Welcome to People vs Algorithms #79.
I look for patterns in media, business and culture. My POV is informed by 30 years of leadership in media and advertising businesses.
Sometimes it’s nice to read in the browser.
DDM's Neil Vogel on Navigating Change. Out Thursday, 8am EST.
Truthfully, I am getting bored of talking about what the internet and publishing look like next, but I am never bored of chatting with Neil Vogel, CEO of DotDash Meredith.
We had him join the podcast this week. It was a terrific conversation.
Neil is never afraid to talk his book hard, a quality I both rib him about and admire. He does it articulately and with conviction. If there is a voice for the publishing resistance, I vote for Neil.
Though we joked about the song referenced in the post title (a wonderful ditty from New Zealand’s The Beths, “Expert in a dying field”). Neil was undaunted:
Maybe we're wrong and maybe in the long term, this isn't a business, but I would bet on brands, real quality scale, real product people who care about and delivering a really valuable audience for people who need it, then you have got a chance. And that's all we've done is put ourselves in the game to have a chance…
And like, I wish there was a magic bullet, we could do it over and over again, but it's not, it's just work and probably more work. But the one thing I would say that really finally kicked in and Troy, we had lunch a bit ago and we talked about this is, I think we finally managed to unlock the best of DotDash, which is a company that is by no means a technology company, but a company that understands how technology works… with Meredith, which had these incredible brands. And what we were able to do is say, all right, using our technology savvy, we're able to understand what form content needs to take wherever it's going to live—on Apple News, on an O&O, in a magazine, on TikTok, on Instagram, on Pinterest—and be very, very comfortable that each one of those things is gonna be totally different. We learned so much about brands, which we sucked at.
He also is pretty direct about the cultural challenges:
I'm convinced your job as a leader of these organizations is to beat the sentimentality out of them. Because people who are creatives, like me included, you guys included, you fall in love with what you're doing, particularly when it's successful. But you have to be really, really willing to not do something that worked because you need to do something different that might work….
It's a value system. You have to get a value system in a publisher of people willing to take educated chances, as opposed to like do more of the same and spin faster...
We go through all this annual planning, which we just did for all of our verticals and all of our brands. And if people didn't have two or three big ideas to at least take a shot at with some resources, it was like, do it again.
If you're an evergreen publisher and you get all your revenue from various sources, like articles that are pretty old, it is very tempting to say, let's just update those articles. Let's write a couple of new ones. We're going to get half our travel from Google and the rest is going to come from all these other places and we'll be totally fine. Let's just do that faster.
Like if we did that, we would be dead.
And frankly, we were late to Tik Tok. I think we've done a good job catching up. We've crushed Instagram. We've absolutely missed YouTube completely, which is a big opportunity for us now to catch up there.
In the end, you have brands and systems and people who shape the output of those brands daily to meet the audience’s needs, inside of a massively dynamic distribution system. There’s never been more pressure to make it work reliably. Modern media, broadly speaking, kinda looks like this diagram:
Digital favors Aggregators like Google, Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, ChatGPT. They are hegemonic and, with AI, threaten to get more so. Few of the Aggregated, achieve Aggregator status and move to the right.
Vertically, we have the modern competitive reality of media Professionals vs the “people”. You don’t have to look hard to see this tension. Neilsen’s January numbers showed just how powerful the people can be, even on old fashioned TV sets. January marked the 12th consecutive month of YouTube as top streaming service, with 8.6% of TV viewing—a daily average of 1 billion streamed hours. A 2023 study suggests 61% of GenZ prefer UGC over other content formats.
Needless to say, the top left quadrant, Aggregator + Professional, is under a lot of pressure, especially in lifestyle media. It’s good to watch Neil and the team at DDM fight to find a path…/ Troy