The AMO Show

Naomi Shah is the founder and CEO of Meet Cute, an audio romcom media company. With a focus on creating consistent 15-minute episodes versus trying to aim for hits, Meet Cute is building a robust catalog of IP that the company could use in the future for exciting opportunities.

During this episode, we talked about a lot, but a few things jumped out to me…

On consistency vs. hits

For many studios, the goal is to create a hit. They create a few big projects every year with the hope that when one is released, people will flock to it and it’ll be an economic success.

That’s not Meet Cute’s approach. Instead, the team strives to consistently deliver on its proposition: a 15-minute romcom audio episode. It doesn’t deviate from consistently delivering that product to people.

The benefit here is that the listener builds a relationship with the Meet Cute brand while the company is less dependent on any one piece of content being a savior of the business. I like the consistency over hits approach.

On IP and monetization

The easy road for monetizing would be throwing a quick ad in the beginning of an episode. But for a 15 minute show, a 30-60 second ad eats up a lot of time.

Instead, they are looking at all the IP they’re creating as an opportunity to monetize down the line. Consider opportunities like merchandise tied to specific characters. As people fall in love with them, they’ll want to represent those characters.

Another opportunity is taking these audio stories and turning them into videos. Could they take their IP and partner with Netflix to create a movie or limited series? When you own valuable IP, your means of monetization are endless.

On using data to inform decisions

While there is definitely a limited amount of data in audio, some of what they look for is how far into an episode a user got, how many actually completed the full episode, and how many went on to additional episodes.

With that limited data, they are able to push that back into their writing flywheel. For example, if they’ve found that cliffhangers often work, that might become part of their strategy going forward.

Mario Gabriele is the founder of The Generalist, a tech publication that tells stories about companies from idea to IPO. The company is new, but he has learned quite a bit about launching a paid subscription and the early days of building a community.

Jesse Jacobs and Mike Kerns are co-founders of The Chernin Group, an investment firm known for their involvement in companies including Barstool Sports, Food52, MeatEater, and so many more. Part of the reason they have found such success is because they have been diligent with executing their thesis.

David Nemetz is the GM of Culture & Innovation at Bustle Digital Group, overseeing brands including Inverse, Input, and Mic. He is also the former co-founder of Bleacher Report, which unlike many digital media companies that started at a similar time, actually had a successful exit.

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau is the CEO and Publisher of MIT Technology Review, the oldest technology magazine in the world. Over the past few years, the business has been going through a transformation of building out the tools and processes to run a digital-first media business.

Jason Yanowitz is the co-founder of Blockworks, a media and events company covering the crypto asset space. Originally, the plan was to create an advisory, but multiple iterations later, it is now has a newsroom, a podcast network, and an events business that plans to go physical again in 2021.

Scott Brodbeck is the founder, editor, and publisher of Local News Now, a network of hyperlocal media properties. What started as a single guy with a camera and a police scanner has turned into a media company with a small staff serving the D.C. area through multiple websites, both owned and through partnerships.

Nick Friese is the founder and CEO of Digiday Media, a company with three verticals: Digiday, ModernRetail and Glossy. Friese started the company during the Great Recession and has gone through a tremendous journey building this company with events, membership and marketing services.

On building membership

The membership product at Digiday started primarily as a print product. As Friese explained it, people were comfortable paying for a magazine, so that’s what they sold. And despite costing nearly $200 for four issues, it sold.

But as time went on, they started adding other features to the membership, including member-only content and then the metered paywall until now, it’s a much more expensive product at the company.

The lessons they’ve learned has been applied to the other verticals where now Glossy and ModernRetail actually have more robust membership offerings that the original at Digiday.

On equal numbers of buyers and sellers at events

A solid number of Digiday’s events are hosted buyer events, where the buyers typically come for free. In exchange for that, the sellers get guaranteed meetings with decision makers.

According to Friese, this boils down why people really want to attend events. They’re looking to do business. It’s about meeting your contemporaries.

This is also how they think about verticals over all. If you can clearly define the buyers and sellers in an industry, you’ve got the potential for something.

On their structure of verticals

Friese has a different approach to the various franchises than other vertical media companies. Each publication has its own writers, editors, marketers and sales people.

This is different than how others have done it where the editors and writers are unique to the publication, but everything else is centralized with services spread across all the verticals.

In Friese’s mind, each brand has its own very unique image, so he believes it’s important for the majority of the people working on it to be focused exclusively to those brands.

Sherrell Dorsey is the founder and publisher of The Plug, a publication focused on the Black innovation economy. While it started as a morning newsletter she did before going to work, it has now morphed into a media company with original reporting, data, research, events and podcasts.

In this show, we discussed a variety of important topics, but a few things jumped out...

On quarterly, not monthly pricing

This was an important topic to me. The Plug's membership is sold quarterly or annually, but not monthly. As she said, this runs counter to the habit so many of us have formed paying for subscriptions every month.

In her mind, though, a month is just not a long enough time to form a relationship. By extending it to a quarter, she feels that The Plug has enough opportunity to demonstrate value to a reader.

It's an important distinction because if we look at when most subscribers churn, it's after the first month. By extending to a quarter, you have more time to form a habit with them and, ideally, keep them engaged for much longer.

On not charging a CPM

For most media companies, charging a CPM is how they do things. But in niche media, it's harder. As Dorsey explained, because they don't have scale, they need to price things based on value.

Whether it's their podcasts, newsletter sponsorships or other content initiatives, they try to determine how valuable a sponsorship is worth to a partner and then work on pricing from there.

On being diversified

Although we didn't explicitly talk about this, The Plug generates revenue through advertising, events, membership fees and has received grants to create new content initiatives.

This embodies a core ethos of successful media companies. Those that are overly reliant on a single source—or a single property—carry more risk than those that are well diversified.

While The Plug has gone on to raise some money, it's clear in our conversation that Dorsey continues to think very diligently about not overextending the business and ensuring there are multiple streams of revenue.

Mike Orren is the Chief Product Officer at The Dallas Morning News and has called this the pivotal year for local media. With Orren leading, Dallas Morning News has been undergoing a digital transformation, using the revenue generated from the print operation to invest in the online business.

In this episode, we talked about a wide variety of topics that you'll find informative and interesting.