Condé Nast CEO Explains Why Human Journalism Wins in the AI Era

This is our full conversation with Roger Lynch, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss why trusted media brands like Vogue and The New Yorker may become even more valuable in the AI era, how Condé Nast is adapting to the collapse of search traffic and the rise of AI-generated content, why Roger believes publishers should stop relying on Google for distribution, and how the company is thinking about subscriptions, events, branded content, creators, and the future of journalism as platforms like Substack, TikTok, and AI reshape the media industry. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  We have the perfect guy to ask about this.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  I don't know who's gonna comment on any of this, but we can certainly try and ask him about it, because we have Roger Lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast, with us here in the TBP in Ultra Dom. Roger, great to see you again. How you doing?

• 0:16Speaker 02

  I'm alright.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  For those, I mean, we were hanging out last week, but for those who don't know, introduce yourself. Let's go a little bit back in time, take us on your journey, and then we can get into all the hot topics in media.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, I've been CEO of Conde Nast for seven years, but prior to that, I spent my whole career really in technology.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  And primarily a fantastic guitarist.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. That was my life's ambition.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  That was an incredible performance. It's a little bit of just lore, I guess, but we can get into hobbies and things outside business. But yeah, take us back. What was the first job in media? How did you get to where you were?

• 0:55Speaker 02

  First job in media?

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that's a good place to start.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it depends on how you define media. Really, I spent my career at the intersection of technology and media. So, the first company that I ran was a broadband business. It was one of the first broadband businesses in Europe, going back to 1999. And literally, one of the first things we did is we did a deal with the NFL to stream live NFL games in 1999.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much demand was there for NFL in Europe at that time?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Well, the reason the NFL was interested in it, this is back when Paul Tigley, who was the commissioner, he came over to announce this, you know, crazy idea that we had, was they were trying to build the NFL in Europe.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're like, I hear people love football over there. Why aren't we, why aren't we making money?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Why isn't it our football? They had, I think it was a team called the Amsterdam Admirals at the time. There's a European Football League that they're trying to promote. And, you know, broadband was a really interesting technology, and I was really... Excited to see how it could be used to change how people consume content. And that's why we did that, that deal. And then I started an IPTV company, first video on demand IPTV and then Sling TV, streaming TV. So always sort of at the intersection of technology and media or content. Then I ran Pandora, the first company I ran that I didn't start.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  I loved Pandora.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Pandora, Pandora is truly, when I think of magical, when I think of magical, when I think of magical technology experiences in my childhood, I think of Pandora. I think of being in my garage with my dad, we'd be like playing pool, listening to music.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I found so many obscure songs on Pandora, it's amazing. Was there some sort of unique opportunity with Pandora around treating it like a radio station? So because it feels like there was some sort of licensing deal on the back end that was not the same as Spotify or iTunes Store at that time where.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Right.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the trade off, I mean, I remember, I must have been, I must have been intuitively at the time, I was like, okay, this is a fair trade off. Like, I'm used to going to iTunes and going to pay 99 cents, or I can just kind of like roll the dice, maybe I'll get my, maybe I'll get my favorite song on Pandora. So I found myself on Pandora a lot.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Pandora took advantage of some rights that allowed them, compulsory rights, allowed them to stream all of that content. And, but, you know, one of the trade offs was you couldn't choose the song.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  And so they did launch a subscription, this is before, long before I joined, subscription service, but we're late for that game. They were quite late for that game. By that time Spotify already had a very strong presence and some of the other big tech companies were getting into it. But you, you mentioned AI. I mean, to me, one of the key things with Pandora was the way it combined sort of human taste with AI. So we had a team of musicologists and one of the, you know, you mentioned, I've been a guitar player all my life, one of the best parts of that job is they were all fantastic musicians. So we do these company events and we'd play all the time and these guys were so, and they were mostly men, were so good. But then we had the data scientists also, and they would take the work that the musicologist

• 4:08Speaker 02

  did and create their machine learning algorithms around that. And each of the algorithms, they had, I can't remember, 90 or so algorithms, each one would get tuned for every individual listener. So it'd be weighted a little bit more Jordy likes this, John's like this. And so it creates a personalized experience and to me, you know, I still listen to Pandora. I also listen to Spotify. But when I want something, just to put something on and let it play, I'll go to Pandora because I think those algorithms still outperform.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we talked to this, the new co-see of Spotify, but like the, that AI driven feature, the promptable playlist is just coming to Spotify like this year. And I'm sure it's souped up and powerful and stuff, but it is, it is remarkable how long that like internet radio lasted. These things have long, these things have long lives. I'm wondering about your view on durability in media generally. It feels like anytime that there's some platform shift, there's endless think pieces about legacy media is dead, linear TV is dead, this is dead. Everyone loves to talk about that.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  But in your experience, how does, how does the media industry actually change as technology arrives?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  You know, the media industry is, has a history of not changing quickly enough. And you can start with the music industry, you know, music, recorded music industry peaked in 1999. And then, you know, Napster.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  And that's sales revenue.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and recorded, recorded, recorded music industry.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we found out like last week or the week before that vinyl record sales are like something like 10% of streaming revenue, which sounds.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  So vinyl records, so that's an interesting trend to talk about. But, but what the music industry did or didn't do is, and this is one of the big mistakes and you know, like most lessons that you learn, you learn the biggest lessons from your mistakes. What the music industry didn't do is look at how their customers were behaving and say, "Okay, let me craft my business around that." They said, "No, I don't like that behavior. I'm going to change the behavior. Let me sue these teenagers in Iowa who are downloading music, or sue the ISPs or their parents or whatever, so I could change the behavior back, because I really like it when they buy CDs. That's really good for my business." That was disastrous for the industry.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  So finally, once they had embraced downloads and then streaming, it started growing again. It's only just gotten back to the size it was in 1999, 27 years later.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  There's more people, and people still like music just as much as they did before.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Of course, but they fought it for far too long, and it's a mistake. Vinyl records have grown every year for the last 18 years, and sales of vinyl records, and it was, it used to be people my age buying vinyl records and collecting them. Now there is many people in their 20s buying them as there are people in their 50s or 60s buying them. A lot of people in their 20s don't even own a record player, but they buy the vinyl records. There's an interesting trend, and we see it a bit in our industry too, like young people buying physical magazines.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  It's like, why? Well, I think it's a search for authenticity. I think when you have so much

• 7:28John Coogan?

  I've got the paper right here.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Digital content that is in your pocket, and it's all free or free to consume, it becomes less valuable and maybe less authentic to you.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's something that's always been missing from like part of the experience of being a music fan, to never actually go and trade your dollars. Like, I think people do like to vote with their dollars and express their interests and actually have this physical embodiment of their taste.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Well, they're doing it with live music now. That's where the money has gone. The money has, you know, really moved to live. It used to be, you know, in the 90s and 80s and everything, people would go on tour to support their record sales, and now it's the reverse. You release a record, so you can go on tour and sell tickets.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  And it feels like the in-person events stadiums are getting, like the CapEx is just skyrocketing across the sphere. SoFi Stadium here in Los Angeles, there's like more and more ways to draw people in with like ever larger spectacles and these like shelling points where like, "Did you see Taylor Swift in the Eras Tour? Like, that was a key moment that even like the casual fans needed to find."

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  So after Pandora, talk about the journey into Conde Nast.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was You know, I wasn't at Pandora very long because we sold it to Sirius XM. Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next and I was fortunate enough to be in process in four different companies. Two were in New York, two in LA, where we're from, LA. So LA had a lot of attractions for us. And I was flying back and forth between New York and LA and having trouble deciding what I wanted to do. And my wife was like, usually you're so decisive. It's like, I know, it's really tough. And then I finally realized on one of these flights, that when I'm sitting here, I had all the information on all these companies. Every time I'd go to the Conde Nast information, I wanted to read about that. And it was like, and that's literally how I made my decision. Like, that's the most intellectually

• 9:24Speaker 02

  interesting to me. I'm going to go do that. So, and I, but there were a couple of criteria I was, I had for what I did next. One was, I still liked the intersection of content and technology and distribution models. Yeah. But, non-exclusive content was going to be dominated by big tech companies. You know, music. Sure. Films, TV, whatever. The stuff that I had been doing, it had all been non-exclusive. Like, I wanted to go somewhere where we had our own content, we had our own brands, we could control our distribution more. And so that was certainly one of the criteria. But also, still the opportunity to innovate around technology, how you use technology to create new business models, distribution models. And, you know, Conde Nast really fit that well. Yeah.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there is, it's interesting, I mean, we've talked about this a ton, because, you know, thinking about all the new categories of media, which we joked about, we put out this really like unhinged market map of, of media as a joke. And then unfortunately, people, we like called ourselves Neo Traditional Media, which was a joke. And then now people will tell us and be like, you guys are a pioneer of Neo Trad Media. We're like, we created that category as a joke. But, but something that we've come back to over and over is just the value of these legacy brands that have been built across decades and how,

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  you know, take away like the business models and how those are evolving, like it just seems like the value of a Vanity Fair or a Vogue or The New Yorker are shockingly durable because we're just, you can make more of these kind of properties, but you need decades, right? And And so I'm wondering your strategy around kind of how you think about counter positioning these brands against the content that is flowing so freely across.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  You're referring to the trough.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  What's that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the trough of social media apps. But yeah, but yeah, like even, you know, I've also talked about the the challenges with Substack around certain stories. Substack, if you're an individual selling a subscription, it wants, it will reward people that publish multiple times a week that sell a subscription. And yet there's so many stories that take months to tell. There's great stories out there that you'd want somebody writing, spending a year on it.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Seymour Hersh is not going to break the MyLion massacre on some.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so there's this opportunity of like the value of brands and curators that that is maintained. And we're not creating, we are like, again, I would say we're creating new iconic media brands, but it'll take, you know, 20, 30 years, right? It's just you cannot do it overnight. And then how these things can operate as platforms where there are a lot of super talented writers that shouldn't be trying to publish every single week because their calling is to publish maybe once a month or even once a quarter at different points, right? And finding, finding those lanes. So I'm curious about how you're thinking about the role of the different brands under Conde Nast and, you know, counter positioning against platforms like traditional social media or Substack.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Look, I think you bring up a really good point about Substack in particular, which is it is a great platform for certain creators.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  And if you are, if you want to be on that bit of a hamster wheel, meaning, but it may not feel like an hamster wheel to a lot of people. They love to publish content multiple times a week. That's great. It's a great platform for that. If you want to spend six months, 12 months, deeply researching something, and Substack is not the medium for that. It won't reward that behavior. The New Yorker is.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  You know? It really is. And that's, and we get rewarded for that by our subscribers. When we come out with these really deeply researched investigative pieces that, you know, we have a huge army of fact checkers at The New Yorker that comb through every single word in that, so that when it is published, it has really, really been thoroughly fact checked. When we publish that, we see the numbers spike on subscriptions. Our subscribers reward us for that type of journalism in a way that I don't think works so well with Substack. Other things work really, really well with Substack.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, that said, there's been, there's been, you know, we, we're, we cover tech primarily, so we've seen a lot of people from tech leave the sort of like brands or platforms to go to Substack. And some of the, some of the times they come out and they're just scooping every single day and it's, it's amazing. But more often than not, I'm like, I actually wish that at least a few of you guys would go to one company and I could subscribe to you and you weren't feeling this pressure.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  And, and I don't actually want, like, for a lot of people, I'm like, I think you, selling ads is a waste of your time. You should just be writing, right? And a lot of them feel that. And then the hamster wheel thing, I was talking to, you know, really big Substacker yesterday, and they were feeling that. They were like, I don't, I don't want to publish every day, right? But you built a business around that and then you're sort of like trapped to this business model. So, so anyways, I think we're gonna, I've, I've said it, I think in this, in this age of AI, in this age of slop and sort of like ultra-fast media, I believe that being a true journalist, being a reporter, being a writer is only gonna, I think it was always

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  relatively high status, but I think it will even go up and up and up over.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  And become more valuable.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's more valuable. It's like, we want people that are doing original journalism, fact finding, it's so essential. And then also, yeah, just, just spending, spending the time. I mean, we're, we're sort of a symptom of the internet, right? We make ultra-fast content, right? I don't expect people to watch. Most of any of the shows from last week, right? Maybe there's some interviews that are sort of durable. But the majority of the commentary, it's just, it's comes and goes, right? We expect people to watch it in the 24 or 48 hours that we create it. But there's so much content that I think about, you know, sitting down on a, on a Saturday. Where I'm like, well, maybe I want to read, I have limited time. Maybe I want to read something that somebody put six months into.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Look, I think it's important to know what you're good at and take advantage of that. And not try to be something that you're not good at. And you guys are really good at exactly what you just described. And so you've made the most of that and you've attracted a really important audience. And it's really worked for you in a business model. For us, to try to chase that would be to move away from what we're really good at. And try to become something different. And I agree with you. I think where, you know, with, with the amount of AI-generated content or low-quality content that is being flooded into the market, that only, I think, accrues to the benefit of companies that can really stand out from that. And so, don't try to be that. Like, I always tell our, you know, we're going to always have human-created content.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  First of all, I think it's what our, I know it's what our audiences expect and want. Secondly, we have no competitive advantage over just creating AI-generated content. There's, that doesn't leverage any of the advantages we have. And so, knowing what your advantages are, competitive and, and really building upon that, I think is always important in any business. And for the industry changes that are happening right now, I think there's real value in it. Because unfortunately, there's going to be fewer places that can do that. Because the ones that are more marginal may not survive the changes that are happening. And, uh, and, you know, our brands have been really thriving in it.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  What is, uh, how do you compare your philosophy of running like a house of brands versus, let's say, an LVMH? Is there similarities, differences? What, what is the, uh, philosophy?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I, when I first joined, I spent a lot of time talking to those companies to try to understand how they were organized. Because one of the things I had to figure out is what I wanted to do with the way we were structured. Because we were structured very differently. We were, um, really a loose collection of companies all around the world. Every country operated entirely independently from every other country.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, it was crazy.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  There was no technology collaboration. There was no, they competed, literally. I remember literally three weeks into the job. I'm start traveling, I go to Milan.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  You know, I'm trying to visit all our different offices and I get a call from my assistant like, you know, some of the team in Milan is upset you're not visiting. I'm like, I'm in the office, I'm here visiting.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Wrong office.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  I found out we had seven offices. Conde Nast US had an office, or Conde Nast Russia had an office, Conde Nast France had an office, all in Milan.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Because of course they couldn't be in the same office because they were competitors.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  So, a lot of changes to make in that model. But, but look, actually, it was a great strategy when the company was a print publication business. It worked by definition. Conde Nast became a very big, successful company following that strategy. But it was not the right strategy for the internet age and a digital age and, you know, how, and how audiences had changed. Audiences moved from, oh, I read my local, you know, newspaper or my local content to, I want to see what's, you know, happening around the world. I want to consume content from Korea or China or Sweden or Israel or wherever.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Much more cosmopolitan in their approach to how they consume content. And, uh, and so really we use that as a guidepost to say, okay, how should we structure ourselves? And just, you know, question everything about, you know, how we organize ourself. And even the culture of the company, which was very, very territorial and fiefdom-based, to, to what it is today, which is much more collaborative.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  So obviously, plenty of efficiencies across the portfolio geographically. Uh, the brands are power law driven, right? You have a few brands that drive the vast majority of the revenue. Have you been in a portfolio expansion period or a portfolio contraction period? Is there a benefit to going more focused around the, the tent pole brands? Or do you want to expand further? How are you seeing like the?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  What we find is, you know, certainly our largest, most important brands,

• 19:47Speaker 02

  have done very well in this, you know, like Vogue is our largest brand.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Vogue has grown every year I've been at the company. It grows revenue, grows profitability every year. And, thank you. It is good news. And, um, And you know, The New Yorker also, The New Yorker just had its most successful year ever by a long shot. Those brands, whatever's happening with search algorithms or AI, they seem to just be able to rise above it.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  We have smaller niche brands, Pitchfork, a music brand, very small, 1% of our revenue. But it has a very strong loyal audience in the category that it covers. It's doing very well. And so there's this sort of barbell effect that's happening, at least within our portfolio. And then we have some that are in the middle that are impacted more. Either they don't have as strong authority in the category, or they're a little too broad that they don't go deep enough in a specific category.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were just talking about BuzzFeed and it felt like for a long time it fell into that category of, you know, decent sized audience, but ultimately built on a shaky ground of another platform without that really strong core audience that would stick around through thick and thin.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about talent identification, going with sort of discovered talent, let's say a writer who's established that already has a following versus somebody who has a lot of potential, but maybe hasn't had a breakout moment yet? And then the same thing with executives?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, for writers, we're a great home for the best journalists in the world. In part because, you know, I wouldn't have thought this was a necessary competitive advantage several years ago, but it is today, which is that we're not impacted by political influence. We're not under the FCC's thumb. We don't have licenses that they need. We're not trying to buy Warner Discovery and need merger approval. And so, and we're owned by a family who's owned Cunnings for seven decades. That, you know, I've been at the company now seven years and not once have they ever called to interfere with anything we do. Therefore, I don't need to do that with our editors.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  We can just hire the best editors and stay out of their way and let them do their job the best. So that is very attractive to journalists because they know when they come to our company, they're not going to get a call from the CEO or the board or whatever about, why'd you say those things about this advertiser or whatever it is? No, the journalism comes first and will always come first. So that helps us attract very established writers, but at the same time, we also

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Are a great place for people earlier in their career to learn because they can learn from the best. So we always try to make sure that we're recruiting really high potential new journalists into the company as well as, you know, the best external. In terms of executives, you know, other than Anna Wintour, every other executive has turned over since I joined the company, every single one.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  And I did most of it immediately and two reasons. One, if you want to effect culture change, change people. Change people that don't reflect the culture that you want to have. And when I got to Conde Nast, I felt like this is not the culture. There were great things about the culture, you know, the focus on excellence, really, really deep at the company. But there are other aspects of it, very internally competitive and political that I didn't like. And I just decided, I'm going to, I want to create the culture of a company that I want to work in. So let me find people who think similarly about, about the importance of culture. And then secondly, because, you know, we were

• 23:34Speaker 02

  going from like in the US, it was a, had its own CEO, it was a separate company from the rest of the world. It was very focused on the US market. I wanted people who had much more global perspective and global experience. And so the skill set I wanted to be broader than, than what the company had traditionally had.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, probably 2018, this idea of like content to commerce, incredibly popular. And even by the time we were starting this show.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  You're thinking New Yorker protein powder. When's it coming?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Love that. But even when we were starting this show, a lot of people said, wow, you have this audience of, you know, entrepreneurs, why don't you build your own software and, you know, spin out software companies or develop stuff internally? And we said, with what hours in the day are we going to do that? And why, why would we deserve to win over a team that is, you know, entirely dedicated to a certain problem? Where has content to commerce worked within Conde Nast? And where have you experimented or avoided it?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  You know, the, if you think about from an advertiser perspective, the reason advertisers have always come to Conde Nast is the influence that we have with audiences, right? That, you know, whether it's fashion or travel or home, you know, it's, it's, it's the influence that we have. Now, You know, that was very, very true in the print era. It's very true today. But they also have many more avenues to reach audiences than they used to. So for us, when we look at commerce, we think that ability to influence audiences certainly exists even more than before because of how much larger our reach is.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  And so we can use that, maybe not to create the New Yorker protein powder, but to sell fashion, to sell travel. And so we've been investing in commerce, but not creating our own products, per se.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Partnerships.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, in partnerships. And that also has grown every year. And we announced, it'll be launching soon, an initiative we announced last year called Vet, which is really at the intersection of, you know, certainly e-commerce growth, social commerce in particular, and the creator economy. And so what Vet is, you know, we have relationships with all the luxury fashion companies. We're using those relationships, creating a marketplace commerce platform that then creators can use to connect with their audiences. And so we'll be working with initially a small number of real tastemakers in fashion and then using the relationships and the technology we've built

• 26:17Speaker 02

  to create this creator marketplace called Vet.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  How do you think about journalists becoming influencers? Can be great, develop their own audience, and then that draws more people into their stories when they do have something to publish. Double edged sword, because if they leave, they have an audience that might sign up on day one. They might say something that doesn't necessarily represent the views of the publication. There's sort of, you know, some organizations have gone back and forth on it, either saying, "Everyone needs to be posting on Instagram every day", to "You can never post on Instagram any day." How have you toyed with that or dealt with that tension throughout your career?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  You know, because we have, you know, as you said, a house of brands. Our brands are very different. So, you know, a journalist for The New Yorker may be very different than a journalist for Vogue in their approach to that question. So, you know, we don't... Have hard and fast rules that we

• 27:13John Coogan?

  So no one size fits all?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Definitely not one size fits all, but we do know that journalists that are able to build profiles for themselves tend to be good for business. So we certainly support that.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Got it. I want to talk about events.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Are events more power law driven? Do you want to like raise the long tail of events? Do more events and try and elevate to something where there's a Met Gala happening every week? Or something? I don't know. Where does the event strategy go?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Events for us are one of the fastest growing parts of our business. But not because we're just doing more and more events. We're actually doing fewer events than when I started. We're doing fewer events, but we're focusing on events that really are what we call cultural moments. Met Gala is a great example of that. Met Gala was last Monday.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  You know, in the first seven days, I just saw the numbers last night, we had 3.1 billion video views of the content we created.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  It is. It was up, I don't know, 60% over last year.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  And isn't a lot of it like off the record too? Like there aren't necessarily, I've never seen like, you can't just livestream it. You can't watch what happens inside. Or like there aren't like microphones on the dinner tables.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  We do a livestream of the red carpet.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's even a limit in terms of what you're sharing.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  The livestream had 200 million people tune in to view it.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  So every year we do the Met Gala.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  It just grows at a level that's hard to believe. And we finish it and we go, oh my God, how are we ever going to exceed that next year? And then it grows 65% again the next year.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  And it was the same thing for the Oscar party, venue or Oscar party this year. 65% growth year over year.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Remarkable.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  So I think we found a playbook on that, but it's not a playbook where you can say, oh, great. Let's just do one a week.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  You can't create cultural moments like that. What you can do, what we found is doing fewer and doing them at very high quality.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  And make them global events. Like the Met Gala is a global phenomenon now.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  In a way that it wasn't, you know, seven years ago when I joined, it was an important, very important, you know, event that people in the US knew about. And, you know, people in the fashion community around the world knew.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  But by bringing the company together.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Into one organization. Now, all of our brands globally promote it, promote the live stream and the content from it. And that's really helped elevate it to become now a global cultural moment.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Help me, I don't know how much you'll be able to say here, but help me understand why BuzzFeed is worth something like 120 million.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  No, 240. About half the company for 120.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, half the company?

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, revenues declining, decent, you know, run rating 60 million a year of losses. I would guess aging audience. Do you have any idea where the, where the value is?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Well, look, the only thing I read about that is there was like 20 million dollars going into it.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Oh, I thought it was 120.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  There's a valuation of that, but there's, there's a stage, you guys may have read about that.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, yeah, yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  But, look, I can't speak to specifics of that business. That was a business that did very well. They were very innovative around a different era of the internet and you could take search traffic and social media traffic and turn it into commerce dollars or other things.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  That era is gone.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Why?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Why?

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what killed that era? Like, people are still spending time on social media, they're still searching on Google, and yet publishers have not been able to monetize traffic or generate traffic from the activity.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  My thing is like, I look at BuzzFeed as like, you know, I, I look at Conde Nast, this is like luxury media. That is what, that, that's my personal view on it. It's like, this is the LVMH of media and BuzzFeed was like a fast fashion.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Just say you've never been to the BuzzFeed Gala.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Think about, it's really interesting. We, we did this for a board meeting about six months ago. Took a snapshot of search results from, I don't know, seven or eight years ago.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  And what you saw were, you know, a few sponsored links and then the 10 blue, you know.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  The traditional search page.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Do the same search term today, you get an AI overview.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  And then you get sponsored stuff.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  Somebody last week was saying, how is search revenue up? I was like, have you, have you done a search recently?

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  I basically have to go to the second page to get an organic result.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  It's been good for Google.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been great. It's been great. Great for business.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  If you're a publisher, you've, you've gone to the same page.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  So if you were, if you had a business that relied on that

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  to arbitrage that traffic to sell whatever, that business got very, very difficult.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  So, you know, in, look, the changes in search traffic have certainly impacted our business, but not to the point that we haven't been able to grow our revenues and grow our profitability. But it's a headwind.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  But, you know, last year, so, you know, each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, we'd put some forecasts in of search traffic declining. You know, why? Just because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally, those algorithm changes were negative, had negative impacts. So we're going to forecast it to be down. And then every year, it was down more than we forecast.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So last year, I told our teams, assume there's no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  But we, you know,

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Don't bank on it.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  We expect it to be a single digit percentage of our traffic. Very low. So we started working on plans for each of our brands around that. And some of the brands we looked at said, hmm, they don't really have a good plan for that. So we're going to reprioritize the ones that do. And, uh, but if, you know, if you don't have those paths forward, you know, and if you don't have really strong authoritative brands or brands have very strong niche in certain areas or direct audiences, then you're just going to be fighting that all the way down.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Talk about subscriptions, bundles, uh, subscription pricing in a time when we have little spurts of inflation here and there. How important has that been? How resilient has the subscriber model been? What are you seeing there?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  You know, it's, um, it's a, it's a very important part of our revenue stream. But, you know, our Digital subscriptions grew 29% last year revenue.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And, you know, they're growing double-digit percentages this year. So it's a really important growth area of our business.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  And we're launching more digital subscriptions for more brands like Pitchfork, small brand just launched a subscription earlier this year. Tattler, another small brand in the UK, launched it. But, you know, our big brands, The New Yorker, you know, very, very strong growth. Vogue is showing incredible growth in digital subscriptions. So that's, that's an area that's important to impress. And we think we've built up some really good capabilities, both on the technology side, but then also on just the people capability side, too.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then do subscribers get stuck in a mentality of I pay a certain amount and they're resistant to a price adjustment in a time of inflation? Or is there some price elasticity there?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  You know, we have, we have raised prices on subscriptions fairly materially over the last couple of years.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, each year we think, okay, we're raising the price. We're gonna, the retention is gonna go down. And actually, the retention has gone, gotten better every single year.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  So the elasticity looks pretty good.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  For us so far.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some ways, you know, and we're the biggest fans of independent creators on Substack and other newsletter platforms. Like, we, we really, we have a lot of them on the show. We subscribe to a lot of them. But in some, in some ways, they're helping your, your guys' like pricing dynamic.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, well, I want $20 a month for my newsletter that publishes, you know, twice a week. And I just kind of like write what I'm thinking. And you guys are like, well, we're gonna give you, you know, all of these stories and all of this like video and images and, and, you know, these deeply researched stories. And so your product or a subscription for one of the brands starts to look like incredible value, because you're like the alternative. My dollars are gonna go way less far with an independent creator in terms of a volume of stories. Now, you don't get the same dynamic that they have, which people just like to support independent writers and content creators. That's a part of it. It's just you enjoy saying, putting, you know, kind of helping somebody be in business.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  But I think that's an interesting dynamic.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the further niche-ification of media?

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, these are already not niche publications, but they have a category, Vogue, GQ, right? There's a, there's a theme to the, to the product. And what we've been tracking over the last couple of years is that the internet native media properties, the creators have been able to find even smaller niches. So we've talked to someone who just does, you know, car reviews or just does.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Car dealership.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Car dealership, the car dealership guy was a good example of like, that, that would not be a national magazine, but he's made a business work there. And I'm wondering if there's opportunity for more niching or if there's value in not over niching a product and how you're thinking about, because you see all these niches and you think, okay, maybe there's a roll up strategy or maybe there's some sort of, you know, synergy between them, but that's already sort of playing out on the platform in the sense that like YouTube is making money from both Doug DiMuro reviewing every car and the car dealership guy talking about the dealer side of the automotive industry. And these are separate from an automotive magazine that might sort of in previous era address both sides.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  You know, I think where publications can get hurt is if they're caught in the middle.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  If you, if you try to be too broad, too large of an audience, this is not the era for that.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  You know, five years ago, maybe that worked, but, but not today. You either need to be large and authoritative in a big category.

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Vogue, good example.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Or Architectural Digest.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yes. Or Conny Ash Traveler would be another one. Or you need to be really nailing a specific niche where you have a loyal audience that's willing to pay. And, and, you know, ad supported only, tough. That's, that's, if, if you are, if you have a brand where you're investing in the journalism, if you have to make significant investments in journalism, supporting that just with advertising is, is a tough place to be. But if you've got, you know, Really content that people are willing to pay for then, but to do that, don't get caught in the middle.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  It's a place to be.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  Devil wear Prada's, the devil wears Prada too, box office hit. Do you expect that to be a pretty major catalyst for, for Vogue?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's actually, it's actually been a catalyst for Kanye and Ast broadly. You know, the, obviously the movie is, you know, based on Anna Wintor and the company is based on Kanye and Ast and, but, you know, I was, I was talking to our chief revenue officer a couple of weeks ago and like, you know, we had a really good first quarter. We exceeded budget and second quarter was looking strong. And I asked her like, you know, what's driving the strength? And she's stopped for a minute and she said, the movie. And I said, what?

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Like that's driving even other brands said, I think there's just more interest in Kanye and Ast in general. Now, I think it's more than just that, but you know, I think the, the movie has created a lot of intrigue and, and it's been fun.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  I imagine it's good for hiring, but can you zoom out and talk a little bit about the hiring pipeline? There's so much uncertainty in the job market. Should you become a software engineer or there're going to be no software engineers? AI can write stuff, but can't really do investigative journalism, but there's still a lot of anxiety. Like, how are you seeing the next crop of great journalists develop right now?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Or advice that you give to like new grads who want to work at Kanye and Ast?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we, we hire journalists and we hire software engineers.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  And it's, it's, it's different.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  And everything in between business and finance and legal.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Look, you know, I, I remember my mom, growing up, she always said, there's always room at the top, right? And it was good advice. Like if you can be at the best of what you're doing, there's always going to be room for you.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Moms have the best.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  That's so good.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  So for us, you know, journalists who really excel, I think they'll always have a home. You know, in terms of software engineers, you know, we, we.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  We brought in a new head of product and technology, really fortuitously in December. And December was, really, you guys covered this very well. Agent Melman. A step function change. Yep. And so when he started, you know, I told him, you need to question everything we do. Start with a blank sheet of paper, rethink everything that we're doing, how we do it, and how we can use AI. And the first thing he did is he started some small pilots, three or four people on a team, eliminating certain roles that would have been on a much bigger team, to create new products. And he ran the pilot six or eight weeks and like there was enough information already, where he said, okay, let's go make big changes now.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  And so we just, you know, last month, made big changes in that in that org, really centered around how we use AI at the core of not our content, but how we develop technology and products. So, you know, the result of that is there were whole departments that we no longer needed. Like, we used to have a, it might be a team of 10 or 12 people on a big project. When you have that big of a team, you need a technical project manager, you need QA engineers, you need, you know, product analysts and all these other things. Well, we just redesigned it and said, actually, you have a product manager and they're going to be the product analyst also. Maybe there's a designer and there's an engineer and we're

• 41:39Speaker 02

  going to have AI create the software and also do the QA of it. And so these teams that were 10 or 12 people became three or four people and they moved at three times the speed. So what does that mean if you're a software engineer? It means there's going to be fewer jobs are entered, without a doubt, fewer jobs, for now. But, like, if you're a product manager, you can do things that you could never do before because you could actually create the code yourself.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Using AI.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and Conde Nast is a unique company because you guys don't sell technology, you sell content. And so you want to make great technology to serve the content, but it's not the core, that's not the thing that you sell. Whereas, yeah, we've noticed something is that we basically, we hired a full-time software engineer. Early in the company, Tyler, sitting over there.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Tyler.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  And we're, uh, we're the kind of employer that never would have hired a software engineer historically because for a small podcast at the time, why would you?

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Build software?

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why would you build custom software? And so there's job creation happening by companies that never made sense to hire software engineers, but now they can.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about, I, I imagine that, uh, at almost all the publications, there's essentially no AI doing writing or, or creative work, but, uh, how, have you had to confront anything on the advertising side? Like, I imagine if I flip over the back of the New Yorker, I'm sure I've seen a 3D render of a watch at some point. Will I be seeing an AI render of a watch?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Very, uh.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Does that matter? Does anyone care?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  It matters. What, you know, last June.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  There was an ad that was run in Vogue, print magazine. And the ad used an AI-generated model.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  And it blew up.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  But people who are angry, they were angry a little bit at the advertiser.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  They're mostly angry at Vogue.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  And I loved it. I thought it was fantastic because it reaffirmed what I had hoped was going to be the case, which is our audiences want human-generated content.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  They want to know what they're reading and seeing is real and not AI-generated.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  So to me, that was a really important indicator of frankly, our future, that our future strategy about using AI in many, many places to drive efficiency, to reach audiences faster, speed up the velocity of what we do, all to enable us to invest more in human-generated content. That that was a really.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very, especially clothing is really interesting. There's a slippery slope where, let's say you generate, you know, you have a, a real piece of clothing and you say, put this on this, you know, even if it's a real model, but put this on this model. And then what happens if like, you know, you could just prompt it and say, make, make it fit, uh, like slightly different. It's like, well, then now that you're, that's not the product that you're selling.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Right.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  You're now selling a product that doesn't really exist anywhere. So there's certain, uh, certain, certain categories that I think will.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  And just, yeah, it'll be a brand decision. And I think, um, ultimately that, that is why.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  That is why I think your brands will endure because there will be plenty that make the opposite decision. We're going to lean into it, but there's always, there's always room at each end of the barbell.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  So lots of care with regard to AI advertising. Zooming out, are, are ads a bug or a feature? If I open up a copy of Vogue?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Well, in a print magazine, it's absolutely a feature.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, without a doubt. I think for, for digital, it can be both.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  You know, programmatic display ads may be more of a bug than a feature.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  But, you know, really high quality.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  It's just, it really, it, uh, it's mostly the visual disruption of like, I'm reading this like beautiful story. I actually like integrated sort of a native ad from the publisher that was, you know, considered, but anything that becomes, you know, display ads, just the...

• 45:47Speaker 02

  So our biggest advertising category is branded content.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  And it's, it's great because it, it, it leverages a big competitive advantage we have. Our brands, our audiences, but our creativity. And so that's a, that to me is a, is a really great place to be in our business and to see the growth of that every year. You know, of course we have display ads, we have print ads, some of which can be branded content. A lot of video, video ads.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Anything else, Jordy?

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  No, this was fantastic.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  Really glad this worked.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Uh, we'll, we'll wrap the show right now. Uh, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sure. Goodbye.