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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 PublishPress Podcast. I'm Steve Birch from PublishPress, and we make professional publishing plugins for WordPress.
Dan Knauss:I'm Dan Knauss from MultiDots, where we architect and build and support enterprise WordPress sites for publishers.
Steve Burge:We both believe that WordPress is a world class publishing platform. And today, we're talking with Ben May who runs The Code Company in Australia, and they build world class publishing experiences for people in all sorts of media niches, but in particular, they do a lot of work for people that are really passionate about what they're writing about. It might be sports. It might be politics, but they take a lot of people from platforms like Substack and help them keep on growing. And so they can start perhaps with the newsletter they're passionate about, but they end up with their own multimedia brand on WordPress.
Steve Burge:And it's built from a newsletter, but it becomes a real company.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. That was a a great conversation. Really enjoyed, finally connecting with, Ben on this podcast. And, yeah, great agency, enterprise agency in WordPress as well. Hey.
Dan Knauss:We even went back and talked Joomla again. We all go go back a long way with that. And some of the things that don't change and things that come back like comments and how much engagement and personalization matter even more after everyone's fed up and done with social media. But, publishers and the broad the broad sense of that from people on with the newsletter and a and a big audience, or traditional media publishers, they all want to have those authentic conversations and high engagement with their users. It's the the thing that lasts.
Dan Knauss:We also got into multilingual, really important thing. We'd looking forward to seeing in core at some point with WordPress, which made a nice transition into my efforts on WordCamp Canada with our Francophone programming and and site there. So all altogether, we we kinda span the globe in in this conversation. It's a good one.
Steve Burge:From Australia to Canada to The United States. Well, let's let's hear from Ben. I think this is a great conversation. Hey, Ben. Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Ben May:Thanks, Steve. Nice was nice to see you and Dan.
Steve Burge:Ben, you run The Code Co, the code company.
Ben May:Yes. And and you are based in Regional Queensland, Australia. So a small town of about fifty, sixty thousand people, but fairly close to our state capital of Brisbane. So I bounce between the two. But, yeah, Southeast Queensland.
Steve Burge:And you are really big in the Australian publishing industry. Right? You got some substantial clients. You work with some some household names in Australia.
Ben May:Yeah. We started, well, I started the business really focusing on sort of WordPress and and media and publishing. Probably, it was around 2017, but had been doing various versions of web stuff since probably 2007. So like a lot of people, you know, I tinkered around with building my own CMS. We I used to work in things like Joomla and bits and pieces.
Ben May:And then, you know, probably during that 2007 to 2017, WordPress really sort of matured as a product. We found well, I found myself working with some pretty big, you know, originally probably blog founded media companies in Australia that would be doing big traffic spikes. You know, one of my earliest customs was a sports media publisher. And in Australia, we have surprisingly still a national holiday in some states, horse race. It's like the Kentucky Derby in The US or sort of this thing.
Ben May:Yeah. And that would be one of their biggest traffic days of the year along with some, you know, like, our version of the Super Bowl and so forth. And this would be running on WordPress, and and we would be seeing, you know, 50 to 70,000 concurrent people on the site checking scores or if they're again, there's this this old maybe it's an old British thing. There's a lot of tipping and betting for horse racing that, you know, they start teaching this in primary school. But from the engineering side, it was like, how do we scale a WordPress site back then?
Ben May:This is before AWS existed, especially in Australian zones. So we were running on virtual gear and and, like, you know, manually configuring physical servers and all that kind of stuff. So that was sort of one of my earliest projects, which sort of helped me realize there's a big market in this high end of WordPress. It's it's gonna continue to grow with these large media organizations. It's a great publishing.
Ben May:Even back then, it was a great publishing platform. But what I found is that the WordPress market for engineering talent was probably much more on the smaller end still. So people who had been more traditionally trained as software engineers like myself well, not traditionally, but I'd worked on a lot more, like, advanced software stuff to really be able to sort of fine tune and make these things scale. So that's where I started. I think I did, like, a talk at WordCamp Melbourne.
Ben May:It was, like, 02/2013 about, like which I cringed to go back and look at, but, like, scaling WordPress and what it meant back then for us and things like that. So I've been doing it doing it for a while, and that was sort of the genesis, I guess, for the code company and, growing it into a business where we've got a whole team now of 25 to 30 people who do that, you know, for a lot of clients in Asia Pacific, Australia being probably our biggest because we're here, but also a bit in The US as well. We we we organically just keep picking up bits and pieces here and there. So it's a really exciting mix of stuff for us and exciting challenges.
Steve Burge:What was the name of the original sports blog, if you don't mind me asking? Is it still going now?
Ben May:I think it's all going now. It was originally called TheRoar, The Roar .com .au , and that was a yes. Sport it was a lot of sports stuff, a lot of live blogging since then been acquired and passed around by, I'm sure, a few different companies in the last five or ten years. And
Steve Burge:one of the
Ben May:other things that really taught me or or was a really good experience to learn about, a, was a, you a fairly tough client, which when you're pretty much a sole trader, a one man person, you know, Never much fun at the time, but definitely learned some some tough lessons that you carry through into to future life with professional services. But, also, one of the things that was so valuable about the roar and why it grew and had so much traffic was the comment system. The comment section was so popular. And if there's any I'm not a sports person. I have almost zero interest in sports, but sports communities that sit there and I can't even remember the phrase, armchair critics or armchair coaches or whatever it is.
Ben May:People who sit in their chair and sort of know better than the coach or the ref or whatever else. And we would have hundreds and thousands of comments on articles about, you know, some call made in a game, and and these comments wouldn't just be like a line. They would be like eight paragraph theses on stuff and and, like, eight level deeps in threads and things like that. So if anyone's
Steve Burge:worked
Ben May:with WordPress, especially the organic commenting system, there's a lot of challenges in making it scale with performance, with caching, with editing, with community, like voting, and then we sorta, you know, over time built gamification. So, you know, when you've got these really loyal audiences, how do you incentivize them to keep replying? And then you get points and you get status, and then people who love their communities really love, like, these arbitrary statuses. If you're a Raw rookie or a Raw pro or a Raw guru or whatever, you know, it gives you a sense of status within these communities. And I think that's probably why that company was able to exit because it had such a loyal, engaged fan base or readership.
Ben May:And that was all built in WordPress, and, yeah, we were we were probably doing some really big stuff really early on now.
Steve Burge:So I don't think I've ever told this story on a podcast before, but have you heard of the Bleacher Report? It's a a US company, US blog that's kinda similar to what you described the roar as being? Okay. So maybe, I wanna say, like, fifteen years ago, this is, like, 02/2007, they they launched on Joomla, and they approached us. And we did some very early work for them.
Steve Burge:And their secret sauce was a a community points component, it was called in Joomla, that they had built. And you'd get badges on their website for every comment would be a point. Every time you wrote a post on the site, you'd get, like, 10 or 15 points. And it was exactly how you described the raw that they managed to take a tiny sports blog with just a a fairly crappy gymnast site. And by gamifying the whole thing, they would have tens of thousands of comments.
Steve Burge:It I mean, they sold they exited as well for a a very nice sum of money. They use the same technique.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. You can't say too much bad about WordPress' core comments if you've worked on Joomla comments. But, boy, ever remember trying to migrate those things around? This is interesting bingo card results here. The last time I was on this show, we had an old Joomla person too, and that's gotta be unusual.
Dan Knauss:But you're making me think. Comments are back in my discussions and in some of Brian Morrissey, who we had on a lot of people in publishing, some clients I'm working with are realizing that their retention is exactly what you're describing with these sports sites. But they're for their particular industry niches. And they're actually thinking, journalists even are like, Comments, we've had all these legal, all these concern. We're happy to get rid of them, but now maybe it's time to bring them back because engagement, really authentic engagement is what is our secret sauce.
Dan Knauss:So are you seeing things like that and and other ways that publishers are looking to to maintain that kind of or get get back that kind of early Internet engagement?
Ben May:Yeah. I think that's probably stemmed from a couple of things. One is that social media pretty much just has gone nothing but down, down market into a dumpster fire of commute like discussion. You know, there was strategies at points where people will will just offload the comments to Facebook or will offload the comments to Twitter or whatever, and that has just become, you know, worse and worse every every time we look at it. And and it's of also no value because you're shipping your most valuable asset, your audience, to a third party that is got many, many ulterior motives.
Ben May:But also, like and I I haven't seen the episode with Brian yet, but if I know anything like what Brian would be talking about, it's that you need to fight off your you know, the existential threat that a lot of publishers are gonna have, which is just anonymous page view traffic, which is, you know, a a death sentence, really, that if that is your strategy still, going into the next five years, I don't think you'll be here in five years to be talking about it anymore. So if you wanna survive, you know, publishers definitely in the last sort of, you know, five years has been talking a lot more niche driven stuff, which I think is important. But then that in itself is still not enough, I don't think, to fight off, you know, the sort of cannibalization that's starting to look like happening with various changes to, you know, how we consume the Internet as a whole, whether it's search, whether it's browsers, whether it's, you know, information gathering. An audience inside a community, is a really good way of doing that is putting it behind a login, behind a paywall if it's free or paid, and owning that community a bit more rather than just you know?
Ben May:In a in a true sense, a lot of people talk about they have a community, but if it's just a bunch of readers, that's barely a community. That's people on a bus. But if everyone's talking to each other and, you know, wanna come back to the website, log in, commune like, talk with their community, then I think that's one of the smartest ways to, yeah, protect against, you know, total annihilation, just to put it, you know, in a in a nice positive uplifting way.
Steve Burge:So do you have the opportunity to work with publishers that are trying to create communities in that way, who are trying to create create a community effect on their websites?
Ben May:A lot of the projects we work with, I think, have probably got that to an extent. Imagine like, for for our business, it's a lot of people who have got to a certain stage with everything they've got. It's been put together, you know, by either an agency that's sort of above their head now. Like, they they sort of can't stand like, keep up with the technical challenges or, you know, something's something's strange, but they've sort of established that already. Guess we have we don't work with a lot of, I guess, startups in that sense of building.
Ben May:I've always been interested well, always. The last, what, three years as the creator economy has taken off, I've enjoyed working with some people, and that's more been for educational for me rather than making any money out of it of, like, seeing how these small, you know, creators can sort of spin up. How does, you know, Brian do a rebooting or Jacob do an a media operator or, you know, a thousand of these other ones, you know, right up to, like, a Lenny's, you know, podcast or whatever else, like, these kind of sole creator media businesses and trying to form a view of, like, is that really is it a media company? Is it just a personality brand that's got a media component wrapped around it? But it's it's it's changing a lot, and I still haven't really picked a trend between all of these different success stories.
Ben May:There's a lot of different ways they've come about to do it. But, yeah, a lot of our main work at Code Company is is people who probably already have got that established community. And some of those have been, they've just been around. Like, they were the first ones to do it. Like, The Raw was probably the first to do the community.
Ben May:In The US, we work with One Mile at a Time, which is sort of probably, it's bit like The Points Guy. I think it's the next biggest one after The Points Guy. Again, massive community, massive commenting system, like, all that sort of stuff, but they've been around since, like, the dawn of the Internet since, like, people probably found them on discussion boards and stuff like that. So it's growing and then sort of fostering that community more so than starting from scratch because it is a it's a it's an uphill battle to start from zero today if you were trying to launch a new product.
Dan Knauss:Do you have any major favored technical solutions for what is still fundamentally that old problem with commenting systems? Just a lot of personalization, logged in users, making little database rights, a lot of interactivity that I can see some things coming maybe down the line with WordPress that are gonna make this or transform this. But have you done much with headless? Or do you have favorite things in your toolkit for for handling those kind of complexities?
Ben May:I mean, my one of my most common things I've been doing for the longest time is talking people out of headless for
Steve Burge:for Okay.
Ben May:Because people people will come to us. They've read something or heard something and wanna go down that path and and really have a good business case for it. If I was purely just a business person and wanted to extract maximum amount of money, I would be trying to sell it to as many people as I could because it's a lot more work. And we have done some multi, multimillion dollar projects that have been headless because of insistence on clients' ends. And the products at the end are not something we like to plug show people because they're just not they wouldn't they didn't need to go down that path.
Ben May:It didn't solve a problem. It it added overhead, things like that. It often creates more problems downstream, things like that. So we've well, I'm I've always been very big on, like, keeping things as simple as possible. You know, we've done mostly traditional, like, always on full stack WordPress front end and back ends unless you have a I think there is a a case for headless, but most people aren't reaching that threshold of genuinely having multiple data back ends that all wanna power a single decoupled front end.
Ben May:If you're just doing WordPress to React one to one, that there's absolutely no point in doing that. Like, unless you've got some incredible specific function that only a client side React application can power. Most people don't need to. When it comes to commenting, things like the raw, one mile at a time, stuff like that, yeah, you'll have hundreds of people logged in. That's gonna bypass cash by default, especially with, like, stock standard products.
Ben May:You know, we've done a lot of stuff, fine tuning things like NGINX, playing with things like fragment cache. So we're we're we're still running page cache at the at the edge for logged out visits, which is obviously our majority of spiky traffic. So we're not having servers down for that. But if we can wrap things like navigation systems anywhere where there's heavy heavy rendering and multiple database queries when there is logged in traffic hitting the site for a commenter, we need them to see their their comments straight away because otherwise, they'll just keep submitting it or the you know, all these other quirks that, again, most people probably have hit in the past, setting specific cookie bypass, edge rules, and things like this. But, you know, I think if you focus on building high performance products, you know, again, that often means we're steering away from page builders, lots of plug ins, all this sort of stuff that we're building.
Ben May:You know? And that is where it's hard to sometimes explain to a client when you're trying to sell the solution of like, look. We could build this for a fifth of the price, but you're gonna end up with all these performance problems later on. We can't quantify when or how or what, but guarantee you they are gonna happen. But when you do it right and or you get clients who have been burnt in the past, and they're like, yeah.
Ben May:We need to do it. We need to invest in the engineering. We want it as absolutely lean as possible. We want every we want someone to go through every single query that runs on that page and validate that it needs to be there, you know, that kinda meticulous thinking, that's when we steer away from most of those problems. When there are, yeah, 30 plugins running and random queries happening and whatever, that's when, you know, you log in and go to load the page in it as a five zero three error or something like that because the database server is is crashing or, you know, whatever else.
Steve Burge:Right. You mentioned you mentioned Brian Morrissey from the rebooting who we had on a few episodes ago. And in the same breath, you mentioned a media operator as well, which is a similar in a similar vein. Can you talk to us about that? The one one of your most high profile clients, I believe.
Steve Burge:You just redid their website recently?
Ben May:Yeah. I'm sure Jacob will yeah. I mean, I think Jacob and Brian have both. So Jacob's the founder of media operator. He used to be I think he was at Coindesk, which was a crypto media company for a bit and then ended up being at Morning Brew as it sort of went from just as it got sold to, like, the hockey stick of, like, 10 x ing and so he was there at Morning Brew for quite a while.
Ben May:And I think I met him on Twitter of all things during COVID, and and that was when he was sort of I think he just started a sub stack of wanting to, you know, do this media newsletter, which is what everyone was doing, especially well, especially in The US. A lot of people were who were all trapped inside and things like that, were, you know, setting up Substacks and and sort of I knew I could tell he wanted to sort of grow it into a real business, and we were just chatting. And I was like, I'll I'll take you off Substack as a as a passion project out of like, both my passion of open source and getting off, you know, proprietary platforms, wanting to see where he was I could see he was trying to turn it into a real business of Substack, which ended up turning into you know, we did probably ten, fifteen, and much bigger Substack migrations as well. We migrated the the dispatch, which was sort of, like, probably one of the top five Substacks at the time. I think there was fifty, sixty thousand paying subscribers, hundreds of thousands of free subscribers off Substack to WordPress as well, and and migrating them off.
Ben May:But, yeah, Jacob Jacob and Brian do very similar things. They're sort of covering the media landscape, obviously, through The US. AMO is definitely growing more into a traditional media business, I think. Jacob's got, like, reporters now, and they're covering a lot more market stuff. Brian, I think, is probably more the I don't think I'm offending anyone in if he's too analysis is on the fly, but I think, yeah, Brian is more the the industry, like, at a higher level, and and Yep.
Ben May:He came from DigiDay, and so he's got a a a perspective as well. And I'd read and follow them both pay them both for their insights. And AMO seems to be growing more into, yeah, more of a traditional meet almost, yeah, I guess, like a DigiDay in a way, but like a traditional media business. Jacob runs his AMO Summit every year, which is on in October, I think, in New York. And I know Brian does a lot more, like, high touch, smaller curated events and things throughout the year and stuff like that.
Ben May:So, yeah, they're both really interesting stories to follow as he's as they're both frenemies, I guess, you know, doing doing similar things in a similar ecosystem, similar overlap, but, yeah, attacking it from two different ways.
Steve Burge:Oh, so maybe there's a a bigger story there with quite a lot of Substackers and original newsletter people ramping up. And when they're successful, they're able to make the leap from Substack to WordPress to their own platform to becoming more of a real business rather than just a Substacker.
Ben May:Yeah. I mean and I've I've talked a lot of people about this, and, like, Jacob and and and Brian went two different ways. And, obviously, this is public knowledge because you can go and have a look yourself. But Brian was on Substack originally. He left, and he talks about this all the time on his podcast.
Ben May:Right. He's on ghost, though. And I think Brian's version of his business, and, again, he said this publicly, is, like, he's got a lot of fractional people all over the place helping him, and it's kind of like it's a different model to, I think, where Jacob's wanting to go. And when I talk to people who say, oh, yeah. I wanna get off Substack or I wanna do whatever else.
Ben May:First thing I think anyone in honest sales should do is sort of talk them out of it first or, like, press why because, like, we can take you off Substack and build you a site and whatever if you can afford it. Like, let's assume that you can. But it's not even that. It's like, if you are this sort of solo, what is it, entrepreneur or or creator or, like, micro business or whatever the term we wanna use nowadays is that it's not just the migration getting off subject and setting up a WordPress. It's who at your end and basically you or these fractionals is gonna product manage this?
Ben May:Who's gonna give you the requirements? Who's gonna actually check it every month? Who's gonna do the testing? Who's gonna, you know, in six months' time, think about you know? One of the one of the rules, I think it was, like, David Baker who works with a lot of agent David C.
Ben May:Baker who works with a lot of agencies, he all Blair ends. He does win without pitching. One of their rules is always don't work with people who are spending their own money. And if you're working with those sorts of business, every dollar they spend with me is a dollar less they're taking home compared to a, you know, real business that has a budget and things like that. So, you know, I talk more people out of leaving Substack because of some, you know, political ideology that, you know, Substack's got, you know, crazy people on there and this, that, and the other, which, you know, true or not, it it's sort of don't cut your nose to spite your face compared to, say, ghost, sort of maybe somewhere in the middle.
Ben May:You're getting more flexibility, not as much. And and if you were trying to turn this into a $10,000,000 business, probably not. I wouldn't think Ghost, you could probably do it. You can do anything anyway, but that's where I would say WordPress is gonna do something. And for AMO, it unlocked the ability to do much more sophisticated, you know, membership using I just completely forgotten the name of the platform that we're using.
Ben May:We were using Memberful for a while, and now we're using Wall Kit. And Wall Kit is sort of like an in between mid market and above. It's not as complex as, a piano, or a Recurly or a Chargify or a Chargebee, but it does, you know, metered paywalling. It's doing progressive paywall stuff. It's doing group subscription, all the other fancy stuff that subscription people like.
Ben May:That's something like a ghost, while turnkey and super flexible, is not gonna do. So, yeah, it's interesting to watch where Jacob and Brian are both going in their businesses, both having successful in in what they're doing, but tackling it in different ways.
Steve Burge:So some of these publishers, if they're going to be remain as individuals or maybe individuals with some fractional help, they're probably best off remaining on Substack or Ghost. But perhaps if you're looking for the big exit in the future, you're going to want to move to WordPress to build a platform that you own because are people gonna be paying $2,030,000,000 dollars to buy a a Ghost newsletter or Substack?
Ben May:Right. Exactly. And, again, I'll just I'll just steal Brian's quotes now, but I think he says I'll probably butcher it, but, are you building a business around a platform? So using, like, Substack or Ghost, or are you building a platform around a business? So you can build a a website around a business that way go where you want it to go.
Ben May:But if you were a Substack, you're always gonna be building a Substack channel or it's like building a YouTube channel, a Substack channel, Substack, very much going platform, you know, like a medium, like a YouTube, like a, you know, whatever, of trying to keep all their users in this ecosystem. Pros and cons, but, yeah, if you are trying to build defensible IP that is something that you own and you can do, you're at the whim of any platform. And, you know, probably all three of us have been around long enough to see publishers who were on the gravy train of Facebook, you know, ten years ago and then had that turned off overnight and business is lost. Or Australia and Canada with these government grants that they strong armed social media companies, and then that's all dying out. And they're like, well, hang on.
Ben May:Where's our $10,000,000? And that's not coming back again. So, you know, if you're at the mercy of another business, another platform, how you value that, I would really struggle compared to an owned and operated piece of technology, you know, that you can that you can sell, transfer, do whatever.
Dan Knauss:No argument for me.
Steve Burge:Other things that, you you mentioned a media operator, and the dispatch and some of the gambling sites in the in Australia as well, and you work with other high profile publishers too. Other things that they're doing now in 2025 that are really driving growth for them? Are there these big successful publishers, the ones that are growing fast right now, what are they executing well on? Is it audience growth? Is it community?
Steve Burge:Probably not social media. Probably not SEO at this point, is it?
Ben May:Yeah. I mean, I think everyone is is different, and there's probably some certain trends that you could pull out of it. But I think, I mean, I hate the pronunciation as someone who speaks English and not American, but there's riches in niches. But riches in niches doesn't really work as well. But those who have, like, gone down in into, like, really specific niches, I think, are really being really smart.
Ben May:Yeah. There's there's a lot of publishers that have been successful and and, like, you know, on on TV advertisements for, like, insurance or whatever else or or, you know, banking is like past performance is not an indicator of future success. If you're you can't ride on that forever. If you are being really clever about the audience you serve, b two b is great. Like, b two b is one of those ones where, you know, you can frame it around.
Ben May:Your audience needs you to do their job better. Like, that means you're gonna get professional development budget. People are gonna be looking at you daily because it's helping them do their job better, make they're gonna make more money, you know, whatever that is. So those have gone niche in b two b or sort of some specialty media. I think news media, we don't work a lot with, and that is fraught with turbulence because news media, like in The US, there's, like, you know, freedom of the press in Australia.
Ben May:Like, it comes into freedom of speech. It comes in all these different, you know, much bigger philosophical challenges, which as a software engineer is not my problem to solve. You know, I just wanna build tech stacks out that work. You know, news media is really challenging. There's all these emergencies of, like, micro news things popping up, but I don't know how well that will work of, like, a two man band in, you know, rural Arkansas, you know, doing a newsletter for 50 people or whatever else.
Ben May:They're they're probably working on monetization strategies that, you know, worked twenty years ago and might work for another ten years, like, at hyper hyper local levels. And then, yeah, I think on the direct, like, b to c stuff is still trying to find some sort of niche or community around that. So whether that's sports, not gambling. I don't work with any gambling companies, which ironically all their advertisers are probably gambling companies.
Steve Burge:Oh, so you you mentioned the horse racing. I guess they're not, gambling specific.
Ben May:They just do the reporting on the horse racing. It's, but yeah.
Steve Burge:Got it. Okay.
Ben May:Like like most, like most, sports companies, they their biggest gamblers are either gonna be alcohol or gambling. So, you know, we're all doing God's work here. And then, yeah, it's it's at those really hyper engaged communities, Car reviews, plane reviews, sports, travel, like, whatever these sort of specific niches or passions are. We're working with a group in The US. Really interesting story.
Ben May:Started off as Freightwaves, which was a trucking logistics b to b media company. We helped them sort of replatform their WordPress stack a few years ago and sort of set all of that up. They're really happy. They've been working on that. Their owner so and and their other core product was actually a a business intelligence product called Sonar for the trucking industry.
Ben May:So they had this really clever media was their funnel, and then they sold people into this business intelligence product. And that is what made, I don't know, the majority of the revenue. Like, they made a ton of money out of this product, and the revenue was from this thing, the thing, the media entity. What they've now done is build out this collection of media companies. I think they've bought, like, 20 or 30 media companies now or media titles, and they've put under this umbrella of Fire Crown.
Ben May:And Fire Crown has got anything from, like, people who who have retired and bought a Cessna one eighty two and now are doing property development projects to sell to those people to have flying gated communities where if you've got that much money apparently that you've bought a plane, you now wanna own a house that's inside, like, a private airport that you can land your plane and fly your plane to your house's hangar. And it's like, that's a hit. So they've created this community, and they've got things like model trains and planes and all these hyper, like, engaged audiences around, like, passions.
Steve Burge:So one level, you have a house on a golf course. Maybe one level higher, you have a house with a a boat ramp and a boat dock. But the real successful people have a house with an airport in there, a private airport in the back of the house.
Ben May:And they've done a ton of other because, obviously, like, they they they've also got flying mag and a bunch of aviation properties, and they've then spun that into another whole business about, like, financing, buying airplanes. So, like, they've been really clever in, like Uh-huh. Using media media around passion because I guess that's another thing that is somewhat AI proof. You can't ask ChatTubichi to give me the experience of owning a plane. Like,
Steve Burge:if
Ben May:I if I my, you know, my goal is to fly a private jet or, you know, own a plane when I retire or whatever else. Like, there's no like, that that is still gonna need to get to that stage somehow. So they've bought these media properties, and a lot of them still have magazines and, like, those high caliber products. But they've used a media asset to sort of be the the the glue or the sponge to bring people in, and then they've monetized it in all completely different ways. So going back to your question about success, like, it's really hard to, like, look at what does what does OMAT do for one mile at a time for for travel versus what does Flying Mag do for financing buying light aircraft or doing, like, joint ventures to, you know, media operator doing, you know, events in New York for the media executives.
Ben May:It's partly what I love about media. Like, some of the leads we've got over the years, some we've won, some we haven't of, like, you know, one we got was something to do with, like, coin collecting. And they're like, yeah. This is a really engaged audience of, like, 200,000 people, and they come to this event. I was like, just these worlds that would never exist.
Ben May:Like, unless you knew about this, like, tiny little community that is this globally, like, highly engaged audience, you know, that something about media that, like, is this glue on the Internet that holds all these these people together. It's kind of one of the things that is so exciting about our work, I guess, is seldom two days that are very different. Like, we just have such breadth and depth of, like, different crazy stuff, but also incredibly cool to be able to work on some of it and see it executed and and working.
Steve Burge:That's an interesting difference. You you talk about not working with, sort of news media, traditional newspapers where the content might be a little drier. Your customers are more passion focused, I guess, often. It may be it may be coins. It may be sports.
Steve Burge:It may be whatever the topic is, but quite often, you're kind of getting a little insight into a world where people are writing about something. They're publishing about something because they're incredibly passionate about it. Yeah. There's a community there.
Ben May:Struggled, like, other than saying niche, is, like, specialty media or something like that seems to be a lot of the clients. We get the most they get the most value of working with someone like us. And they've specialized in something. I think, you know, any I think that's the the success for agencies is is specializing for products. Specializing, you should just keep specializing, going deeper and deeper into into verticals and things like that.
Ben May:And in media, it's a lot easier to build a community around you know, we work with her campus in The US for four or five years. It's like that's they know exactly their audience. It's like college girls who are going to college for, like, those four years. It's a very specific thing. What are the challenges they're doing?
Ben May:How do we monetize that? How do we help them? So on and so forth. It's like everyone else in the world, not interested in in serving, but, you know, it's a super clear positioning.
Steve Burge:Oh, HerCampus.com is girls going to university for the first time. They they deal with them for four years. They provide content to them for four years, and then Yeah. Then they move on. That's not the target audience.
Ben May:Probably not very useful when you're 45, you know, and looking back at you know, I don't know I don't know what like, couldn't even imagine one of the topics, but, like, but having those really clear audiences, I think, is the key. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:So how does how does multilingual fit into that? Because you came back from the state of the word in in Tokyo and said this is the year for for multilingual. And why isn't that something like AI is just gonna solve that for us?
Ben May:Yeah. I I think about that a lot, and, like, there's a lot of degrees of multilingual, I guess. Because, yeah, at at one end, if you're just trying to translate an article about an airplane, like, something simple. Yeah. The web the web is well, even if you zoom out more, like we said at the beginning, the way the Internet has sort of worked loosely for the last twenty years has been, like, browsers, search engines, web pages, like, has sort of been this way of retrieving information.
Ben May:And for anyone to guess what it's gonna look like in twenty years' time is, you know, let alone five years. So I think multilingual or or or reading content in other languages or whatever else is gonna change dramatically and, like, work out what all these different edge cases are. So if I'm trying to research about a hotel in Tokyo for a trip, and I just ask ChatGPT, it might do the translation on the fly. I don't even need to go to its web page anymore, things like that. Browsers are also evolved.
Ben May:Like, again, we sorta you know, in twenty years, we've had Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome. Like, that's pretty much been it for twenty years. But, you know, we're now starting we're seeing products that are changing that concept and, like, what's the concept of a browser? Does it just get baked into an operating system or or an does it become an agent? You know, whatever else.
Ben May:But then at the end of it, like, for the other section of our clients that are still not necessarily media and publishing, but they are sort of really heavy content businesses. So we talk a lot about, like, our work with Fujifilm in Japan. Like, they are, you know, releasing products, and that product is getting released in, you know, multiple market markets around the world, both in terms of the language translation, but also the cultural changes in how the content might be explained, you know, strictly converting English to Japanese or or, you know, two different languages. You know, there's I remember seeing something years ago about someone who had a sentence, and they put it in Google Translate from one to another and just kept translating it 10 times. And the sentences got worse and worse and worse and worse.
Ben May:And that's that that highlights that kind of challenge with, like, automated translation and, like, cultural sensitivities and barriers and, like, a word English I mean, English is a terrible language. It's it one word can mean 10 different things depending on how I say it or when I say it. So organizations like that are still doing manual translation. Some of our clients, you know, we work with a Taiwanese based media company that work in Mandarin, but also publish in tradition or simplified Chinese, which are similar but different. So they used automated translation, but still manually verified before it gets published.
Ben May:They're not just, like, plugging it into a robot to do translations because, you know, they're in news publishing. You don't want things getting, you know, wrong by a robot. But I think multilingual is gonna be interesting of, like, as as brands and and sort of organizations are trying to work in different markets, you know, as most of the world may be becoming more and more globalized. Some countries may not be. But working in different markets, you know, how you sell, you know, a car in Australia might be very different to how you sell a car in Italy, like or America.
Ben May:You know? Those three, countries have got very different perspectives of what a car should look like, what it should do, what the benefits of it are, and things like that. So it's not just translating the language. It's also handling, you know, changing components of the text, you know, things like block editor. Do we break down some elements that get translated and others not?
Ben May:There's a lot of interesting stuff, especially with WordPress core as we, you know, inch closer to having more of that built in. I don't think core will, likely solve those sorts of challenges that, like, really complex brands and and sort of enterprises are looking for. I suspect it would be like, you know, just like, WordPress core hasn't got rid of, something like an ACF or a Yoast or what like, these components still are required to provide that more advanced functionality that specific businesses are are looking for.
Steve Burge:You Right. You have a favorite approach to doing it in WordPress? Do you do multisite? Do you do individual sites for each language? How do you approach that?
Ben May:The two I mean, I'll I'll probably get some of this wrong. The two most common that I see our team doing and when I'm I'm talking with people at the beginning and during the process, the multisite approach is sometimes a good halfway in between of the ability to sync content across multiple brands, but you run into a bunch of technical challenges that by default out of the box WordPress is not great at solving. You know, if I wanna put out a press release across all things, I want that to be identical, just translated. But, you know, I don't wanna have to manually copy and paste an article. Do I then use, like, a plugin like Distributor to, like, try and, like, sort of jankily push it into the and then, like, set canonicals back?
Ben May:Like, it sort of gets a little messy. The most common pathway we've landed on is WPML because it is it can be a a beast, but, when reigned in, allows the most flexibility to to do all the things that we need to do. It has a combination of automations around translations for simple, use cases, but up to, you know, something like Fujifilm, which was, you know, at the time may still be, you know, one of the most complex multilingual projects that have been done on WPML. Like, we were working with their team to get support on certain things to make it work at that sort of scale when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of articles at 45 languages and and 200 writers who are doing different languages all on the same system and things like that, it is a powerful enough product to be able to scale that out compared to some of the other plugins that are almost like running the website through a proxy and just doing on the fly translation, you know, at at the other end of the spectrum.
Dan Knauss:You're describing exactly my my challenges now as a co organizer for WordPress Canada, which you said there's a there's a good there's fair chance you might might meet there and might make it to it, but that would be that would be great. It's it's been a while since I've actually done anything with multilingual in in WordPress and actually having to think about it and with the constraints we have doing on multisite. It's really reminded me that there's the technical side, but it's really a it's it's a tool for, as you were saying earlier, for really the relational you know, the real if you want that real engagement, you're really a machine translation is not gonna cut it. It's not gonna do Quebec French. You know?
Dan Knauss:There's no there's not gonna be a suitable idioms that, well, that really connect people when when they realize you have some fluency or you're you're really taking the time to connect. And that's an organizing issue. We really wanna achieve that sort of connection and label my title as boss de becasse, which is a chief of the toilets, boss of the toilets, someone who makes up authority. Anyone can jump in and organize. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:That's been on my mind a lot and something that the technology to me brings home in WordPress. It's that community connection that allows you to it allows you to bring back when the tool you're using is really ultimately for making those connections and allowing you to reach those audiences. I think you said in your article on the year for translation, when publishers really understand their content and business and how it works across markets, it's not really just about plugins and technology. Can you elaborate on that? That's kind of what you it struck struck me when I when I
Ben May:read it. Anyone in technical implementation or product or whatever else, you know, will will probably agree that the technology is often the easier part. If at a business level, they haven't figured out, you know, processes and workflows and conceptually, what does it mean to to, you know, work in different markets or or or market in diff like, the marketing function in different geographical regions and understanding those nuances and how do those, you know, different international teams work. We don't wanna go ahead and build workflows in a CMS that don't fit that organization. And and I guess this is, like, the challenge going back to WordPress core.
Ben May:For anyone who works in the sort of this enterprise space, like scale consortium sort of members or or WordPress VIP agencies and stuff like that, one of the things we're most commonly fighting or or up against is the other the big enterprise CMS stacks or stacks or whatever we wanna call it. And people or or prospects typically, unless they're educated on WordPress specifically, if you're just a CMS buyer, I don't think you're out looking for advanced multilingual or, you know, whatever that is. They're looking for a CMS or a DXP or whatever we wanna call composable martech stack. The CMS like, the multilingual stuff is just baked into all of these other systems by default. It's not something that is this revelatory extra layer on top.
Ben May:We take it we like, we think of it that way because we know what WordPress is at its core and then extending it all out on top. But if we're up against Kentico or Cycle or whatever, they just have all this multilingual stuff built in. They have all these editorial workflows. You know, it gets a bit trickier when you come and say, well, we can use WordPress plus multilingual press or WPML or PolyLang. And then we're gonna get published press and, like, all these other add ons plugged in, and then, like, it becomes this really complicated narrative verse.
Ben May:Oh, you've got the Adobe Experience Manager Suite. It's like buying Microsoft Office Suite. It's got everything, even things you'll never use. But it pros and cons, the market's getting more sophisticated around understanding all of that. But as, like, we move into that, like, WordPress multilingual stuff in core, it's like, how do we, like, you know, add another checkbox to the side of the, the the software, you know, the old Microsoft Windows 95 box that had all the ticks on the side?
Ben May:Like, how do we add another tick on WordPress of, you know, multilingual? You know, it might be a good message to in market of that it's it now supports multilingual even though it always did, but, you know, helps helps lower those barriers and saves conversations for poor salespeople who have to explain all of this stuff, to to prospects who don't understand all the nuance.
Steve Burge:Also, if WordPress ever becomes truly multilingual in the core, which it may do in Gutenberg phase four, it's likely to be a a base system where people like yourself are gonna have to inevitably add a lot of extents extensible code anyway. It's never really going to scale up to meet the needs of some of your more advanced customers.
Ben May:Yeah. I don't think the block editor introduction has meant that agencies aren't building custom blocks anymore. We're we're working with what we've got now. We're not we're not building, you know, horrible, you know, flexible content blocks anymore and all this sort of stuff. We're doing much richer native Gutenberg development and things like that.
Ben May:I think companies like WPML will still exist because they're gonna have to take whatever that is and then add all of their advanced sort of secret sauce or or, you know, their IP to the mix. I know they're talking about building their own LLMs and translation models and systems like that, so I'm sure there'll be a a valuable business, you know, to build on top of all of these things. But it just sort of rises what the baseline is up a little bit, you know, to go.
Steve Burge:So is would that be your one choice of something WordPress could improve in order to be more competitive with the other big CMS platforms that you're going up against?
Ben May:I would love to see a release or a series of releases on a ton of boring stuff that most people find incredibly mundane and just who cares? But when you look at it at totality, like, things like WP admin and user management and, like, taxonomy management, like, there's so many good foundational pieces in there that probably, you know, so many agencies have built the last 30% on top every single time for a different or whatever else. But it's like, why can't I merge taxonomies natively, or why do I have to like, things that are, you know, that are baked into more mature products. Yeah. Lots lots of little boring things I think could really move the needle on just using it as a CMS.
Ben May:Like, I think we probably forget and take for I either forget or take for granted how good you know, what all the things we can do or power users like probably all of us know all the quirks to get around it. How do I I had to jump into database and just change that, and it's done. But if you think about it as a CMS level, there's probably a ton of just really basic stuff. Well, I know there is. There's ton of basic stuff that could be done that would just make, you know, WordPress as a CMS, you know, just a more mature product.
Dan Knauss:Definitely. Yeah. I think I think that short list of of small yeah. Those are the things you've installed a million times on on some personal project or use over again with clients. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:Absolutely. Steve, is it blog roll time?
Steve Burge:Ben, final question that we ask everyone that comes on the podcast. This is a blog roll question. We work with publishers. You see publishers every day. Is there a publisher whose newsletter you get really excited to read or whose blog posts you get really excited to see.
Steve Burge:Can you pick one publisher whose work you really admire at the moment?
Ben May:Excited is a is a strong word, because it's all work related, really. I probably follow mostly work stuff. I think going back to talking about I'm gonna break the rule and say two, but both Brian and Jacob from, obviously, the rebooting and a media operator, I enjoy, obviously, their content because I live and breathe in this world a lot. And but I also enjoy how they're both tackling the same problem from two different angles. So I I consume both their content in different capacities, whether it's podcast newsletters, reading the websites, and things like that, their communities, their events, like, all these different touch points.
Ben May:So I'll I'll I'll I'm gonna cop out and say, two, it's a media operator and the rebooting. Given we've talked nothing about media for the last hour, that's top of mind. Yeah.
Steve Burge:I'll tell you what, Dan. We need to get Jacob on the podcast then. Yeah. Definitely. We've we've had Brian.
Steve Burge:We need to get Jacob too.
Dan Knauss:Absolutely. Yeah. That would be perfect.
Steve Burge:Cool. Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast, Ben. I really appreciate your insights.
Ben May:Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Dan. Nice to see you both.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. Thanks so much.