TBPN Live - Condé Nast CEO Explains Why Human Journalism Wins in the AI Era

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

This is our full conversation with Roger Lynch, recorded live on TBPN.We discuss why trusted media brands like Vogue and The New Yorker may become even more valuable in the AI era, how Condé Nast is adapting to the collapse of search traffic and the rise of AI-generated content, why Roger believes publishers should stop relying on Google for distribution, and how the company is thinking about subscriptions, events, branded content, creators, and the future of journalism as platforms like Substack, TikTok, and AI reshape the media industry.Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.comFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Anyway, we have the perfect guy to ask about this. I don't know who's going to comment on any of this, but we can certainly try and ask him about it because we have Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, with us here in the TB in Ultram. Roger, great to see you again. How you doing? I'm all right. For those, I mean, we were hanging out last week, but for those who don't know, introduce yourself. Let's go a little bit back in time, take us on your journey,

and then we can get into all the hot topics and media. Sure. Well, yeah, I've been the CEO of Cunninghouse for seven years, but prior to that, I spent my whole career really in technology. And primarily a fantastic guitarist. Thank you very much. That was my life's ambition. That was an incredible performance. It's a little bit of just lore, I guess, but we can get into hobbies and things outside business.

But, yeah, take us back. What was the first job in media? How did you get to where you were? First job in media. Yeah, maybe that's a good place to start. Well, I mean, it depends on how you define media. Really, I spent my career at the intersection of technology and media. So the first company that I ran was a broadband business.

It was one of the first broadband businesses in Europe going back to 1999. And literally, one of the first things we did is we did a deal with the NFL to stream live NFL games in 1999. That's crazy. How much demand was there for NFL in Europe at that time? Well, the reason the NFL was interested in it, this is back when Paul Tagliabu was the commissioner, he came over to announce us, you know, crazy idea that we had, was they were trying to build the NFL in Europe. Yeah, they're like, I hear people love football over there. Why aren't we making money?

Why isn't in our football? They had, I think there was a team called the Amsterdam Admirals at the time. There was a European Football League that they were trying to promote. And, you know, broadband was a really interesting technology. and I was really excited to see how it could be used to change how people consume content. That's why we did that deal. And then I started an IPTV company,

the first video on demand, IPTV, and then Sling TV, streaming TV. So always sort of at the intersection of technology and meteor content. Then I ran Pandora, the first company I ran that I didn't start. I loved Pandora. Yeah, Pandora is truly, when I think of magical, when I think of magical,

when I think of magical technology, experiences in my childhood. I think of Pandora. I think of being in my garage with my dad, we'd be playing pool, listening to music or work, tinkering on something. I found so many obscure songs on Pandora. It's amazing. Was there some sort of unique opportunity with Pandora around treating it like a radio station to, because it feels like there was some sort of licensing deal on the back end that was not the same as Spotify or iTunes store at the time where, because you couldn't play on demand. I must have been, I must have been intuitively at the time, I was like, okay, this is a fair tradeoff.

Like, I'm used to going to iTunes and I'm going to pay 99 cents. Or I can just kind of like roll the dice. Maybe I'll get my favorite song on Pandora. So I found myself on Pandora a lot. Pandora took advantage of some rights that allowed them, compulsory rights, allowed them to stream all of that content. And but, you know, one of the tradeoffs is you couldn't choose. the song. Yeah.

And so they did launch a subscription, this is long before I joined, subscription service, but we're late for that game. They were quite late for that game. By that time, Spotify already had a very strong presence and some of the other big tech companies were getting into it. But you mentioned AI. I mean, to me, one of the key things with Pandora was the way it combined sort of human taste with AI.

So we had a team of musicologists, and one of the, you know, you mentioned, I've been a guitar player all my life, one of the best parts of that job, is they were all fantastic musicians. So we do these company events and we'd play all the time. And these guys were so, and they were mostly men, were so good. But then we had the data scientists also, and they would take the work that the musicologist did and create their machine learning algorithms around that. And each of the algorithms, I can't remember, around 90 or so algorithms, each one would get tuned for every individual listener. So it'd be weighted a little bit more. Jordy like this, John's like this, and so it creates a personalized experience. And to me, I still listen to Pandora, I also listen to Spotify.

But when I want something to just put something on and let it play, I'll go to Pandora because I think those algorithms still outperformed. Yeah. I mean, we talked to this new COSI of Spotify, but like that AI-driven feature, the promptable playlist is just coming to Spotify like this year. And I'm sure it's souped up and powerful and stuff, but it is remarkable how long that internet radio lasted. These things have long, these things have long lives. I'm wondering about your view on durability and media generally. It feels like anytime that there's some platform shift, there's endless think pieces about legacy media is dead, linear TV is dead, this is dead. Everyone loves to talk about that. But in your experience, how does the media industry actually change as technology arrives? You know, the media industry is as a history of not changing quickly enough.

And you can start with the music industry. You know, recorded music industry peaked in 1999. And then, you know, Napster. And that's sales revenue. Yeah. And recorded, recorded music industry. We found out, like, last week or the week before, that vinyl record sales are like something like 10% of streaming revenue. So vinyl records, so that's an interesting trend to talk about.

But what the music industry did or didn't do is, and this is one of the big mistakes. And, you know, like most lessons that you learn, you learn the biggest lessons from your mistakes. What the music industry didn't do is look at how their customers were behaving and say, okay, Let me craft my business around that. They said, no, I don't like that behavior. I'm going to change the behavior. Let me sue these teenagers in Iowa who are downloading music or sue the ISPs or their parents or whatever. So I could change the behavior back because I really like it when they buy CDs.

That's really good for my business. That was disastrous for the industry. So finally, once they had embraced downloads and then streaming, it started growing again. It's only just gotten back to the size it was in 1999, you know, 27 years later. later. There's more people and people still like music just as much as they did before. Of course. Of course, but they fought it for far too long and it's a mistake.

Binal records have grown every year for the last 18 years and sales of vinyl records. And it used to be people my age buying vinyl records and collecting them. Now there are as many people in their 20s buying them as there are people in their 50s or 60s buying them. A lot of people in their 20s don't even own a record player. They buy the final records. an interesting trend that we and we see it a bit in our industry too like young people buying physical magazines yeah yeah it's like why well i think it's a search for authenticity i think when

you have so much you got the paper right here digital content that is in your pocket and it's all free or free to consume it becomes less valuable and and maybe less authentic to you and so yeah and there's there's something that's always been missing from like part of the the experience of being a music fan to never actually go and trade your dollars. Like I think people do like to vote with their dollars and express their interests and actually have this physical embodiment of their of their taste. Well, they're doing it with live music now. That's where the money is gone.

The money is, you know, really moved to live. It used to be, you know, in the 90s and 80s and everything, people would go on tour to support their record sales. And now it's the reverse. You release the records so you can go on tour and sell tickets. And it feels like the in-person event, stadiums, are getting like the Cappex is just skyrocketing across the sphere, SoFi Stadium here in Los Angeles. There's like more and more ways to draw people in with like ever larger spectacles

and these like shelling points were like, did you see Taylor Swift in the Ares tour? Like that was a key moment that even like the casual fans needed to find. So after Pandora talk about the journey into Condé Ness. Yeah, it was, you know, it wasn't a bit Pandora very long because we sold it to Series XM. And, you know, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, and I was fortunate enough to be in process on four different companies. Two were in New York, two in L.A. We're from L.A. So L.A. had a lot of attractions for us.

And I was flying back and forth between New York and L.A. and having trouble deciding what I wanted to do. And my wife was like, usually you're so decisive. It's like, I know. It's really tough. And then I finally realized on one of these flights that when I'm sitting there, I had all the information on all these companies. every time I'd go to the Condiagnas information. I wanted to read about that.

And that's literally how it made my decision. That's the most intellectually interesting to me. I'm going to go do that. But there were a couple criteria I had for what I did next. One was I still like the intersection of content and technology and distribution models. But non-exclusive content was going to be dominated by big tech companies. you know, music, films, TV, whatever.

The stuff that I had been doing, it had all been non-exclusive. Like, I wanted to go somewhere where we had our own content, we had our own brands, we could control our distribution more. And so that was certainly one of the criteria, but also still the opportunity to innovate around technology, how you use technology to create new business models, distribution models. And, you know, Connie Nass really fit that well. Yeah.

Yeah, there is interesting, I mean, we've talked about this a ton, because, you know, thinking about all the new categories of media, which we joked about, we put out this really, like, unhinged market map of media as a joke. And then, unfortunately, people, we, like, called ourselves neotraditional media, which was a joke. And then now people will tell us and be like, you guys are a pioneer of neotrad media. We're like, we created that category as a joke. But something that we've come back to.

over and over is just the value of these legacy brands that have been built across decades and how, you know, take away like the business models and how those are evolving. Like it just seems like the value of a Vanity Fair or a Vogue or the New Yorker are shockingly durable because we're just, you can make more of these kind of properties, but you need decades, right? and and so I'm wondering your strategy around kind of how you think about counter positioning these brands against the content that is flowing so freely across. You're referring to the trough. What's that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the trough of social media apps.

But yeah, but yeah, like even, you know, I've also talked about the challenges with substack around certain stories. substack, if you're an individual selling a subscription, it wants, it will reward people that publish multiple times a week that sell a subscription. And yet there's so many stories that take months to tell. There's great stories out there that you'd want somebody writing, spending a year on it. Seymourche is not going to break the Mila massacre. And so, and so there's this opportunity of like the value of brands and curators that that is maintained. And we're not creating, we are like, again, I would say we're creating new iconic media brands, but it'll take 20, 30 years, right?

It's just you cannot do it overnight. And then how these things can operate as platforms, where there are a lot of super talented writers that shouldn't be trying to publish every single week, because their calling is to publish maybe once a month or even once a quarter at different points, right, in finding those lanes. So I'm curious about how you're thinking about the role

of the different brands under Condé Nass and counter positioning against platforms. like traditional social media or substack. I think you bring up a really good point about substack in particular, which is it is a great platform for certain creators. Yeah. And if you want to be on that bit of a hamster wheel, meaning, it may not feel like in hamster wheel to a lot of people. They love to publish content multiple times a week. That's great. It's a great platform for that.

If you want to spend six months, 12 months, deeply researching something, And substack is not the medium for that. It won't reward that behavior. The New Yorker is. Yeah. It really is. And we get rewarded for that by our subscribers. When we come out with these really deeply researched investigative pieces that, you know,

we have a huge army of fact checkers at the New Yorker that comb through every single word in that. So that when it is published, it has really, really been thoroughly fact checked. When we publish that, we see the number spike on subscriptions. Our subscribers reward us for that type of journalism in a way that I don't think works so well with Substack. Other things work really well with Substack. Yeah. Yeah, that said, there's been, we cover tech primarily. So we've seen a lot of people from tech leave the sort of like brands or platforms to go to Substack.

And some of the times they come out and they're just scooping every single day and it's amazing. But more often than not, I'm like, I actually wish that at least a few of you guys would go to one company and I could subscribe to you and you weren't feeling this pressure. And I don't actually want like for a lot of people I'm like I think you selling ads is a waste of your time. You should just be writing. Right. And a lot of them feel that. And then the hamster wheel thing, I was talking to, you know, really big substacker yesterday and they were feeling that. They were like, I don't, I don't want to publish every day, right? But you built a business around that and then you're sort of like trapped to this. business model. So anyways, I think we're going to, I've said it, I think in this, in this age of

AI, in this age of slop and sort of like ultra-fast media, I believe that being a true journalist, being a reporter, being a writer is only going to, I think it was always relatively high status, but I think it will even go up and up and up over. And become more valuable. Yeah, and it's more valuable. It's like we want people that are doing original journalism, fact-finding. It's so essential. And then also, yeah, just spending the time. I mean, we're sort of a symptom of the internet, right? We make ultra-fast content, right? I don't expect people to watch most of any of the shows from last week, right? Maybe there's some interviews that are sort of durable, but the majority of the commentary, it's just, it comes and goes, right? We

expect people to watch it in the 24, 48 hours that we create it. But there's so much content that I think about, you know, sitting down on a Saturday where I'm like, well, maybe I want to read, I have limited time, maybe I want to read something that somebody put six months into. Look, I think it's important to know what you're good at and take advantage of that and not try to be something that you're not good at. And you guys are really good at exactly what you just described. And so you've made the most of that and you've attracted a really important audience and it's really worked for you in a business model. For us, to try to chase that would be to move away from what we're really good at and try to become something different.

And I agree with you, I think where, you know, with the amount of AI generated content or low-quality content that is being flooded into the market, that only, I think, accrues to the benefit of companies that can really stand out from that. And so don't try to be that. Like I always tell our, you know, we're going to always have human-created content. First of all, I think it's what our, I know it's what our audiences expect and want. Secondly, we have no competitive advantage over just creating AI-Gen. generated content. That doesn't leverage any of the advantages we have. And so knowing which

our advantages are competitive and really building upon that, I think is always important in any business. And for the industry changes that are happening right now, I think there's real value in it. Because unfortunately, there's going to be fewer places that can do that, because the ones that are more marginal may not survive the changes that are happening. And, you know, our brands have been really thriving in it. What is, how do you compare your philosophy of running like a house of brands versus, let's say, an LVMH? Is there similarities, differences? What is the philosophy?

Yeah, I mean, you know, when I first joined, I spent a lot of time talking to those companies to try to understand how they were organized because one of the things I had to figure out is what I wanted to do with the way we were structured because we were structured very differently. We were really a loose collection of companies all around the world. Every country operated entirely independently from every other country. Really? Oh, my God, it was crazy. There was no technology collaboration. There was no, they competed. Literally, I remember literally three weeks into the job, I start traveling.

I go to Milan. I'm trying to visit all different offices. I get a call from my assistant. Like, you know, some of the team in Milan is upset. You're not visiting them. I'm like, I'm in the office, I'm here visiting them. I found out we had seven offices in Milan. Condi Nast, US had an office there,

County Nass Russia had an office, France had a, all in Milan, all different offices. Because of course they couldn't be in the same office because they were competitors. So a lot of changes to make in that model. But look, actually, it was a great strategy when the company was a print publication business. It worked by definition.

Connie Ness became very big, successful company following that strategy. But it was not the right strategy for the internet age and a digital age and how audiences had changed. Audiences moved from, oh, I read my local, you know, newspaper, my local content to, I want to see what's happening around the world. I want to consume content from Korea or China or Sweden or Israel, wherever. Much more cosmopolitan in their approach to how they consume content. And so really we use that as a guidepost to say, okay, how should we structure ourselves and just question everything about how we organize ourselves and even the culture of the company which was very very territorial and

fiefdom based to what it is today which is much more collaborative so obviously plenty of efficiencies across the portfolio geographically the brands are power law driven right you have a few brands that drive the vast majority of the revenue have you been in a portfolio expanding period or portfolio contraction period is there benefit to going more focused around the the tent pole brands or do you want to expand further how are you seeing like what we find is you know certainly our largest most important brands have done very well in this you know like Vogue is our largest brand

yeah Vogue has grown every year I've been at the company it grows revenue grows profitability every year Thank you. It is. It is good news. And the New Yorker also. The New Yorker just had its most successful year ever by a long shot. Those brands, whatever's happening with search algorithms or AI, they seem to just be able

to rise above it. We have smaller niche brands, pitchfork and music brand. Very small. It's 1% of our revenue. But it has a very strong, loyal audience in the category. that it covers. It's doing very well. And so there's a sort of barbell effect that's happening, at least within our portfolio. And then we have some that are in the middle that are impacted more. Either they don't have as strong authority in the category or they're a little too broad that they don't go deep enough in specific. Yeah, we were just talking about BuzzFeed. And it felt like for a long time it fell into that category of, you know, decent size audience, but ultimately built on a shaky ground of another platform without that really. really strong core audience that would stick around through thick and thin. How do you think about talent identification going with sort of discovered talent,

let's say a writer who's established that already has a following versus somebody who, you know, has a lot of potential but maybe hasn't had a breakout moment yet. And then the same thing with executives. Yeah. I think, you know, first of all, for writers, we're a great home for the best journalists in the world. In part, because, you know, I wouldn't have thought this was a necessary competitive advantage several years ago, but it is today, which is that we're not impacted by political influence. We're not under the FCC's thumb. We don't have licenses that they need.

We're not trying to buy Warner Discovery and need merger approval. And so, and we're owned by a family as own cutting ass for seven decades. I've been at the company now seven years, and not once have they ever called to interfere with. anything we do. Therefore, I don't need to do that with our editors. We can just hire the best editors and stay out of their way and let them do their job the best. So that is very attractive to journalists because they know when they come to our company, they're not going to get a call from the CEO or the board or whatever about why did you say those things about this advertiser or whatever it is. No, the journalism comes first and will always come first. So that helps us

attract very established writers, but at the same time, we also are a great place for people earlier in their career to learn, because they can learn from the best. So we always try to make sure that we are recruiting really high potential new journalists into the company, as well as, you know, the best external. In terms of executives, you know, other than Anna Winter, every other executive has turned over since I joined the company, every single one. Wow. And I did most of it immediately and two reasons. One, if you want to affect culture change, change people.

Change people that don't reflect the culture that you want to have. And when I got to Kondi Nas, I felt like this is not the culture. There were great things about the culture. You know, the focus on excellence really, really deep at the company. But there are other aspects of it, very internally competitive and political that I didn't like. I just decided, I want to create the culture of a company that I want to work in. So let me find people who think similarly about the importance of culture. And then secondly, because we were going from, like in the U.S.

that had its own CEO as a separate company from the rest of the world, it was very focused on the U.S. market. I wanted people who had much more global perspective and global experience. And so the skill set I wanted to be broader than what the company had traditionally had. Probably 2018, this idea of like content to commerce, incredibly popular. And even by the time we were starting this show. You were thinking New Yorker protein powder. When's it coming?

Yeah, yeah, I love that. But even when we were starting this show, a lot of people said, wow, you have this audience of entrepreneurs, why don't you build your own software and spin out software companies or develop stuff internally? And we said, with what hours in the day, hours in the day are we going to do that? And why would we deserve to win over a team that is entirely dedicated to a certain problem? Where has content to commerce worked within Condi

Nast and where have you experimented or avoided it? You know, if you think about from an advertiser perspective, the reason advertisers have always come to Condi Nast is the influence that we have with audiences, right? That, you know, whether it's fashion or travel or home, you know, it's the influence that we have. Now, you know, that was very, very true in the print era. It's very true today. But they also have many more avenues to reach audiences than they used to. So for us, when we look at commerce, we think that ability to influence audiences certainly exists even more than before because of how much

larger our reaches. And so we can use that maybe not to create the New Yorker protein powder, but to sell fashion, to sell travel. So we've been investing in commerce, but not creating our own products per se. Partnerships. Yeah, in partnerships. And that also has grown every year. And we announced, it'll be launching soon, an initiative we announced last year called VET, which is really at the intersection of, you know, certainly eco-conference. commerce growth, social commerce in particular, and the creator economy. And so what VET is, we have relationships with all the luxury fashion companies. We're using those relationships, creating a marketplace commerce platform that then creators can use

to connect with our audiences. And so we'll be working with initially a small number of real taste makers in fashion and then using the relationships and the technology we've built to create this creator marketplace called a vet. How do you think about journalists becoming influencers? It can be great, develop their own audience, and then that draws more people into their stories when they do have something to publish,

double-edged sword, because if they leave, they have an audience that might sign up on day one, they might say something that doesn't necessarily represent the views of the publication, There's sort of, you know, some organizations have gone back and forth on it, either saying, everyone needs to be posting on Instagram every day to, you can never post on Instagram any day. How have you toyed with that or dealt with that tension throughout your career?

You know, because we have, you know, as you said, a house of brands, our brands are very different. So, you know, a journalist for the New Yorker may be very different than a journalist for Vogue. Yeah. In their approach to that question. So, you know, we don't have hard and fast. So no one size fits all. Definitely not one size fits all, but we do know that, you know, journalists that are able to build profiles for themselves tend to be good for business.

So we certainly support that. Got it. I want to talk about events. Yeah. Are events more power law driven? Do you want to like raise the long tail of events? Do more events and try and elevate to something where there's something? a Met Gala happening every week or something. I don't know.

Where does the event strategy go? Events for us are one of the fastest growing parts of our business. But not because we're just doing more and more events. We're actually doing fewer events than when I started. We're doing fewer events, but we're focusing on events that really are what we call cultural moments. Matt Gala is a great example of that. Yeah, Met Gala was last Monday. Yeah.

you know in the first seven days I just saw the numbers last night we had 3.1 billion video views of the content rephrase it is it was up I don't know 60% over last year and isn't a lot of it like off the record too are like there aren't necessarily I've never seen like you can't just live stream it you can't watch what happens inside or like there aren't like microphones on the dinner table we do a live stream of the red carpet yeah yeah exactly so it's even a limiting in terms of what you're sharing live stream had 200 million And people turn into view it. That's amazing.

Wow. So every year we do the Met Gala, it just grows at a level that's hard to believe. And we finish it and we go, oh, my God, how are we ever going to exceed that next year? And then it grows 65% again the next year. Wow. And it was the same thing for the Oscar Party, Vanier or Oscar Party this year, 65% growth year over year. Remarkable.

So I think we found a playbook on that. But it's not a playbook where you can say, oh, great, let's just do one a week. Yeah. You can't create cultural moments like that. What you can do, we have. found as doing fewer and doing them at very high quality. Sure. And make them global events.

Like the Met Gala is a global phenomenon now. Yeah. In a way that it wasn't, you know, seven years ago when I joined, it was an important, very important, you know, event that people in the U.S. knew about, and, you know, people in the fashion community around the world knew. Yeah. But by bringing the company together into one organization, now all of our brands globally promote it and promote the live stream and the content from it.

And that's really helped elevate it to become now a global cultural moment. Yeah. Interesting. Help me, I don't know how much you'll be able to say here, but help me understand why BuzzFeed is worth something like $120 million. No, 240. About half the company for $1.20 million. Oh, half the company.

Yeah, 240. What's the both case? The revenues declining, decent, you know, run rating, 60 million a year of losses. I would guess an aging audience. Do you have any idea where the value is? Well, look, the only thing I read about that is there was like $20 million going into it. Oh, I thought it was $120. There was a valuation of that, but there's a stage.

You guys may have read about that. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. But look, I can't speak specifics of that business. That was a business that did very well. They were very innovative around a different, era of the internet and you could take search traffic and social media traffic and turned it into commerce dollars or other things. That era is gone.

Why? Yeah, what killed that era? People are still spending time on social media. They're still searching on Google and yet publishers have not been able to monetize traffic or generate traffic from the activity. I look at BuzzFeed as like, you know, I look at Condé Nast and this is like luxury media. is what that that's my personal view on it it's like this is the LVMH of media and BuzzFeed was like a fast fashion just say you've never been to the BuzzFeed

gala think about it's really interesting we did this for a board meeting about six months ago took a snapshot of search results from I don't know seven or eight years ago okay and what you saw were you know few sponsored links and then the ten blue you know yeah the traditional search page yep do the same The same search term today, you get an AI overview. Then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links. Yep. And then you got sponsored stuff.

Somebody last week was saying, how is search revenue up? Have you done a search recently? Yeah. I basically have to go to the second page to get an organic result. It's been good for Google. Yeah, it's been great. Yeah. If you're a publisher, you've gone on the same page.

Okay. So if you had a business that relied on that, arbitrage that traffic to sell whatever, that business got very, very difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, look, the changes in search traffic have certainly impacted our business, but not to the point that we haven't been able to grow our revenues and grow our profitability, but it's a headwind. But, you know, last year, so, you know, each of the last three years, we would do our budgets,

and we put some forecasts in of search traffic declining. You know, why? Just because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes, and generally, those algorithm changes were negative, at negative impacts. So we're going to forecast it to be down. And then every year it was down more than we forecast. So last year I told our teams, assume there's no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.

We don't expect it to be zero. Yeah. But we, you know, we expect it to be a single digit percentage of our traffic. Very low. So we started working on plans for each of our brands around that. And some of the brands we looked at said, they don't really have a good plan for that. So we're going to reprioritize on the ones that do.

But if you don't have those paths forward, if you don't have really strong authoritative brands or brands have very strong niche in certain areas or direct audiences, then you're just going to be fighting that all the way down. Talk about subscriptions, bundles, subscription pricing, in a time when we have little spurts of inflows. here and there. How important has that been? How resilient has the subscriber model been? What are you seeing there?

You know, it's a it's a very important part of our revenue stream. But you know, our digital subscriptions grew 29% last year, revenue. And, you know, they're growing double digit percentages this year. So it's a really important growth area of our business. And we're launching more digital subscriptions for more brand like Pitchfork, small brand, just launched a subscription earlier this year. Tatler, another small brand in the UK launched it. But, you know, our big brands, the New Yorker, you know, very, very strong growth. Vogue is showing incredible growth in digital subscriptions. So that's an area that's important to impress.

And we think we've built up some really good capabilities, both on the technology side, but then also on just the people capabilities side too. And then do subscribers get stuck in a mentality of I pay a certain amount and they're resistant to a price adjustment in a time of inflation, or is there some price elasticity there? You know, we have raised prices on subscriptions fairly materially over the last couple of years. Okay. And, you know, each year we think, okay, we're raising the price, we're going to, the retention is going to go down, and actually the retention has gotten better every single year.

Yep. So the elasticity looks pretty good for us so far. Yeah, in some ways, you know, and we're the biggest fan. of independent creators on substack and other newsletter platforms. Like we really, we have a lot of them on the show. We subscribe to a lot of them. But in some ways, they're helping your guys' pricing dynamic. And they're like, well, I want $20 a month for my newsletter that publishes twice a week.

And I just kind of like write what I'm thinking. And you guys are like, well, we're going to give you all of these stories and all of this video and images. and these deeply researched stories. And so your product or a subscription for one of the brands starts to look like incredible value because you're like the alternative, my dollars are going to go way less far with an independent creator in terms of a volume of stories.

Now you don't get the same dynamic that they have, which people just like to support independent writers and content creators. That's a part of it. It's just you enjoy saying, you know, kind of helping somebody be in business. But I think that's an interesting. interesting dynamic.

You talk about the further nicheification of media, architectural digest, the New Yorker, these are already not niche publications, but they have a category, Vogue, GQ, right? There's a theme to the product. And what we've been tracking over the last couple of years is that the internet native media properties the creators have been able to find even smaller niches so we've talked to uh someone who just does you know car reviews or just does uh the car dealership car dealership guy was a good example of like that that would not be a national magazine but he's made a business work there and i'm wondering if there's opportunity for more niching or if there's value in not over niching up

a product and how you're thinking about, because you see all these niches and you think, okay, maybe there's a roll up strategy or maybe there's some sort of, you know, synergy between them, but that's already sort of playing out on the platform in the sense that like YouTube is making money from both Doug Dumuro reviewing every car and the car dealership guy talking about the dealer side of the automotive industry. And these are separate from an automotive magazine that might sort of in previous era address both sides. You know, I think where publication

can get hurt is if they're caught in the middle. Sure. If you try to be too broad, too large of an audience, this is not the era for that. Five years ago, maybe that worked, but not today. You either need to be large and authoritative in a big category, Vogue, a good example. Architectural Digit.

Yes. Or, Connie Nash Traveler would be another one. Or you need to be really nailing a specific niche where you have a loyal audience that's willing to pay. willing to pay and you know ad supported only tough that's that's if you are if you have a brand where you're investing in the journalism if you have to make significant investments in journalism supporting that just with advertising is is tough place to be but if you've got you know really content that people are willing to pay for then but to do that don't get caught in the middle yeah

it makes a place to be the devil wear prodas And the devil wears Prada too, box office hit. Do you expect that to be a pretty major catalyst for Vogue? You know, it's actually been a catalyst for Kandi Nass, broadly. You know, obviously the movie is, you know, based on Anna Wintor, and the company is based on Kondi Nassed. But, you know, I was talking to our chief revenue officer a couple weeks ago. And, like, you know, we had a really good first quarter.

We exceeded budget. and second quarter was looking strong. And I asked her, like, you know, what's driving the strength? And she's thought for a minute. She said, the movie. And it's like, what? Wow. Like, that's driving, even other brands said, I think there's just more interest in Connie Nass than general.

I think it's more than just that. But, you know, I think the movie has created a lot of intrigue. And it's been fun. I imagine it's good for hiring, but can you zoom out and talk a little bit about the hiring pipeline? There's so much uncertainty in the job market. Should you become a software engineer? There are going to be no software engineers. AI can write stuff, but can't really do investigative journalism,

but there's still a lot of anxiety. Like, how are you seeing the next crop of great journalists develop right now? Yeah. Or advice that you give to, like, new grads who want to work at company and asked. Well, you know, we hire journalists and we hire software engineers. Yeah, of course. And it's different. And everything in between business and finance and legal.

Look, you know, I remember my mom growing up, shall we? said there's always room at the top. And it was good advice. Like if you can be at the best of what you're doing, there's always could be room for you. That's remarkable. Moms have the best. So good.

So for us, you know, journalists who really excel, I think they'll always have a home. You know, in terms of software engineers, you know, we brought in a new head of product and technology really fortuitously in December. In December was really, you guys cover this. Yeah. Very well.

Agent moment. A step function change. And so when he started, you know, I told him you need to question everything we do. Start with a blank sheet of paper, rethink everything that we're doing, how we do it, and how we can use AI. And the first thing he did is he started some small pilots, three or four people on a team, eliminating certain roles that would have been on a much bigger team to create new products. And he ran the pilot six or eight weeks, and there was enough information already where he said, okay, let's go make big changes now.

And so we just, you know, last month made big changes in that org really centered around how we use AI at the core, not our content, but how we develop technology and products. So, you know, the result of that is there were whole departments that we no longer needed. Like we used to have it, it might be a team of 10 or 12 people on a big project. When you have that big of a team, you need a technical project manager. You need QA engineers. You need product analysts and all these other things. We just redesigned it and said, actually, you have a product manager, and they're going to be the product analyst also.

Maybe there's a designer and there's an engineer, and we're going to have AI create the software and also do the QA of it. And so these teams that were 10 or 12 people became three or four people, and they moved at three times of speed. So what does that mean if you're software engineer? It means there's going to be fewer jobs or entry, without a doubt, fewer jobs for now. But like if you're a product manager, you can do things that you could never do before, because you could actually create the code yourself using AI.

Well, yeah, and Condoness is a unique company because you guys don't sell technology. You sell content. And so you want to make great technology to serve the content, but it's a new technology. It's not the core. That's not the thing that you sell. Whereas, yeah, we've noticed something is that we hired a full-time software engineer early in the company, Tyler, sitting over there. And we're the kind of employer that never would have hired a software engineer historically because for a small podcast at the time, why would you build software? Yeah, why would you build custom software?

And so there's job creation happening by companies that never made sense to hire software. software engineers, but now they can. Yeah. Cool. How are you thinking about, I imagine that at almost all the publications, there's essentially no AI doing writing or creative work, but have you had to confront anything on the advertising side? Like I imagine if I flip over the back of the New Yorker, I'm sure I've seen a 3D render of a

watch at some point. Will I be seeing a AI render of a watch? Very, does that matter? Does anyone care? It matters. You know, last June, there was an ad that was run in Vogue, print magazine. And the ad used an AI-generated model. That's right.

And it blew up. But people who were angry, they were angry a little bit at the advertiser. They were mostly angry at Vogue. Interesting. And I loved it. I thought it was fantastic. Because it reaffirmed what I hope was going to be the case, which is our audiences want human-generated content.

They want to know what they're reading and seeing is real and not AI-generated. Interesting. So to me, that was a really important indicator of frankly our future, that our future strategy about using AI in many, many places to drive efficiency, to reach audiences faster, speed up the velocity of what we do, all to enable us to invest more in human-generated content.

That that was really wide- Yeah, especially clothing is really interesting. There's a slippery slope where, let's say you generate, you know, you have a real piece of clothing and you say, put this on this, you know, even if it's a real model, but put this on this model. And then what happens if, like, you know, you could just prompt it and say, make it fit, like, slightly different. It's like, well, then now that you're, that's not the product that you're selling. You're selling a product that doesn't really exist anywhere. So there's certain categories that I think will. Yeah.

And just, yeah, it'll be a brand decision. And I think ultimately that that is why I think your brands will endure because there will be plenty that make the opposite decision. We're going to lean into it. But there's always there's always room at each end of the barbell. So lots of care with regard to AI advertising. Zooming out, are ads a bug or a feature if I open up a copy of Vogue? Well, in a print magazine, it's absolutely a feature. I think so.

Yeah, without a doubt. I think for digital, it can be both. Sure. You know, programmatic display ads, maybe more of a bug than a feature. Yeah. But, you know, really high quality. It's just, it really, it's mostly the visual disruption of like I'm reading this,

like, beautiful story. I actually like it, integrated sort of a native ad from the publisher that was, you know, considered but anything that becomes you know display ads just the so our biggest advertising category is branded content yeah and it's it's great because it it leverages a big competitive advantage sure our brands our audiences but our creativity and so that's a that to me is a really great place to be in our business and to see the growth of that every year you know of course we have display ads we have print ads some of which can be

branded content uh... lot of video video ads yeah anything else jury now this is fantastic fantastic i'm really glad i'm not this work uh... will wrap the show right now uh... leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify sign for our newsletter tbpn dot com and we will see you

tomorrow at eleven and pacific sharp good-bye