The AMO Show

Mario Gabriele is the founder of The Generalist, a tech publication that tells stories about companies from idea to IPO. The company is new, but he has learned quite a bit about launching a paid subscription and the early days of building a community.

Jesse Jacobs and Mike Kerns are co-founders of The Chernin Group, an investment firm known for their involvement in companies including Barstool Sports, Food52, MeatEater, and so many more. Part of the reason they have found such success is because they have been diligent with executing their thesis.

David Nemetz is the GM of Culture & Innovation at Bustle Digital Group, overseeing brands including Inverse, Input, and Mic. He is also the former co-founder of Bleacher Report, which unlike many digital media companies that started at a similar time, actually had a successful exit.

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau is the CEO and Publisher of MIT Technology Review, the oldest technology magazine in the world. Over the past few years, the business has been going through a transformation of building out the tools and processes to run a digital-first media business.

Jason Yanowitz is the co-founder of Blockworks, a media and events company covering the crypto asset space. Originally, the plan was to create an advisory, but multiple iterations later, it is now has a newsroom, a podcast network, and an events business that plans to go physical again in 2021.

Scott Brodbeck is the founder, editor, and publisher of Local News Now, a network of hyperlocal media properties. What started as a single guy with a camera and a police scanner has turned into a media company with a small staff serving the D.C. area through multiple websites, both owned and through partnerships.

Nick Friese is the founder and CEO of Digiday Media, a company with three verticals: Digiday, ModernRetail and Glossy. Friese started the company during the Great Recession and has gone through a tremendous journey building this company with events, membership and marketing services.On building membershipThe membership product at Digiday started primarily as a print product. As Friese explained it, people were comfortable paying for a magazine, so that’s what they sold. And despite costing nearly $200 for four issues, it sold.But as time went on, they started adding other features to the membership, including member-only content and then the metered paywall until now, it’s a much more expensive product at the company.The lessons they’ve learned has been applied to the other verticals where now Glossy and ModernRetail actually have more robust membership offerings that the original at Digiday.On equal numbers of buyers and sellers at eventsA solid number of Digiday’s events are hosted buyer events, where the buyers typically come for free. In exchange for that, the sellers get guaranteed meetings with decision makers.According to Friese, this boils down why people really want to attend events. They’re looking to do business. It’s about meeting your contemporaries.This is also how they think about verticals over all. If you can clearly define the buyers and sellers in an industry, you’ve got the potential for something.On their structure of verticalsFriese has a different approach to the various franchises than other vertical media companies. Each publication has its own writers, editors, marketers and sales people.This is different than how others have done it where the editors and writers are unique to the publication, but everything else is centralized with services spread across all the verticals.In Friese’s mind, each brand has its own very unique image, so he believes it’s important for the majority of the people working on it to be focused exclusively to those brands.

Sherrell Dorsey is the founder and publisher of The Plug, a publication focused on the Black innovation economy. While it started as a morning newsletter she did before going to work, it has now morphed into a media company with original reporting, data, research, events and podcasts.In this show, we discussed a variety of important topics, but a few things jumped out...On quarterly, not monthly pricingThis was an important topic to me. The Plug's membership is sold quarterly or annually, but not monthly. As she said, this runs counter to the habit so many of us have formed paying for subscriptions every month.In her mind, though, a month is just not a long enough time to form a relationship. By extending it to a quarter, she feels that The Plug has enough opportunity to demonstrate value to a reader.It's an important distinction because if we look at when most subscribers churn, it's after the first month. By extending to a quarter, you have more time to form a habit with them and, ideally, keep them engaged for much longer.On not charging a CPMFor most media companies, charging a CPM is how they do things. But in niche media, it's harder. As Dorsey explained, because they don't have scale, they need to price things based on value.Whether it's their podcasts, newsletter sponsorships or other content initiatives, they try to determine how valuable a sponsorship is worth to a partner and then work on pricing from there.On being diversifiedAlthough we didn't explicitly talk about this, The Plug generates revenue through advertising, events, membership fees and has received grants to create new content initiatives.This embodies a core ethos of successful media companies. Those that are overly reliant on a single source—or a single property—carry more risk than those that are well diversified.While The Plug has gone on to raise some money, it's clear in our conversation that Dorsey continues to think very diligently about not overextending the business and ensuring there are multiple streams of revenue.

Mike Orren is the Chief Product Officer at The Dallas Morning News and has called this the pivotal year for local media. With Orren leading, Dallas Morning News has been undergoing a digital transformation, using the revenue generated from the print operation to invest in the online business. In this episode, we talked about a wide variety of topics that you'll find informative and interesting.

John Yedinak is co-founder and President at Aging Media, a vertical media company focused on the business of aging. With so many people retiring every single day and few b2b companies covering the space, John and his brother have grown into multiple verticals over the years and have even more growth ahead of them.