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Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Episode 172: Mark Stenberg on Vox, Ziff-Davis, and How Publishers are Taking Control of Distribution
00:56:02
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A
This podcast is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in our industry and that's exactly what the show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to the Build with Mike o' Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is brought to you by CloudX, the agentic platform for mobile advertising. Connect to the CloudX command line interface or MCP server and have Claude or Gemini pull reports, run experiments and automatically drive better outcomes for you. CloudX add infrastructure for the intelligence era. Head to CloudX AI start to get started. That's CloudX AI start. Welcome to the marketecture podcast. This is Ari Papero. Eric is traveling today, so we have a special co host, Paul Connectin. Paul, how are you doing?
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B
I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Not a little nervous, but I'm doing great.
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A
I don't know there to be nervous about. Used to work for me. This has got to be easier than that.
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B
Well right. I mean the Friday one on ones were something but this is a step up from that, you know, and really going to have to deliver.
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A
I like to bring like a little Dada energy to the one on ones like just like what's top of mind. Let's just free associate here for a
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B
minute for better or worse.
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A
So Paul, for those of you who aren't intimately familiar with his personality, is a fractional CMO in the ad tech space. Former beeswax, former guest on this pod. Anything else you'd like to say Paul?
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B
Yeah, yeah, I think last time you introduced me as the CMO to the stars of ad tech, so I'm going to run with that. But as we'll touch on in a little bit, I'm also from Chicago.
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A
Oh, Chicago. We have a lot of Chicago in this episode. Which brings us to our guest for the episode, Mark Stenberg. So Mark is the senior media reporter at adweek. He's the author of the On Background with Mark Stenberg newsletter. He was a moderator of the recent Mark Dexter Live conference. And I believe you're based at Chicago. Is that accurate?
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B
Mark?
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C
I'm, I'm based in New York. I'm, I, I do have some Chicago connection. I went to grad school in Chicago, so I, I did my time in the Windy City, but no, I'm I'm, I'm coming to you live from Union Square in Manhattan right now.
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A
Oh, I'm in Union Square too. We should, we probably should have met up in person or something. I know, right? And Paul, what's your Chicago connection?
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B
I grew up there, grew up in the suburbs and I happen to believe it's a superior city to New York and in quite, quite a few ways that I'm happy to enumerate when we get to the segment of how you fig.
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A
Okay, well, let's just dive right into that because like the big announcement we had this week was that our next event, Mark Texture Live, is coming to Chicago on September 23rd. So mark texture Live, probably many of you listeners were there was a great two day event in New York in March. It was amazing speakers. Mark was there, Paul was there. And we have decided to do a one day September 23rd in Chicago. Chicago is the second largest media city in the country, I believe. No statistics to back that up. I'm just going to say that. And it's a great city. It doesn't get enough love from our community. It, you know, it gets little, small half days and little, you know, drive bys. But we're, we're going to do it for real, a full day, great content coming to be announced on September 23rd. You can't buy tickets yet, but if you're interested in sponsoring, let us know. Okay, enough of that. Paul, tell us. You know, first of all, before you say anything, I'm going to say calling one city superior to the other, you know, has a whiff of fascism. So like, please defend yourself.
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B
Listen, I'm gonna tell you a couple, two, three things, all right? About my hometown in Chicago. Decent pizza, you can get a good pie. You know, you got Luminari's, you got Giordano's, you got Uno's, you got Pequods. I don't know what you got in New York, but let's just start there. Number two, you got the skyline, you got the Sears Tower. Not going to call it the Willis Tower, John Hancock. Just a beautiful city. You got a beach, Most people don't know you got a beach.
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A
Yeah, there's no beach. It's a lake beach, which is weird. You know, I normally, my normal role in this conversation would be to just start slagging on Chicago, just saying terrible things about it because I'm a chauvinistic New Yorker. But now I have to love Chicago for at least the next five months or so. I can say nothing negative about Chicago. It's the best city in the world, right?
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B
Leo Burnett, you can't fuck with him. Best ad agency stories in the world came from Chicago. Vivici based in Chicago. I'm trying to think what else? I mean, so many brands.
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A
So many brands. One of the things about Marcus Nashley live in New York that was everyone talked about the food because we had Russell and Daughters for breakfast and stuff. And I really want to get quarter pounders or McDonald's as the food. I really want to have filet fish and quarter powders. Just like Donald Trump in the White House. If Donald Trump could get in the White House, why can't I get it at a conference?
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B
This is true.
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A
Mark, I'm sorry, we're not letting you talk. What's your perspective here? Well, I.
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C
So I spent some time in Chicago, I'll admit this. It was kind of the first big city that I ever lived in. So I have a bit of romance and nostalgia, like, wrapped up in my memory about it. But Paul's right. The beach is phenomenal. The food is great. I used to live near the lake and I was a big time runner, so I would run by the lake all the time. And that is pretty undefeated.
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B
Beautiful.
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C
It was also the first place. I'm originally from Texas and I spent most of my life in Texas. So Chicago is the first place where I ever went where the summer was actually like the best part of the year. Growing up in Texas, like, summer is like shelter in place. And so I have like a lot of like, just beautiful, idyllic sort of memories tied up of like running along the lake during the summer and seeing the people playing volleyball and then like stopping in Lincoln park and getting a hot dog. I don't know.
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A
It's.
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C
The museums should also be not scoffed at. And the restaurant scene. Nothing to shake a. Nothing. Not nothing to shake a stick at. The opposite of that. Plenty of shake a stick at.
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A
Plenty to shake a stick at. I think all of our listeners are now pict a Mark Stenberg, shirtless, like Top Gun style, playing beach volleyball in Chicago.
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C
I hope so.
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A
With a hot dog. With a hot dog in his other hand. All right, all right. Why do we have Mark on? We have Mark on because we want to talk about media. We want to talk about your beat. You've been covering a lot of interesting goings on in the media world, which is in chaos, as I like to say. So two interesting stories that I think have come out in the last two weeks is about Vox Media and around just, I think yesterday around Zev Davis. So tell us about what's going on with Vox.
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C
Yeah, Vox is such an interesting one. I think, like the sort of official starting gun on this story really went off in November when Sarah Fisher at Axios had a story that basically the Vox Media board had considered splitting off the Vox Media Podcast network and selling it as its own entity, basically divorcing it from the rest of the Vox Media portfolio, which basically consists of, to be sort of simplistic about it, the Podcast network, New York Magazine, and then a bunch of, like, digital media assets like Eater and the Verge and the Dodo and stuff like that. And so the narrative was basically that the podcast network was really quite profitable compared to the rest of the business. It was growing and it was really well positioned to succeed given, like, the prevailing media trends that are making open web digital media properties not so attractive anymore. So that's when people first started thinking, oh, maybe this is Vox Media beginning to come undone and be sold off, you know, into parts to various buyers. So then I started looking into that story, snooping around a lot of people in and around the company, and it gradually became clear that, like the podcast network spinoff is a near certainty. So that's almost guaranteed going to happen. Two buyers have emerged for that. One just came out of the woodwork a few days ago. The first is Versant, which is like the package of cable companies spun off by Comcast, which itself is looking to buy a bunch of media assets. And then the other that just came out of the woodwork the other day is James Murdoch, who is the son of Rert Murdoch and the brother of Lalin Murdoch, each of whom is now kind of creating their own media empire. So the news that broke the other day was that James is interested in buying both the Podcast Network and New York magazine, which are basically like the most lucrative asset and the most prestigious asset, you know, respectively. So that's kind of what I wrote about just the other day. I think the way that I've come into this a lot is like, as somebody who came, came up loving a lot of the digital media brands is what happens to them. You know, like, selling off your most coveted assets was never going to be the hardest part of this. It's finding suitable buyers for Eater and The Verge and Vox.com and Dodo and what do you do with them? And specifically, I was talking with an M and a source who was basically like, you know, once you sell off the parts of your business that you yourself had said are the most valuable parts of your business, then you're left operating kind of a dog's breakfast of leftover brands. And how do you get yourself out of that situation and find homes for them without appearing too desperate or vulnerable, etc. So that's the sort of like macro story is how does Vox Media kind of sell off its parts in the most value laden way possible while minimizing disruption to the company? And that's like an ongoing story.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's super interesting. So let's go backwards and, and what was the thesis to bringing all these together in the first place? Who owns Fox Media? I guess I should know that it
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C
is owned, I mean it's privately held by a consortium of investors. The last, like there is big investments from Comcast. I think there were big investments from some private equity and venture capital firms. The last money in, and this is a relevant point, was in 2023, Pinsky Media came in and invested $100 million for 20% of the company. So technically like the, the, the, the last money in is Pinsky. So they, I've heard from some people say they're kind of steering the ship at least a little bit as it pertains to the fate of the portfolio. So, but that your point is relevant because it's kind of owned by a variety of investors with competing interests.
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A
Yeah. So it was valued at $800 million a couple years back. And do you know what the thesis was of bringing together these webs, these web specific brand digital brands like Virgin Eater, the podcasts, which I think include like Kara Swisher's podcast and others. And then, and then also, and then also New York Magazine, which is kind of like a glamorous old school print property.
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C
Yeah, I think it's one of those things where you could almost like, like when you cut a tree and you look at the rings and you can tell what happened, you know, in those years. Like Vox Media is like a digital media company has like accumulated different strategies over time. And so you can like look at the assets it's bolted on and with each asset be like at that time this was the leading thesis about what to do with the digital media. So it kind of started with the collection of basically blogs like SB Nation, the Verge and Vox.com were the originals that really blew up in sort of like the 2000 and tens where there was this sort of scale play. They brought in a variety of different blogs and dot coms that were serving different audiences. And then around 2019 I think is when they acquired New York Magazine. That's when there became a real vogue to get into the subscription business as sort of scaled advertising plays on the web were getting a little bit more challenging. And then I would say probably around 2018 is when they first started getting serious about podcasts. But I think that that effort really matured post pandemic, let's say 21, 22. And I think that that movement and the investment in that was a real sort of acknowledgment of the growing dominance of like the creator space and the one to one connection that podcasts create and the way that advertisers really want to have, if nothing else, not at least another touch point. Right. That's like what podcasts are able to offer to a larger media portfolio, but on their own, they are a little bit more defensible than I think a lot of digital media brands are today.
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A
Yeah, let's talk defensible. Because it seems as though the original assets, the digital assets are, have this kind of a shock in that AI is just wiping out their traffic and that. So the original idea was build on this digital base, then add podcasts because they're cool and whatever. And now it turns out that podcasts, you own your audience, you're not nearly as much intermediated. Whereas, you know, a website like either, you know, you got to hope the search traffic comes, you got to help the social traffic comes.
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C
Exactly. I. It's like you're, you know, building a life raft for cruise liner, but then the life raft becomes more appealing than the cruise liner. Yeah, I mean, like, and so now all the podcasts are like the future of the business. Like Jim Bankoff says this all the time. Like, he's like. And so they split them so that the podcast industry, it even has its own sales team or the podcast business has its own sales team. So they were very clearly like, this is our growth engine. And so the fact that they're looking to sell it is like, okay, good, maybe you get some capital from that. But side note, the first money that they get from that might go to Pinsky, which is why that was sort of a relevant note earlier. But, you know, if you're selling off your best asset, that's. That's not great for the future of that portfolio. Right.
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A
So Penske came in late, late investors. So probably they have a lot of preference and maybe even some escalating preference where that 200 million is the first money they're going to get back. So who knows, they might be advocating for a sale just to get their money back if they're not happy with the direction of the business, but I'm just speculating.
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C
Well, and it's interesting because until the Murdoch element arrived, a lot of the leading thinking had been that Pinsky itself wants to take New York magazine because it kind of fits with the Pinsky portfolio. It's sort of glossy magazine oriented. New York's not a trade like the Hollywood Reporter and Deadline and all those things, but it kind of is birds of a feather with some of the other properties. And that introduces an interesting element because, you know, Pinsky is already the fox in the him house. They already have investment in the company. They're already internally able to see, you know, what things look like under the hood. And so as I was speaking with him in a source the other day, he was basically saying, you know, if you're James Murdoch, you want to know that you're not competing against an internal bidder because that kind of puts you at an immediate disadvantage. And so the fact that Murdoch has apparently sort of leapfrogged over Versant to be the primary bidder, at least for the podcast network, suggests that Pinsky isn't interested in buying. But Pinsky's like. Pinsky's machinations in this whole scheme are kind of hard to figure out because they've been there for years, but they haven't really shown any. Any inclination to buy. It doesn't really strike me as the kind of company that you invest in, especially in 2023. I've heard that that 100 million they put in was like purely to keep the lights on. So why.
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A
I'm sorry, something like that. Was it 100 million or 200 million? I think I misspoke earlier and said it was 200.
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C
It was 100 million at a 20% valuation.
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A
Right. So that would be a $400 million value. I had said earlier is 800. So there's a. My $5 million valuation. Well, if you put in 100 to get 20%, it's a. Anyway, never mind. You end up with 20 of 500. So it's a 400 million pre money. So let's. It depends. Anyway, so James Murdoch, remind us, is he the Jeremy Strong character or the Kieran Culkin character?
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C
That's so funny. I get he'd be the Shiv Roy character because he's sort of like the lib coded Murdoch. So although I guess like the Murdochs do have a sister, but I don't think that she actually is involved in the media space, but she is sort of famously so. James has an investment vehicle Lupa Systems and it's made some previous investments. Gosh, I'm, I'm blanking on what they are. There's like one or two US ones. It's a big one in India. This is its first major play, I think into like a, a well known household name US media company.
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Okay.
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C
So theoretically this could be the foundation for building outward.
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A
Right. Let's talk about Versant for a second. So Versant is the spun out cable networks from Comcast NBC. It's an interesting company. What I know about it is that the, the mothership, Comcast, NBC is going to continue to drive monetization for Versant for several years. So they didn't get spun out with a salesforce, they got spun out effectively with Comcast still paying the bills. Sort of like selling the ads, which means they have a lot of freedom right now to kind of figure out what the future is. Do they want to become a media company that's ad supported? They want to do subscriptions? Who do they want to buy? I think there's a lot of things on the table with them. Have you seen anything else from Versant that's interesting?
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C
They are like they made a big to do about when they got spun off saying that we have a war chest and we are looking to make acquisitions. So they, that is the overall vibe that I've gotten from them, I guess. Ms. Now, is that a part of Versant? It is, right?
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A
Yeah, it is.
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C
They, they did a deal with Crooked Media to sort of cross exchange some audiences and content there, which was I think their first kind of dabbling in this world of we as like a compilation of legacy cable brands. What if we start partnering with podcasters and creators and like digital media players? And so I think, I mean that literally was like in February. So I don't think that they have many insights that they can take from that, but I think that that was the first indication and the Vox Media podcast network game of Footsie was the second indication that they are interested in taking that cash and using it to move into the digital future and sort of like subsidizing those efforts with the, you know, capital being thrown off by this lazy business.
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A
And it sounds like they should buy architecture. They want podcasts. They got, they have cnbc. It'd be like, you know, we could, me and Jim Kramer can duel it out on CNBC.
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C
Yeah, or anthropic. You know, now that OpenAI's got its horse in the race, Anthropic needs a horse in the race. And I think you guys are the right fit.
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A
So, Ziff Davis, some new news. So Zif Davis just bought a bunch of older magazines. I guess you come dwell Domino, Popeye. Does this mean anything or is this just shuffling deck chairs around?
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C
Well, so I'm, I'm glad that you mentioned this because I think that, you know, I didn't plan it this way, but the contrast of these two strategies is so stark and so interesting. Yeah, everyone else in the digital media industry is like, get me off the Internet. We want to be on newsletters, we want to be on podcasts.
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A
Get me off the Internet.
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C
Yeah, I, I say a lot to a lot of people, like, construct a business strategy as if the Internet was nothing more than like a showcase for your brand, but not a source of traffic. You know what I mean? So a lot of the strategies that I see now, new media companies doing are building on YouTube, building on, you know, substack or Beehive, and, And basically building off the web. So that's what a lot of people are doing. That's what Vox is doing, trying to, you know, sell off its parts and get out. That's what, like, geomedia has done. That's what Conan Nas is doing. And then on the other hand, you have Ziff Davis, which is like, actively acquiring digital media brands. And I'll say, like, a few caveats. First, it only does, like, distressed bargains. Like, it's always getting a deal. These are all pretty affordable. That's number one. Number two is it just sold its connectivity business to accenture for like, $1.2 billion. So it has a bunch of cash that it can spend, so it's not necessarily, like, hurting for the money. And then three, like Vivek Shah, the CEO, says all the time, this is becoming a bit of a tagline, I would say, amongst media CEOs, like Neil. Neil Vogel at People Inc Says it all the time. He says, you know, we're buying brands and, and you can monetize it in a variety of ways. Offline, through merch, through subscriptions, through products, whatever the case. So Neil's been saying that for a long time. I'm just starting to hear Vivek say that a little bit more. But that was his sort of rationale for this, was like, look, we have. We're buying these. Well, basically he was like, look, our portfolio caters a little bit. It's a little bit male heavy. We want to bring in a little bit larger of a female audience. They want to build out a lifestyle section. And so this sort of home vertical is A great place to start that because three of the four properties they bought are business of Home Dwell and Domino. Those are all like interior design, decor, furniture, Etc. The fourth property they got, Pop Sci, is like a 187-year-old brand. It's like one of the oldest media brands in the country. And for science readers and technology fans, it's theoretically a household name. So I got the sense that that kind of got thrown in, sure. But I. He wasn't upset about it. And they do have a pretty good like tech in science sort of vertical already, so that slots in nicely there. But I think this is part of a larger play for Vivec and Ziff to build out a lifestyle offering and bring in brands that consumers are familiar with. So it's interesting. The long and short of it is he's kind of zigging where there's a zagging and Vivek's smart, but it's definitely an interesting sort of counter move.
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A
So Paul, put on your marketing hat, which I guess you have on all the time. So how does that thesis sound to you? Brands plus owning your own distribution, Is that the approach?
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B
I mean, if you can get these legacy brands like Pop Sci, which I grew up at, it was popular science. Like you can, you can tap into a nostalgia among a set of consumers that have money, Gen X boomers, you know, a bit of millennials, and you can do whatever you want with them. Like if you're buying them for pennies on the dollar, start, start a bunch of podcasts, do a bunch of documentaries like the History of Popular Science. And like you can, you can monetize the heck out of this thing through a lot of like non Internet ways that actually make money. I mean it all depends on how much they're paying for it. But I think that the strength of these brands, back when we had a monoculture is, is. Is really undervalued.
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A
Right. I have to agree. You see Pops I or Domino as brands, you could be on Netflix, it could be in a lot of places, they could be in social. So let's talk about social for a bit. So you wrote about Mark, you wrote about publishers using push notifications and peer to peer sharing as kind of distribution. That's a little bit new to me. What are you getting out there?
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C
Yeah, isn't that a trip? I strive. I found this out. I was working on a different story that I got an interesting tip about. I went to Chartbeat to sort of corroborate this tip. They shared some data with me that had like one element that made me like double take. And I was like, wait, what's that? And it basically was all, you know, the macro story for publishers is that web traffic is declining from most sources, right? And specifically, you know, search and social. But when I was looking at these charts that were showing where traffic is coming from, there was one that was kind of up and to the right. And they basically labeled that external traffic, which was basically when somebody lands on a specific article that a publisher has produced, but they don't have any clear referrer present. So they didn't come from search or social, they didn't go directly to the webpage. Basically they out of nowhere landed on one specific article. And they basically say the only ways that that can happen is from somebody sharing that article with a friend, like a text message, peer to peer sharing, a push notification or a news aggregator. And they're able to look at the news aggregators and basically rule those out. Say that hasn't really increased recently. So the two main sources for this pretty substantial uptick in traffic were peer to peer sharing and push notifications. And so I was kind of surprised by this. I reached out to a bunch of audience operators at publishers to get their two cents on it. It sounds like it's a, as often is the case, sort of a concert of various factors that are leading this to be the case. But the primary ones are a Publishers have put a large amount of effort into moving their most dedicated readers over to apps. That's sort of related to the open web becoming a little bit more fickle. So they're saying if you really care about what we're doing, you know, get onto these direct channels. And that includes podcasts and newsletters, but it also includes apps. So the more people that you have using apps, specifically, the more of your dedicated users you have using apps, the more effective push notifications are going to be. And I think that those have also improved in their sophistication in terms of like the targeting that publishers are able to do, the customization that they're able to offer. I spoke with a number of audience operators who are saying based on users behavior, we're getting better at being able to suggest push notifications to them or at least a cohort of people like them that are able to, you know, bring people onto the app. And then once they're on our app we get, you know, our recirculation tools in place and we're able to really juice those visits. So that's one thing. The other thing is the peer to
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A
peer sharing Peer to peer.
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C
Yeah, I think that in many ways, I mean, this is simply a byproduct of publishers with subscription strategies have made it really simple for people to share their material. Gift articles are basically the norm nowadays on, you know, these blue chip publishers. And again, I think this is part of getting more engaged users on the app and presenting them with these options of do you want to share it? And making that really prominent. So we've seen those two factors really increase over the last two to three years and I think they're really a byproduct of more consumers using these apps.
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A
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think the general, the general point of view is that social has lost ground to private communication, that messaging has become more important than social as it relates to discovery. And I think a lot of marketers haven't really jumped on that just yet. I think it's still put it in the feed and hope for the best that, you know, Meta or TikTok will give you some love. But there's nothing that beats, you know, texting it to your family or your friends. Right?
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C
Yeah, they call it, they call that ironically like dark social, which.
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A
Right.
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C
Like I was like, that sounds like such an ominous phrase for like a very benign, wholesome activity. Like I'm sharing this article with my family and it's dark social.
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A
It's actual social. Yeah, like that's the group chat, light social, positive social.
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C
But I think that we are seeing like even our sort of social team here at Adweek now uses sort of like the primary KPI of success of a story on social to shares rather than like engagement or likes or you know, comments or whatever. So I think that we're reorienting around that. With the rise of dark social and sharing becoming kind of like the North Star. As social teams orient around those KPIs, I think we're going to see peer to peer sharing become even more important.
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A
So, so I assume you both guys have some sort of, you know, group chat with your family. Is that accurate?
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B
What is better or worse?
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A
Okay, Paul, I'm calling on you. What's the last article you shared with your family?
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B
Oh gosh, probably something about Japan.
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A
Okay.
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B
Directly to my son. But I, I was going to comment that like whoever invented the idea of the gift article, it might have been like the most impactful marketing idea in publishing in the last 10 years.
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C
I agree. I mean, right. It's so like the, the opposite of it where you're like, I love this article. Let me send it to a Friend. And then they run into a paywall. They're like, why would you do this to me? It, it upsets people, you know, so it's like if you've got someone who's, you know, handing you this olive branch, like to, to squander that opportunity is a, is a huge, you know, step on a rake. So I think that was sort of a no brainer, but it took a while to get there.
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A
Yeah, I think B2B marketers can learn something with all the paywall. Download our infographic nonsense. You know, you're so desperate to get someone's email address that you're not spreading your information properly.
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B
I think we'll learn nothing from that.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Mark, what's, what's the last article you shared with your family?
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C
Yeah, that's, that's so funny. I wrote in one of my newsletters recently that like, literally, I think sharing articles is like my love language. Like I do it, I do it incessantly. And I think my family group chat is basically just me sending articles and nobody responding. Basically the last one I sent. So I'm, I'm from San Antonio and we have a basketball team there called the spurs that's doing very well in the playoffs right now. So I sent an article about, you know, their, their matchup against the Timberwolves.
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B
All right.
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C
Which they're currently in the midst of it.
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A
I'm going to read you the headline of the one I just sent to my family. Rabid beaver attacks 8 year old boy at New York New Jersey lake.
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C
I saw that video.
- [29:46]
B
Of course it's about New Jersey. Of course.
- [29:48]
A
Of course.
- [29:49]
B
Never misses an opportunity to throw shit at New Jersey, where I live.
- [29:52]
A
It is.
- [29:53]
C
Did you see the video?
- [29:54]
A
Yeah, I did. The beaver really goes at that kid.
- [29:57]
C
It was like Stephen King esque. Like it's kind of terrifying when you think of like a beaver with like bloodlust.
- [30:02]
A
Like it's kind of because those teeth, I mean, they could chew through trees. What are they gonna do when it was a little 8 year old boy? What? I mean, my God, they know. The boy ended up getting stacked like a log in the river.
- [30:18]
C
Part of an important marine ecosystem now.
- [30:20]
A
Exactly. Helping the marshland.
- [30:22]
C
There is a funny thing where they throw the beaver into the lake like and it kind of get. It goes from like serious to comical when they're like flinging it.
- [30:31]
A
But we're putting this in the show notes obviously.
- [30:36]
B
I'm picturing like a Sopranos esque, kind of like this beaver was in on some sort of thing.
- [30:41]
A
And or. Or one of or like Paulie fighting a beaver that would the missed episode of the Sopranos. All right, so with that conversation, now that we are beaver dialogue is done, let's take a quick break. We have a lot of earnings news and OpenAI opening up, so we're pretty excited to talk about that. So we'll be back in a moment.
- [31:04]
D
This is at Tech God and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing and of course the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to market. Com, check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the Brand Forum, the Advertising Forum, the Monopoly Report, the Ad Tech God Pod, the Market Pod and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out. Market or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon.
- [31:53]
A
All right, we're back. I don't have Eric to lean on to do the news of the week or to actually read these articles, so I guess I had to do the work this week. So let's talk about OpenAI. So OpenAI kind of really launched their ad program. They have a pixel, they have a conversion API. They have partners including Stack, Adapt, pacview, Cargo and Critio. There's it is self service. They don't have minimums. So this is exciting. I think this is was not news. It was totally expected by everyone except for the small minority of people who don't understand how the world works and who freaked out at the $60 CPMs and the preview program. Those people should apologize to the rest of us for knowing that it was all going to happen anyway. But the real question is, is this exciting for advertisers? Are is there going to be budget moving here quickly? Experimental, whatever. Paul, do you want to give your first.
- [32:51]
B
Well I mean like any new channel, like you want to be where the cool kids are. I for one personally can't stand browsing anything on Amazon anymore. So I just ask chatgpt like I need mount for the projector I just bought. Which one should I get on Amazon? Because otherwise I'm just going to be inundated with the insurification of the of the feed in Amazon. So I mean it makes perfect sense. It makes sense that they're partnering with these companies. They probably need an identity solution. They should probably use ID 5. I'm kind of conflicted on that. I work with them. Sorry, edit that out. Yeah, but you know, I think this is also though like a little bit of cope. I mean anthropic is running away with it. I spend an ungodly amount of money as a marketer on cloud and like I don't know, is the ads going to do it?
- [33:37]
A
Well, someone's got a, someone's got to support a free, a free AI solution and the majority, if we see from any other market, the majority of consumers around the world will want a free ad supported solution and that could be really, really lucrative. Mark, what's your take on this?
- [33:54]
C
Yeah, I mean I think definitely the novelty element to Paul's point that makes it attractive in and of itself but I think, I think I'm sort of like taking the long view here in that like there's incredible engagement with these products and I think that the ad product will figure itself out. I feel like not to be a defender of like a multi billion dollar startup, but there's a lot of criticism placed on these companies when they don't have these new products sorted right out of the gate. I think that you have, I mean I just spent probably half an hour last night talking to Claude about the stock market and I've never done anything like that with Google. I mean I just think that like I think that they have. I was just having a conversation this morning with Joy Robbins from the New York Times where they're talking about like the primary thing that makes their advertising product relevant is engagement and I think that you have incredible engagement with answer engines and obviously making it self serve. I think opening. I've rolled out something along those lines, democratizing it. The nuts and bolts will get sorted but I think that they have a compelling product and I would imagine within a year advertising starts to be a relevant line item.
- [35:03]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean they have very ambitious targets because they're pre IPO. It's not. Yeah, the 100 billion. We'll see if that develops. You mentioned Amazon. This wasn't in the show notes but did either of you see the instant podcast feature on Amazon where basically if you've got any product, the most, most banal product like toothpaste, you can get a podcast about that product auto generated with two guests who are very compelling and male, female I guess and they're like wow, did you know this had fluoride? I had no idea. Et cetera. It's the most bizarre product but I kind of love it. Have either of you listened to these things?
- [35:43]
C
I saw this on Twitter and I was like, I definitely don't need to listen to it to get a sense of the flavor here. I would be astounded to meet the person who finds value from that. But I also think that there'd be like, I'd be like a, like an explorer in, like, Papua New guinea, finding, like, a new species of person, I feel like. But I think that this goes a little bit in line with this larger, like, we're talking about slop of all these different kinds. Ashley Carmen at Bloomberg has written about this AI company that produces podcasts just at extreme scale using just complete artificially generated avatars. I did a little bit of reporting on it as well, but I think that, like, when the barrier to entry for producing content goes to zero, you're going to see, like, all these kinds of things thrown at the wall. And if any of them have even a slight modicum of value, more so than it takes to produce them, it's
- [36:36]
A
companies going to be like, why not?
- [36:37]
C
But then to Paul's point, I don't know that that creates a better user experience writ large. I think that they're kind of losing, you know, the forest for the trees.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah, I think it's always hilarious when really big companies, really successful companies, forget for a moment that their customers are human. Like, they do something completely just for. Just for the cred for having AI somewhere.
- [36:57]
A
Well, okay, I'm going to take the other side of this, which is I think there's something about listening to other people talk about a subject that can make you learn a lot about it. I mean, people are listening to this podcast right now. We're not AI, but we are talking about stuff. And there's an entertainment value, but also information value. And I heard Mark Cuban on Alex Cantrowitz podcast the other day, the big tech podcast, and he was giving this weird example that was super interesting about, could you teach a janitor how to do their job better by giving them a podcast about it rather than reading a manual? And he gave the example about, like, hey, it'd be great if we mixed in this cleaning fluid at this ratio. Don't you think that would be great? Like, oh, no, you don't want to make that mistake. Don't put it too much. You'll get too sudsy. And you could actually maybe think about a way of communicating information that is boring and mundane, that is more effective than reading a PDF or watching an instructional video.
- [37:57]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's true. I mean, I feel like that sort of like presupposes, like when somebody chooses to listen to a podcast. Part of the element of the appeal of the podcast is that they've opted into like that experience in like a very intentional way. That's like theoretically the case if you're like reading an instruction manual. But I think, like, the amount of participation it entails to listen to something is higher than it takes to just have your eyes glaze over text on the screen. So I think that plays a role in it too. Like, if you've sought out that decision to listen to that thing, you're already like an above average level of engagement.
- [38:34]
A
Sure, yeah, I'm going to. It'd be great if I could listen to a podcast on like how to clean my toilet while I'm at the gym. I guess more useful than the stuff I listen to. All right, so let's move on. Let's talk about earnings. We have a lot of earnings and. And we'll try to distill what's interesting about them, not just the financial side. So I think the standout is Applovin. Applovin just continues to absolutely kill it. Their sales increased 59% to quarterly sales, 1.84 billion. That's a pretty big number. Was that quarterly? I'm sorry, I may have misspoken that. That seems like a very big number. So is Applovin just the undefeated leader of the open web at this point? Like, is it. Is it over?
- [39:18]
B
They've certainly convinced me that having a name like that doesn't hurt you.
- [39:23]
A
That is. That's a good point definitively.
- [39:26]
B
Don't worry about the name of your company. Exactly.
- [39:29]
A
That's. That's a lesson right there. Yeah. So it is quarterly revenue, I guess, like to put more of a fine point on it, like, there's no company that is putting up numbers like that. They're not the biggest of the. If you think about the world as the walled gardens, there's four of them or so and everybody else. They're the biggest and fastest growing of everybody else. I think at this point maybe someone can fact check me on that. But if not the biggest, they're pretty close. They're seemingly going from strength to strength with moving from just in app to now e commerce to self service, Axon, Axion, whatever they call their product. And I would be hesitant to doubt that they can't continue the running ramshod through the rest of what we used to call open web or non walled gardens. Paul, do you want to give me the Bear case. Am I wrong?
- [40:24]
B
Well, I would ask you, you know more about this. Eric Soyfer does way more than I do about this. He'd be a great resource on it. But where's the headroom? Exactly. I don't doubt there is, but I'm sort of curious. Like, the open web is a shrinking island. Yeah, yeah, They're. They're the kings of that island. Sure. But like, where's that? Where, where. Where's the headroom, I guess, is what I would ask.
- [40:42]
A
It's a good point. They. Their market share in the in app install business is getting up there and. And then e commerce is their big bet. Like, can they. Can they drive actual sales, not just installs, through the in app world and then they own world. So that's their CTV play. So that's a lot of room, those three spaces. Not infinite, but it's a lot of room. Mark, do you run into them at all or it's not a little bit outside your beat?
- [41:06]
C
I've. We've definitely had some coverage. My. My colleague Kendra has covered Applov and specifically as it relates to, I think, some of the concerns about its performance, which I guess have been put to bed at this point. I used to cover them a fair bit, but I've moved out of that space a little bit. I do know Whirl a little bit better because I've covered CTV a bit. I did not know that that was an Applovin product. Is that like they bought it? Is that recent?
- [41:32]
A
No, a couple years ago. Yeah. I'm not really clear what they're doing with World. I know it's a. It's a. I think it's a healthy business within Applovin, but I don't know if what the synergies are or how it's tied into their buying platform just yet.
- [41:44]
B
Yeah.
- [41:44]
C
I would just say to Paul's point, maybe that's. I mean, it's a good point about where's the headroom. But I feel like every ad tech company I know is sort of picking up their stakes and moving to CTV if they're not there already. So at least they have sort of a beachhead there. So maybe that's what they're looking at it as.
- [42:01]
A
And if we wanted some clarity on Applovin, it would be very easy for Adam to come on the show because he's been doing a lot of podcasts lately, but notoriously is not doing this one. Let's move on to Taboola, which is a company we probably don't talk about that Much, but I think it's relevant here. So they had a pretty good quarter, 466 million in revenue. So they're like roughly a little less than a $2 billion a year advertising business. That puts them in the, you know, probably top 25 advertising companies in the world. The, one of the weirdest things about this earnings report is that they have a $77 million favorable legal settlement. That's all they said. I looked at the documents. I couldn't find any information about what this favorable legal settlement is. They sued somebody and won and got $77 million. Full stop. Don't ask any questions. Maybe some readers know more than I do. I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure this out. No, no information. Nobody like was something like, you know, sexually harassing them or something. I don't. What is this the company?
- [43:07]
B
I don't know. But they, they are, they are only down all time, 49%, which sounds bad, but when you compare that to rivals who are down 90%, I mean, half the, half the IPOs in ad tech that, that went public that, that, that year are down 80, 90, close to 100%. So they really have dug themselves out of what was a pretty bad hole. I still struggle to understand all the moving parts of their business. I compete. So full disclosure, I was the CMO of Outbrain. We competed with them very famously. Like there was a pretty much, yeah, the most bitter rivalry. And so when they, so they have made some acquisitions that they folded into their earnings that make it a little more difficult to figure out what the heck is going on. Smarter people than I, I'm sure do. And that's why their stock is trading up 30% after they announced earnings yesterday.
- [44:00]
A
Yeah. Well, let's contrast it. So Teeds, which is the new Outbrain, they renamed the company Teeds after the merger. Now they reported $266 million in revenue, which was down year over year. So they're about half the size low, little less like 55% the size of their rival Taboola. And Taboola is growing and Teeds is declining. Is this a long term trend? I mean, Paul, I don't know what you're allowed to say.
- [44:26]
B
Oh, well, I haven't worked at the company in quite some time. So I'm just, I'm just in the cheap seats looking at this. You know, they, they definitely still have some really great people there. It's a tough, it's a tough fact set. I mean, I briefly looked at some of the numbers. You know, they're, they're losing money. The, the numbers that should be, I mean if you're a public company and you're not showing double digit growth quarter over quarter, you're sort of screwed. Like you can't have like more than one quarter like that. And this is like year over year, like you're down. They project 100 million in EBITDA for the year. So I think, if, I think their case is that this is the low point where this, this is a V, you know, or maybe you.
- [45:09]
A
But I got to, I got to interrupt for one second. EBITDA has a D in it. What does the D in EBITDA stand for?
- [45:15]
B
Oh, debt.
- [45:16]
C
Right, debt.
- [45:17]
A
So 100 million. EBITDA is fine if you don't have any debt, but they have a very substantial amount of debt because of the deal they did. Right.
- [45:25]
B
That's a lot of debt. It's more debt than I have. I mean I have a mortgage but it's at 2%.
- [45:29]
A
Do you ever tell your wife about your EBITDA from your consulting?
- [45:33]
B
Yeah, I mean look, the deal made sense to me as an, as a former insider like you had, you had. If we can go on a small tangent about this. You know Outbrain was famous for having code on page on the greatest publishers in the world, CNN and Washington Post. And everywhere you see it it's code on page which to which to the non initiated means they're not bidding for that inventory. They essentially own and operate that inventory. In fact they owe money to the publisher for it directly. You know, pay out huge, huge, huge amounts of that. So that then you figure the mid article stuff, the outstream stuff, that's what teased was really good at. If you can combine those two things, you can unlock all kinds of pricing dynamics between those two units. You unlock a whole bunch of demand that Outbrain really never had access to given the notorious nature of that category. Why that hasn't happened yet I think is anybody's guess. It's an expensive business to run. Selling to brands requires going to can and throwing a bunch of money around, which was not really outbreans like culture I would say down to the core of it. So look, I, I mean I still root for them. Like I said, there's a lot of great people there. They recently hired a new cmo. Her name is Danny Cushion. And, and I think a lot of people are rooting for this company.
- [46:47]
A
Right. And, and Mark, like this used to be a topic that publishers and media companies talked about a lot is like, well it's a duopoly we play them against each other, we maximize our revenue and we don't care about the tofungus ads. You know, like, is it still that way or is this like become the lowest possible priority for, for media companies?
- [47:06]
C
It has, I think, become lower. I think that like a large part of the thesis, like, so if you take as a given the fact that traffic is declining, you can go one of two ways about that. One, you can say, well, we have to monetize every square inch of our UX so that we get the most per user. But then the healthier way to look at it is to say, look, once we get somebody on the page, they're more valuable than ever because we get fewer of them. So we have to keep them on pages longer. So we have to make the UX better. So we have to really think about overloading people with these kind of chumbox ads. I will say one thing that I spoke about. I think Taboola's CEO is Adam. They debuted a product that I covered because I thought it was like kind of conceptually interesting, which was basically like an answer engine on page that used only content from that publisher to populate its answers. So I think USA Today was like their primary like test partner where it's like you're reading a USA Today article and like a little search bar pops up and it's like, would you like to know more about the Knicks game last night? And if you, you know, engage with it, it feeds you articles that are only from USA Today. Which was like an interesting. This was to me like them saying, look, we see that the open Internet is kind of, you know, caving in around us. How can we hop aboard the answer engine sort of trend and partake in this larger thesis of we need to increase site engagement. And if answer engines are proven to do that, let us do that for you as, you know, publishers. So I thought that was a smart move. But ultimately it could be rearranging deck chairs, I don't know.
- [48:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, well, we'll see a lot more to watch on there. So some quick hit. So Kochava, the mobile app measurement company, they've been involved in this yucky lawsuit with the FTC for, for quite some time where the FTC accused them of selling mobile data without illegally in some way. And it was, it had this weird political aspect where it was by the Biden administration. I think the Kachava team is in like a bunker in Idaho and is sort of a little bit red coded. And there was always like, what's going on here, here. And it had something to do with like with the Supreme Court ruling about abortion because you'd use location data to find out where women were near abortion clinics. And now that's finally been settled and it was settled with Kochava having to get consumer permission to share the data basically. So that's kind of just putting a bow on that. I don't know if either one of you guys have any real thoughts on about it.
- [49:40]
B
We're in a litigious time in ad tech right now. I would say. Yeah, there's a lot of this kind of stuff.
- [49:47]
A
I'm really not. I've been on the record a number of times saying I'm really not a fan of location data being available for sale. I think there's just no way to make it privacy safe. I think good job. Probably got got dragged into something that wasn't entirely unique or different. One of the things they did, which is the biggest mistake any ad tech company could do is that they said exactly what they do on their website. Right?
- [50:12]
B
That's. It's not very common.
- [50:15]
A
Not very common. I think that was a big part of why they got nailed on this. They had like a catalog of all the data you could get from them and people were like, what I could get what from who? And it wasn't good.
- [50:27]
B
It reminds me of the. I forget what the website was, but some website was talking about how they listened to your app.
- [50:34]
A
That was a debacle. That was Cox Media. And everyone assumed, including me, assumed it had to do with, with the same company that owns Cox, the telecom company. It was not. It was a spin out company and they did not have access to your phone even though they said so. That caused me a lot of problems.
- [50:51]
B
But anyway, I was told on CBS Sunday morning by this guy, our phones aren't listening to us.
- [50:57]
A
All right, let's pour one out for the butler. Jeeves. Ask is done. Ask jeeves is gone. Ask.com is gone. It was shut down. Any fond memories of Mr. Jeeves or ask.com with the logo? Why don't we explain? Could someone, Paul, give an explanation for anyone under 30 who might be listening? What we're talking about.
- [51:19]
B
There was a time when search actually was garbage. Firstly, like it didn't really work. I mean Yahoo, which stood for. It was a backronym or something. I forget what it stood for. I bet you know what Yahoo stood for. I don't know, another something.
- [51:34]
A
Hierarchical, ontological, something.
- [51:38]
D
There was a.
- [51:39]
B
There was actually, there were, there were search wars and Ask Jeeves was one of them. I never used it. I don't remember using it. I mean, I was on a AOL at that time, probably. I'm actually really surprised to hear that it's still around. Like, I think most of your listeners would be. But it's probably changed hands so many times. But once Google ran away with it, that was. That was it. It was over. And this is. We're talking about 20 years ago now, more so.
- [52:01]
A
So the premise of Ask G's when it came out in the 90s, was you could ask it questions instead of using keywords. So you could say, like, instead of just saying capital Idaho, you would say, what is the capital of Idaho? And that was unique. And the other search engines couldn't handle it because they would look at keywords and would spend all this time trying to figure out what the word what meant. So that was kind of the intriguing part. For those of you. Okay, let's go a little deeper. Who's Jeeves? So Jeeves is a famous character from numerous sort of movies and comedies in the 1950s black and white era of a butler. And he became synonymous with, you know, the butler era. And actually the actor who played Jeeves has a tie in which I'm gonna. I would be astounded either, you know, the combination how. What does Ask Jeeves have to do with the fast food industry? The actor who played Mr. Jeeves in the movies was named Arthur Treacher, who they named the seafood restaurant after. You don't know about Arthur Treacher's. Oh, my God. Okay.
- [53:02]
B
It's not a Chicago thing.
- [53:05]
A
Arthur Treaters is like the fast food version of Red Lobster. And it was very, very popular for a long time. Okay, I'm going really deep. Okay. I know I'm talking too much. And everyone's, like, freaked out at this point. So I have a story about Ask Jeeves. This is a little bit apocryphal or secondhand. It's not a proper secondhand story, but it's a good one, which is that Ask is owned by iac, an interactive corp, which was famously founded and run by Barry Diller. And. And Barry Diller, by all accounts is just a super genius who is a bit understated. He's just sort of like this marketing super genius. And at some point, maybe 10, 15 years ago, they're talking about how they're going to spend so much money to increase Ask's market share against Google by advertising, basically spending money to tell people that Ask is better than other research engines. And the marketing team has this very complicated, very expensive marketing plan that they bring to the board and to Barry and everyone. And it's all about how we're going to convince consumers that it's the better search engine. And in the meeting, he just says, Barry says, nascar. We want the nascar. People don't know what search engines to use. Let's buy a car. Put all your money into nascar. Forget everything in this plan. I just want the rural white Americans who don't care about Google to start using Ask instead. And that worked, of course.
- [54:27]
B
Wow.
- [54:27]
A
That's the end of the story.
- [54:29]
B
Wow. Well, in hindsight, with a name like that, they really should have just invented ChatGPT.
- [54:35]
A
They should have. Or they could have sold some fried haddock or done like a.
- [54:41]
C
Like a. Like a nascar, like with a in Ask AR type vibe. That might have looked all right now.
- [54:49]
B
Wow.
- [54:50]
C
That might have been. I don't know if that's appropriate for the demo, but I think there's something there.
- [54:54]
A
All right, so long to ask. All right, let's call it. So, Mark, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you at Adweek and on your newsletter?
- [55:04]
C
Yes, adweek.com Mark Stenberg. Or on social media, I also write on background. It's free. It's a media newsletter. It goes out every Wednesday evening. You can subscribe all over the website and on my socials.
- [55:15]
A
Great. And, Paul, thank you so much for sitting in for Eric. He'll be back next week.
- [55:20]
B
Thanks for having me. Thank you for subscribing to Market.
- [55:24]
A
New interviews are added every week at marketecture tv and your favorite podcasting.
- [55:28]
B
Applause.