Managing Business Model Changes

Summary

Masters in Business: Managing Business Model Changes

Hosted by Bloomberg's Barry Ritholtz | Release Date: July 9, 2025

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Introduction

In the "Managing Business Model Changes" episode of Masters in Business, Bloomberg Radio host Barry Ritholtz delves into the seismic shifts occurring in business models, particularly those driven by technological advancements and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). To unpack these transformations and their implications for careers, Ritholtz welcomes veteran markets journalist and CFA, Sam Rowe. With over two decades of experience at esteemed publications like Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, and Axios, Rowe brings a wealth of knowledge on the evolving landscape of media and business.

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Guest Introduction: Sam Rowe’s Career Trajectory

Barry Ritholtz (02:16): "What happens when the best business decision you can make is to change businesses? What's the best way to redeploy your skill sets in the modern age of artificial intelligence and changing business models?"

Sam Rowe opens up about his unexpected transition from aspiring Wall Street professional to renowned financial journalist. Initially aiming for a career in equity research, Rowe's exposure to asset valuation at a law firm ignited his passion for understanding the blend of hard sciences and human behavior in finance. This curiosity led him to Forbes' investment newsletters, marking the beginning of a dynamic career in financial journalism.

Sam Rowe (03:30): "This is the first time I started to realize that how asset valuation worked... There's a lot of soft sciences involved here because you're dealing with human behavior."

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The Evolution of Media and Technology’s Impact

Rowe chronicles his journey through various digital-first media outlets, highlighting the significant changes in the media industry's business models over the past few decades. From Forbes' dominance in the late '90s and early 2000s to the challenges faced during the 2008 financial crisis, he illustrates how traditional revenue streams have been eroded by technological innovations.

Sam Rowe (07:04): "I think it was late in my Business Insider days and early in my Yahoo Finance days where we started to really begin to understand how much digital news sites were beholden to the traffic coming from places like Google Search and social media platforms like Facebook."

Rowe emphasizes the diminishing returns of traditional advertising models, as advertisers pivot towards more effective channels like influencer marketing on platforms such as TikTok.

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Transitioning to Independent Platforms: The Substack Movement

With the decline of traditional media revenues, Rowe discusses his transition to launching his own Substack newsletter, Ticker (tker), in 2022. This move symbolizes a broader trend where journalists and content creators seek autonomy and direct engagement with their audiences.

Sam Rowe (08:27): "If you can keep your costs low... if you have an audience and if you are sort of very deliberate about who your audience is and how big that audience can get, then you can have the revenue to cover that cost and you can have a nice small business like what I'm doing now."

Ritholtz probes into the inversion of traditional media roles, where writers now bear the responsibility of building subscriptions and managing business aspects, contrasting with their former roles focused solely on content creation.

Barry Ritholtz (09:04): "Substack really inverted the traditional media model... writers now earn money based on their subscriptions, which are driven in part by their content, but also their marketing savvy, their branding, their reputations."

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The Diminishing Role of SEO and Search Engines

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the declining effectiveness of Google Search as a traffic driver for media sites. Rowe acknowledges the challenges posed by algorithm changes and the "crapification" of search results, which inundate users with low-quality content and diminish the visibility of reputable sources.

Sam Rowe (12:21): "I think it's probably hurt the large media companies significantly. I think Wall Street Journal had a fabulous article about how much search traffic digital media sites were getting from Google. And it's all shrinking—it has collapsed."

This decline forces content creators to pivot towards alternative means of audience building, such as direct subscriptions and word-of-mouth promotion.

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Challenges and Benefits of Independent Writing

Rowe candidly discusses the trade-offs involved in moving away from large media organizations to pursuing independent journalism. While enjoying greater autonomy and flexibility, he highlights the loss of certain benefits associated with traditional employment, such as comprehensive healthcare, technical support, and the collaborative environment of a newsroom.

Sam Rowe (13:43): "The most difficult part... having access to really great healthcare for a very cheap price... and then there are intangible values like being surrounded by passionate people and having the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other."

Conversely, he appreciates the reduced time spent in meetings and the ability to focus more on content creation without corporate constraints.

Sam Rowe (14:55): "As an independent writer, I'm not in nearly as many meetings as I used to."

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Advice for Aspiring Career Changers

Concluding the conversation, Rowe offers pragmatic advice to individuals contemplating a shift to independent content creation or entrepreneurship. He encourages aspiring writers and professionals to take the plunge, leveraging low-cost platforms to test their passion and capacity for self-driven work.

Sam Rowe (15:06): "You just have to go out and give it a shot. It doesn't cost anything to start a website or a blog on any of these newsletters, especially if you start off free."

He also touches on the emotional aspects, acknowledging the solitary nature of independent work but highlighting its potential therapeutic benefits and the satisfaction of connecting with an audience that finds personal value in one's content.

Sam Rowe (15:26): "It can be very lonely. And then some people find that it's therapeutic or it's a way to keep themselves organized."

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Conclusion

Barry Ritholtz wraps up the episode by emphasizing the importance of adaptability in the face of technological disruption. He advises listeners to stay informed about how technology is reshaping their industries' revenue and profit models and to proactively manage their career trajectories to better align with evolving business landscapes.

Barry Ritholtz (16:00): "If you're thinking about changing careers, you should be paying attention to technology, what it's doing to your field's revenue and profit models. Understand how technology is changing the way businesses are being done—it's usually better to jump than to be pushed."

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Key Takeaways:

• Technological Disruption: Traditional media business models are under significant threat from digital platforms and changing consumer behavior.

• Shift to Independence: Platforms like Substack empower journalists and content creators to establish direct relationships with their audiences, bypassing traditional media gatekeepers.

• Decline of SEO Reliance: The effectiveness of search engine optimization for driving traffic has waned, urging creators to explore alternative audience-building strategies.

• Balancing Autonomy and Challenges: While independence offers greater control and flexibility, it also comes with challenges such as loss of corporate benefits and potential isolation.

• Proactive Career Management: Staying adaptable and informed about industry changes is crucial for career resilience in a rapidly evolving economic landscape.

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For those interested in navigating business model changes and understanding the future of media and content creation, this episode offers invaluable insights from an industry veteran navigating these shifts firsthand.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

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[Podcast Host]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.

[Sam Rowe]

What.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Happens when the best business decision you can make is to change businesses? What's the best way to redeploy your skill sets in the modern age of artificial intelligence and changing business models? I'm Barry Ritholtz and on today's edition of at the Money, we're going to discuss how to manage your way through the challenges of technology driven change. To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your career, let's bring in veteran markets journalist and CFA Sam Rowe. Sam is known for his clear, data driven insights into markets and the economy. He spent two decades working in the trenches for shops such as Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider and Axios. He launched his own substack 3 years ago, ticker tker which earned him the Society of Business an Editor and Writers award for Best in business in 2022. So let's start with your background. You earn a certified financial analyst, but you became a financial journalist. Explain that initial career choice.

[Sam Rowe]

Yeah, well, the initial plan actually was to figure out a way to get into Wall Street. If we go even further back, I was working as a contractor for a law firm that for whatever reason, got me exposure to equity research for the first time. And this is the first time I started to realize that how asset valuation worked. And it's not just math and spreadsheets and a hard science theoretical exercise. There's a lot of soft sciences involved in here because you're dealing with human behavior. So I was interested in getting into equity research and my first job being able to write about stocks or markets was at Forbes in their investment newsletters division.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So a traditional media outlet, but a sort of non traditional position that's kind of been your career history. So you go from Forbes newsletters, Yahoo. Finance, Business Insider, Axios. These are all post 20th, 20th century, sort of technology based news organizations.

[Sam Rowe]

Sure, yeah, yeah. I mean, even, even Forbes, when I was there, I was there from 2006 to 2010 was by far number one in terms of news websites. They had tons and tons and tons of traffic going to their website because they were one of the first news outlets to really establish themselves in the late 90s and early 2000s. And then of course, the financial crisis comes and, you know, business media did not do very well during that time. I eventually get laid off in 2010 and I'm in between jobs a little bit, and then I end up at Business Insider where the business model is just completely different. My last day at Forbes, I actually had a talk with my boss's boss in my office. That's what the state of things were back then, right? That I could actually have an office at a print magazine in a building.

[Barry Ritholtz]

In Greenwich Village seems super inefficient.

[Sam Rowe]

Well, I didn't realize how inefficient that was until I ended up at Business Insider, where on my first day, on a desk that's probably about 3ft wide in a newsroom where we're basically just sitting there shoulder to shoulder with every other editor and journalist, including the editor in chief and the CEO of the company. And the productivity there was insane. So, yeah, like in the snap of a finger, I realized, you know, there's a reason why we had layoffs at my previous employer.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So that took place in 2010. But really we've seen technology really hurting traditional media's business model since the 1990s. So Craigslist really did a job on the classified advertising business, which was big driver. Ebay was another thing that took sales away from the traditional ad model. Now it's things like Facebook Marketplace, Zillow for real estate, bring a trailer for automobiles. Technology has been taking big chunks of the revenue streams from traditional media. It's now three plus decades of this. When did you first start to realize, hey, this entire underlying business model is under assault?

[Sam Rowe]

I think it was probably late in my Business Insider days and early in my Yahoo Finance days where we started to really begin to understand how much digital news sites were beholden to the traffic coming from places like Google Search and social media platforms like Facebook. But then in terms of the revenue perspective with advertising and all of this stuff, you quickly saw that the economics of this was falling apart. And I think the advertisers were largely realizing that the ROI of having ads on some of these sites weren't as competitive as what they're doing now, which is having an influencer on TikTok hawking products.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So. So we're going to work our way up to social media. I want to track your career. So you start Business Insider in the 2011. Yahoo Finance is when 2016, so five years later.

[Sam Rowe]

And then Axios 2021 for a very brief period.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And then you launch your substack back in 2022, when substack was still kind of young. We hadn't quite hit, you know, peak substack yet.

[Sam Rowe]

Sure.

[Barry Ritholtz]

What, what was the motivation to say, you know what, I have to take control of this and do it on my own?

[Sam Rowe]

I think, you know, being in management at Yahoo Finance and getting a little bit of exposure to it at Business Insider, for me, I think it was as simple as it was. There was two parts to this. One, if you can keep your costs low, then I think you can have a media operation and related to costs. If you can be. If you have an audience and if you are sort of very deliberate about who your audience is and how big that audience can get, then you can have the revenue to cover that cost and you can have a nice small business like what I'm doing now.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So substack really inverted the traditional media model back in. When you have an office and a salary, they're the ones who are, who are building subscriptions, running ads, doing the business side of it. Your job in a traditional media business is to just create content. The inversion is writers now earn money based on their subscriptions, which are driven in part by their content, but also their marketing savvy, their branding, their reputations. Is this new content model a modern meritocracy?

[Sam Rowe]

I think increasingly, I'm not sure if I would characterize it that way. You know, I think about, you know, I spend a lot of time on TikTok and Twitch and watch, you know, all the various streamers that have found career success. And there are some people who get massive and there are some people who have very medium sized, you know, moderate sized audiences. The analogy that I've been using lately when it comes to how people or how media has been working is the difference between publicly traded fast food companies and your favorite restaurant that's run by mom and pop around the corner, right? It's possible to have a really great restaurant with just one outlet, right? I think if you ask most people, if you ask them what their favorite restaurant is, it's a privately owned family business somewhere. Because the red sauce will never be replicated by Olive Garden or whatever. That doesn't mean olive Garden and McDonald's and any of this stuff is bad, but it's just the business strategy, the reach, the audience that they're going for is going to be very different. And so I think that there's probably a world where these big mainstream media outlets and the independent journalists can coexist. I think it only works because the frictions and the costs and the barriers to entry to becoming an independent writer has come down significantly.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Let me ask you a sort of abstract question about Google search as a source for new readers or new blog followers or read whatever Cory Doctorow uses the phrase platform crapification. And we've certainly seen that with Google. I find myself using Google far much less. The whole genius of page rank seems to have gone away. I don't want their AI answer. I have perplexity on my phone. I don't need them. If I want an AI answer, I know exactly how to get it. What I want is show me the top 30, 50, 100 sites that have this phrase or this topic. And I, I just don't get that anymore. It's just festoon with so much garbage. So the question I want to ask you is, has the slow, I guess it's too early to call the death of Google, but has the crap ification of Google harmed writers who are looking for an audience? Or are people no longer relying on it? And, and word of mouth is helping people looking for.

[Sam Rowe]

Yeah, I would actually say it's probably helped, really. I think it's made, it's hurt the large media companies significantly. I think Wall Street Journal had an article, fabulous article about this in terms of how much search traffic digital media sites were getting from Google. And it's all shrink, has been shrinking.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's collapsed.

[Sam Rowe]

It's collapsed. Yeah, it's a nightmare. But that also means if people are spending less time being drawn to these mega properties, well, where are they going for their news and their information? And maybe they're gravitating toward something like a newsletter that they signed up because one of their friends shared something and they saw something good here.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So Google SEO is not a job anyone should be thinking about. That was a real job, certainly since the 90s and 2000s. Hey, if you can optimize for Google search, here's a fire hose of traffic. Just hope they never change their algorithm.

[Sam Rowe]

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think passively. I try to be conscious of things that help improve the SEO of anything I publish, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it because, you know, I might get a couple more clicks.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's so diminished today from, from what it once was. So what's been the most surprising part of this transition to, you know, hanging out your own newsletter? What's been the most difficult part?

[Sam Rowe]

The most difficult part is very easy. All of the other resources you get from working at a large company, you realize you took all that stuff for granted. Having access to really great healthcare for a very cheap price. That's number one. Two, when you have tech issues, you're not on the phone. When you're employed by someone, you're not the one on the phone with Verizon. Someone else is taking care of that for you.

[Barry Ritholtz]

And you're here today because you're Verizon modem.

[Sam Rowe]

Yeah, that's a whole other nightmare. But yeah, all that stuff like the AC doesn't work in my apartment, who's paying for the snacks and all this kind of stuff. And then there are other things that are intangible value that I really do miss about working at larger media companies, which is being surrounded by people who are passionate about what they're doing, they're curious. You can bounce ideas off and have something crushed or really developed, you know, in a room with people. So I think, you know, it's a trade off though. The other thing being that as an independent writer, I'm not in nearly as many meetings as I used to.

[Barry Ritholtz]

You're not wasting as much time. So final question, someone thinking about a career change, thinking about hanging their own shingle. What's the most important lesson you can impart to those people?

[Sam Rowe]

You just have to go out and give it a shot. It doesn't cost anything to start a website or a blog on any of these newsletters, especially if you start off free. And you know, if you might actually find you have a passion for writing. Some people think that they want to be a writer. They give it a shot. They find out that they don't want to be a writer.

[Barry Ritholtz]

It's a lonely grind. It can be.

[Sam Rowe]

It can be very lonely. And then some people find that it's therapeutic or it's a way to keep themselves organized. I've actually talked to a couple of financial advisors who have started newsletters for no other reason than to help them keep themselves organized and have found an audience for this because what they're doing for themselves is actually benefiting someone else.

[Barry Ritholtz]

Huh. Fascinating stuff.

[Sam Rowe]

I think it's just worth giving it a shot.

[Barry Ritholtz]

So to wrap up, if you're thinking about changing careers, you should be paying attention to technology, what it's doing to your field's revenue and profit models. Understand how technology is changing the way businesses play being done it's usually better to jump than to be pushed. I'm Barry Ritholtz, this is Bloomberg's at the Money.

[Podcast Host]

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[Sam Rowe]

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