The Pomp Podcast - 355: Jarrod Dicker on The Rise of Individual Creators

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

Jarrod Dicker is the Vice President of Commercial at The Washington Post, where he oversees strategy, engineering, product operations, technology and R&D. In this conversation, we discuss newsletters, streaming music, individual creators growing bigger than media companies, bundling and unbundling, and audience as the core unit of value. =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices sending small bits of data. Join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jared Dicker is the Vice President of Commercial at The Washington Post, where he oversees strategy, engineering, product operations, technology, and R&D. In this conversation, we discuss newsletters, streaming music, individual creators growing bigger than media companies, bundling and unbundling, and audience as the core unit of value. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jared and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Crypto.com.

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take back power from the telcos and earn a little bit of crypto in exchange so go to helium.com h-e-l-i-u-m.com and use the code pomp to get your helium hotspot today lastly don't forget that i write a daily letter to over 50 000 investors about business technology and finance i break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry, you can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Jared. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. He's back. Jared, what's up, man? Thanks for doing this again. What's up? Thanks, Pom. Great to be back. For sure. So for people who didn't listen to the first time we did this, maybe give us kind of a quick two minutes on your background and then you've got an update. You're back at the Washington posts. Yeah, so we spoke, it was probably like almost a year and a half, two years ago.

I was the CEO of Poet, which was a decentralized media technology, every buzzword you could think of company, but really focused on what blockchain can do for news and media, which I'm still very, very bullish on. Happy to dive deep on that and kind of talk through where Poet's at, but also other companies and kind of what they're focusing on there. But really trying to get to the bottom of a thing that I'm still hyper focused on, which is like, what's the value of content, right? We're in these creator led societies. Our attention is constantly being given to all these different platforms where creators are producing, but like, what is that value? And what are the business models built around that value? So yeah, the last time we spoke, I was CEO of Poet. I left

and returned to the Washington Post where I oversee the entire commercial business. So really focused on how we make money at the post, how we drive all of our revenue arms, subscriptions, advertising. I oversee R&D, so what new businesses, products, technologies we could build, which we could then create new businesses out of, which we've done twice. One is called ARK Publishing, which is a software as a service arm for content creators and content management systems that we licensed to now like 1,300 sites globally. And the second and most recent is Zeus technology, which is kind of the revenue side of that framework. So really trying to think about how media companies, particularly news journalism, media companies can compete with the behemoths

like Facebook and Google when it comes to revenue and how we can build software that they can license, tie themselves together and kind of bring on a more sustainable approach to, you know, their, their business. Yeah. And I think part of what is so interesting and I love following you on Twitter because you just, it's obvious or constantly thinking about this and you just nailed a key piece, which is you're not just thinking about it from the content, right? Like what are creators going to do next? What platforms are they going to and all that. You're also thinking of how do these platforms make money, whether the Facebook's and the Google's and Twitter's of the world, all the way down to the actual media companies. And then even further

down to the content creators themselves and kind of full stack, like how does money flow and where does value accrue? In reading all the things you've been putting out, there's two key themes that you've been talking about. I think the first one, and only because you wrote about it first, we'll start there, which is media companies are going to become similar to these music labels. And so maybe talk a little bit about like, what does that mean and kind of elaborate in what you wrote on? Yeah, it's really interesting to think about all the complexities in kind of the content creation world and the media world that seems so, so, so like, like, like, I guess the term is complex. Like, it seems like there's so much

going on, all these different roles, all these different companies doing all these different things. And, and when you really kind of back up and boil it down, it ends up being very simple, right? And, and I started kind of diving into this notion that what is the role of a media company, right? I think roles in media companies at least decades ago, when everything was owned by that media company was a lot, right? They own the distribution. They own the relationship with the customers. They literally own the value of their product. Like an advertiser would call in the eighties, you know, the person leading revenue at CBS and say, Hey, how much for a 30 second spot? And they'd basically like make up a number and they'd be like, all right, we're in, right. There

was like no kind of free market to then kind of set what the costs and structures would be in media companies had a lot of power right revenue power relationship power distribution power um and of course they were like the medium that people were getting information there weren't all these options and uh everyone knows what happened when the platforms kind of came about but um all that somewhat became very distributed and now we're entering into worlds of like things being decentralized but that gatekeeper mentality is really no longer the business value or the business proposition so what do media companies like what are media companies now right if if if the consumer is everywhere else and there's not really a direct relationship outside of subscription products and

if they're not delivering the content and if they're not managing the relationships with advertisers and driving that revenue um what is the positive to being a media company which is kind of the the the um perspective that i tried to take and that really is kind of this notion of managers of talent right like there is a ton of value when i speak to creators for creating under the umbrella of a larger brand um i think that there's a huge uh that there's a huge belief i won't say like this book like like his belief but there is a huge belief that every creator wants to be independent and that's really not the case when you talk to a lot of them there's a ton of value especially in news media to write for the washington post the new york times it gives

reputation. It gives access and enables you to have a book deal and grow your audience. And then eventually you decide to do what you want to do after that. But there is tremendous value there. But media companies were never really set up for that from a business perspective, right? They were essentially employing writers, employing creators to create content under an umbrella. And the revenue models was advertising on that content and subscribing to that content. And if you blew up a creator's reputation, they would often leave and go somewhere else and build their own business if their reputation wasn't great enough then they were a subpar kind of creator and there really was no formula that incentivized um these creators to essentially like build for the brand

in a way that benefits both them and the brand so the media label or sorry the media company has record label ideas kind of like well if media companies know how to manage talent how to distribute talent how to work across the entire uh kind of media ecosystem how to drive revenue from it then if i'm an independent creator and if i'm set up with options which is basically like could i go and create on my own yes there's benefit of being independent and owning my ip but now all of a sudden i'm my own manager on my own distributor i have to figure all this out that i have no idea what to do there um or right if the economics makes sense i could go to a media company they handle all these things for me and it starts to kind of change

the game now media companies aren't there yet like that's the one thing that i kind of like lay out there but that to be crystal clear they don't realize that they need to be this yet and i'm pushing it uh hard and i think it's like becoming very very obvious when you start to unravel it but media companies need to rethink a lot of things if they do become labels like one of which is what's the relationship with the creator it's not just hey your salary come create content it's what's the relationship with joint ip if we create something and you leave the company then what are are the royalties tied to this sort of relationship? How does the media company get incentivized to allow like Pomp to go and do his own thing, even off their platform, because there's mutual benefits

there. And same for, you know, Pomp to go and do things that then drive back to the media company. So the economics are still being worked out, but in a very, in a very rash way of saying it, I don't like, I firmly believe that media companies don't figure that out, like how to cultivate talent, how to recruit talent, how to build business models out of maintaining it, like really, really looking at writers and designers and editors and everything that allows that process to flow as actual artists and build models according to that, then I think more and more artists are going to go somewhere else where that's going to be accommodated, which you're seeing, right? You're seeing Substack, you're seeing a lot of platforms starting to take that

role where they were just distributors. And now they're saying, well, look, we could become media companies as well. So it's really kind of coming to a head right now. And it feels to me like there's two separate trends that are happening, and you're trying to pull them back together, right? And those trends are the mainstream media organizations are losing, and I put losing it in kind of air quotes because it's how you perceive it, but they're losing trust with the public. They're losing individual creators that previously wanted to work for them go off on their own.

In some cases, some are losing revenue. Others are gaining revenue. So that one's a little bit more up in the air. And even at some point, you're seeing organizations lose readership on certain platforms. So you may see somewhere that you were super successful on Facebook, now all of a sudden that's getting taken away, that type of stuff, right? And so it's not all doom and gloom, right? Obviously, you see things like the New York Times, right? Those numbers get published and they're at all time highs in terms of subscribers and things like that. But I think generally as a sector,

that there's some struggles or obstacles. Then on the other trend you see is people leaving as the individual creator. And what's interesting to me is historically people have thought about the journalist as a kind of a subsidiary of the media company. Now you're seeing that break away and it's not just journalists though, right? You're seeing everyone from an entrepreneur to an investor, to a journalist, like anyone who basically can do analysis or share an opinion about something, the tools are now in place. So you get, you know, the sub stacks you can literally do audio video and uh written content all by yourself and do it pretty successful right and so what i think you're trying to figure out is like how do you take those

two trends and actually align the value proposition so that the creators want to work with the organizations the organizations get value in the short and long term from working with the creators is that kind of a fair yeah i mean i mean so much unpacked there but definitely right i think i think the um the example of the new york times is very interesting right i think they they were one of the first at least legacy media companies that i've started to um see trying to take an approach that does put kind of the talent front and center like there was an article in neiman labs a few months ago that says for the first time the morning newsletter is not going to be called like new york times morning like the new york times morning newsletter but it's going to actually

have the author's name on it because they're looking to build a brand around that. You see Taylor Lorenz and Corey Sika and Ben Smith and big talent that can easily go and create their own brands and build their own businesses going there, right? And I think that that is a very interesting trend to look at because it's kind of an acknowledgement from the New York Times basically saying like, yes, like we are a media company, like there is value attributed to our brand. That is why people subscribe. That is why advertisers advertise against us. But we do also understand that we need to evolve as a business. So as the future of news starts to figure out like what that looks like and what a Netflix and news could look like and what the value of content

looks like, then all of a sudden they start to think about their role of recruiting and bringing that talent there versus that talent going elsewhere. But I do, I mean, I'm very bullish on the independent creator space like i like that's basically why i've been uh so involved in thinking through this and um somewhat trying to like poke holes in it by trying to figure out okay if if we see this trend happening and it is happening right like someone said to me the other day um yeah it kind of seems like this would have happened like this was supposed to happen a decade ago and now they're saying that it's going to happen again but is it actually happening and And I think that's a narrow vision because you look at YouTube, you look at TikTok, you look at these media networks that are distributors for these creators, and the top creators aren't the New York Times, Vox Media, the Washington Post.

It's these independent creators that have figured out how to build their business within this sort of new ecosystem without that legacy debt, right? That legacy, in fact, does kill the dream. Those legacy operations do inhibit you from being able to understand how the media industry is evolving. and as far as I'm concerned that's already happened on these new platforms right and I tweeted something out this morning which is really which is like very obvious too but like I think that it starts to spark an interesting conversation it's always been a conversation of like publishers versus the platforms right like media companies versus the platforms how much should media companies give the platform should platforms be paying media companies and I think

the entire time, platforms knew that they had already become the media companies, right? They were already the place that both the New York Times and both an individual creator was going to go to to create content. And media companies wanted to believe that they're competing, competing, and competing, but they're really not, right? And now media companies have become creators. Now, if they're 900-person newsroom creators, that's great, but they're the equivalent of a creator creating on TikTok as an independent creator is creating on TikTok. So what kind of that convergence to your point, what that allows us to start to think about is what are the new businesses and companies that are going to be built that help create like comfort and confidence

for creators? I think that's obvious in the media company sector. Like they basically do that already. They just need to figure out how to make themselves more attractive so that creators still want to stay there and come there but then there's this whole other space right which you saw with like sub stack announcing legal um coverage and conversations around health insurance and conversations around like a collective like what uh the sub stack people uh have that type house group where they all kind of come together and support each other that in itself is going to evolve into businesses and opportunities that are going to compete directly with all these media companies. And now it's kind of a race to figure out who becomes the next supportive media company

business model that enables these creators to go and kind of like the fastest race there. So it is a convergence, but it's also a competition. And so let's talk about the media companies specifically, right? So if you're a media company today, historically, your promise to a creator has been come here, I'll give you the safety net of a salary, you know what you're going to get paid. Um, and there's probably some brand, uh, kind of promise or brand backing. You sort of give some, uh, version of legitimacy, whether you needed it or not. Um, there's some built-in audience and we're hoping that you'll help us grow that more, but there's already this built-in audience associated with our brand. Uh, you get health insurance and legal defense and kind of

all of these other elements. Uh, and then on top of all of that, uh, you also are going to be, um, have your work kind of, uh, bundled with a bunch of other people who, uh, either write about related topics or maybe even unrelated topics, but together we're going to put forward a product and then we'll go do all the ad sales and basically worry about the monetization. Right. And so that for a long time was like a pretty good deal, right? If you wanted to create content, like why not go do that now? I think your argument is like, that's got to shift. And so talk to me about what in that offering, do they not need to offer anymore? And then what are the things that they actually do need to offer that previously wasn't part of the deal? Yeah. Yeah. That's

great question so so one thing that you highlight is that and that i think is often like overlooked in the media space is that media companies are bundles like you just mentioned there's like the post has a thousand journalists right there's there's a ton of writers running on a ton of beats and a ton of sections there's kind of this desire um that's often brought up on twitter which is like we just want one new subscription that we then get access to the times and the journal and the post but then you're when you peel it back you're like they're all competing bundles right in their in their own companies and in their own thinking they are trying to expand coverage and essentially be like a Netflix or you know enough of a bundle of content that you are going to go

there and want to subscribe and get everything that you need I think traditionally like you're right media companies did provide that support there's a lot of value in the opportunity to build your brand there, right? The legitimacy of having that brand, the access. I think something that's often not discussed enough is this idea of breaking news, right? Like when you think about the kind of life cycle of content right now, you have breaking news and then you have like curation commentary, then aggregation, then shit just goes and floats in the ether and hopefully pops back up again. But without that breaking news, that like chain like doesn't work well. And a lot of breaking news is happening at these media companies, right?

Because if you're covering something in politics, you're covering something in sports, you know, having it come from like breaking from an ESPN versus breaking from like a random independent writer, a lot of, a lot of like people will want to break news with those larger corporations, with those larger kind of holding companies. So, so it really is still a critical part of the life cycle for creators. it is so attractive because you have that overhead. You have that reputation to build your brand. I've spoken to a lot of friends who have gotten furloughed or laid off right now in media because that is happening like more and more and more often. And I've asked them about starting up

their own independent companies. And they said, look, I would take health insurance over going independent any day, which of course is a preference. Not everyone feels that way, but there is kind of this mixed sentiment of this assumption of do these creators and writers actually want to be entrepreneurs, right? Or are they happy creating and, you know, working for the larger company to build that reputation and not want to handle the rest? To answer your question, like what needs to be created, right, is kind of that other approach now, right? Which is creators do want to become entrepreneurs, right? They believe that they are bringing IP and bringing unique value to the brand. And to do that, then the economics need to change. So to give you an

example, right now, I forgot the name of the podcast, but there was a podcast created for BuzzFeed. And now the creators want to kind of renegotiate IP and license management and rights because it's their name on the podcast. And, you know, they kind of built the audience and built the brand under the BuzzFeed umbrella. But because of how the economics are set up, it doesn't make sense, right? BuzzFeed probably said, hey, look, we'll pay you a salary. We'll take you on. We'll pay for the entire show. You know how much production costs and time costs. They eat all of that. And that is an exchange for the creators to be able to create this content that they could then monetize together. You're kind of seeing this desire now where creators, maybe they didn't

realize how things were set up. Maybe they didn't understand the business side as well. And now they're educating themselves more to them saying, look, like this IP is tremendously valuable, right and I want to be able to like own this especially like whether I work here whether I not and or whether I work here whether I don't and so forth so I think the biggest things that like media companies need to shed is this notion that like our biggest value is our umbrella brands I think that's not the case I think that's like tremendously valuable for creators to come there and want to work there but the whole emphasis really needs to be on how do you make these creators' job better? How do you give them more independence? How do you give them more value so

that you essentially represent them as an agency wherever they're creating, whether that's TikTok, whether that's Facebook, whether that's audio and so forth. On the flip side, it's also rethinking about what those economics look like. So if I am going to join a media company, right now it would be I take a salary, I get health insurance, I have overhead coverage, but maybe it changes to, hey, look, I don't want a salary or I want 20% salary, but I want 50% of all the IP that I'm creating. I want to be able to own that IP for 25 years, right? If that's licensed or syndicated to Netflix and so forth. And those companies, I think you'll see really start to like make the biggest significant changes. And I think companies like in new media, like BuzzFeed and Vox do already

think like that. I think traditional media is where it's going to become a bit more. yeah and so obviously a lot of this is uh you've got old kind of legacy media not old in a negative connotation just they're been around for a long time right and it's an advantage they're like 200 years old yeah yeah and by the way and it's an advantage and a disadvantage depending on what you're talking about um but the other thing you've got changing is the types of creators and so you wrote a piece uh all about this like renaissance creator talk a little bit about what is a renaissance creator and kind of elaborate on what that exactly means for uh for kind of the creator industry yeah yeah so um a lot of the kind of software and and uh products

that are being built today is really around this idea of creator independence right and when you think about what that like like who that typical creator is um it's usually this idea it's someone who works for a media company who has built a big audience and is very critical for driving that media company's business and now is going to branch out and create their own kind of company and business on their own. But there's also this flip thing happening right now, which I'm actually curious how you bucket yourself, honestly, which is basically entrepreneurial minds, people that have maybe built their own businesses or that have built businesses within media companies and are now saying i'm a creator right so it's not like your background's journalism right you created a

blog you're a designer right and that's your pathway to becoming an independent creator and that's why this trend of what's happening on tiktok and subsec um uh is is beneficial for you but it's actually the inverse right it's people who have maybe had like more of a business mind have built businesses have expertise there that are now entering the arena and saying we're independent creators too we're going to create on topics and they're learning in parallel which is like amazing right you have people with journalist backgrounds or creator backgrounds who have left these companies who are now jumping in and can easily create and understand that flow but now they have to figure out how do I build a business what do I charge who do I work with how do I

distribute and then on the flip side you have these entrepreneurs coming in or these business heads coming in basically saying I know how to build a business I know distribution I know how to do all those economics but like I need to figure out like how do I write how do I pace right where do I create so like how do I do a podcast and that's kind of this notion of the renaissance creator which is we've created an environment with these platforms which is like awesome like I'm hyper obsessed with it and you know I feel like everywhere you look people are talking about these things but it's that anybody now can really enter the arena to create their own brand, to create their own media company. You do not have to have any particular background.

In fact, the weirder the background or the most unconventional that step up, the more successful you will likely be because you'll have something to say. It'll be different. It'll be relatable to people who are also thinking in that scope. And there's so many things that kind of fall into that bucket as I dove into this idea of like, what does that typical creator look like in this new kind of Renaissance era? And how do they enter the playing field? And there's all these different analogies that come about like one of which is this idea of newsletters everyone has a newsletter everyone's like it's a bubble or or it's the future right there's like all of these strong feelings um on the other side of it but when newsletters really allowed is like this low

barrier to entry for anyone to be able to say okay i have something to say i'm going to create it and i'm going to put it out there and it's become something that's very interesting because the relationship is one-to-one you can kind of go at its low production value it's like the written word literally you don't have to produce video you don't have to produce audio like you're just putting thoughts of content out there and it's essentially like in an like in an analogy to the music industry like if you are an artist right and you create a mixtape you don't have to go into the studio you don't have to be signed by a label you don't have to do all these things if you're talented you just go and as you go you have an interesting path to really becoming like a

celebrity right when you're a mixtape creator or a newsletter creator your audience is coming along for the ride. They're paying, they're essentially investing in you. Like I can't tell you how many sub stacks I subscribe to that I won't unsubscribe because I have such a strong relationship with that creator and I want them to succeed. Even if I don't like the content, I'll stomach the bill because I want them to succeed. I don't feel that relationship with these larger media companies or holding companies, right? So it's just a whole different approach to like that business and how it grows. And this notion of like now being able to build that and leverage that, right? So in this notion of like renaissance creator anyone could step in anyone could be a media company anyone

could build a media business you now have in like the old worlds like five years ago where you had a separate strategy for facebook and youtube or not separate strategy but separate audiences for like facebook youtube sub stack audio now you're like how do i port that stuff over which again i feel like i'm talking to someone who does this in real time so hopefully it relates to you but like everything that these newsletter writer like like everything you built on twitter you can now port over to a newsletter you start to create that newsletter audience you can now port that over elsewhere and you're not just kind of a unique entity per platform all the platforms are now working for you and pushing you forward so there's there's like a ton of different kind of um angles

that we could take there like that we're kind of like dug in on in the piece but it really is this idea that before, right, if you wanted to join a media company or be a creator, whether that's in news or, you know, in publishing or in broadcast, there was a very like obvious way to get there. And it was limiting for most. Now it's basically limiting to none and it's hyper competitive and has opened up this notion of a free market where you're not just getting a salary to create for a brand, you essentially are getting the value attributed to you of the output of the work that you're actually doing. If you can build a business, you can make a ton of money. If you understand how to flex and maneuver, you can do this all on your own. You don't need that overhead.

So the options are there and it's just kind of inverted the entire funnel of what this media economy looks like. Yeah. When I read the piece, the part that was most interesting to me is you break down, historically people think of creators as creators first, and then they may be able to figure out how to monetize that. What all of these platforms have done, though, is they've allowed entrepreneurs, whether they're venture funded, you know, kind of tech types, founders, or just entrepreneurial in nature, to now start to build these content businesses, right? It's almost like the cost of starting one of these businesses has drastically been driven down by the sub stacks, by the YouTube, by the podcasting platforms, very similar to what we saw, let's say, with server

costs, right? There was an explosion of startups that happened because simply now you could spin up AWS rather than have to go buy a server and set it up. And so that to me is interesting because what you get is a blurring of the line, right? Is somebody who, you know, let's take away all of our investing activity, everything. If you just look at the things that I've done on the content side, is it that you're an entrepreneur or is it that you're a creator and what's the difference, right and you can kind of go down whether it's the sub stack list or or other platforms and you start to actually look at the skill set that's necessary is very different than the skill set of hey just go work inside the media company right and and so i think that that's the other

piece of this where everyone's like oh all the uh all the journalists are going to leave the media organizations like ah there's a lot of people who actually are not entrepreneurial that not at all like they're scared right they just want to like stay where they are safe get a salary and they're perfectly happy or it's not a bad thing. They're happy doing that. But then there is a subset of people. And the question is how big is that subset that want to go do this? And I think that's kind of what you're hitting at here is, are those people creators that were doing it already and now building a business or were they business people who now are seeing an opportunity and they're coming in and creating any kind of content? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's so right

on. Right. I think, I think everybody, a lot of people are saying like, okay, when you go and become your own creator business. You go and create a sub stack, you go and create a brand on TikTok that now you get to just focus on doing what you do best creating. And it's the opposite. It's like when you decide to go and do that, you're actually assuming the business of your entire self. You're basically saying, yes, I'm going to create, but I am now choosing and willingly going to take on all of this work in order to help build my brand, my business, and really try to figure out entrepreneurially how we go there. And that's a totally different skillset. I think that's why right now, some of like the earliest people in this space, especially

like in that Substack crew, but even newsletter creators like Webb Smith that have done it outside, they're here to stay, right? I think everyone who's kind of in at this moment has really figured out what they need to do in order to kind of like support their own business, how to kind of manage certain times, how to focus on distribution and really be able to see what's next. The next, but that also on top of that, I think that's also an acknowledgement that we probably have 1% of the creators that are like interested and willing to like leave and do it because of that, that need for them to be able to own it all, right? That's a particular person that can really do that. This next phase of like creator economy, passion economy,

whatever you want to call it. There's so much focus and people that I'm talking about that are people that I'm talking to and people that are investing in the space around that notion of comfort and confidence, right? So if you know that right now it takes a particular creator who really understands not just how to build audience and create, but also manage a business, then how do you start to attract the millions and millions and millions of other people who would be willing to come over and do this if they weren't so nervous about health insurance, if they weren't so nervous about getting sued and liable, if they weren't so nervous about the fact that they don't have an editor or don't have a designer or don't have a newsroom support.

And what's incredible is that is not going to be a catalyst for people to not come over. That's actually going to be a catalyst for builders to build those products and build uh those sort of networks and marketplaces and support in order to recognize that that pool is a ton of people that would be willing and interested to come over if those things are built so that's really like the next phase of what's happening here i think phase one was okay can creators go out and do this on their own and are there enough tools for them to be able to actually create and put content out there now it's okay how do we build things that help support that business which kind of goes full circle to the emphasis of media companies at record labels it's not really a

choice i think if they if they don't figure out how to structure their companies in order to focus on creators and build for creators to manage that sort of talent and delivery then these companies are going to be built outside of them and things are just going to run right so it's kind of no longer a choice but more so starting to kind of make that transition and make that approach but one more thing that's really interesting on top of that though is like and i talk about this in Renaissance creator is that newsletters kind of had the same effect as streaming in a very weird way, right? Like the music industry was kind of dead when Napster came out and Napster didn't come out because people wanted free music, right? Napster was basically developed because no one

could stand the UX of the music experience. No one wanted to buy a $20 CD, you know, at whatever your local record store was for a single track. Nobody likes like how bulky and kind of the cost structure and everything around that experience to the point where like Sean Parker and co built Napster to basically say, okay, we're going to build an experience that consumers actually want when it comes to listening to music. And what came out of that, right, via Spotify was that not only did people stop stealing music, but now they're paying for it, right? Because it's an experience they like, it's a relationship they like. There's a ton of arguments that could be thrown at me, which I get all the time at Twitter, which is like, is it better for the artist?

Separate conversation. But for the consumer, Napster and streaming really kind of broke through and built a better business for music than it was when it was totally broken down via the Napster era. Newsletters are kind of the same. We're forgetting now because of all the media growth that two or three years ago, you had an ad blocker on. You didn't want to go to a site and read content and see ads, and you chose to turn that blocker on. You would bypass paywalls constantly right like you like mainly like maybe you wouldn't even go and see that content or you type the url into google and you'd circumvent it you did not want to pay for content and you didn't not want to pay for content because you didn't believe content was valuable you just

didn't like that experience right and what newsletters have done in a very weird way is really broker that one-to-one relationship again right and there's like weird synergies it's like i get say i get your newsletter in my inbox there's nothing stopping me from forwarding your newsletter to 10, 11. I mean, there's tracking and stuff, but there's ways to go about it. But nobody does that, right? Nobody does that because there's a relationship with the creator. They like the way that it's being delivered to them. They like the experience. There's a value exchange and they know what they're paying for and they think that that's valuable and they're getting that back. So it's kind of changed, like the newsletter ecosystem has kind of also changed

the way that the broader media ecosystem really thinks about the value of content because of that. And I kind of believe that it was like less severe, but the Napster moment was kind of ad blocking paywalls. Users are fed up with that way of navigation content. Here comes newsletters or independent creators that are building a new relationship value exchange. And now all of a sudden people are like, oh yeah, content is valuable. And I do like this. And media companies are starting to adjust the way that they operate in order to accommodate that UX. And it's kind of a similar sort of slope that I think is just really, really, really badass. to pay attention to. And it feels like as this is occurring, the newsletter, you mentioned it earlier, right? And exactly what I did, which was go build on Twitter first, then you can pull them to the newsletter, then you can kind of go to platform by platform. But the newsletter specifically is kind of the most censorship resistant thing that we have currently, right? I get to send something direct into your inbox. You've opted into receiving that thing. Yes, there is the

ability for, let's say, Gmail to kind of filter and put you into spam. And, you know, it's not perfect, but more so than, let's say, the algorithms when it comes to social media or anything like that, it is the most one-to-one authentic thing that we have. And it feels like that's the way we're trending. So there's going to be more people who want more of that. And whether that goes to other platforms, whether there's platforms built specifically for this, it's just the idea of removing the middleman. And I wrote today about this idea of within a media organization today, what we basically, or inside of an industry, what we basically have is we've got three types of content creators. You've got journalists, which actually practice the art of journalism.

So it's unbiased, no opinion, all fact-checked, kind of all the things that we associate with journalism. You then have a category that I call bloggers. And I clearly say, I don't think of that as a negative connotation. It's just, these are people who have a different process for publishing than journalists do. And it's usually more opinion-based. And then you've got what I call market participants. So in the finance world, these are all the investors and people who are creating content, but they're actively practicing the craft. And my point was like, those three things are actually all valuable for different pieces. But what I wonder is that middle group, the bloggers right there's not as much downside risk for when they create content so you've got

let's say investors where they're actively putting money to work and if they're wrong the market goes against them and they lose money right so there's some risk to kind of how you um think about things and intellectual rigor that goes into this as you make because there's money on the line journalism it feels like um there's almost this community of people that uh fact check each other meaning that you know if you're a journalist i'm a journalist and you write something and it's factually inaccurate there's somebody else that is going to just you know absolutely light you up and be like no dude you got it wrong right and so there's kind of this like you know eat what you kill but you better be accurate you know community of journalism that middle group what i i still

don't understand yet right is the thing that i've labeled as blogger feels like they're not held to the journalistic standards they also don't have skin in the game and so it's just this constant regurgitating of my opinion my opinion my opinion and what i am wondering is like is that the ideal group to go and leave and become these creators right and also the market participants you get two of the three groups are the prime suspects to go leave but the journalists end up staying because they actually are the ones that need the most infrastructure right they're the ones who need the editors the fact checkers the legal defense all that kind of stuff and maybe just talk through you know you can use those through labels or think of it differently but like

who inside of a traditional media organization is most likely to leave? And is it just are you entrepreneurial or are you not? Or is it actually the type of content you create can really hint at whether you're likely to leave or not? Yeah, no, it's so it's so interesting that you say that because one, I realized that a lot of a lot of people don't understand the separation between news and opinion within a traditional news organization, like how severe it actually is. So news and opinion literally sit on different floors within the building there. Uh, they have different editors, um, the way that the business is managed, the way that converse like conversations aren't had between one another because news can't be influenced

by opinion and opinion shouldn't be influenced by news. So they literally operate separately. However, the way the business models work is it essentially is the same, right? It's the same subscription unless you break them out, but across the entire media company, advertising is still across you know particular audiences so even though there's so much work being done to separate it the business still treats it the same so thus people often bucket things in the same and you see this all the time right like on twitter if somebody posts something even if it's an opinion from the new york times or the wall street journal or the washington post

it's very hard for the casual reader to understand what's an opinion what's not and then you have conversations well this is fake news or why are they writing about this and traditional media companies will say like well it's opinion and it's not news and people should know but they don't know right and it's been hundreds of years of trying to educate um how these things operate and the nuances of it but readers still don't understand and it drive and it just causes a lot of like conversations and differentiations when it comes to like how how it should exist and how it should exist further uh you hit it on the head i i think i think opinion writers within media companies are the ones that are most likely to go independent. I think you've already seen it with

Andrew Sullivan from New York media who left. There's like rumblings of a few recent New York Times journalists who have left on the opinion side to go over to a sub stack. But I think traditionally, when you think about what opinion writers do and how they create and how they build audiences, there's a natural progression for them to build kind of media companies or voices on their own. There are also a lot of interesting things. Opinions drive a ton of subscriptions for traditional media companies, right? So like, even though on the news side, right, it's very, it's very unbiased, it's indifferent, right, with how that's reported. A lot of people subscribe because of, you know, the opinion writers within, within a news organization. In fact, a lot of them

subscribe to particular writers, which is pretty, you know, well, sorry, they don't subscribe to particular writers, they subscribe because of particular writers, which is a huge bull case for a sub stack if they're betting like banking on the fact that they could get a writer to leave and that will bring a massive amount of audience i think like those assumptions are are are very accurate so i do think that that's the case i think that people who would consider leaving media companies i think the opinion side is kind of the most obvious like early on because exactly what you said the fact checking the uh like even though fact checking and research on those things are important. Needing edit, needing design, et cetera, like isn't as critical as it

is from the news side. They already have their own audiences and have oftentimes built a lot of their own reputation on the platform. So a lot of the opinion writers are kind of building their own kind of chorus on Twitter and on YouTube and so forth. And they kind of have that audit audience and move aside. That third category that you mentioned, market, what did you call them? market participants yeah market participants i think is like why i'm also so bullish on the creator economy because it's essentially saying like we're going to recognize new talent and bring that new talent up and build fame out of that right so we look at kind of the idea of like renaissance creator and how people kind of get to this and build their own brand there's people

that already create content under big brands that are highly reputable that can move that over um whether that's news or whether that's opinion um there's people that are starting up and building that on a particular network and then porting that over but then i think there's people that you'll start having conversations with like within your own communities like like a big thing with substack right now that i'm hearing a lot of writers talk about is like there's a great up like it's currently set up in a great way for them to communicate directly with their audience to deliver content right to put that in their inbox and you know have a direct conversation they could reply directly to that writer but what's that next iteration of connecting community to one another

like i'm a member of x um like i subscribe to x writer i then want to engage with other people within that community the tools to do that aren't really there and i think that that's going to start to surface that third bucket which is market participants where we're going to start to be pulling out creators from communities of existing like independent creator media platforms that are then going to start to be building things on their own. And you'll start to see like in a similar way to what's happened with people growing followers on Twitter because of like certain point of views to people becoming creators on YouTube. You'll see that within the written space. So it won't just be limited to like, I worked in a media company or I'm a business entrepreneur that

has done something that has already built an audience and came here. I think we'll start to see new creators cultivated out of that community and out of those conversations which nailed that third bucket which i think is like right on in very early days yeah and the part to me uh that is so fascinating is uh take the most extreme example so take a joe rogan right which it seems like everybody and their mom at some point has tried to cancel joe rogan and you know from the mainstream media and frankly some of it's because uh they got nothing better to do some of it's because he said things that they disagree with, whatever the reasoning is. But when you break it down, he has a bigger audience than they have. And to me, that is like, whoa, hold on, time out a

second. You're telling me that the individual creator has built a bigger business and a bigger audience than many of the people that work at these big brands. And so it almost feels like there's going to be this switch in mentality from, oh, if I stay at this one organization, i'm going to be able to reach x number of people but if i leave and i execute correctly i can reach x times five right and i can't actually reach a bigger number of people and that would you know uh traditionally lead to more revenue but i do it all as an individual creator rather than trying to do it here under this brand so maybe talk a little bit about like what happens in a world where the individual creators are actually bigger than the media yeah yeah so this is like

something that's really interesting that kind of goes uh to what we were saying earlier which is like media companies have always thought that they're competing with platforms but they're not right i think i think platforms are the kind of bridges and tunnels of how all creators deliver their content or you know their products throughout throughout the web ecosystem um i think media companies are actually competing with creators right and and that's kind of their role now and And you'll see that media companies will have the opportunity to bring more creators on and start to accumulate that audience. But because of how things are set up right now, my independent audience as a writer maybe

that I build on Twitter isn't necessarily associated with the umbrella brand because there's no incentive to do so. So the larger incentive right now, exactly to your point, is I'm getting so big that if I get so big, I should just branch out and build my own business because the economics for me to say aren't as great as the economics for me to leave. So one like one thing to hit on, which you were saying, which I think is very true, is media companies are creators, right? And if platforms are leveling the playing ground for a Joe Rogan

or, you know, a Vox Media or a Barstool Sports, then they're all competing on the same playing field. And they need to think about how they could strengthen their own individual company or their own individual brand to compete against that. I think if any lifestyle company doesn't think that they're competing directly with Joe Rogan, they're way off. In fact, they should be looking at that. People could hate Barstool all they want and things that are coming out of there, but you look at how that business has diversified,

you look at how they create talent, how they build individual brands out of their talent, how they think about license and IP and things that traditional organizations don't think about, they've diversified themselves way more right than any traditional company has which is usually built off the idea of like subscriptions and advertising right so um it's really this this this acknowledgement that independent creators have the opportunity to grow a bigger audience and grow a bigger brand than that of umbrella companies i mean if that is the case how do you set up your company in order to attract those creators there and the answer may be it eventually becomes impossible right there There may be so much work happening within like the platform space where we're building so many tools and so many like business opportunities and operational support that individual creators are the media companies and they're just sharing tools.

What's really interesting too, to kind of highlight, to kind of bring this back to some of the work happening at WAPO too, is that when we, like about eight, nine years ago at the Washington Post, we really started to think about how we could expand our businesses beyond just like what's happening on the washingtonpost.com. And what was a very obvious one, one being owned by Jeff Bezos, we had to figure out how we actually become a technology company because everyone expected us to become a technology company. But two, it was like, where can we actually expand?

right? And we're like, we're a media company. We create content. We're trusted. We distribute that content. But all the tools that we use to do that are outside tools. We license them. We work with companies, whether it's a content management system, workflow management system, so forth. So we said, okay, let's invest in building that, right? And let's build something better than we have today that we could use for the post to make the post strong. That has then translated to us now powering like 1300 sites across the world. A lot of publishers like the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, and so forth. But the crazy thing is that you started to see a shift where these media companies, because they were so

financially lucrative and growing over the past two decades, they decided to bring everything in-house. They're like, okay, we create content, but we're going to be a technology company. So we're going to build a content management system and have all this in-house. What we've seen when we built ARK is now these media companies are like, we're not technology companies. We can't compete. It doesn't make sense. We're going to license it and we're going to focus on creating. Now with Zeus, which is our next kind of business, which is focused on revenue for media companies, it's a similar thing. Just like these media companies said, we're not technology companies. We're not going to staff that anymore. We're going to license it. We're now seeing that on

the revenue side. These media companies are like, we're not ad tech companies. We're not really consumer marketing companies. We staff it, but we're not as good as other places. We're going to license that so then we can reallocate resources elsewhere. So you're starting to see like a centralized approach to technology, a centralized approach to revenue, which goes to like the final prediction, which is a media company eventually, whether you're one person or whether you're a 300 person newsroom is probably going to be a ratio of 99 to one, like 99 creator, right? Whether you're a 300% creator room or one creator room and 1% software. You're not going to have your own sales team. You're not going to have your own engineering team. You're not going to have

all these things that you now manage as fixed cost overhead. You're going to license that because it's not your identity. But that really accelerates this whole entire notion of Joe Rogan being a media company. Jemele Hill is a great example. She worked for ESPN. All that happened. she now creates and and delivers and is getting paid by like 10 different media companies and platforms like as her own brand that is where everyone will go so like what we're seeing right now is these larger media companies will start to like divest in different areas that don't make sense for them and focus more on content creation these independent creators don't have the legacy debt they could start thinking about how they can focus on growing audience and leveraging the tools

that are out there and being able to build on that. And we'll see them meet in the middle on like a very, very, very level playing. And it feels also like all you're getting is, you're getting the unbundling by getting all the creators out from the media organization, but then you're getting rebundling, right?

Which is basically Joe Rogan has somebody who helps with ad sales. So he has somebody who helps him with the production, right? On Substack, we're seeing bundling of newsletters together. they're also providing you know the legal assistance right which is exactly what a media company would do and so maybe talk through a little bit like are we just recreating the world with different tools and platforms or is there something that ends up actually being different

in kind of where we're going i think um i think that's i think it's our responsibility to not um to i i think it's our responsibility to not renovate the business model and to actually build a new foundation um i think that if like it's always the case that business models drive product strategy right if you're not making money then you're not going to do it and um if we go through a unbundling rebundling and the models are still the same which is where advertising against content, right? People are subscribing to bundle subscriptions and there's nothing else that evolves out of that. Then maybe we have the opportunity to recalibrate our businesses, build a more lean setup so that margins and profits could be somewhat better, but then we

could end up in the same place. What I'm seeing and what's most exciting is that we're actually not relying on those traditional models. I think there are many extremes, like Substack believing that advertising is not a good model, I think is like crazy. I'm not going to push them on that. Like if they're building that, they understand their business, like they could continue doing that. But we are entering a world where advertising is completely changing. Third-party cookies are going away. It's all about context and content. And like Substack is literally a breeding ground for that and could actually become like the next Facebook or FBX, like what that was for the web. Substack could kind of do that for this iteration of the web if they wanted to go that route.

So really kind of testing and thinking through new models. I think bringing back old ideas, like the idea of like the wire service, I think is like something that we've lost, which is really interesting, which is you creator create content. Yes, there's like licensing deals that how do we start to create new mechanics around the idea of, well, if this content is used or licensed by others or repurposed, what are different financial incentives and models that we could build around that? I think that's very untapped, right? You look at the music industry and you look at the idea of like, I create a song, I get

paid like for streams or royalties or things tied to that in, in kind of our content creation business that doesn't really exist, right? Like you create content, it's out there and then it's kind of on the go, right? Maybe you license it once, but this idea of like long tail business benefits really don't exist, which I think could start to exist. So I think in order for us not to reinvent the wheel, which is why the art, I mean, again, I'm biased. I wrote the articles, but why they're, but why they're so hot right now is because one media companies are realizing that their traditional business models aren't working. that advertising is owned by facebook and google that is the truth um and they'll continue to grow that pie and they have so much investment uh like in building the next phase of that publishers it's

very hard for publishers to compete there so publishers need to think about like what is our new role and new role being you know focused on talent focused on building new revenue models and distribution models for that talent starts to become a real business right in a new arena that they get to move into and build off of. On the other side of it, it's really trying to think about like, how do we not renovate these old business models or renovate this old house and actually build this new house, right? And build this new business models and really start to kind of focus on what can be done there. And like, you're kind of seeing that, right? You're seeing that happen without revenue tied to it. Like, I love the idea of type house. What type house tells

me is that all of these writers are coming together because there's all of these services that they need and want to share and work on, which to me is a business, right? People should be focused on building those businesses. Health insurance and libel are so traditionally held and you need to be an employer for a company. So how do you start to separate the idea of 1099 workers and give benefits to those sort of workers so that it's not just, to your point, unbundling, rebundling, but also saying, okay, now you want all these benefits. You now have to be an employee of Substack if you're a writer. These writers are going to say, no, that's not why we joined in the first place. So there needs to be new models bred out of that or else you do risk

kind of running into the same thing but everything that i see um right now is is is going in that right direction is kind of saying how do we blow this shit up and you know figure out how to actually create something that's focused both on the creator and then that next iteration is going to be like the consumer right and we're in a very tight spot right now to figure that out one thing you mentioned earlier if we go deeper on this monetization theme is uh this idea of like licensing the content. And so for people that don't know today, somebody inside of a media organization creates content, they go ahead and it's published on that platform, they get paid a salary. And for the most part, that's how it works. In terms of moving forward, is there a

world where these media organizations say to somebody, hey, we'll do a revenue share. So if you have an email that makes X million dollars, you get a piece of it or your articles, the ads we sell against it, we'll keep track of for you specifically and give you a cut on a percentage basis. And then as part of a second part of that question, talk about this licensing idea of like, after I leave, I can still maybe have a royalty stream from the actual content. Yeah. Yeah. So there is a ton of attribution to individual creators within these larger media companies, or we'll call them holding companies because we're trying to tie them as close to possible as the music industry um there is there there there are stats there is data looked at that

individual writers drive certain business right so whether that's um who's driving the most subscriptions who's driving the most traffic um that data is available now that data isn't necessarily something that is used from a business perspective or set up from a business perspective but I think that it starts to become a opportunity to be leveraged when you are kind of trying to court or attract more creators. So really being able to think through, all right, if you work here, this is what you drive. And there are certain tiers of that. Now, the one thing that I'd say is something that constantly is brought up to me as I push out these ideas is like, there are those layers in the middle that are often unaccounted for, right? Like we know the byline writer and

that byline writer, yes, is definitely the dominant force to that content being engaged with or shared or viewed. But those layers in between editor, designer, right, are oftentimes not considered within that value chain, but they're critical, right? So one thing to really think about as kind of working through those models is really thinking about how you start to expose that value as well. So you start to really attribute all these different things. um on an inverse look what's really interesting is like and i've kind of brought i brought this up in the poet days and we talk about it all the time at the post and the times is working on a project um with adobe um that's that's a blockchain project i think uh sponsored by ibm garage but

really about the exposure of the effort in that work right like there there's this notion of like you work in a company you're driving all these benefits and that's recognizable and how does that look and how does licensing and setup and those things look but also on the other side it's like, as a reader, I want to read content, and I will trust this content or engage with this content more if you start to expose that same data to me, right? Like, was this fact-checked? Who's the writer of this? What links are, you know, tied to it? What's the provenance of that information? Yes, this is source, but who was the source? There's a couple different ways to do that that both drive and kind of deliver both of those models. When it comes to the licensing thing of people leaving

afterwards. I think that's the most interesting thing for a lot of companies to start thinking and talking about. And I do know a couple media companies today that are already kind of thinking about this, which is this idea that traditionally it was a risk for media companies to like make celebrities out of their writers, right? Because they're salary employees, they're creating under the umbrella. So the whole goal and focus always is like to put the brand first and to push the brand forward that's what you sign up for absolutely but if you start to kind of if if if a creator starts to fly away right which now think about how easy that is with twitter every other platform you could like go viral and you could be gone 30 years ago it was like you get to pick up

the phone to call someone and tell them they had a great article right like it just never happened um but media companies were essentially incentivized to like not let that creator reputation fly and not make them famous and you could look at actual examples like politico when ben smith and maggie haberman maggie haberman now writes for the times and ben smith now writes for the times with his formerly editor-in-chief of buzzfeed um they blew up at politico and they left right and and like politico was left there and they went off and continued to build their brands um there needs to be that incentive for media companies to allow that now because one it benefits the media company and their brand. If that creator blows up, creates content,

builds a huge audience, that reflects on the brand. But the brand's concern that that creator is just going to leave is all tied to the incentive models. It's all tied to the fact that you're not giving them an incentive to stay. If there is shared equity, if there is more like a revenue opportunity or some sort of ownership opportunity, or you can leave, to the example they said you can leave and you still own 20 of the ip so you are incentivized to like go and create and even when you leave that value ip still remains there's another radical idea that i'd love to put out there which is basically like can media companies or uh like you definitely see this in the venture space right but in media companies it doesn't happen if i'm an up-and-coming creator

um maybe a media company wants to invest in me as a brand right like we talk about like tokenizing the individual and I, you, I could talk to you about this cause you'll get it. But some people are like, what the, what's that? But like this idea that, okay, like you're an up and coming creator on my platform. I'm going to invest in you. I own 10% of you as a brand. You go do whatever you want. That's going to help build your brand because the financial returns make sense to me. So like these mechanisms need to change. It's going to happen. I think it has to happen or else, you know, independent creators as they grow up and there's more and more and more opportunity for them to get famous for them to drive value drive popularity they will leave unless those

incentives remain intact now i think news is a like like news is unique because news is very contingent on the brand but that's a micro but that's a micro topic on a way more macro trend that will need to work out so lots to unpack there yeah well and i think that you're you're nailing it in the sense of if you align the incentives correctly then a lot of things can change. But right now, it's one side of this relationship is extracting way more value than the other. And that's almost caught, think of like a pendulum, right? Like the pendulum swung in the favor of the media companies. Now there's tools and services that are coming out that are allowing the pendulum to swing back in the power of the creators. But actually, we should find

somewhere in between, right? Somewhere in the middle of that, where it's a win-win for both parties will kind of find harmony or equilibrium in the market, rather than just allowing every five to 10 years, depending on the swing back and forth, it kind of just feels like, you know, you never get to a steady state of a win-win type relationship. Yeah. Somebody said this morning that like the middle class of publishing is gone. Like there's no middle class in publishing that you're either like one of these independent creators that's building on the platforms, or you're one of these larger holding companies. And I basically said, it's kind of the opposite. like it could be looked at in the inverse where like everyone is kind of working on either side

back towards the middle like sure the middle class is like gone but everyone's trying to work back towards that you have these media companies who in who over invested in so many things outside of their business whether that's tech business like investment venture like things that weren't tied to their content or their main value proposition which were which they're now trying to divest in order to have a better kind of fixed cost structure so that they could be a profitable media company and then you have these independents that are basically saying what's the minimal kind of like add-ons I need to put in order to be a successful company so that I'm not over bloated and I don't lose focus and they're actually coming back towards the

middle and that's exactly right on I think what happens is everyone on this even playing field now I don't know like people are like is the next phase for a lot of these independent creators for media companies to acquire them and like web smith said that you know there's been a couple conversations happening that like he hasn't entertained but he's been approached um and then that starts to open up this notion of like what is that value of the independent creator like you would assume that a media company would want to acquire them because their audience but you think like what i said earlier that relationship of like me with that creator as a as a subscriber i'm going along for the ride feeling like they're a part of it and growing it

there's a huge argument to be made that their relationship with the subscriber is like 10x the relationship of a larger company with the subscriber thus is their value 10x is it like something that they should never sell there's like all these different things that'll kind of factor and come to play but it's all happening the last thing i want to talk about is this idea of um the creators actually using their audience not for just monetizing in the way that you or i would think about monetizing content, but actually being the top of the funnel and really the potential customer base for building businesses. And in the most extreme examples, we've seen Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Kanye West kind of do this. They are creators, but I think mainly we

think of them as celebrities that have audience and then they were able to monetize it by building a business. One, do you think that's going to happen with the independent creators? And two, have you seen anything there that suggests like that might actually be underway? way yeah people I mean people have gotten mad at me for saying that I think like at least in early days of like this creator movement that you kind of have to be famous at least with Substack I felt that you really had to already have a pre-existing audience or a pre-existing following in order to port over um I got slammed on people were pissed that I said that and there was like two examples that people gave me of people who actually built brands on on like Substack from

the ground up but i do i do think that um this idea of i mean look audience audience is probably the the the hardest most underappreciated work that needs to happen for these independent creators right it's something that we constantly overlook when we talk about leaving media companies we're like totally disregarding the fact that these media companies allow them to build audience right when we talk about all the work that needs to be done like creating content every day and figuring out what CMS to use, you forget about the fact that all this work has to be done in order to accrue and build that audience. So I think that as these creators find their platform of choice and delivery, it really is kind of contingent on or most beneficial for them to be

able to have another platform where that audience is built to then port over. I think that there are kind of extremes outside but um the goal the goal too right like you you use the word famous and i do i do think that that's the goal too right i think the goal for these creators um as they start to kind of build their brand and move over between different platforms and kind of grow kind of grow their influence is in fact to become famous because as you do become famous then you are able to then easily port over and go on to new platforms go on and build new businesses and be able to extend that you can't imagine a world right and like there was an article in the journal about this like that that like the top musicians aren't making music like they're like

90 of their business is being made from other shit like if they're creating like a beverage company or you know they they they have a new network or you know they're doing things through like investments and you can imagine that a similar approach will probably be taken for these independent creators especially like the writers on substack it's like okay they're making money through writing and building audience now but eventually they'll grow fame and celebrity and popularity to the point where now they'll be able to leverage that not have to do that for their business be able to do that to your point to like build more audience or just for fun and allow all that work that they've done to then be pivoted and moved over to doing other things

whether that's you know being on a network or doing television or broadcast or being able to extend that kind of like a Jamel Harris type approach like I think like that should be the goal. It shouldn't be, I'm going to create a newsletter. I'm going to have a single channel my career. It's that, oh, I'm using this in order to get to that next thing. And that's very rare and weird for journalism because that's just never been the case. But again, it's happening. And I think we'll see similar kind of behaviors and transitions there as we've seen with every other industry. It's fascinating to me because I think that it all comes back to the idea that audience is the new currency and if you have audience you're able to push them between

platforms you're able to monetize them you're able to do all kinds of things but audience is kind of that that powerful thing and that ultimately to your point leads to you know who owns the audience right so um you know if a no-name journalist and not no name in a negative sense but just they're unknown uh joins a media publication they build a massive twitter following and then they leave, right? Was it the individual or the publication that created that? Now, today, I think default always is, and I personally believe it should be in the hands of the creator. But I think that that is a whole other strategy that we will see. We will literally see people who want to be individual creators, but they'll go join somewhere, use that brand as a launching

pad. Probably the best example that we've seen so far is Pat McAfee left the NFL, joined Barstool, was there for a decent amount of time, realized, wait, I can do this exact same thing myself, went and now he's got i believe the largest youtube uh show uh in terms of uh sports audience yeah and so you look at that you're like okay like here's a dude who just left walked out of the nfl learned built you know kind of an audience with a barstool and then left to get it for himself and i think he just signed like a big multi-million dollar contract with draft kings yeah it's like such a big point that you like it's really interesting that you say that right Because I think the common thinking is that you don't want to work at a media company

because you want to own that audience, right? Like early Substack conversations were like, when you're creating for a publisher, they own your IP, they own that audience. Come over here, you own that IP, you own that audience, which is true. But then on the inverse to your point, if you don't have an audience, right, the audience literally isn't just who's reading you on that publisher. Your audience now becomes your Twitter following or any platform following. So you leverage that media company in order to build that following that in fact, you are actually owning and accruing your audience there and porting that over. I think that that's the biggest thing though, is like the future media businesses are all about interoperability. It's really about being able to build audiences places and port them over.

again you know this probably better than most people um and and and and creators are going to be kind of focusing on those things where and connecting those platforms and connecting channels and connecting content when they know that that portability could exist things that don't allow for that sort of portability or that kind of brand building or reputation building i think are going to start to become like very very very uninteresting or disinteresting for a lot of these creators yeah it's a fascinating world what's the one thing that you're looking for in the future as we wrap up uh in terms of uh this specific trend or this specific like milestone to happen where you will say hey that that's big yeah so i think um i think i think there's a couple things one is

i think the more the more creators that start to come over outside of kind of like an opinion vertical that are focused on um like news right or things really focused on um like breaking news investigative journalism and work there that is really expensive and it's like really hard and needs a brand umbrella and reputation and i think when you start seeing that happen you can really start to understand like how this is actually going to break apart i think right now what's very clear is there are a lot of exactly your point like opinion writers who could go and create their own brands but news is still news and you trust the news to be there i think when you start to see those trends move over then things could become a little interesting um i do i do want to

see um how uh how platforms like substack or you know other kind of or like ghost or mailchimp start to build on top of that comfort confidence level like that to me is my passion economy thesis like how I think about, you know, investing, how I think about, uh, products being built. It's all around this idea of like enabling that creator comfort and confidence. And once those things start to pick up, I think we'll start to see gradually other things move over and it'll start to kind of like boom up and move. Um, there's like this idea of membership, which I think this, uh, this, which, which we didn't hit on, but it's a big point. Um, the idea of subscriptions is very transactional and old, right? It's kind of like, I pay you to get content and it's like,

like, I give you the ticket, you give me the goods, I'm out. Membership is really like about status identity. It's like Amazon Prime, I have two-day shipping, I have Whole Foods discounts, it's my identity, it's my status, I need that. These independent creators are building similar things, right? Like, like WebSmith has Polymathic, you can join to be a part of that community, you engage on that particular community there's like monthly webinars there's a lot of um uh people are doing like like community only conversations you can have like one-to-one interviews like it goes way beyond access and into these benefits and as those things start to build that's going to pose a real threat to you know traditional media companies or any businesses that are just

focused on subscription when it's like well i'm paying you and all i get is this content i'm paying this creator and i'm getting 50 things a month right and i'm really kind of part of this community and it like essentially becomes my identity the last thing to put on my crypto hat which i'm begging for is like this ownership economy right so so like how do you start to be able to build a platform where your audience right like your loyal audience the ones who follow you the ones who engage are actually equitable like in you as a brand right instead of instead of um creators getting like paid through transactional subscriptions or by media companies what does it look like when the community itself start to like engage with the creators on a level

where they then have a stake in the ip they then have a stake in your success very crypto thinking but like been hammering that for a bit and waiting and waiting and waiting for that to start to move and people are thinking that way right and it's that's where i think things start to become really interesting because it's like i believe in you as a creator so much so that i have equity in you as a creator, you create this content, there's benefits for me. But then if you as a creator end up getting bought, like you, Joe Rogan, get this deal or go somewhere else, then there starts to become returns to that community. And that really kind of like sparks a new economy. That's really weird, but really exciting. Look, we're already seeing it in some form or fashion with

like the Lambda School ISAs, right? They're sharing agreements, things like that. Now, that's a very specific use case with kind of capped risk for both the individual and for Lambda. And And so I think that's kind of a test the waters, dip your toe type thing. But to your point, is there a world where a creator in the future says, hey, I'm basically going to put myself on Kickstarter, right? You're going to give me some money up front. I'm going to go create awesome content. And every dollar I make, you're going to get as a community 20 cents of, and I'm going

to do this and I commit to doing it for the next five years, right? Whatever it is, you could see people very, very much saying, yeah, this is worth it. And then if all of a sudden, uh, kind of your share in the creator is tradable, right? So, Hey, we thought that, you know, they were going to make a hundred K a year, but actually they're making two 50. I've been able to pull out all the value I want out of this. Now I can actually sell the, uh, the share of the token at a higher price. I mean, you can see this whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. It creates, it like creates an entirely new world that I think is, I think it's something people have been asking for and people want, like you see these, this, like, I kind of said this earlier. I feel even with newsletter subscriptions that I pay for, that it's less about me paying for that content because I need that content, even though I wouldn't subscribe if it wasn't valuable. But it's more so I feel like I am investing in that creator, knowing that they need this money in order to continue creating the content I like and building the community I like. um if there's an option to say okay you could pay ten dollars a month for this newsletter or you

could pay twenty dollars a month right and you accrue 0.05 percent of like holdings of this like of this company then maybe i would do that because my kind of intent to subscribing in the first place is to invest in this creator and believe that this creator is kind of going places so yeah i love it it makes a makes a ton of sense where um where can people find you on the internet and where do we want to send them? Yeah, so I'm at Jared Dicker on Twitter. That's where I've been spending way too much time lately. So shoot me a note there.

I get back to everybody, so would love to chat. You are one of my favorite follows because I feel like you're willing to say the things that are one, likely to happen, but two, may be unpopular or people don't understand. So please keep going because you make me think all the time when you tweet stuff, but I appreciate you coming on and we're gonna have to do,

We'll do round three again at some point in the future. Fantastic. Thanks for having me. This is a blast.