The Digiday Podcast

Chances are you've heard of Business Insider. But how about Insider, full stop? In this week's episode, Insider, Inc. CRO Pete Spande talks about growing the Insider brand that complements Business Insider, balancing subscription revenue with that coming from advertising, and Insider's reasoning behind their recent merger with eMarketer.

Building publishing products is fraught with challenges, as product leaders have to balance various constituencies -- editorial, sales, marketing -- that sometimes have competing goals -- all while keeping users top of mind. “It serves its purpose,” Barton said on this week’s Digiday Podcast. “It allows both sides of the business to be represented. It allows the newsroom to be represented, and for...

Two decades ago, The Fader launches as a magazine for up-and-coming music, entering a crowded space with the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, The Source and XXL. Times have changed. Taking a multiplatform approach, joked Fader president and publisher Andy Cohn on this week’s Digiday Podcast, is “that’s the only way for us to stay alive.”

For Dow Jones, Barron's Group -- home to Barrons, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, Financial News and Penta -- is home to its more niche publications focused on financial decision-making. Digiday's Brian Morrissey spoke to Barron's Group publisher Almar LaTour on this week's episode.

In 2014, Time Out opened its first marketplace in Lisbon, Portugal. The idea was a food hall with restaurants, bars, a cooking school and an event venue, a  curated celebration of the best the city has to offer. Since its opening, Time Out has seen massive success with this market. Just last year, nearly 4 million visitors passed through its doors, and it is largely considered to be one of the bes...

Since short-form video app TikTok, formerly known as Music.ly, burst onto the scene in 2018, it has captivated young audiences with its endless challenges, memes and lip syncs. The app even helped launch rapper Lil Nas X, and propel his hit "Old Town Road" to a record-holding 17 weeks on top of the Billboard charts. To outsiders, the app has a reputation for "cringey" content and comedic music vid...

National Public Radio is no stranger to the world of audio, which is why embracing the rise of podcasts was a natural move for the company. NPR is a nonprofit media organization that creates content to distribute to its network of affiliate stations throughout the country. For a long time, that content was meant for traditional broadcast radio, but in recent years the company has begun testing out...

In 2018, After a long career in media, former Politico USA president Poppy MacDonald decided to make the jump to a non-partisan, not-for-profit, data reporting publication: USAFacts. USAFacts was founded in 2017 by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, with the mission to "help inform active citizenship and fact-based debate, and advocate for transparency of and ease-of-access to public data," accor...

In 2015, CNN launched Great Big Story -- a video-first media company that produces inspirational micro-documentaries. For its first four years, that meant building an audience on platforms. Now, as Coupe looks towards the future, she wants to see GBS continue to grow, not just in views, but also in audience impact. On this week's episode of The Digiday Podcast, Brian Morrissey sits down with Coupe...

When Will Welch took the helm as editor-in-chief of GQ in January, he announced that a new era of GQ had officially begun. And this new GQ is not for everyone. In the latest iteration of the men's fashion and lifestyle magazine, Welch intends to home in on the strengths of the GQ brand through a more focused content and an evolving social media strategy. In this week's episode of The Digiday Podca...

What was once a digital-first news brand has now become its own full fledged news network. Newsy, which got its start as a syndicator of short-form video, now is a news channel that claims to reach nearly 40 million viewers. The decision to move away from its roots, according to Newsy CEO Blake Sabatinelli, was a result of a shifting digital space. Just last year, the E.W. Scripps-owned brand took...

There are many video streaming services hoping to be the next big player in the future of TV. Peter Kafka, a reporter at Recode Media and host of the Recode Media podcast by Vox, thinks Netflix has remained ahead of the curve and will retain the top spot for as long as streaming services keep positioning themselves as the answer to Netflix.

Subscriptions and advertising businesses may stand in conflict with each other, but The New York Times has been bullish on this strategy. While remaining a shining example of a successful subscription business, last year, it also had its first growth year overall in advertising since 2005. Sebastian Tomich, head of advertising at The Times discusses the advertisers’ aversion to news, how audio has...

In the last year, Twitter and Facebook have been scrutinized for the lack of brand-safe environments for advertisers. At Cannes this year, Twitter is spending much of its time addressing those issues. Sarah Parsonette, vp of global client solutions at Twitter, discusses how the platform can contribute to brands’ bottom line, why it is open to regulation and more.

On this episode from Cannes, we talk to Andréa Mallard, the newly minted CMO at Pinterest. The platform has about 300 million active monthly users on its platform and Mallard’s pitch to advertisers and publishers includes a brand-safe environment and access to new audiences.

Despite the ever-changing methods of delivering content, Hearst, first and foremost, remains a magazine company. In the latest episode of the Cannes edition of the Digiday Podcast, Troy Young, president of Hearst Magazines, talks about culture changes at Hearst, his ambition to integrate data in every part of the organization and more.  

Once known for its brash ways, Vice under new CEO Nancy Dubuc is presenting a different, more streamlined appearance for the market. Part of that is presenting a simplified structure and recent moves to bring in new leadership across the company. CRO Dominique Delport kicked off the week’s episodes of the Digiday Podcast by detailing how the company has gotten its house in order.

Millie Tran is the deputy off-platform editor at the New York Times, where she manages how The Times handles coverage and distribution of its content on social media channels and everything else that is not their owned and operated platform. In this episode, Tran talks about platform behaviors, how she approaches organizational differences, how women are over-mentored but under-sponsored and more.

The Financial Times has long charged readers for access to its content. While other publishers are pivoting to paid today, the FT is much farther along in this journey. It recently reached 1 million subscribers. CEO John Ridding cautions that the road is much tougher in execution than it looks in understanding. In this episode, Ridding talks about the biggest growth areas for the FT going forward,...

Last year, Viacom acquired Awesomeness, a youth-focused media company that is behind the Netflix success To All The Boys I’ve Ever Loved. Rebecca Glashow, co-head at Awesomeness, shares how things have changed internally for the company.

PinkNews is a U.K.-based digital publication that covers news and entertainment for the LGBT community around the world. Founded in 2005, the bootstrapped media company employs 24 people and has established a sizable audience in the U.S., India and other countries. To keep this business alive and growing, founder Benjamin Cohen has tried every trick in the trade -- and every revenue stream. On thi...

Many publishers are trying to diversify their revenue streams instead of relying solely on advertising for revenue growth. But for Forbes, the digital ad business is still seeing double-digit growth. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Forbes CRO Mark Howard discusses revenue diversification, why a paywall isn’t right for the publisher and more.

Bonus: This March, the bootstrapped media company Mobile Nations, a digital publisher with a focus on consumer electronics, was acquired by Future in a deal worth $120 million. On this episode, Mobile Nations co-founder and COO Kevin Michaluk, discussed why venture capital funding never made sense for the company that last reported $8 million EBITDA over $16 million in revenue.

Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini believes Barstool can be a $100 million revenue company "within the next year and a half." That will have to come from growing channels of revenue and not depending on any one of them, especially advertising. Nardini discussed how Barstool is building out these revenue streams, why personalities matter, how podcast revenue is lucrative for Barstool and more.

The Mueller Report confirmed a lot of reporting already done around the Trump administration and Russian meddling in the 2016 election. One of the many newsrooms whose reporting was vindicated in the process is The Daily Beast, a mid-sized publisher that seized the opportunity to compete with big news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Noah Shachtman, editor-in-chief at...