The God metric for audience value - podcast episode cover

The God metric for audience value

Jul 11, 202432 minEp. 127
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Episode description

In a discussion held in Cannes, I sat down with Jason White, chief product and technology officer at The Arena Group, and Johanna Bergqvist, general manager of the managers at The Rebooting partner EX.CO. A part of the conversation that resonated was how White has zeroed in on revenue per session as what he calls the “God metric” that prioritizes session depth over raw page views. This is a recognition that traditionally digital media publishers have focused on eyeballs without understanding the intrinsic value of user engagement.

"The days of not knowing the value of your audience and your content are kind of gone,” Jason said. “Marketers forever have had CRM experts; they know their audiences, they know the value of their users, the value of their products, their margins, etc. We've played an eyeball game for the past 30 years in digital media."

The benefits:

  • Organizational alignment. As highlighted in The Rebooting and WordPress VIP’s recent research, internal misalignment bedevils publishers. Different groups pursue different goals. The horror show of many webpages is a sign of internal misalignment and “shipping the org chart.”
  • True personalization. There’s no personalization without understanding the person. RPS allows The Arena Group to figure out not just how best to serve visitors – “Is this a younger audience that wants to consume video?” Johanna said. “Let’s take them down more of a video path." – but how best to make money from them. Publishing is increasingly a game of finding the high value audiences within a mass of impressions.
  • Resource allocation. The more-with-less era is a reality. It requires making hard choices about where to spend and where to cut. Having alignment on a KPI makes these choices somewhat easier, if no less painful.

Transcript

Brian

Welcome to the rebooting show. I am Brian Marcy. The following is a spotlight episode I created in Cannes with my partners at Xco. General Manager for the Americas, Johanna Berkvist joined, as well as Jason White, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Arena Group. In this discussion, we talk about the essential challenges of running a publishing business. In a more with less era.

And, this is a big theme of can, and in particular, Jason zeroes in on the hard choices this forces on publishers, as they by necessity, prioritize depth of a breath, really appreciate, X, co for their support, and Jason and Johanna for joining this conversation. Now, here it is. Johanna, Jason, thank you for joining me here in Cannes.

Johanna

You're welcome. Um, I mean,

Brian

that. The wind,

Johanna

the wind. I thought some rose was about to take off a couple of times, which is probably a first first

Brian

wine glasses were flying at

Johanna

Exactly. And fedoras.

Jason

was

Brian

Yeah,

Johanna

So, so that was a little weird.

Jason

end other than the torch experience was great.

Johanna

Okay, yeah.

Jason

Right when I first got in. Did

Brian

Kassin carry it?

Johanna

Michael Kasson

Jason

it? I didn't see him, not on my

Johanna

Yeah.

Brian

Alright, let's get into it. I don't want to start bleak. We just started, we talked beforehand. I was saying how I don't like to be called cynical. at the same time, I don't know, I feel like a weather weather forecaster in England, right? it is, it's gonna rain, like, I don't know what

Johanna

cloudy.

Brian

I don't know what, yes, okay, well, maybe at best it could be, like, cloudy and it might rain, but, like, bring an umbrella. you know, I just saw, like, Comscore figures came out today, and, you know, it's Comscore, but, Everyone's down. Traffic is down. It's 7 percent at CNN. They made sure that both CNN and Fox are down equally,

Johanna

very suspicious? They're

Brian

is like,

Jason

magic how that

Brian

right? Isn't that very suspicious? They're like, no, it's just algorithms. It's just, it's just algorithms. but like somehow we got it exactly 6. 6 percent down for both of them. the Times only went up. Thank you. Wordle, NBC News down nine and a half USA Today down nine, Washington Post down 21. Ouch. Business Insider, ouch, down 29%. Even the journals and, and Politico are down 12 and, and 9%.

Johanna

entering almost

Brian

LA Times, 31%. Atlantic, 26%. It's, it's, that's bleak

Jason

that's a trend.

Brian

it is a trend. it seems like we're entering almost like a more with less era is what I call it, right? I mean, there's just, this is not a blip, right? there's gonna be, There's going to be less traffic and that's been the lifeblood. How do you adapt to that?

Jason

our perspective, it's investing in intelligence. I think the first thing that you have to understand from a digital media publisher site is the days of not knowing the value of your audience and your content are kind of gone. forever, we've never known what I would say the digital media publisher's KPI should be, which is revenue per session. And that's embarrassing for an entity to kind of admit that they don't know.

marketers forever have had CRM experts, they know their audiences, they know value of their users, the value of their products, their margins, et cetera. We've played an eyeball game.

for the past, you know, 30 years in digital media, where it's, you know, slap an ad on it, slap an ad on it, slap an ad on it, and there's a, you know, linear line to revenue, and revenue per thousand, but at the end of the day, we don't know or haven't traditionally known, but we have invested in knowing, what, what is the value of this content? What is the value of that cohort? and how do we grow and scale those cohorts?

in interesting ways, because we're entering an era of, from a publisher perspective, of audience. and we need to know the value of those audiences that advertisers see the most value

Brian

in. So break down revenue procession. Cause I mean that, what you're saying is I mean, it's, it's a nuance, but I think it's important. I mean, cause it was always RPM.

Jason

Yeah. It's a God, what I call like a God metric, right? It's one of those things, or a power KPI. it is the KPI, from a digital media perspective, because it contains both volume, and revenue, right? And so both of those things, when you're looking at them, it aligns the edit side and the product side, along with the revenue side and monetization side of the house.

So when you look at both of those things, the interesting thing is we've always thought every page view was created equal in the era of programmatic, where advertisers are buying, picking off users, and we all say these things on all of these panels. But the reality is. They're not. And we know that they're not. Because advertisers know the value of those audiences.

And for the longest time, digital media publishers have felt like canvases, blank canvases, that advertisers just paint on and, you know, give us a little more of this, give us a little more of that. And we're like, well, I don't know the value of that. I know content context. I know scarcity, the Big Bang Theory, when I was at CBS. We knew how to price that.

Using tools like Yield X and the such, but when it comes to audience and understanding like what should this cohort be valued at, that this advertiser wants GM, and we look at that and go, well, Ford is now interested in that. So we know that that cohort is probably an auto and tender. We don't need to know their data, but we know that those are concentric circles that overlap and there's value there for an auto and tender is an

Johanna

an example. I think also, though, pricing those cohorts differently. So knowing your power, sort of power users or your highly engaged users. Kind of what you talked about. So in the past, it was all about scale. So the more traffic you

Brian

Well, a cookie is a cookie is a cookie. And the thing is, you don't know it. Like, when, I remember, I used to, at Digiday, I did this confession series that was delicious,

Johanna

Yeah.

Brian

people, people, people frequently don't tell the truth and they have their names attached to them. But they do, if they're given anonymity. But, I remember one of the ones I did, it, it resonated with me. the person that said it's, we're just see a cookie, hit a cookie. That's, that's what this industry is. And the reality is the advertiser side knew the, what, you know, the demand side knew who was on the other side of that cookie, but for a publisher, right? Like it was just like,

Johanna

just traffic numbers or impressions.

Brian

it was a unique,

Jason

you start to align on the right thing, the right metric, like you start coming up with great ideas. Like we, we started ideating on, cause let's talk about, go back to revenue per session. You're talking about session. How do you extend the session? We start asking questions like that. You start thinking about like product experiences for the user video, vertical video, IE social video.

we create it and we put it on the social platforms, but we have like small followers, you know, most digital media publishers have small followers on the social platforms and we're making a pittance for that from the social media companies. Why not take that?

Johanna

unit

Jason

And the, content that you invested in and move that onto your site. You have tens of millions of people on your site, and if you can have them consuming more of the content you're creating,

Johanna

to them right. now, especially from a video perspective, because I would say from a social aspect, that's at least when you look at younger audiences, that's how they are entering the world of content consumption. It's through a vertical video format through a social platform. It's not frankly, Unfortunately, reading, you know, a, a piece of written content in an, in an art, in an article format

Jason

there will be people that want to

Johanna

that. Yeah.

Brian

I admit that my audience is not Gen Z. Okay?

Johanna

we have

Jason

So we have

Brian

That's why I'm doing this podcast, for my Gen Z

Johanna

I would, I would also say that podcast and audio as well as video are, are on the rise. I

Brian

no, I have different segments by

Johanna

that. Yeah.

Jason

That's

Brian

who never Read the newsletter, and there's people who never listen to the podcast, and they're just, you know, I think you just have to create

Johanna

create a

Jason

it's value, but, but ultimately user pathing, right? So cohorting is what we're, you know, when you talk about audience, basically cohorting, is it, is it, is, is this a, is this a gen, Is this a gen X

Brian

a

Jason

to read and consume articles? For example, let's take them down an article path. Is this somebody that wants like the premium articles? let's take them down a subs path. Is this somebody that's shopping? Let's take them down an e commerce path. Is this a younger audience that wants to consume video? Let's take them down a more of a video path.

Brian

But, and this is where I want to get into the look, everyone knows there's way more demand for video. The, The rates are better. I don't think anyone's like, you know what? I want to serve more you know, static display. That's where we're

Jason

punch the monkey ads. That's what I

Brian

go back. What was the 480 by 60? Whatever. Let's bring them back. but at the same time, how do you build the products when you have a page based model?

I keep asking people we did a dinner last night, but we did one like on Monday and I was just asking, I'm like, Do you really think that people are coming to, to webpages in five years that they're like Visiting a webpage hitting a back button and like that's gonna be the main way you're engaging With with the audience because I think a lot of times what I see is the tik tok experience? Is completely seamless, right? And I think sometimes with publishers, it's how they're trying to chase.

Okay, look, this works and everything like this, but we have a totally different container. So how do you sort of bridge that?

Jason

I think that you're you've always challenged people to see ahead. And I think that you're spot on. We look at it as building the brand. First thing is understanding value. Like we talked about, once you understand your audience more and that value, then you can start doing things like, we, we saw, for example, that, we were taken over by private equity and we turned the company around and, we're profitable now. And we're also taking a look at a lot of the brands in the portfolio.

And we look at our adventure network. There's great, you know, brands there like Powder Magazine and Surfer Magazine and Skateboarder that have loyal followings. And when you start to think about You know, let's take that content and put it everywhere, social platforms, et cetera, because you're right. You know, people potentially won't be coming to web, traditional websites in the future, but then also experiential type stuff.

Once you become a brand, then you can start to ideate on that and go, let's do events. Let's do surfer events. You know, surfers for the longest time been reading surfer magazine and back in the day they did events. Why did that stop? Let's revisit that. Athlon, is known for a periodical that did, the NFL, draft. let's do Draft Day. and, you know, make that be a brand experience for users and invite advertisers to it. have celebrities to it. you know, old players and such.

and really design that where you're providing the content for it, but that's content that's a module that can go anywhere. Johanna,

Johanna

Yeah,

Brian

Johanna, how do you think about that? I mean, with if for a lot of publishers, I feel like the page is not going to be the main monetization driver or do

Johanna

sophisticated. Yeah, I would disagree with that, actually. And it was quite interesting listening to Jen and Lisa, and we kind of talked about this in our prep call as well, but, I think publishers fall sort of two sides of the coin. Either they're investing in building out their own technology products versus relying on, you know, like a double verifier is obviously brand safety is becoming such a huge topic.

But when advertisers are relying on working with companies that basically do a really good job protecting brands against brand safety, but the publisher knows their content way better than anybody else. So why not build? Your own technology that's going to do a better job of doing that, versus relying on some of the bigger tech platforms. So when it comes to video, I think it's the same thing. If you're able to have a seamless video experience

Jason

kind of I guess hit

Johanna

I guess hit the bar, meet the bar of what TikTok is doing,

Jason

then

Johanna

not leverage that and build a really good experience for, for the user? I think with video in particular. It was always a very difficult format because you have things such as streaming

Jason

and

Johanna

bandwidth and, you know, loading issues. so I guess, you know, at Xco, that's what we've doubled down on and how, how do we give publishers the best tech that's going to give the user a very seamless video experience where there's no buffering, the right ad, the right user, the right content experience, basically.

Brian

I, I'll be interested in, in this, if we assume that we are entering this more with less zero, right. And, and obviously AI is, is here and, and it's, it's gonna, it's not going away.

Jason

quotes, by the

Brian

is is where Well, you know, it's used,

Jason

Sure, it's thrown around, so.

Brian

a little bit

Johanna

year of mobile.

Jason

exactly.

Brian

but, it's only Wednesday

Johanna

But

Brian

But what I, what I end up, I end up like wondering is, you know, there's, it's always build by partner, right? When it comes to like tech and how that equation changes for publishers. Because, you know, we talked about this. You got to make tough choices, right? So I think a lot of publishers, I think some publishers will become, you know,

Johanna

a BV to

Brian

ways, not a B2B in an audience, but be suppliers, and just, just be like, you know what, we're going to take, we're not going to do any of it. And we're just going to supply to the people who, I mean, you see with like perplexes, like we're just going to be, we can be a supplier. And I think that's a path, right? I think, you know, you're,

Jason

We're really good at creating content and that's what we're going to do and you get content and you get content and you yeah

Brian

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, it's a valid strategy. I don't know if it's, it's obviously not right for, for all brands, but how do you see that, that, you know, people making like those decisions? Cause every, every path has trade offs.

Johanna

I would be sort of a bit cynical in that sense of I think it depends on

Jason

it depends on What stage?

Johanna

The business itself,

Jason

do they have capital

Johanna

capital to be able to invest in their own technology?

Brian

Yeah. Nobody's talking to me about their fancy CMSs anymore. I, I don't know.

Jason

publishers

Johanna

are definitely under duress. either, you know, you're very strapped and you're outsourcing

Brian

Yeah.

Jason

Which is mostly the case. or, you know, or you're

Johanna

owned by a, you know, a bigger, a bigger company that has deep pockets. And I think you're going to be more on the sort of build side, for

Jason

the things that are endemic and natural to your cause. Like this is one thing that we did at CBS and we're replicating at the arena group. When we came in at CBS, we were making 4 in revenue and 6 in costs. Like it was all upside down bill. And we were building our own tech, built our own ad server, order management system, forecasting

Johanna

engine, It's like building your own

Jason

you're not an ad tech company. And you're not even a public, media company, you're nestled up underneath, you know, the bosom of, of CBS. So once we realized, you know, who we were, we, we're a premium content company. And when you start to

Johanna

identify, you start to we're not our

Jason

your identity, exactly. Then you can start to ID it on things like product that we should invest in, like CTV, you know, and that's how we came to be the first 24 7, 364 News app with CBS News, CBS All Access, creating a subs product. Because that's where we knew the future of consumption was going to be. I, I think you have to stop making it complicated. You have to boil it down and go, what am I? And then you ideate on that.

And when you ideate on that, you come up with ideas like you're talking about. Take that premium content and distribute it in all the places that people are consuming

Johanna

it. But

Brian

But what do you end up not, not investing in? Because, I mean, you have to, I mean, we talked about hard choices. Give me, couple examples of, of,

Jason

I think that you don't invest in certain things like, certain technology components like, you mentioned CMS. CMS is a great example. It's very easy for a company to go, Oh, well we're publishing

Johanna

content. So why not build my

Jason

We should

Johanna

have the thing that controls but also why reinvent the wheel.

Jason

Right. But where does that end? Right? And it doesn't. And then the next thing you know, you kind of look at it and go. Oh, well, that was ridiculous, and we spent a ton of money on that. print, you know, we kind of took a look at some of the traditional print stuff we had at Sports Illustrated, which was one of the problems with that brand. when we looked at it from, you know, a business perspective, i. e. making money, that was hemorrhaging money, right?

And that's something that we shouldn't support that anymore. That's silly. let's not do that. so I think, you know, stuff like that is kind of anecdotal

Brian

so I think, you know,

Jason

the user experience.

Brian

that is kind of anecdotal examples. It's

Jason

around CDPs. When you start to, we're saying audience, audience, audience, audience. So, let's unpack some of the things that you invest in. CDPs is an area that we're investing in. I think those things are very relevant for publishers now. They've been relevant for marketers for years. Now publishers need to lean into those. we're going to build LLMs.

If you think about it, publishers come and do click actions on sites, whether they're reading a thousand, five thousand articles, to your point, that's going to go away slowly, but watching videos, understanding metadata.

E commerce, understanding those click actions, all of that information, storing that, and then, you know, doing LLM models on top of it to do smart user pathing to go, oh, just like we were talking about earlier, they need to go here, they need to go there, they need, that's something that a publisher should invest in.

Now, there's licensing that comes along with that, we're not going to build our own CDP, we're going to license that, But there's certain things like, you know, CRM, data scientists and the such that you should invest in. And that's more human, powered capital than it is building technology. It's the people that know how to

Johanna

use the

Jason

technology, architect the databases. Schemas, building those message buses back and forth, you know, in those databases. But I think people that understand data and know how to use it and present that for a more elegant, user experience, to your point, is the winning recipe, I

Brian

up becoming almost like a general contractor when it comes to technology? Yeah. You know, and how the things like link together. So how does, I have to ask the AI question. Sorry,

Johanna

it's okay. Go for it.

Brian

it's illegal. I'm legally obligated to

Johanna

ask.

Brian

ask. because I wonder, cause I get, I think in a lot of conversations I have, things are changing so much, right. And that can be that, that's scary and maybe exciting. but it could also lead to some like paralysis, right. Because you don't even know what to build, right.

Jason

to

Brian

You see the advances that are happening, seemingly weekly, not daily, and, it could be a little bit paralyzing. what, how do you think, whatever is to come with this AI era, how does that impact, how publishers think about,

Johanna

I mean, this is

Brian

Well, I mean, there's look, we focus a lot on the search side, the distribution side, et cetera, and like a lot of stuff's out of your control at the end of the day. but you can control, you know, your own strategy and how, and how you react to that. so how do you see AI changing, this sort of decision making that publishers are making with what to build? Yeah,

Johanna

what to build. Yeah, we talked a little bit about this in terms of doesn't make it easier for publishers to build their own tech to a degree, potentially,

Brian

being like, you know,

Johanna

of course, but I think

Jason

with

Johanna

I, it can be used for so many different things, right? It can be used to Automate it can be used to scale. It can be used to, I guess, become more efficient as a business. Is

Brian

But is that where you see, both you see the biggest impact, the positive impact for publishers, right? I think a lot of times it's viewed as a threat, and that's because, there's, it's reality, that, that there are a lot of negative implications.

Johanna

I think you have to jump on the opportunity.

Jason

Yeah, I, I, I agree. As with, as

Johanna

with, you know, the way this, so I used to sort of be more on the influencer marketing side. Yeah. back in

Jason

in 2010

Johanna

YouTube was just becoming a format, brands were not working with, you know, influencers. We had to do a huge education piece. Now that's

Jason

Now

Johanna

arguably. all that you see on the La Quisette is you know, influencer activations. Exactly.

Brian

athletes. A lot of tall

Jason

think that aren't making any

Johanna

of tall people should have worn my

Jason

think with AI It's going to be one

Johanna

more of these sort of fundamental shifts

Jason

in the way that

Johanna

the

Jason

internet

Johanna

works, if

Jason

that makes sense.

Johanna

and I think we have to jump on it. So, at least on the Xco side, we've doubled down on the optimization or yield side. we've always been very supply side focused, so how do we give tools to publishers

Jason

to help them

Johanna

leverage their cohorts and make them more competitive? There's a lot of technology on

Jason

the advertiser

Johanna

side, to what you said earlier of them having all this data and understanding the users, but the publishers weren't looking at it in

Brian

Well that's always been the challenge, right? I mean, it feels like, particularly with audience data, like, yeah.

Jason

think with AI,

Johanna

AI you can do a lot of clever things where in the past you probably have to hire a significant amount of data scientists. Yeah,

Jason

scientists.

Johanna

ops people in

Jason

And that doesn't, and that doesn't scale. It

Johanna

It doesn't scale,

Jason

got us in the problem that we're in. We've leaned into, sorry,

Brian

No, no, no. Go ahead. Because I wanna get into the internal question 'cause I think one of the questions with the more, with less and when it meets with AI is how do you use it to be more efficient? I don't mean

Johanna

like, try to

Jason

the analysis parallel is saying that you brought up is important. No, but I think that it's, so a couple of different things.

Johanna

Analysis paralysis is definitely

Jason

And stop doing stupid things. Right? But,

Brian

Usually a good strategic

Jason

yeah. yeah. Don't, don't

Johanna

make stupid decisions. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Sounds easier said

Jason

I mean, we lean into, so let's go back to understanding your KPIs and analysis paralysis.

Once you understand your KPIs, you can, and your operating levers, there shouldn't be more than like 20 or so, but there's one golden KPI, but then the levers that move that KPI and you start ideating around that and that should take you down a path of You know, having a list of things that you want to work on, and then you cut that list down to more than five things, like, all of those institutional things to streamline stuff. But once it starts getting complicated, you have to cut that out.

You have to laser focus everybody on, we need to extend sessions on our site, okay? How do we do that? What are the product ideas around that vertical video, isn't that, okay, let's write that one down. And you start writing those ideas down, and then you know the things that you can get done in a quarter. Okay. or six months. and then you invest in those things. So that's how we look at it.

A. I. From an efficiency perspective, we look at the operation side and, you know, I'm sorry, but like people that fear certain things that That's like the accountant fearing, Excel back in

Johanna

the 80s. Or like

Jason

that that's going to take my job. No, it's a tool. It's a tool. And the smart accountants that knew how to do, you know, the pivot tables and the joins

Johanna

and all of that Only had to

Jason

that were more

Johanna

hours a day versus 24 basically.

Jason

and they had a better work experience, and their clients had a better experience as a byproduct of that. It's the same thing with you know, at Operations we do order to cash, automations, and we lean in those technologies, built a company around that, Jiffy, that ultimately takes the order to cash paradigm, that last mile for digital media publishers, especially

Johanna

in the direct side,

Jason

You have an insertion order that comes in on a PDF. You have to take that information, you have to put that in the order management system, the CRM, and the ad server. The same information, and we expect human beings to do this job? It's a terrible job. Terrible. That's absolutely something that should be automated. doing, creative checking, you know, on a site and screenshotting and sending that to a client. A human being still does that job. That's something that can be fully automated.

So you have to look at the positive applications in the use case that can make your business, A, more efficient and your workers

Brian

does that job. That's something that you can't automate it. So you have to look at the positive applications and use cases that can make your business, A, more efficient and your workers happier.

Jason

those

Brian

Those of us like on the, you know, the, the laptop class, we love automation when it, when it, it, it hits, you know, more analog world of you know, it's like factories and, and, you know, with globalization, we're like, yeah, well, that's just how the economy works. And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden the technology that comes after like the laptop

Johanna

let's stop. But

Jason

but let's slow it down a second. Yeah, wait a second.

Brian

but yeah, I mean, it's inevitable. I

Jason

in my

Johanna

Not in my backyard.

Brian

on all sides of the media industry, there's just, I would love to know a global figure of, of how much money actually goes towards transferring data from one system to another system. So

Johanna

I I mean, I won't, I won't name the event and who the person was, but I heard, so obviously on sort of like the news side, the brand safety and allow lists and block lists is a huge topic and nobody knows how to get on or off

Jason

It's set and forget.

Johanna

but

Jason

so, A 25 year old sets it, and then they forget it, and then you wonder why your campaign

Johanna

know, what's fascinating is. basically a senior agency exec said one of her biggest pain points is the fact that for each campaign and brand, they have a different obviously set up in six different DSPs, each DSP in each brand has a different allow list and block list that somebody manually has to go and update in basically six different systems

Jason

per client.

Brian

get

Johanna

And that's why you never get off a block list, because nobody even knows in what system or what list where it actually lives. So that's, that's, that's an

Jason

played on. That is what they mean by that

Johanna

And they probably,

Jason

oh, don't worry about

Johanna

100 100 emails per day. Like, Hey, I think I may be on a block list and nobody, we have

Jason

a problem. yeah.

Brian

I will, I will obscure the publisher name, but a very prominent business publisher was handed a 4, 000 term block list in which, in which they, their

Johanna

Should ask AI to try to write an article with that, without using one of those words.

Brian

That literal name of the publication is

Jason

with. Well, we've had a client in the past group black. I mean, think about that. This is the DDI category. Black Lives Matter was blocked on a black owned media site. Well, yeah, they're covering that, but they're not covering that in a hate speech

Johanna

nobody's taking words off. Right. They're only adding.

Jason

correct. And that, but that prohibits, you know, somebody wants to invest in a D I campaign to run on a, you know, a black owned site like that prohibits them from running on there because they had a block on that the entire time. There does need to be a better process. And automation can be applied to that as well. for sure. But I think that that's a easy problem to fix that we should.

Johanna

Right. Right. I think AI could do a lot with that

Jason

So what are the

Brian

So what are the hardest problems to fix?

Johanna

that. Yeah, which sounds really

Jason

throwing a ton of human capital against it, to, to do it, to start it in the first place, but then they forget it. Yeah. So you need to apply technology to then fix that. I think some of the harder problems are, so from a digital media publisher perspective, Google Chrome's, sorry, Google, Core update, Ground kind of shifted. You were just quoting numbers at the top of that.

So to bring it alpha to Omega We're investing a ton in our audience teams to understand that fully How should we rearchitect all of our sites which we are doing? But again, it's all about brand if you look at that core update, you know They even take it down to the level of understanding pronoun usage At a hyper local level. and so I'll use this as an example of a sports site. So a sports site. so we have Athlon. It's the same model as like SI. So we have National Desk.

And then we have local desks. And on the local side, because we can only scale so many writers so much, we strike partnerships with people that are in those local markets. Dallascowboys. com, denverbroncos. com, atlantabraves. com, and put those on the subdomain, where we tap into those guys for what their expertise are. They're editors. They're there. They're on the scene. I was here. I was hanging out in the Dodger locker room. We went over to the Dodger game and covered this.

It's like the nuanced level. The new, the new, core updates love that. Because that's something that's relevant. It shows investment. It shows relevancy for the users. Which is going to equal a better user experience. But those are things that you have to invest in. in order to

Brian

Well, that's why I like, sort of, I don't know. I go back and forth over like things like coupons gate because, on the one hand, look, it's a dot, I mean, like I understand it, you know, you set up a sub domain, they supply, it goes straight to the bottom line. it left, I was told like at one dinner, like a publisher lost a 7 million hole in their balance sheet. I mean, that's tough. And then they're going to. appeal to, to, to Google, which is also, I think

Johanna

the, the sort of

Brian

of just hiding behind the algorithm, the fact that like you have to go in person to appeal. and then the meeting

Jason

Yeah, shocker.

Brian

but at the same time, like I understand, like publishers have respond, responded to incentives in the market and those incentives have been set up by, by the people on the beaches at the end of the day. And then the blaming, The, the publishers are responding to the

Johanna

they set

Jason

Yeah, that You set up. Why are you doing that? It's it's the game that you, you set the terms of the game.

Brian

yeah. So, I mean, that's

Jason

That's like passing Go and Monopoly and going, you are mad at me for passing Go? I thought we

Johanna

we were supposed to pass go. Those were the rules.

Jason

right? Yeah,

Brian

and, you know, I don't know, there's a lot of intergalactic battles going on between technology giants and, and governments and, and there are things that publishers really can't

Johanna

impact on.

Jason

can, and you shouldn't get distracted by that. Like you should understand the outputs of those things because those are tectonic, like shocks to the, and it can impact your business. But just understand those things once they, once they settle, how can it impact your business? Develop your strategy and then laser focus on executing on that strategy like we

Johanna

we talked about. I think agility so learning to become more agile businesses.

Brian

Yeah.

Johanna

I think historically media companies are quite set in their ways terms of processes or sort of just Quarterly planning or annual

Jason

think you have

Johanna

I think you have to be more

Brian

it's underrated how conservative, it's small. C.

Johanna

know, things can be on board large. We on board large premium publishers and

Jason

that process.

Johanna

You know, sometimes it's one developer that needs to put one piece of code. It can take months. so I think agility and being a little bit more opportunistic rather than sort of, I guess, fear. fear mongering around

Jason

the changes that,

Johanna

you know, we've talked about the cookie going away for the last,

Brian

mongering, don't

Johanna

yeah,

Jason

away. yeah. well he's got us covered. But no, but gone are the days of fear driven organizations being overly conservative, And building, you know, fiefdoms and the such and creating bureaucracies. This era that we're entering in is the anti, exactly.

Brian

Yeah.

Jason

Create bureaucracy at your peril. Yeah,

Brian

it's going to break a lot of that. I feel like, because I mean, there's just some crazy stuff that still exists. you know, like a big newspaper, you know, they, you know, commerce, you know, they set up a commerce operation and they're fighting like the newsroom says, ah, you can't do the, you can't do the credit card reviews. do you know what kind of bounties, like a credit card?

what was it like, but our personal finance team, you know, does that as part, and it's like you, you can't afford that

Jason

By the way, if they knew more about value, if everybody rallied inside that publisher around revenue per session, And that's the golden god. It doesn't matter if you're an editor and your words are beautiful and everything that you write is amazing. Well, we know that that's how they have viewed it. But you have to understand value. And get rid of the conch shell. Look at data. And let that be your guide. And get rid of all that bureaucracy.

Because when you do that, a lot of that silly behavior goes away.

Brian

and get

Johanna

use your words beautifully, by the way.

Jason

Yeah. he does. very much. Yeah, exactly

Brian

because when you do that,

Johanna

You

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