Slow growth

This week, I wrote about how growing a new publishing brand is different now. Perhaps it’s just preference, but I’m not a big believer in the aggro marketing tactics that have too often come ahead of the quality of the actual product. Seems like putting the cart before the horse. Instead, I’d rather focus on creating something worthwhile for all 7,000 of you who get this newsletter. Along those lines, if you find The Rebooting valuable, please share it with a colleague, friend, family member, even enemy. If you’re interested in sponsoring The Rebooting, check out the sales kit and get in touch: bmorrissey@gmail.com.

Back in 2007, at what would come to be the height of the media business before the fall, Condé Nast launched an ambitious new glossy business title that would give the titans of industry the glam treatment usually afforded movie stars and musicians. Two years and $100 million later, Portfolio was gone. It lasted barely longer than the time spent planning the launch.

Of course, Portfolio belongs in a media time capsule, the last gasp of the kinds of big bets expected by publishers like Conde Nast. With 85 employees at the time of it closure and a penchant for spendthrift ways like paying $30,000 to rent an elephant for a photo shoot, Portfolio was part of the “go big or go home” methods of launching new publishing brands, a bookend to an period that arguably kicked off with the Talk magazine launch in 1999; it ended up burning through an estimated $70 million in two years.

Starting a new publishing brand now is obviously a far different proposition. There are still those pursuing a go big or go home strategy. Semafor is looking to raise up to $30 million for its global news brand and plan to lose $50 million before breaking even. But for the most part, the venture capital-fueled era of big-scale launches are out. The slow burn of organic growth rather than splashy launches are now preferred. Nobody wants to be the next Quibi. It took Barstool 13 years to get to 5 million users.

Building sustainable media brands takes time. The pageview era gave us many brands that racked up big numbers but were hollow. Nobody needed them. The shift to niche media, to what I like to call primary-engagement media, means a new launch playbook is needed that can get publications sustainably profitable very quickly with a lean media approach. And it needs to rely far more on the strength of the content itself to drive organic growth as opposed to the types of distribution tactics – SEO, social, buying email lists, running ads, offering people coffee mugs for referrals – that would be prioritized in pageview media.