Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan

Hey! Nilay here. It’s conference season, so I’m traveling across the country and around the world a lot more than usual. Stay tuned for some very special Decoder episodes we have coming up soon, starting on Monday. In the meantime, I wanted to share a conversation between my friend Peter Kafka and Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on the excellent Channels podcast. Lynch says he’s told his teams to assume that traffic will be zero from now on — that’s what I’ve been calling Google Zero. Roger also shares his thoughts on AI, the growing influence of the creator economy, and more. Links: Channels with Peter Kafka | Apple Podcasts Condé Nast CEO: Plan As If Search Traffic Will Be Zero | Search Engine Journal Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of search, and what’s happening to the web | Decoder Google Zero is here — now what? | Decoder Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ | The Verge Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hey, everybody. It's Neelai. It's conference season, so I'm traveling across the country and around the world a lot more than usual. I'm out this week, but stay tuned for some very special Decoder episodes we have coming up soon, starting on Monday. In the meantime, I wanted to share this conversation between my friend Peter Kafka and Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch on Peter's podcast Channels. Lynch has been outspoken about traffic from Google Search declining every single year. He said he's now told teams at Conde Nast to assume that Google traffic will be zero from now on. That's what I've been calling Google Zero for several years now. And you might recall that I just asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai about Lynch's comments during our recent interview. Sundar has always disagreed with me that Google Zero is real, but I thought you all might be interested to hear Peter and Roger talk about it directly.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  You'll also hear Roger talk about AI, the growing influence of the creator economy and more in this excellent conversation. Okay, here's Peter Kafka interviewing Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch on Channels. Enjoy.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we are talking about running the last remaining magazine empire with Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch. Except I just looked at the transcript of this chat and Lynch only used the word "magazine" once. These days, he thinks of Conde, which for decades was the world's most prestigious magazine publisher, probably still is, as a portfolio brands that shows up all kinds of places: on the web, obviously, on TikTok, and at movie theaters, and at the mega glamorous Met Ball. So in this conversation, we skipped the question I normally ask magazine people,

• 3:23Speaker 05

  which is something like, hey, what the hell is a magazine in 2026 anyways? When we move on to other topics like, what's it like to be the subject of one of the most popular movies in the world? What's it like to run a media business when Google stops sending you traffic? And who's going to replace Anna Wintour and David Remnick, perhaps the two most influential editors in the world? And where is that shortlist? Spoiler: Lynch does not tell me where the list is. But you're going to like this interview, anyway. Here's me talking to Conde Nast's Roger Lynch. Roger Lynch, welcome to Channels.

• 3:59Speaker 06

  Thank you, Peter. Good to see you.

• 4:00Speaker 05

  You are talking to me from LA. Very show busy of you. Speaking of showbiz, you guys just finished the Met Gala. I think it's an enormously successful project for you.

• 4:11Speaker 06

  It is, yes.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  It's it's showbiz, it is commerce, it's philanthropy, it's a ton of celebrity, some controversy. It also seems like the most sort of obvious expression of Conde Nast as a company today. Is that a fair summation?

• 4:30Speaker 06

  I think it's I think it's right, and I think it also showcases what we do best, which is Create cultural moments. So, you know, events has been a strategy for us, as it is for many media companies. But for us, our events are really around creating cultural moments that really break through the zeitgeist and search algorithms or whatever's happening in sort of the, you know, the headwinds of the media industry. Nothing holds back big cultural moments like the Met Gala.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  How do you measure success for a big cultural moment? At some point, you're a business, so you're trying to make money from it. You're also raising money for the Met, but it's a, it's a big, it's a big dollars and cents event for you as well. Is that the most important thing? Is the reception it gets online most important? How do you, how do you measure it?

• 5:18Speaker 06

  Look, you know, that event in particular, it's, it's different for each event. For that event in particular, it starts with the Met, right? That is a fundraiser, and this year was immensely successful for the Costume Institute and the Met, and also the inauguration of the Conde Nast Galleries that, that we did the ribbon cutting for the morning of the Met Gala. From an audience standpoint, every year, it surpasses our goals. And we, we finished the Met and we go, how could we ever do anything like that? And then it grows another 50 or 60% the following year. So, you know, last year, I don't know, we had a little over 2 billion total video views of the content we produce around the

• 6:02Speaker 06

  Met. This year, it was 3.1 billion, another 50-something percent increase year over year.

• 6:07Speaker 05

  Does that tell you you're getting better at, at making the content? Or is there, is this audience getting bigger for this stuff?

• 6:14Speaker 06

  You know, I think, I think that in the earlier years for me, when I, when I joined, I think we had a lot of room to improve in the content that we created around the event itself. The event itself was spectacular, but how Conde Nast covered it and created content around it, there was opportunity for improvement on that. And I think, you know, we, we have done a, I think the team has done a fantastic job. Really increasing the quality and the creativity of the output around it. I think then what compounds on that is that the intrigue around this event just seems to grow every year. And yes, you mentioned this year there's some controversy. That's fine. That's actually good.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  Let's spell out the controversy. It's Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Seines. We're sponsors and curators of the event. This event's always been tied to extreme wealth. You've always had benefactors working with you on this project. Were you surprised at the blowback controversy you got from the Bezos's involvement?

• 7:14Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, to be clear, their involvement was in support of the Met, the museum, and the Costume Institute, and the money that they gave went to the museum. So, look, I think there's a lot of reasons you can criticize extreme wealth and, you know, people will criticize what they... But to actually criticize them for donating money to a cultural institution, to me, was a bit off-base.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  But were you surprised when you... Because this is going to be a regular feature going forward, as long as you're working on this. You're going to have people like the Bezos's who want to be involved, and they're going to pony up a lot of money. Will that give you any pause, like, oh, do I want to deal with this? Or are you okay saying, yeah, these things come with attendant controversy, and that's okay?

• 7:56Speaker 06

  That's okay.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  Well put. Let's zoom out a little bit and just talk about Conde as a business. You came in in 2019. It's a privately-held magazine publisher. In 2019, the future for privately-held magazine companies didn't look great. What's the best way to sum up what you have done during your tenure there?

• 8:20Speaker 06

  Well, I had the distinct advantage of not knowing anything about the business and not having grown up in the publishing industry. So it enabled me to come in and question everything. And... The first thing I questioned was how we were structured. We were structured, you know, first as two separate companies. There was an international business with its own CEO and a US business. And they really acted like competitors in every way possible, including the editors competing with each other. There was so much internal competition, we had no time to focus on external. Even every country around the world where we operate, and we're a very global company, operated completely independently from each other. And you know what?

• 9:04Speaker 06

  That, I think, was probably a good strategy for many, many decades. It made Conde Nast into a very large, successful global publishing company.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  Whole series of fiefdoms, and then people were proud of the fiefdom nature.

• 9:14Speaker 06

  They were, they were, and very, very protective. And, but, you know, what I came in and looked at is like, okay, I can understand why, in a print magazine business, why that was a successful strategy. But the world has changed. The opportunity for us going forward is really about connecting with audiences in new and different ways, using technology certainly. And also, audiences have changed, maybe in part because of technology, but if you just look at how cosmopolitan people have become in terms of their content consumption, when, you know, some of the most popular shows you may watch come out of Sweden, or Korea, Israel, wherever.

• 9:57Speaker 06

  And when I, when I first joined, I started looking at the data about where our visitors were coming from each of our websites. And there was something that really struck me, which is, you know, wherever you went around the world, and you looked at the data of our websites, about 40% of the traffic was coming from outside of that country. So, you know, my first listening tour, three or four weeks into joining Conde Nast, you know, I'm meeting with editors around the world, and I heard, you know, sort of a similar story, which is, you know, oh, audiences in Italy only care about Italian culture and content, they don't care about what happens, or same as France. And I'd always ask, well, then explain this. You know, why does 40% of the traffic to the sites here come from outside of the country?

• 10:42Speaker 06

  And the reverse is. True, which is we have a huge audience from France or Italy going to our sites elsewhere around the country. It's because they are interested in it. We're just not organized in a way to present the content to them the way they want to consume.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  And by the way, some of your employees still tell me that this culture, the former culture is important. And by by globalizing things and sort of consolidating brands globally and having shared resources for some of these companies, that you're missing out on what makes a particular title unique and how they do speak to their core audience and whatever, whether it's geographic or demographic and and that mushing this stuff together has been a detriment, even though you're going to say it's successful.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  Well, the first thing I would say is I'll never be someone who just admits that everything we've done is perfect and is right. I think you can always learn and what I told our teams when we made all the editorial changes now four or five years ago. The first thing I told them was assume we got it wrong. Go figure out where we got it wrong and let's make adjustments, but don't assume we got everything right and wait till, you know, we learned a lesson a year from now. Figure it out now. Figure out what we got wrong, what adjustments we need to make. And there'll always be that case. We'll always be making adjustments to try to figure it out. And some of those adjustments, you know, it's different brand by brand. If you take a brand like Wired,

• 12:05Speaker 06

  you know, technology is more global, you know, the interests, the factors that influence our lives through technology is more global in nature. Something like Vogue, there's an element of global fashion, but then local markets, whether it's Japan, China, India, very strong local culture and local fashion. So there's not a one size fits all for any of our brands. You have to you have to adjust your assumptions based on that brand and the local markets. So I do feel like. We have largely got it right and you know the results have been you know we've taken our largest brand Vogue it has grown every year that I've been at the company and

• 12:46Speaker 06

  its profitability continues to grow its reach grows and it's more successful than it's ever been under my tenure so.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  So overall the the business is profitable which wasn't always the case um increasing profitability revenue is basically where it was in 2021 if you were a public company people would be very upset with you but you're not a public company you're owned by the Newhouse family is is sort of flat revenue and increasing profitability is that what they want out of out of this company?

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Well I think if you look at what we we have revenue streams that have declined structurally and revenue that has grown and and they you know coming in to the company I came into print advertising print you know subscription newsstand revenues that was just going to decline we knew that and that was by far the majority of the revenue when I joined so the real trick wasn't to change the trajectory of that because that wasn't going to change it was to develop new revenue streams at a fast rate so that you can offset the decline that was going to happen in the legacy business and we've done that and so

• 14:00Speaker 06

  if you look at you know our big growth areas certainly digital subscriptions you know that grew 29% last year I think there are not many companies that wouldn't be thrilled to have 29% growth in digital subscription revenue or events you know we talked we started the conversation today about events our event strategy has really paid off and every year these big 10 pull events grow more than we expect so if you look at last year our big 10 pull events last year grew about 50% revenue year on year huge and these are not small revenue activities for us this year our events so far are up 60% over last year which was

• 14:42Speaker 06

  up 50% over the year before so those strategies around leaning into digital subscriptions or our commerce business or our events business has really paid dividends for us.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  But I guess what I'm asking is, are your owners okay if you come back to them and say, at the end of this year, say, "Listen, our revenue didn't increase much, or we're still where we were in 2021. We've had some declining businesses. I've replaced them with growing businesses, and you, the new house family, you get to enjoy X percent more profits." Is that a win for them and for you?

• 15:13Speaker 06

  Well, let's be clear. Our revenue is growing. Our revenue grew last year, and our revenue already this year is growing again. So we do have growing revenue.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Okay. So it's, do you think you are gonna, if we look at the chart, right, and you're still sort of where you were in 2020, you went down from 2021 and now back up to 2021 rates. I guess what I'm saying is, is the expectation that you're gonna surpass where you were at 2021 at some point, or is this sort of the level you're gonna be at?

• 15:39Speaker 06

  Oh, no, we're definitely surpassing. Our business is gonna continue to grow.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  You think it is reasonable to grow revenue and profitability?

• 15:46Speaker 06

  Definitely, because the, you know, the trajectory that we had to overcome was, again, the majority of the revenue of the company when I joined being print, advertising, and print subscription newsstands as a declining business. It's a small minority of our revenue today, because all of these other revenue areas have been growing, and they grow every year. And so now they've surpassed the decline in the traditional business, and they're only gonna continue to grow. So our revenue will continue to grow, because these new streams like digital subscriptions and commerce and events and all of that are growing, you know, at double-digit rates.

• 16:22Speaker 05

  And if we go back to 2019, does this look like the company you imagined? You were taking over and were going to transform. Is this where you thought you'd end up?

• 16:31Speaker 06

  You know, I knew that we had some big challenges, and frankly, that's what attracted me to this. I, you know, like really big challenges. I like transformation. I like connecting the dots and strategies and then going executing against it. The thing I knew is that there was gonna be a big, messy transformation, just in terms of the structure of the company, and that, and that those changes were gonna be cultural as much as they were organizational, and that we were gonna need to do a lot of innovation around creating new businesses and revenue streams. But what gave me hope that we had that opportunity was the strength of our brands. And so the number one thing for me when I was considering whether to

• 17:13Speaker 06

  take this job was to try to understand, were our brands becoming

• 17:21Speaker 06

  More connected with audiences or less? And so I asked for a lot of data on that. I wanted to see principally around digital platforms. And what I really quickly realized is they're definitely becoming more connected with audiences. We're growing audiences and therefore, okay, what we have is really a business model problem that is very solvable.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait. It is because the traditional line, as you know, for every company going through analog to digital is you're trading your analog dollars for digital dimes, pennies, whatever it is. And so it's a business problem that has really bedeviled just about every media company.

• 18:01Speaker 06

  That's true. But Peter, when I joined, it's been widely reported that the company was losing money and not a small amount of money. And today, we're profitable.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 06

  And when I joined, we were majority print revenue, and today, we're majority digital.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  Right. What I'm saying is when you said this is a solvable business problem, now you can point back and say, yeah, we solved it. But in 2019, you had that same level of confidence that we're going to figure this out, where most people have not?

• 18:25Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah, I did. I knew it would be tough, but I knew we'd figure it out.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, most of, I mean, your peers don't really exist anymore. It used to be Conde Nast and Time Inc. And Time Inc. doesn't exist. It's been chopped up and renamed a bunch of places. A lot of the, most, I think, of all the digital brands that we're going to challenge the Conde Nast of the world. I just wrote about basically the end of BuzzFeed yesterday. Vice has gone bankrupt. Vox Media, who makes this podcast, is splitting itself up as we talk. So I guess what I'm saying is you did a good job. If you can sit here and say, yeah, it has, we have grown revenue, we've grown profitability while other folks have been falling down. Not really a question, I guess. I guess that's a compliment.

• 19:07Speaker 06

  I'll just say thank you.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  You're welcome. We'll be right back with Conde Nast's Roger Lynch. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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• 20:45Speaker 05

  And we're back. You mentioned cultural stuff inside the company. I was going back and listening to our 2021 conversation in the pandemic, sort of post George Floyd reckoning, and this was a period where a lot of companies, and particularly media companies, had found their staff very upset with management. And you guys had had to let go of a teen Vogue editor that you'd hired because the staff didn't want to work with her because of her bad tweets. When you look back at that time, that sort of pandemic 2020-22 era, do you feel like

• 21:26Speaker 05

  at any point you sort of overcorrected to accommodate staff? It seems now that the cultural pendulum has swung a lot, and a lot of the stuff that people were complaining about in 2020, 2021 aren't things they would at least voice publicly now. I'm wondering if you look back in that era and go, hmm, maybe I overdid it.

• 21:46Speaker 06

  Well, it really hit us in 2020 and it started right around the time when George Floyd was murdered. And I knew when I joined that we had a lot of cultural issues to deal with. And, you know, one of the first things that I did, again, because we had all these separate businesses around the world, there was no one company, there was no one even executive team. I wanted to try to find some things that I could get this newly, what was about to be combined company focused on, some global initiatives. And it can't be like, we're going to be profitable. We're going to, like, that's not inspiring.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  But what I found talking to our employees was they were really interested in a couple areas. One, what are we doing on diversity? And two, what about sustainability? So I thought, great, these are really two really important issues for us to work on. And what we can do is even in advance of changing all the org structures or the, you know, how we do our editorial, I can create teams from around the world of employees who are really vested in this to help advise the company and help drive forward progress in these areas. So that work resulted in a diversity report and goals that we set in 2020.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  And so we were, by the time this hit us, we were already had a lot of work underway. And, but it was, it was work that we needed because I think the company, you know, was, was not showing up well in these areas. And so, do I think we overcorrected? No, I don't think we overcorrected. I think we had a lot of room for improvement and I think we seized the moment. And, and so today, when you see so many companies abandoning these efforts, you know, we just, last month, published our diversity report again and we showed the progress that we make. And as I stood up in front of our company last month at our company meeting, I said, look, this is a core value of the company and it's discouraging to see all these other companies.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  You know, dropping these initiatives, but it only says one thing, that it never was a core value, it was a convenience. For us, it's a core value and it is a source of competitive advantage for us now.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  You know, I'll talk to people who run media companies who said they were interested in diversity and now literally can't say that out loud because the FCC might come after them or they might get some other kind of blowback in the Trump 2.0 era. And they'll say, this is as important to me as it ever was, I just need to phrase it differently. I just can't come out and say, literally can't say diversity, I can't say any part of diversity, equity and inclusion. Do you have sympathy for the folks who are running media companies who think they're doing the right thing but can't say that out loud?

• 24:35Speaker 06

  Look, I think there's a couple of categories of companies that have backed away from the commitments they made. One is companies that are under threat from our own federal government and the FCC. I certainly have sympathy for the threats that they face. I wish more of them were willing to stand up because I do believe that the fears that they have are overblown in terms of what the government can really do. There are other companies that just abandoned them because the winds changed. I have no sympathy for them, none whatsoever.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  Do you feel like you can make that assessment from the outside, go, oh, these people never believed that they were just saying it and these people do mean it?

• 25:18Speaker 06

  Well, I think that companies that aren't under the type of political pressure that you mentioned earlier, who abandoned these, it just says one thing, it was never really a core value. It was a response to a moment. And the thing, one of the things I'm most proud of with our company is that we've retained it as a core value and we report on our progress every year and every year we make progress. And we have publicly stated goals and we track ourselves to those goals. And I think our employees really appreciate it. And as I said, with fewer and fewer companies doing that, it puts us in a position of, I think, great competitive advantage.

• 25:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this. You brought up this idea that you guys have not been buffeted by the Trump, the second Trump administration like other media companies. And you said, look, you know, we don't, we don't have a Warner Brothers deal to get through the FCC. We don't have this issue, we don't have that issue.

• 26:13Speaker 05

  You know, certainly, there's an audience, people that I work with who like hearing that, but I'm wondering why you make a point of bringing that up in public. Who is, you've talked about it in a couple of different settings. What is the point of you saying that out loud? Who is the audience for that?

• 26:28Speaker 06

  The audience is our own employees and our future employees. You know, we have a talent brand that is very important to us. And I think if you're a journalist today, I always tell our employees, our journalists, that right now, there's fewer and fewer places where you can practice your best work without, you know, being either impacted directly by the government or by the ownership group or whatever. This is one of them. That is a source of competitive advantage. In the seven years I've been at the company, not once has our owners, have our owners or our board come to me and said, hey, don't publish

• 27:10Speaker 06

  this, don't publish that. And therefore, not once have I done that to our editors. Because we have the best editors in the world. And the way to keep the best editors in the world is to stay out of their way and support them. And I really believe that that is the key to our success. And I'm fortunate that we're owned by a family that believes in that, too. And so, I talk about it publicly because I want people to know, especially journalists who are maybe at places where they don't feel that they have that freedom, that should there be an opportunity to work at Conde Nast, they'd be welcomed here and they would not be interfered with.

• 27:47Speaker 05

  Thank you for that. I really was curious about that. And it leads me to this question. And we talked about this a couple of times before, but now it's a bigger deal than ever. Half of my show is spent interviewing people like you who run media companies, and the other half is spent talking to, we'll just call them creatives. Increasingly, there are people who've left big media companies and created their own business. At the time, it was, the last few times we talked about this, it was mostly theoretical. And now, it's a real thing, and it's happening in a lot of places. And I'm wondering how you think about two different versions of this. One, How do you, how do you work with someone like an Emily Sundberg who's been on this

• 28:30Speaker 05

  show, who has her own center of gravity, but she's very adjacent to a lot of what you guys are doing and very interested in that world? What do you do for either Emily or someone like her to say, hey, you're off on your own and you're successful, but we think you can work with us? What is, what is that pitch like? And the second part of that question is, if you have an Emily Sundberg at Vogue, before she becomes Emily Sundberg, how do you keep her there? Or how do you keep her at Vanity Fair?

• 28:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. Look, I think that these new outlets for creatives or journalists is, are very good. You know, I mean, this is an industry that's been under pressure. There are fewer jobs in it than there were five years ago. That trend you've seen year after year. And so, new outlets and new ways for, for journalists or creatives to be able to develop businesses that can sustain them is, are only good. For us, it does make us think differently about how we, how we operate and how we work with, with, with journalists and creatives. We have to be more creative.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  We have to say, okay, there may be somebody who's got a Substack who is, you know, in an adjacent field that we can work with in some areas and they'll have their Substack and it's not necessarily competitive what we do, but it's not, you know, it's not part of our business and that's okay. And so, I think you'll probably see us do more of that rather than less of that.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  What does work with them look like? Is that you can freelance for us?

• 30:00Speaker 06

  Could be, or they could be writing a column for us, as an example.

• 30:05Speaker 05

  And what, and what is the upside for, I'll just keep saying Emily Sundberg, but she's a generic stand-in here at this point, for them who, who produce their own content, get paid well for it, and are profiled in the New York Times? What is, what is Conde Nast giving them by saying, you can now publish in our outlet too?

• 30:24Speaker 06

  Well, look, I think for them, for most of them, they may have a Substack. Let's take someone like Lachlan Cartwright, you know, at Vanity Fair. You know, he has Breaker, which is his own.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  And he's been on the show.

• 30:37Speaker 06

  A publication, yeah, and it's great. And he does that, but it's a limited audience that he'll reach on his own. It's also working with us at Conde Nast or at Vanity Fair gives him access to a much broader reach audience than he would be able to develop just on his own. So to me, it's a pretty good model to have where you can have somebody as talented as he is and connected as he is, building his own business, but all at the same time collaborating with us in a way that works for both parties.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  And what about the retention idea that, you know, let's say you've got a Lachlan Cartwright on Vanity Fair and he goes, "Oh, wait, I could be making 3X what I make if I go off and do my own Substack and podcast, et cetera." How do you convince them to stick around? Or do you say, "Go off and do your own thing, but we're gonna make some arrangement with you."

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Look, we haven't had a lot of that happen, but, you know, I think that, you know, the unfortunate case with Substack is there aren't that many that really can make a good living doing it. And I think those that do find that also, it is hard work.

• 31:43Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 31:44Speaker 06

  It is, you're constantly having to produce, you're constantly having to think about how you grow your business. And for some people, that's exhilarating and can be very successful, and some it's exhausting. And so I think there's a limit as to how many people will be able to do that in a way that really supports, you know, their lifestyle.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's many more than I thought there were gonna be five, six years ago, but it's still a limited universe.

• 32:13Speaker 06

  I think it is. But again, that doesn't mean there's not an opportunity for them to do that and to work with us in certain ways.

• 32:20Speaker 05

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• 33:54Speaker 05

  And we're back. Talk me through how you're thinking about platforms these days. In the old days, I would say, "What do you think about Facebook? What do you think about Apple News?" I'm still curious about that. But I want to hear you talk about Google and the AI companies. It looks like you are... What? You tell me, because it kind of seems like you're washing your hands of Google, but I'm not sure if that's the case. And you're definitely doing deals with the AI companies. And it seems like in all these cases, the platforms have something to offer you, and there's a lot of risk of being dependent on the platforms.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  You know, the first thing is, start with our audiences. And I've always been a believer in you have to observe what your audience or your customers are doing and try to craft your business model around that. And audiences are on these platforms. And so it's very important for our brands to be where our audiences expect them to be. I think TikTok was a great example of that. When TikTok launched in the US, we saw a growth of Vogue on TikTok, but not by us. Yes, people were producing content under the Vogue name, putting it on TikTok. That was a really strong indication that audiences expected Vogue to be on there. And so we jumped in a big, in a big way. There was no revenue.

• 35:17Speaker 06

  There was no revenue model that we had for this. But it was important, I felt, for us to be there because our audiences expected us to be there. And we'd figure out, you know, that's been the history of the internet. It starts with engagement and then monetization figures itself out later. And that's what's happened with us and TikTok because now we have ways to sell ads around our content and it's become a good business for us. So it starts with where do our audiences expect our brands to be? Let's make sure we're there. Now, your specific questions around AI?

• 35:48Speaker 05

  Well, wait, maybe even before we get to AI though, right? Because it's one thing to say, I want to be on TikTok, or in the old days, it's important for me to be on Facebook, or pick your place, and it makes, that makes sense. There's a difference between that and saying, I'm going to do a commercial deal where, you know, either I'm going to make stuff for the platform and they're going to reward me with traffic, or, or we don't have a commercial deal, but also they're using all my content and not sending me any traffic. I'm wondering how you think through all that.

• 36:15Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Because you do have to be there, but you can also end up just sort of building a business for someone else and getting very little in the way back.

• 36:22Speaker 06

  Always a risk. So. As I mentioned, it starts with the audience. In terms of these platforms, I don't believe that any of these platforms owe us an obligation to send us traffic or customers or audience. I also don't believe that they have the right to use our content to come and compete directly with us. So, you know, if if Google wants to change its search algorithms and and stop sending traffic to publishers, as we've all seen, you know, the amount of traffic that comes to publishers from from search has declined precipitously. That's fine. They can have their business reasons around it. It doesn't give them the right to use our content to then come and compete with us for those audiences. That's the that's the rub there.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  And so for AI, the risk is these AI companies use the content that our journalists create and use it to compete with our core business model. Now, if they want to negotiate with us and enter into license agreements like OpenAI has done, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or Perplexity, fine, then we can come to terms on how that will work. Those that that don't do that, or worse, and frankly, in the case of Google, they tie their scraping of AI content to their search scraping. So Google's been found to be dominant in search.

• 37:48Speaker 06

  They don't let you opt out of scraping your content for AI unless you opt out for search, which is very difficult for a publisher to do. I think that's anti-competitive. I think it's wrong that they that they do that. But, look, these these companies are also our partners. So we can have disagreements in some area of our business and strong alignment in other areas. Again, with Google, you know, we're one of the largest publishers on YouTube. We have a very, very good, strong relationship with YouTube, and it's really core to our business and really important for them, too.

• 38:21Speaker 05

  And you've said Google Search is basically gonna go to zero or something close to that for you, or be, you know, basically stop showing up as referral traffic sooner than later because of the AI summaries they're doing. Google Discover is this hugely important product for publishers that I think most regular people don't know about. That isn't often as big a deal or bigger than Google Search. Are you still working to get your stuff showing up on Google Discover?

• 38:51Speaker 06

  We do get traffic from Google Discover, but it is very different traffic than search. Search is intent-driven traffic. Google Discover traffic doesn't convert for subscription, doesn't convert for commerce. You may be able to sell a few ads around it, but it is far less important.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  And spell out why it's less important.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  Because, you know, if somebody goes to Google and types, you know, Vogue shopping recommendations, there is real clear intent with what they're looking for. If they're going to Google to search for something and they see an article promoted that catches their eye and they click on it, it's much less committed. It's great, you know, we love to get traffic from Google Discover, but that person is much less likely to become a Vogue subscriber, a New Yorker subscriber, or even transact in commerce than someone who shows much more intent through search. So it is not a replacement, even though, you know, we've seen Discover traffic grow as search traffic has declined, that's a bad trade-off.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  When we get off this call, I'm gonna slack some people I work for. I'm gonna say, here's what Roger Lynch, the CEO of Kinda and Asset says about Google Discover traffic. I'll let you know how that goes.

• 40:04Speaker 06

  I bet you Jim Bankhoff agrees 100% with me.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  Jim's one of the people I work for, at least as of today. We're recording this on Tuesday, May 12. Did you, were you, did you take a look at the Vox Media Podcast Network, which is recording this podcast? It's an asset that is probably gonna trade hands very soon.

• 40:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm not gonna comment on that, Peter.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  Fair enough. I'll take that as a maybe. With the AI deals, given that you've now gone multiple rounds with different platforms and you've seen all The promise and peril and pitfall. What is most important to get out of the AI companies? Is it straight cash, like you're going to use our stuff, pay us? Or it sounds like the referrals aren't really a thing, that most people are not clicking through those footnotes and AI results. What is the best case scenario for you in these AI deals?

• 40:52Speaker 06

  First and foremost, it is to have a license arrangement, which reflects the fact that this is copyrighted content.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  You're using our stuff, pay us.

• 41:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, not just pay us, but agree to terms on how you're going to use it. Just like when I was in the music industry, or we did film and television. These license deals, you can think about two main components. There's the money, but there's also the use, the grant of rights. How can you use it? And most importantly, how can you not use it? So as an example, we would never do a deal with an AI company that says, take all of our New Yorker content and just show it verbatim to your customers. That wouldn't be in our interest. We would have put conditions around it. So the terms of the license deals are just as important as the money that's generated from them.

• 41:44Speaker 06

  We don't think that they will refer traffic anywhere near the rate at which search did. But there's an interesting dynamic that we see. You mentioned that I said search is going to go away. We chased it for a number of years, and each year we'd do our budget, and we'd say, search is going to decline, just because we don't know why, but we know there'll be some algorithm change that'll cause it to decline. And each of the last three years or so, we underestimated the decline. And so last year, we said, we're going to take a different approach. I told all of our teams, you need to plan your businesses around there being no search.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  And if you don't have a plan for that, you may not have a business. And we took that approach, and I think it was very effective, because it caused people to really think about, how do we generate audiences that have strong intent and strong engagement? Now, as search declined, we saw our direct audiences grow. I think it was in part the work that we were doing, but I think it was also in part because... People like if you think about the example I gave, I said Vogue shopping recommendations or something like that, you type that in a search algorithm. If what you get in return is an AI summary or a bunch of Google links to, you know, Walmart or whatever they are, whoever the deal is, that's not a satisfactory outcome.

• 43:09Speaker 06

  You might just type in to a search bar, vogue.com, and then find it that way. So we've been seeing direct traffic grow dramatically where it's, you know, it's the majority source of our traffic now. And I think it is, you know, our teams would like to say, oh, it's because we've done such a great job, you know, and I think that is largely true, but I think it is also because people are finding less relevant search results than they used to. And so where they used to use Google in some ways as a navigation tool, they're finding that navigation. It's very effective, the AI summaries for answering really simple questions, but less so for things that involve taste. And this is one of the big things that I've seen in the discussions that we've had with AI companies.

• 43:52Speaker 06

  Three or four years ago, when we started negotiating with them, it was a bit surreal because we literally, one company in particular told us, okay, we need to know how many words you have. It's like, okay, do the words matter or just any words? Can you tell us how many words you have? Because we pay by the word. Like, okay, this is gonna be a long discussion. But we got through it, negotiated these deals, and then as these services, answer engines, started to become used more and more, these companies started to realize that our content was being used in their answers much more significantly.

• 44:35Speaker 06

  So they started coming back to us like, oh, okay, we see your content really matters in certain areas. And now there's a whole debate about whether AI has taste or could ever replicate taste. Perfect, right? Because that is our core business. Creativity, taste, and I think that, you know, I think that creates much more opportunities for us now and how we can work with AI companies.

• 44:59Speaker 05

  What about the worry that even though you're getting paid today, even though you have restrictions and limits around how you can use your work, that inevitably what you're doing is building up these platforms, making them more and more useful. And certainly, one of the products they might come out with one day is not their own version of Vogue, but just things that deliver enough information to people that's tailored the way they want, that they really don't have any need to go somewhere else most of the time. And you're essentially building, you're building a thing that will put you out of business, which is a recurring issue with all the platforms, but it seems more likely than ever with AI?

• 45:37Speaker 06

  I think it is more likely than ever with AI for brands that don't have the authority that our top brands have. I don't worry about AI putting Vogue or The New Yorker out of business. It just will never replicate what those brands and what the editorial teams can do with those. If you have, and you mentioned some of the companies that are sort of gone by the wayside, look, I think they were the darlings of these platforms when they were sending them all the traffic and they did a really effective job of arbitrage and taking

• 46:17Speaker 06

  intent-driven searches or video, whatever, and turning it into commerce transactions or ads or things like that. But they were entirely reliant on that traffic continuing. And when that traffic went away, what they didn't have was brands that had the level of authority that frankly, our brands have. And so-

• 46:39Speaker 05

  This is, this is what every publisher tells me is how they're going to survive this, is our brands are meaningful, people have relationships with our brand, we're going to create even more direct relationships with our brand, people will come to us because our thing is special. Let's stipulate that, you said, I think, seven of your brands make 85% of your revenue. So seven of your brands all fit in that category. How many other publishers do you think are going to make it through this era? How many publishers do you think realistically have brands that- resonate with enough people that they can stay afloat on their own without being disaggregated by AI.

• 47:14Speaker 06

  Well, first of all, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to give the impression that it's only very big brands that can be successful. Cause we have some very small brands like Pitchfork, you know, it's a, it's less than one percent of our revenue. But it has a high, we, we put it under GQ, but it is, it has a separate editorial team and operates.

• 47:38Speaker 06

  You know, under its own brand and has been very successful. It actually has one of the largest direct audiences. And now has a subscription product, which is doing very, very well. Like that's a brand that will do well in this era because it has authority. It is more niche in its content area. It's never, never going to be as big as Vogue. But it has a point of view and it has loyal, dedicated audience. So it's not just big brand, small brand. It really is, does your brand have authority? Does it have connection with audience? That is really deeper than search or discover traffic.

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Another way of putting my question, what percent of publishers, existing publishers, do you think survive this era?

• 48:19Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, we've already seen a lot of that damage done today. So, you know, of the publishers that are left. You know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a higher percentage that will survive than it was five years ago. But certainly they're not going to all survive. I think that's, that writing is on the wall. Or at least not in the form that they are today.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Speaking of the future, one day Anna Wintour and David Remnick will no longer work for you. They're not young people. They, they're, they're very good at what they do and they're, and your company seems. I don't depend on them, leans on their authority in a, in a really meaningful way at The New Yorker and then broadly for Anna Wintour.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  What is the plan when they leave? How are you thinking about who's going to take, fill those shoes?

• 49:08Speaker 06

  Well, you know, first of all, for people that are in this field, those are the pinnacle jobs, they really are. And you're talking about two of the most successful editors ever. So it will be very, very difficult to find people who could ever replace them. But guess what? I'm sure the same was said about Grace Maribello when she ran Vogue for several decades before Anna came in, or Tina Brown, or William Shawn, or any of the great editors that have been attached to these brands over many, many, many decades.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Have either of them said, "This is who I want to replace me, just don't tell anyone yet"?

• 49:45Speaker 06

  No, no. I mean, we, you know, we, you know, it's very funny because one of the things I also implemented when I joined was succession planning. It was very clear that this had never been done before at Cottin's, and it caused people to be very uncomfortable to start talking about who could ever possibly replace them. But we, you know, we always look to have a broad selection of potential people who could fulfill a role, but you never know whether they're going to be available or what the situation is. So, you know, and we also work to bring in talent specifically with the idea of succession. So it's something that, that we run a really disciplined process every single year.

• 50:29Speaker 06

  We report it to my board, we spend time going through, we have our editors.

• 50:33Speaker 05

  Wait, so what does that look like? So you run through a process of if David Remnick got hit by a bus today, here's who would replace him?

• 50:40Speaker 06

  Look, the standard process for every company I've run is you have an emergency successor identified, you have a list of people who could be ready, you know, now or in the next year or two, you have a list that could be three to five years, and a list that could be five plus years.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  So these lists exist, the files exist, they're on your desk, as Pam Bondi would say.

• 51:02Speaker 06

  They're not on my desk, they are locked away.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  And you revise them periodically?

• 51:05Speaker 06

  We revise them every year. We go through a formal process where we evaluate it every year, and some names are added and some names drop off.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  And do Anna and David participate in this process?

• 51:17Speaker 06

  They do.

• 51:18Speaker 05

  Okay. All right. Let's find the list, people. Conde Nast, Conde Nast, send me your stuff.

• 51:25Speaker 06

  Good luck with that one.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  Last question for you. The biggest movie in America, I think, or biggest movie in the world, I think, is Devil Wears Prada 2. It's about Conde Nast. They don't call it Conde Nast. They don't call it Vogue. It's about your company. It's owned by Disney. Do you participate financially? I know you guys did a lot of marketing for it. You had Anna and Merrill on the cover of Vogue. Do you participate financially in that movie's success?

• 51:52Speaker 06

  No, that movie is their movie. It's not our movie. And we have no direct participation in it, but we certainly have a lot of fun with it. And I think Anna and Merrill going on the cover of Vogue, and as you may have seen, Chloe, our editor of American Vogue, had to work hard to convince Hannah to do that because that is not who she is, was fabulous. And that cover of Vogue with the two of them was iconic. But what I would say is, that movie has generated a lot of interest, not just about Vogue, but about Conde Nast. So it's been good for our business. It's certainly been good for our business.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  I know for a while, every publisher, and we talked about this, said, hey, we make all this amazing, we make great stories, et cetera. These things are often turned into movies and television shows. We really got to lean into that and figure out ways to get these things made, either by ourselves or with partners. And for a while, during the streaming boom, the streamers were buying literally anything you guys could make. That does not happen anymore. How have you rethought the business of getting into Hollywood and television and streaming?

• 53:00Speaker 06

  Well, you know, that business has...

• 53:04Speaker 06

  Shrunk as an industry, the number of new shows and films being produced has shrunk and the time it takes to get something approved has shrunk. But for us, you know, we had seven shows and movies premiere last year. We sold 11 new ones. So our team, it's a very small team, but our team does, I think, a really good job punching above their weight with that. But, you know, it starts with, you know, all of that starts with the IP of our journalism and our content.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  What's more important for you to figure that out or to figure out like TikTok and short video that more people are consuming more often?

• 53:38Speaker 06

  Well, short form video is a much bigger part of our business than film and television. So that, you know, in terms of revenue, certainly short form video is very important for us.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  Roger Lynch, you've been there since 2019. How much longer do you have? When does your succession plan kick in?

• 53:55Speaker 06

  You know, it's, it's, I always tell people, I, I've started a number of companies. Like, most of the companies I run are companies I've started. And even companies I've started, I've gotten bored after maybe four or five years. And I know when I get that feeling like, uh huh, okay, I'm starting to get bored. Time for me to do something. I never get bored in this job. I honestly, it's, there's, first of all, always really challenging problems to solve and also the most interesting intellectual people to deal with. So I have no plans on leaving. I really enjoy it and I'm definitely not bored.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  As a bonus, you get to talk to people like me. Roger Lynch, thank you for your time.

• 54:31Speaker 06

  Thanks, Peter.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  Thanks again to Roger Lynch. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits the show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. More Media Bosses coming your way soon. See you then.

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