B2B lessons

Tomorrow (Feb 26) at 1pmET, we are holding our next Online Forum, an hourlong interactive deep dive into how social media can still work for publishers in 2025. I’ll be joined by True Anthem's CEO and founder Chris Hart, and Valnet's director of marketing for gaming James Kosur, for an interactive session focused on how Valnet’s brands in entertainment, gaming and tech use Facebook, TikTok, X and dark social. Thanks to True Anthem for sponsoring this discussion. Sign up.

Today:

• A conversation with Sean Griffey about why B2B models are sturdier
• Anonymous Banker on AI’s next cycle, X’s comeback, creator financing
• Perplexity’s new browser, Substack’s video pivot and more on my radar

Reminder: You can send feedback, ideas, critiques etc by hitting reply or emailing me at bmorrissey@therebooting.com. 

B2B lessons for B2C

Sean Griffey, until recently the CEO of Industry Dive, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the big things Industry Dive, and by extension a lot of B2B, got right. 

Sean was rarely mentioned in the collection of digital media CEOs of the recent decade. Yet Industry Dive achieved one of the standout exits of the category. He led the B2B publishing company to a $525 million exit to Informa. At the end of 2024, Sean left his role at Informa TechTarget to enjoy “semi-retirement.” 

I’ve found over the recent years that the worlds of consumer and business publishing are coming together. It used to be that they spoke differently and had different priorities. Now, you have publishers like Punchbowl and Puck executing B2B strategies. Semafor relies on events as the bulwark of its revenue model. Publishers are more likely to talk up their newsletters than ComScore numbers.

Some of the lesions we discussed:

• Focus on a specific audience. Industry Dive would turn off ads if it had a story picked up by Reddit that led to a flood of viral traffic. That’s because the people arriving weren’t the “right people.” B2B isn’t about reaching everyone. 
• Know who you’re writing for. A trick of B2B that narrows the focus: Write for a specific job title. Media properties nowadays can be messy, but they need to have a person in mind (and know enough similar people exist).
• Get receipts. Industry Dive focused its business model on marketing services and lead generation. In B2B, budgets are far greater for demand generation than branding or thought leadership. 
• Do more with less. Industry Dive operated dozens of publications in verticals like wast management, retail, marketing and for CFOs, CIOs and more. But it operated a single platform. That allowed it to quickly move to create new brands, even if it sacrificed unique branding elements.
• Go direct. Media companies have three core areas: creation, distribution and monetization. Sean criticizes consumer publishers for relinquishing control over distribution by chasing search and social traffic and monetization by relying on programmatic advertising middlemen. B2B media markets have developed differently, allowing companies to avoid those kinds of dependencies. 

Key insights:

“The media industry put in an ad tech middleman between them and the customer and stopped talking to the customer. And when that happened, the audience stopped being valuable."

“The thing about audience hacks is they work for a while and then they don’t work. There’s never been an audience hack that has withstood decades, because once it becomes a hack, everyone uses it and then we destroy it.”

“A legacy company shouldn’t try to build creators. You’re paying for someone to utilize your platform. If you’re going to be creator-centric, you can’t grow your own creators—you have to buy creators.”​

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Anonymous Banker speaks

On People vs Algorithms, Anonymous Banker joined us to give us the money view of the media-tech landscape. (We are finetuning AB’s voice disguise; the distortion was perhaps too Charlie’s Angels.)

• AI funding craziness is ending. AB sees the insane valuations for foundational models that are just ideas and teams as giving way to the inevitable more practical phase. The action is moving to vertical applications, like how Harvey is taking AI to legal work, as opposed to obtuse debates about AGI.
• Follow the debt. You can argue whether X as a product is to your taste. But the truth of Elon Musk’s radical makeover is in the debt. That it is now trading on par with how it was priced at Musk’s takeover, after plunging in value, is a sign that Musk has again proved it is a bad idea to bet against him. The value is helped by the stake X holds in Musk’s xAI, of course. 
• Creators vs VC. Many of the most successful creators are steering clear of the traditional funding ecosystem because they’re typically very profitable. That changes the typical leverage of the established VC industry. “The best creators don’t want to take money unless there’s real operational support,” AB noted. 

Key insights:

“Traditional media companies are cleaning up their portfolios. Most large media brands you’d recognize have a for-sale sign on their smaller titles.”​

“Substack only becomes a real business when they actually start taking a cut of the advertising because they have all the audience data.”​

“You can generate a lot of cash flow with these businesses, but if everything is tied up in one person, there’s not a lot of long-term equity value.”​

YouTube | Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms

On my radar

1. Perplexity is building a browser. The browser is completely out of date. I do not believe we are reopening Three Mile Island for AI but will still constantly hit the back button on webpages. For publishers, Perplexity has emerged as thorn in the side, ignoring robots.txt and drawing lawsuits from publishers like News Corp. You can be sure this browser will be… aggressive. (Techcrunch)
2. Media always goes first. I have a theory that tech changes swamp media first since it’s easy pickings. AI’s put the industry under the familiar feeling of pressure, only this is spreading quickly to related sectors like software development. The scarcity of engineering and development talent is being erased, meaning an explosion of software like we had an explosion of media, with good and bad downstream effects. (Michael Magnano)
3. Trump is trusted more than the news media. When you’re losing, it’s best to recognize the situation. The Information Space gives structural advantages to the New Right. I believe Trump has a reptilian feel for the chaotic Information Space, thanks to his immersion in the world of NYC tabloids and reality TV. It’s working. A new poll reports Trump gets higher trust rating than the institutional news media. (The Hill)
4. Substack’s pivoting to video. Substack is moving well beyond email newsletters, with a renewed focus on video creators. This is good news for Substack investors – video beats text – and bad news for email newsletter writers who want Substack to be a far better ESP. (CNBC)
5. Scenes from the rebundling. Apple is rebundling recipes. They’ll strip out the auto play and junk and be a 10x better experience and product. This is a real pickle for publishers. They are trapped in business models that cause them to make shitty products that can’t compete with upstream aggregators. (TechCrunch)

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Thanks for reading. I’ll be back on Thursday with thoughts on why newsletters usually aren’t businesses themselves.