B2B’s moment

There’s plenty of doom and gloom in the air these days around the media business. The pandemic bazooka of government cash into the economy and the era of rock-bottom interest rates are in the rearview mirror. And straight ahead is the prospect of AI living up to its billing as the most consequential tech shift since the internet itself, which hasn’t gone great for large swathes of the publishing industry.

Over the next several weeks, I want to highlight models that are working. B2B is one sector that is emerging from the wreckage of the past generation of digital publishing. The business models in B2B are less flashy: generating leads for SaaS companies via webinars, white papers and eBooks, putting on vendor-driven events and wading through complicated and even esoteric issues. To many, B2B is boring and even, in some aspects, unseemly since trade publications was that their cozy relationship with companies in the sectors they covered was hardly the journalistic ideal of speaking truth to power.

That view is changing.