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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the Publish Press Podcast. I'm Steve Burge And here at Publish Press, we make plugins that improve the publishing on your WordPress site.
Dan Knauss:I'm Dan Knauss, and I'm a solution architect with Multidots, WordPress enterprise agency that works with publishing media companies and all kinds of clients and using publishing plugins like PublishPress.
Steve Burge:Hey. Good choice.
Dan Knauss:That might be it.
Steve Burge:So we invited Jacob Donnelly on the podcast today. And Jacob runs a media operator, which started on Substack as a a newsletter, basically sharing the experience he had from working at publications like Coindesk and Morning Brew. And over the last six years, he's grown it from being just a newsletter to being a fully fledged media business with events, with data services, with a private members community, and a big annual conference.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. There's a lot to learn here. It's quite a great conversation. I really appreciate how Jacob sees himself as a media company that is really in the audience business, an audience company, and that that's how serious niche publishing should be these days up against the potential of a Google zero scenario where AI has scraped everything and you have only your own uniqueness and you're dialed in clear focus on your audience that knows you and the way that might intersect with other projects like a event sidearm of the company. And, yeah, the whole picture there of being able to control your own platform based around a very personal and well known expert niche that is gated and not simply open and available to be consumed for free by AI.
Steve Burge:Yeah. We talked about all the threats. We talked quite a bit about AI. But I came away curiously optimistic from our conversation with Jacob that he thinks media companies can thrive by serving their audience well no matter what AI might bring. So welcome, and here's our conversation with Jacob.
Steve Burge:Hey, Jacob. Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Steve Burge:He so you run a media operator. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is? What do you do? What is AMO?
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. So AMO is a media company covering the media and increasingly the events industry. We launched five and a half years ago as a place for me to write about the media industry and how I thought you should build media companies, and it has grown into its own its own media company now.
Steve Burge:You were a journalist originally. Right? You were working at CoinDesk, and you had a journalism career before this.
Jacob Donnelly:So my journalism career was always in the my nights and weekends. So by day, I have always worked on the business side of media companies. So or you know? So my first job out of school was working at an industrial directory. So I did SEO and product management and new ad product development there.
Jacob Donnelly:Then I was at CoinDesk. And my nights, I was a freelance writer there. But then once I went over there full time, I was their director of marketing, and then I was in charge of the advertising business there. And then at Morning Brew, I was the general manager of b two b and then the publisher of the business. So I've always professionally, by day, worked on the business side, figuring out how businesses make money, but I've always loved writing, and I've always loved journalism.
Jacob Donnelly:And so I did that in my nights and weekends.
Steve Burge:You've always been on the media operator side of things.
Jacob Donnelly:Hence the name.
Steve Burge:And and Morning Brew in particular became and still is enormous. Right? Their newsletter base is gigantic.
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. I don't know. It's been a year and a half since I was there. But if I recall correctly, that main newsletter had over 4,000,000 subscribers. 4.2, 4,300,000 subscribers.
Jacob Donnelly:So massive audience, and that doesn't even include the b two b portfolio, which I was I was responsible for.
Steve Burge:So what does what does AMO look like now? You have you have a newsletter. You have membership area. Can you describe what AMO involves right now? What pieces do you have going on?
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. So AMO started as a twice a week newsletter. I would write everything. Tuesdays would be primarily my reaction to things in the news. Fridays would be a deep dive on a certain topic.
Jacob Donnelly:Pretty early on, this was back in 2019, early twenty twenty, I was on Substack, and everyone on Substack had a paid subscription. So we launched a paid subscription, and that's the royal we because for the first five years, it was only me. But I launched a paid subscription with the idea of, like, know, let's see if anyone's actually gonna pay for this. They did. Not a ton of people.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? Like, this isn't this know, the subscription business is not a a a million dollar business, but, you know, people paid. And what I realized is people liked what I had to say. It has since sort of morphed a little bit. I've hired two reporters now.
Jacob Donnelly:So I've got a I've got a a gentleman over in in The UK, and then I've got someone here covering The US market. And so now I've got two reporters who are publishing, you know, between the two of them, probably six or seven pieces a week. So the content strategy has evolved. Right? Plus we got some freelancers.
Jacob Donnelly:So if it used to just be me writing about what's going on in the news or a deep dive, now I've got six, seven different originally reported stories from actual journalists covering the media and events markets both here in The US and in The UK. And so that's kind of, like, the the the core product is that content, and then we monetize that with subscriptions. You know, we we've never gotten rid of that. It's a grind of a business, which I'm happy to talk about why, but subscriptions are a grind. And then we also have a sponsorship component where, you know, we do still sell newsletter ads because, you know, the newsletter is still how most people know us.
Jacob Donnelly:We do webinars. We do what I call sponsored deep dives, and then we have an event.
Steve Burge:You have a, yeah, like, a big conference once a year. Right?
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. So it's this year, October in New York City. We bring together it'll probably be 225 to 250 folks, you know, predominantly media operators and very much senior media operators. So we're talking to CEO and maybe their direct reports. You know?
Jacob Donnelly:And it's a day and a half of us discussing the latest trends in media, interesting business models. We do, you know, fireside case studies on stage with different publishers to kinda learn about their businesses. You know? It's a ticketed event. People pay to come and be there.
Jacob Donnelly:It's we sell sponsorships. So it's a it's a good it's a good business for sure.
Steve Burge:So you have really ground this out over nearly six years now. Right? You said five and a half years now starting with subscriptions, starting with a a newsletter, and you really found it a a grind to begin with to to build that subscriber base to to move from being a a substack newsletter to where you are now, which is a a real media company with multiple arms, multiple revenue streams. Yeah.
Jacob Donnelly:I mean, media has always been a grind if you do it the right way. Right? Like, this is not it's not like a software business where once you reach a certain inflection point, like, you start to scale and your cost structure gets better and all that. Like, as a media business, your cost structure kinda always sucks because if you're investing in more content, you can't you have to hire more people. So media businesses have always been a grind of a business until you get that flywheel moving.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? And so, like, in the early days for AMO, I had to do all the writing, all the selling, all the marketing, all the responses to people when they responded to AMO and all that. And, you know, that's just part of building a community. Now I don't have to do all that. You know, I have, you know, people who who write, and I have, you know, help from an operations perspective.
Jacob Donnelly:And so that allows us to move a little bit more quickly, but media is always a grind. Right? You're always chasing the next story in part because you gotta put up new product every day. So it's it's it's always a grind.
Steve Burge:So, Jacob, you you started a Substack. You you tested the business. You got it going. And then if I'm right, maybe about a year or so ago, you made the leap from Substack to WordPress, perhaps to make the leap also from being a newsletter to being a fully fledged media company. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Steve Burge:Why did you jump from Substack to WordPress?
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. So I actually left Substack back in late twenty twenty. So it's been it'll be five years on WordPress by the end of this year. So Substack is phenomenal, and you get we we have to kinda go back in time. When when Substack started, you know, it was great for launching a newsletter, and it was great for putting up a simple paywall.
Jacob Donnelly:The paywall did nothing from the perspective of, like, is it a metered wall? Is it a hard is it a soft? Like, is it a permeable wall? Like, it was just this is a wall and all that. So I decided that they were anti advertising.
Jacob Donnelly:They didn't provide any sort of growth helpful. They didn't there they, at the time, didn't really bring much to the table beyond, like, here's a very clean publishing platform. And I liked it. Right? Like, it was a very clean publishing platform.
Jacob Donnelly:My problem was I knew at some point I'd want AMO to become a media company. I knew that I would want it I named it a media operator rather than Jacob writes about media. Like, I named it something else because I knew at some point I would want this to become, you know, a brand that has multiple perspectives, multiple voices that had, you know, real infrastructure in place and to depend on Substack for that when it was very much pushing what it believed was the right way to do things rather than what I believed was the right way to do things. It just it made sense at that point to leave. I think the other issue for me was subsect has and it's gotten a little bit better at this, but it still struggles from this.
Jacob Donnelly:Subsect has always struggled to know what it was. You are either a tool for people to build their businesses, or you are a platform that you want people to know about. If you go to shop if and the classic example is Shopify. Shopify's whole thing is to, like, arm these in individuals to build their storefronts. Shopify doesn't care if their branding is there.
Jacob Donnelly:Shopify doesn't care if you know that Shopify is powering it. Shopify is going to build those tools. I always felt that Substack couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Did it wanna arm people to build their, you know, their own their own great businesses, or did it want to be known as a network of people who were writing about things? And that difference meant that I was always gonna be operating at the whims of whatever Substack wanted.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? So, like, Substack didn't give me the ability to build segments of my audience. Substack didn't give me the ability to easily run ads in my newsletter. Substack didn't really give me a lot of the capabilities that I would need to to build a media company. And so Right.
Jacob Donnelly:I moved over to WordPress, and I moved over to a different email service provider, and I used a third party paywall provider because I wanted to have that flexibility. Because the idea was in 2020, I was actually going to leave CoinDesk and go full time and build my own media company. I wasn't entirely sure AMO was gonna be the thing, but that was the plan. Morning Brew was a fluke. At the end I had no intention of joining Morning Brew.
Jacob Donnelly:So when Ben and I started working on the whole migration, like, the idea was Substack won't allow me to build a media company in 2020.
Steve Burge:So nowadays, they've added a few more features, but, generally, they seem to still go back and forth between maybe wanting to be as kind of x slash Twitter style platform versus allowing people to have their own Shopify sort of private label business.
Dan Knauss:Look. And define your define your audiences.
Jacob Donnelly:If you
Dan Knauss:have are are you pursuing, like, different on different channels, slightly different audiences within your your larger I guess the the larger collective that you're you're reaching out to? Is that easier to do when you can kind of custom build that?
Jacob Donnelly:Growth is a pain in the ass. Growth is an absolute pain in the ass. Substack has made it a lot easier to grow for people, but that didn't exist in 2020. Right? Like, I think Right.
Jacob Donnelly:When we when we look at Substack in 2020 versus when we look at Substack in 2025, like, they're dramatically different tools. There's an argument to be made that all publishers should be posting on Substack. Not, like, entirely, not, like, as your only newsletter, but they now have a growth engine. So there's no reason to not be publishing some of your content there as distribution to get people back to your ecosystem.
Steve Burge:Yeah. I've seen some magazines do that almost treating it like like Medium used to be back in the day as, like, an extra platform, or maybe some people treat LinkedIn now like an extra place to post their thought leader essays and
Dan Knauss:Sure. Yeah. And the newsletters and stuff.
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. Look. I think especially if you are running a subscription business, these readers have a propensity to pay. Right? Substack has trained them to pay for content.
Jacob Donnelly:And so if you are if you can build something that is still unique, right, like or not, like, not totally unique, but maybe it's older pieces of your archive that don't, you know, surface a lot or are not driving a ton of subs or or something along those lines. If you can start to promote that content on Substack and then include links to other stories, If you can get those people over from Substack to your site, it's the same strategy we've all been doing for the past twenty years, whether it's Google, Facebook, Meta sorry, or LinkedIn, Twitter. Like, the goal is take the user from the platform, move them onto your site. And at least with Substack, those people know to pay for content, so it actually could be pretty beneficial.
Dan Knauss:Right. So so what does that ecosystem look like, the AMO? You've got a newsletter or there might be multiple segments in that pro and VIP membership, Slack and database access advisory services and then the events. So how do you how have you organized that or how has that sort of developed? Has it been kind of an organic process or yeah.
Dan Knauss:How have you iterated through to its current form?
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. So the core has always been the content. Right? So it originally, the newsletter was the primary thing. We were a, quote, unquote, newsletter company, and now we are a media company.
Jacob Donnelly:So but at the end of the day, the content has always been the core thing that we do. And that's not going to change because, a, like, I think our our industry deserves great content. There's not a lot of great content covering the media and events industry. And, b, I just like content. I like content businesses.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? And, you know, the word content has a negative connotation, but I just it's just the easiest way to describe it. So that's the core of it. Whether it's pro or VIP or whatever we wanna call it, those are just a diff a few different pricing mechanisms to promote the the the to promote the subscription. And, really, it's to promote the paid content.
Jacob Donnelly:So every story on AMO is free until you hit the paywall, and then it's all paid. Right? Like, we're a metered wall. It's one story, then you have to register, and then one more story you gotta pay. It's a very straightforward model.
Jacob Donnelly:We're gonna test things out and iterate and make that stronger. But if you go to our pricing page, we have three offers. Right? $33 sorry. A $150 a quarter, which works out to $600 a year.
Jacob Donnelly:Annual, which is $3.95. So, obviously, I wanna try to capture you and get you in and keep you around for a year. And then the VIP, which not a single person has purchased, and if anyone ever does, that'd be hilarious. But it's $5,000 a year, and you get four you get basically a quarterly call with me. No.
Jacob Donnelly:Again, no one's purchased that.
Steve Burge:Is is that kind of a staking mechanism to say
Jacob Donnelly:Anchor in there.
Steve Burge:Yeah. To a kind of an anchor mechanism to say, hey. We're kind of at the high end. We're a prestige brand.
Jacob Donnelly:A little bit. I think it's one of those things that there's no harm in having it there, and that used to do it where it would be $600 and you'd get one hour with me and then an annual subscription. That was back when the AMO Pro was $200 a year. When I increased the price at the beginning of this year, I realized that, like, just doing one off calls is kind of uninteresting because, like, I don't have a ton of time to get in prepared about anything because, you know, the hourly rate's not that high. Plus, like, only having a single conversation, the stakes are kinda low versus if you treat it as sort of like a quarterly check-in with me where you can bring your stuff to the table, we can have a good conversation that evolves over time.
Jacob Donnelly:I thought that was more interesting. No one's bought it. No one may ever buy it, but it does show It does make $3.95 look a hell of a lot cheaper.
Steve Burge:It's true. And and so you're also kind of positioning yourself up that way with the the big annual conference. Right? I'm I'm intrigued because you mentioned in our conversation here, at least a couple of times already, that events are a big part of the way things are going. And you've obviously taken the time and effort to launch a big annual conference for several 100 people.
Steve Burge:How do you think about events as part of what publishers do these days? What inspired you to start your own conference?
Jacob Donnelly:So I started my own conference for I had two people who were chirping in my ear telling me that I should do an event. This was back in beginning of twenty twenty three. One was a very old AMO reader who had who was building his own media company. He has since sold sold it, and then the other was a sponsor of mine. You know, his company, Omida, has been a huge sponsor of AMO, and their CEO, you know, he and I have have become friends, and he just kept saying to me, like, there's nothing in the market for what you do.
Jacob Donnelly:Like, there's there's nothing in the market for how you approach media. Do an event. And if you do an event, I promise I will sponsor it. And so I have, you know, two different people, one of which is willing to give me a decent chunk of cash saying, you should look at doing an event. But I've always sort of believed you know, this goes back to my CoinDesk days.
Jacob Donnelly:I've always sort of believed there's a really nice intersection between media and events that they play nicely together. And so, you know, the ability to get someone to read your newsletter and the ability to get, you know, to get someone to even pay for access to content is very different than the ability to get someone to give up a day of their life and give you over a thousand dollars for the privilege to do that. Like, if you can do that and you can convene people in one place, like, that's powerful. That community is then super engaged. They care.
Jacob Donnelly:They're invested in what's going on. And that is you know, seeing that event in that first year play out the way it did, like, that was the kick in the ass I needed to to to finally truly treat AMO as a business. You know? It had always been a side hustle, a great side hustle. I made good money on it.
Jacob Donnelly:But doing that event made me realize that I finally have a thing that's mine. Like, now I can really go in all all in on this. And in the second year, the event was much bigger. Alright? We went from a 130 to 230 people, more profitable, you know, great speakers, and it's just it's it's it's confirmed.
Jacob Donnelly:It's made it possible for us to hire, you know, two reporters who are great reporters. We'll probably hire another one before the end of the year. The the the revenue, but even more the the profit from an event, especially for niche operators like what I do, but there's a ton of people who have who should have events who don't. It's it's it's a great validator of everything.
Steve Burge:Oh, so this was literally a a business changing decision that you kind of reconfigured what you thought was possible with AMO. It gave you a influx of money. It was an inflection point?
Jacob Donnelly:I don't it was an inflection point for the business. I look. I always had a belief in my mind that if you have a loyal audience, getting them to come face to face is important. Right? Which we we we were building an events business at Morning Brew.
Jacob Donnelly:When I was at CoinDesk, we built an events business. I mean, when I joined the first year, we had 2,400 people at the at consensus, but, you know, three years later, had 8,800 people. Maybe even two years later. It doesn't matter. I saw the power that came from being able to convene people.
Jacob Donnelly:CoinDesk was, at the time, by and far the most important media brand in crypto. It had the most important event in crypto. Like, it was the most read and well respected media and events brand in the industry, and I think a big part of that was our ability to bring anybody we wanted to the stage. And I think the same thing exists for IMO. You know?
Jacob Donnelly:Do I think that we're the most important brand covering media and events? I think we do the best work, but I also think that we put on the best event. And that one, having gone to a lot of events, I can say definitively, you're not gonna see content like this anywhere else. You're not gonna learn, like, as you do anywhere else. And so the event was a validator of AMO's potential to become much more, but it was also a validator to the market that AMO was serious.
Jacob Donnelly:It's one thing to write a newsletter. It's something entirely different to organize eight panels and sell sponsorships and sell 200 tickets and do all of that and then moderate all day. And to pull that off and for people to feel it's a great experience, that's validating, and that that AMO punched way above its weight class when we pulled that off.
Steve Burge:It yeah. More than a webinar, more than an online conference, more than and particularly in the era of AI as well. You're doing something which is entirely defensible, which people are really, really hungering for to have some in person connections with people like themselves. And if I go to the AMO website now, you actually do real coverage of events companies as well, not just media companies. Take the intersection of events and media seriously, but also events themselves.
Steve Burge:I've seen some coverage of companies hosting big events around passionate audiences.
Jacob Donnelly:So if I think about the growth so obviously, v one of AMO was just I'm gonna cover the media industry. Two of AMO is, okay. Now it's gonna become a media company. As we start to evolve into v three, I look at sort of three buckets of audience. And this, again, you know, I I learned a lot of my, like, defining moments philosophies on how to build media companies comes from CoinDesk, both positively and negatively.
Jacob Donnelly:But one of the things when I was there, our CEO at the time, he when he came in, he pushed hard to build out what he called the three legged stool. His theory was if you have a great media business and you have a great event and then you can build some sort of a data business, those three things intersecting together give you incredible power in a market. And so if I look at CoinDesk, we had the media and events thing downright. And so then the question was, what kind of data business could we build? We never at least in my time there, they never really quite figured it out.
Jacob Donnelly:By the time you know, probably by 2021, they started to really get it going with they had an index business where they had pricing data of all these various crypto assets, and financial institutions would license that data to build financial products. So that was the three legged stool. And so if I look at AMO and I look at our coverage areas, you know, it's sort of like a three circle Venn diagram. Right? You have media companies that only do media.
Jacob Donnelly:You have events companies that only do events, and you have information services companies, data businesses, research businesses, things of that nature, that only do that category. But then there are some companies that do media and events, some companies that do events and information services, and then some that do all three. If we can cover those three areas, I think that becomes a very interesting business. You know, AMO could have multiple newsletters at that point. AMO could have multiple events at that point because, you know, there is obviously overlap, but there are obviously unique audience needs with each of those three quadrants.
Steve Burge:And it seems as if at least two of those are well protected from the new AI era we're in. Events and also the data are behind paywalls or behind, like, physical walls where you with an event. It seems like it's a three legged stool that, although it may have been first mentioned by the CoinDesk CEO about ten ten plus years ago, it it's it's a three legged stool that could set you up well for the next ten years even with the age of AI coming to.
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. So it's it's not a new model. I mean, I'm I'm you know, I learned it from Kevin, but that doesn't mean that it's something like, I'm sure Kevin learned it from somebody else. But I think the thing that for for us, for AMO, that gives us something, you know, something to be excited about is, you know, the media industry is going through immense disruption. Right?
Jacob Donnelly:You know, people are not sure what what's the media industry gonna look like. Is AI gonna destroy you and all that? But while that's happening, the events industry is exploding. Like, it's absolutely crushing. And that doesn't that hasn't really slowed down.
Jacob Donnelly:And then, you know, from a data perspective, data businesses are crushing. Now there is an argument to be made that the only one that's truly secure in an AI world is events. Because if you're a data business or you're a media business, your primary asset that you're selling is information. And if an AI company wants that information, they're gonna get that information. So they're you know, even even if there's a paywall, if it's $10,000, but your data is so damn good, would an AI company not just pay $10,000 for access?
Jacob Donnelly:Now the only way to stop this, and this, you know, this is not the point of your question, but I think it's an important point, is, like, the only way to stop that clear theft is is is for there to be constant lawsuits. You know? It hasn't quite reached the point of for these data businesses yet, but, like, at some point, like, if if data is that important, $10,000 for a single seat license, and they can scrape everything. So I think that the only true defensible business is the events one, but that doesn't mean that the other two have no future. I think they have an immense future because I think that laws are gonna have to change.
Jacob Donnelly:Again, not what you asked, but just where my mind went.
Steve Burge:No. That's really interesting. I I genuinely didn't realize that data companies were so concerned about AI companies buying an expensive subscription and and scanning the data like that. It makes sense that they do, especially with running out of running out of data sources.
Jacob Donnelly:No one
Steve Burge:will admit
Jacob Donnelly:that it's happening. Right? And and these data businesses, they might not be aware of it yet because it's been very easy to steal all the free content or the perceived free content or the permeable wall content. But at some point you know, I was at I was at an event beginning this year, and there was a lawyer speaking. And he goes, look.
Jacob Donnelly:If your information is that good, what's to stop them from just paying and and and and stealing at them? Like, the only way to stop it is is to go through the courts or for congress to pass a law that makes it much clearer about what copyright is. But, you know
Steve Burge:I think that at the moment trying to pass a law where there will be no restrictions on AI for the next ten years or so.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. Is there is there any scenario where it makes where there's a price point where it makes sense to treat that as a as a customer access?
Steve Burge:Charge the egg.
Dan Knauss:Not carte blanche, but right. Double VIP.
Jacob Donnelly:So, you know, I think about this a lot. You know? And and Steve, you and I were talking about this right before you hit record. There's gonna come a point, I think, where everything is there could come a point, and we don't know yet if we're gonna get there or not. But there could come a point where every media and data business is built is an app is builds an application layer where, you know, you have your front end experience.
Jacob Donnelly:You know, maybe you have some of your content out front because you wanna market the fact that you exist. But then the bulk of your great stuff is gonna be behind a paywall. It's gonna be behind some sort of a a validation. It's gonna be behind some sort of a registration. You know, you'll probably put in place, you know, mechanisms of preventing scraping or, like, load time or, you know, you can only access two pages a second or I'm not a developer.
Jacob Donnelly:I'm sure, you know, there are way smarter people than I am. And so I do see that that we will get to this point even as a publisher where that becomes if AI truly, quote, unquote, destroys the open web, that will be where we go. Now if AI becomes the the default and these tools do become the default means of communication, then you could imagine a world where there are licensing agreements between the AI platform and the publisher where it's not a carte blanche licensing agreement where, like, you pay once, you get access, and you train your entire model. But instead, it's a the user the end user on the AI side asks a question. They need that information.
Jacob Donnelly:And so a the AI scraper knows that the publisher has it, and there is a an exchange of value one time. And so it's not a model training use of that content, but a one time use of that content. I don't I don't know the technical term for it, but I believe we're starting to see this more and more where, you
Steve Burge:know, it's one time use rather than model training. Think I saw that idea maybe posted on Ben Thompson's techery site. He called it like micro transactions for the AI era. And that makes sense, you know, where you know?
Jacob Donnelly:And there are some tools that are already popping up to do this. There's one called Tollbit that sort of acts as like a, you know, a if if one of these bots hits your site, they actually get redirected to a Tollbit page that makes them create an account and actually potentially pay for that for that individual piece of content. And so it's just gonna it's just gonna require publishers to start really aggressively locking down their sites if this becomes, like, the worst case scenario. Right? Because the worst case scenario is everybody spends all their time on chatbots, and click through rates crater and publishers can't monetize.
Jacob Donnelly:Because, like, you publishers can only monetize their business if they can get the user to the site because that's how you that's how you maximize LTV. Maximizing LTV purely based on the licensing business is licensing has always been incremental high margin revenue, not revenue.
Steve Burge:So, Jacob, you've talked us through some of the changes that are happening with AMO. You're moving into events. You're moving into data. You're thinking hard about AI. Are a lot of these changes reflected in your customers you're talking to?
Steve Burge:Are they moving into events? Are they really nervous about AI? Are they putting a lot more of their content behind paywalls? What are you what are you hearing from your user base at the moment?
Jacob Donnelly:I think it just depends on the type of publisher that we're talking about. Right? So if we start at the the traditional publishers, everyone's scared of AI, and everyone is seeing the impact of AI on a traffic perspective. You know? Every single publisher is seeing less traffic than they did before.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? And that is it just it is what it is. At the same time, they're very excited about the opportunities from a an efficiency perspective. The ability to use AI to you know, for one person to do the job of two people perhaps because of AI. Like, that's there's some compelling merit there.
Jacob Donnelly:So I think from that perspective, there's a lot of interest. I don't very few operators are fundamentally changing their business models because of AI. You know, I haven't, like, seen, like, this, oh my god. AI is here. Let me rapidly change.
Jacob Donnelly:You know, legacy institutions take a while to change anything. Now so that's that's the one side. You know? And and and by and large, especially in the B2B world, they have events. Right?
Jacob Donnelly:A lot of these legacy b two b publishers also have events tied to it. They have for for years, if not decades. Then there's the other side, which is where I sort of categorize myself, which is more of the creator turned media company example. Right? Started as me, has evolved into becoming a media company.
Jacob Donnelly:I expect many more of them to launch events simply because they're they're starting from a content first perspective. Their audiences are more engaged. And if that's the case, you know, I said it before, if you can convene people to an event, like, that is a massive validator. That's a power move.
Steve Burge:Yep. So the these are the people who are coming from Substack, maybe following the same journey as you from Beehive, from Ghost, maybe the newsletter people. Once they have an audience of a certain size, then it's feasible to hold an event, to hold a conference, to turn some of that newsletter community into real in person energy.
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. I mean, you know, a good example is Eric Newcomer. I think he and I started around a similar time. He might have started a little bit after me. I think he derives more than half his revenue now from his events business.
Jacob Donnelly:Like, you know, he started as a paid subscription, you know, covering the venture capital industry, now he does multiple events. And he's doing he's doing great. He's hiring people. He's got more people on the editorial side. He hired a salesperson.
Jacob Donnelly:Like, he newcomer has turned into a media company, not just the voice of Eric. Now he still has to do a ton of the work, and that is what it is, but that's a great example of of of one of these starting independent or individual and then starting to expand and become an institution.
Steve Burge:So on the creator side, we're seeing a lot of a lot of YouTube creators making the leap from being individual people with a with a YouTube channel, individual people with a podcast to becoming actual fully fledged businesses. We may be seeing the same thing on the Substack side too, that Substack slash Beehive slash the Newsletter business may be producing people who probably like five, six, seven years into this phenomenon now are able to to build their own exciting new media companies, perhaps to replace some of the legacy ones that have struggled to keep up. How do you think about the future of AMO now? It sounds as if you mentioned I don't wanna ask you for specific numbers, but it sounds as if with Eric, his business is more events than newsletters now. And it sounds from what you said that your conference is increasingly successful for you.
Steve Burge:Could you find yourself moving into someone with the newsletter side business and finding yourself running conferences or events around the country?
Jacob Donnelly:I view it all as a media operator. Right? So there's not a side business or a main business or or whatever. It's it's all inter interconnected. We are an audience business.
Jacob Donnelly:Our job is to convene people and to provide them with the information that they need to make better decisions while running their media and events companies. We will do that for three hundred and sixty five days a year through our content, through our Slack community, and through our event. That's how we do that. The event you know, I mean, I I have no problem sharing numbers. So for AMO, we'll probably finish the year at just about a million dollars revenue.
Jacob Donnelly:It's great business. It's growing. It continues to grow every single year. About half of that will be the event. The other half will be split between digital sponsorships.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? So we have newsletter sponsorships, sponsored deep dives, and webinars, and then subscriptions. Now I don't know if it's gonna be fifty fifty between those two, maybe sixty forty. You know, it depends on how the subscription business grows for the rest of the year. But, you know, we we couldn't do half the business without the other half.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? I the AMO event doesn't work if I don't have you know, that's a day and a half. So if I don't have three hundred and sixty four other days, 363 other days of building an audience and engaging the audience and and and all that, like, I I still remain my mind is boggled when I hear of an events only company. What do you mean that you're only talking to your people three days a year? Like, what are you talking about?
Jacob Donnelly:Like, that to me just is is confusing. So I don't view it as a newsletter or a pub a website or an event. It's a media operator, and our job is to is to deliver value to our audience 365 a year.
Steve Burge:I've I've probably heard you say that just about every time one of your newsletters drops in my inbox that you encourage your readers to think of themselves as an audience company, that in the age of AI, of events, of a lot of rapid change going on. Mean, we're probably in 2025 is probably a year when we're going to see as much change as we had in hard to think of a comparative year in terms of the amount of change. The key, the recommendation you've just given us now and you keep on repeating is that media companies have to think of themselves as being in the audience business first. But the actual products, whether it's a newsletter, whether it's events, whether it's data, are all just various touch points around creating that audience and building that community?
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. I I think the the issue with media companies has been they they and for and this has had this has gone on for a long time. For for for twenty years, the game was traffic. The game was how many people can you get to your website. Right?
Jacob Donnelly:SEO was the thing. Social media was the thing. But the end goal was how many people can you get to your website? Who the hell cares who those people are? And you can even say that with the monetization.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? We monetize the programmatic ads, which was a third party cookie based business, which basically meant what did the user do before they came to your site. We're gonna monetize you based off that activity. I don't care who you are. That's a bad business.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? That's a really, really bad business, and we've seen that been a bad business for far longer than AI has been a, you know, a potential existential threat. So to be an audience first media company, to be an audience first anything is to know that you need to care intimately about who is coming to your site. You need to know who they are. I'm a b to b media company.
Jacob Donnelly:I need I care about who they are, where they work, what is their job level. Right? What's their function? What do they care about? What are what's what's their job to be done, right, to use that that that customer research framework?
Jacob Donnelly:Right? What are those things that my audience cares about? And then my job is to give them that in some way. As a media company, that is great content that helps them make better decisions for their jobs, an opportunity to connect with other their contemporaries at the event, but also hear from them on stage. Like, that's my job.
Jacob Donnelly:Your job is to provide them with software for their WordPress sites. That's the job to be done for your customers. Now we have similar my readers and your customers are very similar, but, like, to be an audience first company is to recognize that the audience is the most important part. For too long, media companies forgot that. And so that's the thing I care about now.
Steve Burge:Does the that sounds like it inherently produces a very different business model that we're not moving towards building the biggest media company that's possible. We're not going the BuzzFeed route. We've had quite a few people on the podcast who wouldn't say less I'm trying to think of the right phrase. It's not less ambitious. It's that a twenty twenty five media company is going to be smaller but perhaps more resilient because they have a tighter connection to their audience.
Steve Burge:They're not going to be suffering from huge traffic crashes because suddenly the algorithm is not pumping, the free traffic to them. We're looking at an era of inherently a very different kind of media company similar to AMO perhaps.
Jacob Donnelly:Let's just be real here. The big media companies of the last decade didn't work either. Right? It's not as if, like, they were more ambitious or anything. They were just funneled with a ton of free cash.
Jacob Donnelly:Like, venture capitalists gave them an obscene amount of money. There's a reason that BuzzFeed trades for as low of evaluation as it does. There's a reason that Vice doesn't exist anymore. Vox is they they say they're profitable, and they seem to be doing okay. There's a reason Business Insider just had to lay off 21% of their of their readers.
Jacob Donnelly:Like, these are not businesses that were built on, like, cement foundations. They were all built on sand. The only media companies that are that that that are going to be able to survive, and the only ones that will survive long term are those that, a, clearly know who their audience is, b, have a brand. The like, you know, I remember I have a friend who who worked, I believe it was at BuzzFeed, and their their whole thing was they know that one day they're gonna put the New York Times out of business. New York Times is is is massively strong.
Jacob Donnelly:Right? It makes less money than it did twenty years ago. Right? The ad market certainly changed, but it has a very, very resilient business. You might not like the New York Times because your political leaning is something different, but it is a very, very resilient business.
Jacob Donnelly:And so media was never supposed to be these mass scale, free, consumer oriented, ad supported businesses. That is a weird phenomena of the Internet. Go back to the nineteen eighties. What did media look like? A bunch of magazines on a newsstand, many of which didn't even have a 100,000 readers.
Jacob Donnelly:That's the era that we're moving back to. It's not new. It's just it we're we're we are course correcting back to the way we used to do things, which is clearly defined audience and, hopefully, a bit more reader revenue. It's hard to build a large scale business purely on advertising unless you can get to true mass scale. If you can get to true, true, true mass scale, then maybe you can do it.
Jacob Donnelly:But my belief going forward, the only that that is that media companies will monetize their readers directly, whether that's a ticket to an event or a subscription or selling a product or good to them. And then secondarily, they will monetize with ads. Right? The reason retail media crushes as much as it does is because none of those companies that run ads like Uber or Amazon or anything, none of them primarily monetize with ads. They make the bulk of their revenue from something else, and then they make a lot of margin from the ads because the ads are secondary.
Jacob Donnelly:I think that is where publishers might go. But I wouldn't say it's less ambitious. It's that we are Yeah. Back in an era. Yeah.
Jacob Donnelly:We're back in an era where you have to care about who your audience is more than ever before because it's too easy to build something smaller. Right? Like, you can take three people and launch a media company about one subset of even what AMO does potentially. Right? Like, that's powerful.
Steve Burge:You we've had a couple of people now on the podcast who've talked about magazines as a very good way to think about audiences nowadays. Like, you have someone who's publishing a magazine for fly fishing in California or, like, building wooden boats or bird watching, and they they're very targeted on their audience. They know exactly who's gonna be paying $30 a year to get their magazine on the doorstep. And they've got quite a few ways to monetize that audience as well. They might have a magazine conference.
Steve Burge:They might have all sorts of wooden boats. You could sell all sorts of products based around wooden boats and that kind of more tightly focused that the focus on the audience is what will distinguish successful companies from unsuccessful ones over the next few years.
Jacob Donnelly:Yeah. I mean, I think there's something interesting about print. I I don't know if in 2025, I think that print is, like, a primary business model, like, you know, how we used to, and they were going back to that. On the other hand, I had Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, speak at the AMO Summit. And one of the things I asked him was, you know, they had just expanded their frequency of the print product from 10 times a year to 12 times a year.
Jacob Donnelly:And he was like, well, look. Like, we're you know, we were called the Atlantic Monthly. It's nice to get back to being monthly. And besides, if AI destroys the Internet, at least I've got something people will buy. And so, like, there's an argument to be made that if if the AI thing doesn't work and the Internet just becomes full of just AI generated slop, well, then what will be a differentiator will be the increase of friction involved in making a print product.
Jacob Donnelly:And so as a consumer, I will look at the print product and go, well, that's actually hard to do. Right? You gotta get people to lay it out. You gotta go get a printing press and all that. So, actually, I'm gonna go to get the magazine for my information rather than the Internet.
Jacob Donnelly:So, like, there is a an interesting, like, play here where the rise of AI results in the Internet just being completely horrible because you don't know if the information is true or false, and we've seen AI make things up relentlessly. In which case, does the magazine become a validator? Friction is good. I think as product people, we sometimes think that we wanna remove friction. I actually think friction is a good thing.
Steve Burge:That actually answered a question I had about the Atlantic a while ago. I was a reader for a few years, and they would send it all I think sometimes like eight times a year or sometimes like all sorts of weird and random cadences for sending out. So they've actually turned up to your conference and decided to send every month, which is good. You're right. It's another AI AI proof touchpoint with the audience.
Steve Burge:And there's also an
Jacob Donnelly:argument that Gen Z actually is gonna get tired is is getting tired of, like, the digital world. They're so digital. Like, they're so overwhelmingly digital that, you know, it it's it's anecdote, but I see a lot of people on I still use Twitter. People on Twitter who will say, like, my kids, like, they come home. They don't wanna use their phones.
Jacob Donnelly:They don't want like, they they want something in their hands.
Steve Burge:This weekend, one of my kids texted me. She wants to get a flip phone, just an old fashioned flip phone. Yep. And another one wants to get a Kodak camera with the the old fashioned printout to their their high school kids now. Yep.
Steve Burge:And they're very much feeling that.
Jacob Donnelly:Hey. Look. It's awful about being online twenty four seven the way that, you know, these kids are. Like, I was bullied in school. I know it's not the point of the podcast.
Jacob Donnelly:I was bullied in school, but at least I knew when I got home, the bullying stopped. Now, like, you get bullied in school, then you get bullied on social media as well. Like, it's it's relentless.
Steve Burge:Well, you've I think you've made really a pretty a positive case for media being a good business to be in over the next few years.
Jacob Donnelly:Great business. At
Steve Burge:the end of every podcast, we ask our guests for at least one or two recommendations of other publishers whose work they really enjoy. Is there someone who's when their newsletter or when their podcast drops, you think, I'm happy to see that. Who who's doing who do you see who's doing really great work at the moment?
Jacob Donnelly:So you have kids. I don't have kids. But what I can tell you is that all my readers publish media companies, and for me to call anyone out would be pretty is like saying I have a favorite. Like That's true. It's not really fair.
Jacob Donnelly:What I will say is, you know, I think there are a lot of interesting media companies doing really interesting things. You know, I find like, I've I'll always have a soft spot for Morning Brew. Right? I love the business that they built. I think that everyone has now copied what they've done so aggressively that, like, I don't know if anything is innovative there anymore.
Jacob Donnelly:You know, I I have a love hate relationship with Adam Ryan, who's the CEO of Workweek. We have and I by love hate, I mean, truly just like we we we are in each other's texts debating things relentlessly, but Workweek is such an interesting business. And what he it it's a it's it's a far riskier play, I think, than how other people have built their businesses in that, like, he's really invested heavily in, like, solo creator type plays. But if it works, it's really going to work. And so that I think is interesting.
Jacob Donnelly:You know? And then it's just I learn about new media companies all the time. New ones that I've never heard of, and I'm like, that is incredible. So I can't tell you a great one or a not great one, but there are you know, if you care about your audience, you're a
Steve Burge:great one in my book. That's what when we had Ben Ben May, who helped you move to WordPress came on, he said the the thing he absolutely loved about being in the media business was you discover all these new media companies, and each of each of them opens up their own little world to you. And suddenly, you discover that coin collecting or or wooden boat building is, in fact, its entire passionate, interesting community of people who you can share that time with for while you're helping them out.
Jacob Donnelly:Exactly. The the the power is in the niche, and I think that that's that's fun.
Steve Burge:Well, thank you so much, Jacob. Congratulations on your first six years of AMO, and I hope there's many more successful years to come.
Jacob Donnelly:Thank you so much. I appreciate it.