
So one, one more question before we take a quick break. I mean, you're one of the co founders of Pak, so you've been there since before day one, but you only took on or transitioned into the CRO role recently, just in April. And I think that's the first time you guys have a Croat. Why now? Why does now feel like the time for Puck to have a CRO?
- [22:48]
Liz Goff
Yes. So your, your facts are correct on the timeline. And I was the COO for the first four years of the business, which really meant a little bit of everything. And so in those really early days, actually for almost the first two years, I was actually the salesperson for puc, in addition, as just part of my responsibilities for being COO. So we didn't hire our first sales executive until October 2023, which is kind of crazy to think about. But as the team has grown, so I've always overseen it. Commercial revenue. But as the team has grown, we now have six sellers. We also have a five person creative strategy and account management team. We have an outsourced adopts team. It's a real function and it's also a really important, big part of the business. Last year, we grew our commercial revenue by over 70%. We have similar ambitions for this year. And so it became time to really have a C suite person at PUC dedicated full time to driving commercial revenue growth. And given my background, given my existing work on this at puc, it really was a natural fit for me to raise my hand and say, I think it's time that I spend all of my time working externally with our partners, current and potential, and also just with the sales team and growing and developing them. So we made the transition about three months ago, did a little bit of a internal reorg with some of the internal functions I was overseeing, like finance and strategy and ops. But it's been really seamless and fantastic, and I've really been enjoying having the opportunity to really dedicate my time here. And we're seeing great results. So hopefully it will be a fantastic 2025.
- [24:42]
John Kelly
All right, well, we're. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we'll talk a little bit about what life for publishers in general is right now, because it's. It's a tricky time. And we'll talk a little bit about AI too, because there's a lot more to say there, so stick with. All right, we're back. And I actually want to go back in time for a second, if you don't mind, to 2021, or perhaps a little earlier, when the idea for Puck was starting to percolate, but it wasn't born yet, because it feels like a wild time to launch a digital media company. Like, was there any trepidation about doing it just in this, in this world, you know, where audiences are fragmented, people don't necessarily read as much, which makes me sad. Like, ad revenue is dominated by, you know, like, tech giants, although I know some of your advertisers are the big platforms, and there's just like, general pressure. Publishers are under a lot of pressure and there have been layoffs, and I really, I admire what you've done, but it really is a wild time to decide. Like, yes, it is time to launch a new digital media brand. Very. It's. It's thrilling, honestly, that it's doing well. But what gave you the. What gave you the balls to do it, honestly?
- [26:22]
Liz Goff
Thank you. I think if you love media, you are an optimistic person. That also could just be me projecting. I'm highly optimistic, but we just believed that we could do it. And we believe there was room for our model. John started working on it first. John and I met at Conde Nast. We did not work super closely together there, but live somewhat parallel existences and the kinds of businesses that we were helping launch and grow at Conde and got to know each other. He left Conde Nast first and started working on the idea of what would eventually become Puck. And then he looped me in and pretty much the rest is history. I think that Covid gave me personally a ton of confidence to leave an established organization that I loved in Conde to take a risk. And I think you saw so much very rapid change and fallout in the beginning of COVID on publishing ad revenue. And it felt like this is the exact perfect time to take a risk because there's already so much upheaval and so much challenge in the marketplace. And we shared a studio apartment in the basement on bank street in the West Village with some other friends that had a startup as well and just started working on it. And it, it just. It all just came together, to be honest. We just take one day at a time. And I think we've been really focused on methodical growth, and we also are trying to grow quickly, but it's been really important to us to not grow at all costs. And I think you. We've all seen a lot of lessons in digital media companies that were launched 10 to 15 years ago, where everything was about growing as quickly as possible at all times. And we, we watched that and we said, we want to grow aggressively, but we also want to grow smartly and methodically. And I think that so far we've been able to accomplish that.
- [28:31]
John Kelly
It feels like the digital media equivalent of a startup in your college dorm room. Like doing in someone's apartment.
- [28:41]
Liz Goff
Yes. Maybe there was actually a bed in the studio apartment because it was technically a residential rental. But it's just really funny when we think back on those days. I think by the time we left 64 bank, which is the name of our large conference room in our current office, I think we had nine people working there. And everyone just really wanted to be part of the team and wanted to sit on a couch next to each other working, if you had to take a call, you had to walk around the block or sit on the stoop or go to my apartment, and it was just such a. Such a fun time. And most of the people from that early 64 bank team are still on the team at Puck too, which is really fun.
- [29:26]
John Kelly
And I'm glad you use the word optimism. Optimistic. Because despite what I just said and the tenor of my question listing this litany of challenges facing publishers, I do really dislike this narrative of journalism as always struggling and being a downtrodden industry and publishers always being on the back foot. It's just it. I don't like it.
- [29:53]
Liz Goff
Me neither.
- [29:54]
John Kelly
What is, what can publishers do to empower themselves so that they're thriving and they're taking control of their own destiny amid all of the craziness and doing that thing where, you know, they, they're investing in, in their future instead of just investing in their, you know, like a week or month to, to really invest in future sustainability instead of just staying afloat.
- [30:28]
Liz Goff
I think that's a great question. I think for us there have been a couple of guiding principles, especially on the revenue side, but really this is true across Puck. Building relationships and picking up the phone is one of my core operating principles and has been for as long as I can remember. And I think that when you are able to build real relationships with your partners and your clients, regardless of if they're actively advertising with you now or you hope that they are in the future, I think you can become a true partner to them and you can start to understand their business. I think the same is true on the journalistic side as well. And if you think about source development and relationship development, having the ability to have real person to person conversations where they're based on trust and an understanding and an intellectual shared interest, I think is really important. So I think that that is one thing that is really important and it can be time intensive. And I think to your question about how do you, how do publishers, how should we think about the longer term health of these businesses? Invest the time in making the relationships that matter. I think another point that has been one of my principles since day one at Puck is have confidence in our offerings and our rates and don't be in a rush to discount things just to have them sold to make it feel busy. As I said in the beginning of our chat, we have limited inventory at Puck and that's by design. And when we were doing the visual, the brand identity of Puck and the visual experience of our website and our newsletters, we took a lot of inspiration from the magazine arts and we wanted an ad experience that was additive to the whole subscriber and reader experience and also really premium for our ad partners. And so we have fewer, bigger, better ads. They're high impact, they're beautiful. We're proud of all of the advertisers that are in our newsletters, in our podcasts, on our website, and sometimes it's not fully sold through. It will be an incredible day when every single ad at Puck and every franchise is sold out. But even when it's not, it's allowed us to uphold our rates, to grow our rates as we've grown our audience again. We started with 300 emails. And so almost every quarter since we started the business, we have raised our prices. And I think that's pretty bold in publishing. And we're constantly told by other people, potential clients, current clients, that we're crazy, but we. We stand true to what we think the value of Puck. And I think the third thing, one of our board members actually said in the summer of 2021, before we had launched this piece of advice to me that I'll never forget. And he said, there's nothing sexier than saying no. And I think that in publishing, from my experience at all the places I've worked, especially when there's so much pressure on the business, people can feel. Brands can feel like they have to say yes to things just to get the money. And it's really easy to say yes and say, I need this money right now to hit this quarterly goal. But I really keep that notion of there's nothing sexier than saying no front and center for my team all the time. As we think about the discussions that we're having with partners and does what they're asking for make sense for our readership? And I think it's a really helpful framework that I would. I would keep as a piece of advice for other people in the field.
- [34:16]
John Kelly
Yeah, there is this kind of, like, everything must go mentality.
- [34:21]
Liz Goff
So sad business. Yes. Like dress. Dress Barn or something.
- [34:27]
John Kelly
Yeah. Well, I live in Astoria in Queens, not too far from Steinway street, and there are two or three stores that have been going. And this is a classic thing. You see it in lots of places, but I just pass these places all the time that are. They've been going out of business for, like, three years. Like, it's when.
- [34:43]
Liz Goff
That's so sad.
- [34:45]
John Kelly
I know. And I do wonder whether it's a. It's a tactic or not. But. But yeah, it. There is. There is something to making your inventory special by pricing it appropriately. Because people want value and they associate value with. With higher prices, not value like buying a very large container of, you know, detergent. There's. That's the kind of value. Or the 2 for ones. There's a different kind of value. And yes, saying no is. Is the right thing to do. Also because if you have limited resources, then saying yes means you're going to put your writers under pressure and they have to produce something under a time crunch or to certain specifications that you know is taking away from what would feed the better part of the business. Yep, completely agree. One One reason though that publishers, some publishers are struggling is because AI is just changing the way that journalism gets created, how content gets created, and also like how traffic reaches the product, like reaches the stuff. And search is transforming.
- [35:59]
Allison Schiff
It's transforming.
- [36:00]
John Kelly
Like as we speak. I'm convinced that when I stop the recording I'll go and check the news and like something will have happened, maybe another publisher will have sued OpenAI or something. And I've said this multiple times on this podcast, so I hate to be repetitive, but it's surprised me. My own behavior changes how rapidly it's happened where I I've been asking perplexity natural language questions as I do research for stories far more often now than I do Google searches. I only use it for stuff I already know the answer to. That I just want to pull up very quickly because I have come across straight up and very clear errors, stuff that I know to be untrue and don't understand the hallucination because a fact is a fact. It's just very strange to me. Like why this was even coughed up by the LLM because it's just patently wrong and there is an article to pull from that has the fact written there like in black and white.
- [37:09]
Liz Goff
Like right there.
- [37:10]
John Kelly
Yes, but what are you guys experiencing in terms of traffic patterns related to AI search? Is that something you're thinking about? How are you thinking about AI as an a factor that will impact your business beyond your new vertical to cover AI?
- [37:27]
Liz Goff
Like yes, I think, I mean, I completely agree with you that every day, I mean we're covering a lot of it. Dylan Byers wrote about the New York Times and Amazon in his franchise in the room last night. I mean, Puck is obsessively covering the topic. Of course we also are a media company. We exist in this rapidly changing world. I have not yet read all of Mary Meeker's 305 slides about the AI trends, but I've read part of it and I look forward this weekend to reading the rest of it. But I think for us we are a talent first business. As I've said, we are not trying to build a newsroom. We are not trying to cover the waterfront. We are really, really focused on what mass media is leaving out and what the insiders are really saying. And so as a result, at this very moment, Puck is talent first. And I would say we are AI ready on the tech side of our business. And a little bit on consumer marketing, of course, we are actively monitoring everything that's happening on a traffic perspective. They're engaging in lots of potential conversations about every aspect of the AI ecosystem, which is a little bit of field from what I'm working on, so can't speak to it too much. But I would say what gives me the most comfort in the business is that direct relationship that our readers have with our journalists. And so, as I've, as I said earlier in the conversation, newsletters have been a very important part of how Puck's content is distributed since day one and continues to be. And I think of newsletters as on demand content for elite audiences, businesses. It's the business and political elites that are subscribers to Puck who have raised their hand, gotten out their credit card and said, I'm buying Puck, and here are the things that I want in my inbox every day. And so for our existing business, I feel that it is pretty well insulated. Of course, as we're continuing to grow and we're working on the top of funnel, everything that you mentioned with regard to search patterns and website traffic and all of that is changing every day. And that's where I have a lot of faith in our consumer marketing team to work through the constantly changing dynamics there. But if I think about our content and our journalists, we're in the opposite of the skimming economy, right? I mean, we're not a quick morning read. We actually very strategically publish Puck in the afternoons, usually between like 3pm and 9pm Eastern, sometimes a little later. We do have a number of talent on the west coast, but we are trying to break through that that morning facts skimming inbox economy and really give our readers a deep, insightful, analytical, entertaining read that may take you 10 whole minutes to read an article. And I think that kind of content, as well as the voice with which we write, hopefully provides a bit of a moat for us with some of the threats from technology.
- [40:39]
John Kelly
Does Puck have an AI policy in place for how writers do or don't use AI tools in their reporting?
- [40:46]
Liz Goff
That's a great question. I don't believe we do, but I am not positive. I will say that we are testing a number of AI tools internally to make our editorial processes faster, more efficient, to make our preparing for new business meetings more more efficient. You know, there's a ton of information about companies who we're meeting with, whether it's earnings information or whether it's other camp ad campaigns they've done and things like that. And so we're trying to work on building systems, using AI to make our operations more efficient, but we're most certainly not using AI to write our content. But I don't know exactly what our. If we have an editorial policy.
- [41:36]
John Kelly
Yeah, we don't have an official policy either. We're quite small. We're six people on the editorial team and we've been just systematically testing a few things, but in a lackadaisical way. And then reporting back like, oh, it hallucinated that. Oh, it was like kind of useful for this. But I, I do find tools like automatic transcription from voice to text that, that's kind of saved, I don't know, 20 hours a week for me. It's unreal. I transcribe interviews in my own strange way. I would, I wouldn't record them, but I would take really, really, really fast notes, like banging on my keyboard, like that meme of the cat, you know.
- [42:25]
Liz Goff
Just.
- [42:28]
John Kelly
Yes, it produced something unintelligible to any other human and it would also be unintelligible to me unless I quote unquote. I called it transcription, but it was my own weird process. Unless I went through it that day or the next day and I was able to interpret it and write it out in like long form sentences. It took such a long time. It was faster than transcribing from audio. And then I didn't have to have that horrible experience of listening to my own voice, voice over and over again as I tried to capture quotes. But I spend so much time on that and it, it does speak to me that AI can make parts of my life better. But I really, I, I, I want the guardrails because I don't want to slip into laziness. I don't want to lose my ability to like really home in on parts of a conversation that I want to call out later in a story. When I was taking those physical notes, they were messy and weird, but I was also more actively listening than I do necessarily when I only record knowing that I'll have an AI just transcribe the whole thing for me in seven minutes after the interview.
- [43:40]
Liz Goff
It's funny, I hadn't even thought of the transcription as AI, but we've been using that since the beginning of Puck as well. One of the commercial products that we have offered since the very early days is sort of a custom built experience offline featuring one or several Puck talent, as well as usually an executive or a talent from our advertiser or partner, and oftentimes as part of the package for whatever we're doing experientially, we're thinking about how we're digitally amplifying the conversation or the event across Puck in an online capacity as well. And so we've transcribed the conversations, for example, and then push them out in an email or in an article that is essentially a transcript of the event. And I hadn't even really thought about that as AI, but you're 100% right. That is a core part of our business operations here. And something that I think I agree with you is very helpful and for the most part pretty accurate and something that we will continue to employ as we continue to have different types of offerings.
- [44:50]
John Kelly
So we're nearing the end of our time together. So I wanted to ask you a broader question. If you had a time machine, what would you change so that publishers would be in a stronger position now? Like, when not. And I don't mean digital media publishers that were born, you know, in the past five or 10 or even 12, 15 years, but like legacy media publishers that had to transition to online. I feel like there were a lot of missteps along the way.
- [45:30]
Liz Goff
I think that's such a great question. I think I, to be honest, I spend so much of my time obsessing over Puck and how to make Puck better and how to make Puck grow and how to make Puck win. And so a lot of times when I'm pitching Puck and market, people ask about competitors. And one of my other principles is really not to ever talk about other brands and meetings unless it's forced upon me, because I would rather just be more positively talking about our business. I think that one of the things that has been challenging for so many of the legacy brands, and some of which that I very proudly worked on at Conde, was the Scale era. When we were building Puck, we really saw the publishing industry had become barbelled in our view. With one end, you had the scale publishers, and that's where I would put a New York Times, an Axios, an ft, a Wall Street Journal where you have to cover the waterfront and your Their success is predicated upon scale and eyeballs and having a little bit of content about everything. And then on the other end, you have substack, you have single writer, single channel, no marketing, no brand, no editorial, no barriers to entry. But that middle space where magazine brands used to play, organized brands organized around niche audiences and dedicated Paying communities had become so hollowed out because all of the former magazine brands obsessively chased scale and the pivot to video and all of that from the last decade. And so we saw that and we lived it. And so when we were building Puck, launching it, and now as we're building it, we were really, really focused on that white space in between where we felt like we could build a brand and a business around a niche. But niche can still be several million people, a niche audience. And I think that if some of the magazine brands, and I can't speak for any of them, but since you asked me the question and my opinion, I would be thinking about how they can pull back some of their uniqueness and nicheness on some of the iconic brands that existed for, you know, some of them over a hundred years. What are the things that differentiate them? What is the point of view and the voice and the distinct offering that is different both from the other brands that exist inside of their portfolios, but also from the many, many other sources of content that exist from influencers and all the platforms.
- [48:13]
John Kelly
I mean, niche all day. That's what we do.
- [48:16]
Liz Goff
We love niche. You're niche, we're niche. I think what's interesting, what's interesting for Puck is that we're. We're absolutely a niche brand right now. But as we continue to build one of the pivots. Not pivots, but as we've expanded the business model, I would say what started as single journalists, single newsletter, has really evolved into a franchise model where we're offering a franchise that's anchored maybe by one or two star talent and then building around them a little bit. And so at the. At this present moment, they're all still part of the Puck umbrella and the Puck brand. But it's really fun to think about how you build different businesses around line sheet in fashion, beauty, retail, compared to the best and the brightest in Washington, D.C. compared to what I'm hearing in Hollywood. And each one of those categories has a really entrenched trade market, has interested consumers, and different ways that Puck shows up, both with advertisers online, and also the types of events and podcasts and other things that we're doing. So while we have this one business at a macro level and one brand, there is a lot of complexity which is exciting to the next level of nicheness that exists underneath the primary brand of Puck.
- [49:41]
John Kelly
The next level of nicheness, yes.
- [49:45]
Liz Goff
It'S real.
- [49:46]
John Kelly
It'd be a perfect place to end. But I did want to say before we close. Dylan Byers doesn't know me, but if you see him, please tell him that he wrote my favorite headline of 2025 so far. Which one out of Fox to give if anyone hasn't read it, about big advertisers that shooed Fox News and they're coming back now that Trump is president. And it's just such sharp and economical wordplay. So kudos.
- [50:15]
Liz Goff
I will. I will definitely share with the team.
- [50:17]
John Kelly
I love a good headline.