Nick Friese on the 12 Years of Digiday Media

Jacob Cohen Donnelly: In 2015, you wrote a blog post called A Founder Story, 7 Lessons on Building a Modern Media Business. In it, you said the Digiday story goes back to April 1st, 2008 when only a fool would start a media company. It was the second worst economy since the Great Depression, and it was a very bad time to start a media business. How did you get into media and why did you decide to launch Digiday at the worst possible time?

Nick Friese: Great question, and guilty as charged. Only a fool would start a business at that time. What happened was I had a big change in my life. Before I get to that, I can talk to you a little bit about my background. I was in publishing for years. I was at Hurst, I was at Meredith. I left those big corporate structures and got into startups as soon as the internet really started to bubble up. Once I got into those startups, I realized that that was the place for me. I loved building businesses from scratch.

I was at media technology startups, and then I left those and then got back into publishing and helped build a B2B media company and was there for about eight years. Then I got fired from that job. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I’d always wanted to build my own business. I had spent lots of time writing out business plans for probably about a decade, tried things, didn’t work, so stayed in a company job.

Then now that I had no job and I had to figure out how to make money, I thought, this was my time. I launched Digiday. It wasn’t Digiday at the time. It was called DM2 Events. I wanted to build a community for publishers at that time, because in 2008, publishers were being completely transformed by digital technology. The web was coming up and that’s all anyone could talk about or focus on. I wanted to help big media companies manage that transformation from analog companies to digital media companies. That’s how I started it.

I cashed out my teeny puny 401(k) and I put it all down onto what was then DM2 Events. The way I went, and the good thing about that time is that I had a lot of friends in the industry, and it’s one of the things that I talk about in that piece. You have to have friends, especially when you’re building something from scratch. I formed a good network. They spoke at my show. They helped me with the operations. They helped me market it, spread word of mouth. I launched something called the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference back in June of 2008. That’s where it started.

Jacob: When you started, was it purely an events business or had you also started a publication?

Nick: Well, it was purely an events business because, look, I had no money. I had like $30,000 and I had to put that all into the venue cost, basically. I had to sell tickets and I had to– I sold three sponsors, and after that event was over, I had $3,000 left to my name. What are you going to do with $3,000 when that’s all you have left? You, hire a salesperson. I hired a person who worked solely on commission and paid a small draw to that $3,000. That was a really important step for me.

The whole plan from the beginning was to build a community. It wasn’t just an events business, although that’s what took me forward for a long period of time. The idea was to build a community. Events were going to be a part of that, but also I wanted to put media at the center of it, because that’s the connected tissue between a community is content. Connecting people with ideas and information and help make them smarter about the industry that they’re in and with the pro work that they’re doing.

I launched a really bad newsletter in July of 2008. It was poorly edited. It was called the DN2 Daily, and I had friends contribute to it, I wrote stories. I think even at the time I had friends who were outside the industry writing for it. I just wanted to do anything and everything I could to just keep the conversation going between that first event and the community and the next event, which was planned about three months, four months later.

Jacob: What point did you recognize you needed to really start investing in the media side of things and start bringing on more traditional reporters and editorial staff?

Nick: Yes, it’s a great question. It took me some time because I was so busy with the event community, and that was driving the majority of revenue for us. We were selling sponsorships, we were creating events in all these different verticals back in 2008, 2009, 2010. We had Digiday everything. It was Dgiday, until when it was video, it was apps, it was Digiday Target, it was Digiday Networks. If there was anything interactive, all you had do was just slide that word into Digiday and we did a show around it.

I realized that I could only get so far with the events without a lot of media behind it and a true publishing business that was run by editorial talent and have real journalism at the heart of it. About three and a half years in, I teamed up with Brian Morrissey and hired him from Adweek where he was a digital reporter, and then he and I set off to build the media business, which we did.

Jacob: I want to spend a bit of time talking about team composition, because I feel like getting this right is integral to a vertical publisher’s ability to grow horizontally like you have. How does the organization look today from a people perspective, and where have you staffed up and where do you think you’d likely staff up going forward?

Nick: It’s a great question. It’s something that every media company has to figure out, and it’s constantly moving and it’s constantly in flow. The organizational structure as well as talent is constantly moving. You have to constantly evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. We’ve changed a lot from those early days and even from just a year ago, about a year ago at this time, we really had two departments. We had editorial on one side of the office, then there was a big divide by a conference room and a reception desk at our office. Then there was the business side. The business side operated independently, editorial team operated independently. There was complete autonomy.

They didn’t really work very closely together. They sort of were operating in their own cultures, their own systems. I realize that, as we go forward, as the type of media company we are, we have to figure out a way to bring everything together. That doesn’t mean that you jeopardize the editorial integrity or the autonomy of that team, but we have to become one team, especially if you’ve got memberships starting to come into the heart of your organization.

Memberships has to live between editorial and the business side. Then if you’ve got events and you want to continue to scale the events, the business side and the content team have to come together and work closely together. That was important. As well as just developing new products and sharing data and insights, we had to bring these teams together. That’s what it was a year ago.

If you look at it today, essentially the way the teams are organized, and we’ve got three media brands with Digiday covering media marketing and advertising, Glossy covering fashion and beauty industries, and then Modern Retail covering the DTC industry, as well as traditional retail markets. We have three editor in chiefs, one for each one of those titles. They have their own independent teams that work with them. They have their own set of reporters.

There’s business teams that are aligned with each one of those titles. We have a team that sells across the titles. Then we have product that sits right at the center between editorial and between business. Before product was a part of editorial, what I realized is that product really is everything as a media company, because product is obviously all the software that you use, audience development, it’s memberships, it’s email production, it’s ad delivery, it’s in almost everything that we do, product. Essentially now, the way we’re organized, is we have the teams more or less in a triangle. There’s product, there’s business, and then there’s editorial.

Jacob: I want to spend some time digging into the horizontal nature of Digiday Media, because like you said, you have those three brands, Digiday, Glossy, and Modern Retail. How have you approached launching these verticals? If you think about the vertical as a group of people, how much of that is dedicated just to the vertical versus being able to spread those people over multiple verticals?

Nick: Again, a great question, and something we’ve had to figure out. Because, originally, what we did is we just used one team under one EIC that was managing people that were reporting across brands. We had a business team that sold across every single brand. We had a marketing team that handled every single brand. I realized that if we wanted to continue to grow each one of these media hubs, we had to give them their own identity, their own teams while tapping into some service departments, whether it was finance or event operations, awards, things like that.

We needed to have dedicated teams because they could go deeper. Modern Retail has its own reporters, it has its own sales team. We’ve got sellers that just put together deals and marketing programs and advertising campaigns and event programs for Modern Retail. Then the same thing for Glossy. It’s got its own team dedicated to it. Then we also have marketing resources that are dedicated to our retail properties that just work on those brands. Then we have a whole set of team members that just work on Digiday.

About a year ago, we were spread across all the brands and we operated them under one umbrella. I realized as we were moving forward, I wanted to operate them independently. I wanted them to find their own voice and somewhat their own culture and develop their own identities and not just be tied to Digiday. I think the brands that we’re operating right now, I think Modern Retail and Glossy have all the opportunity to be as influential and as big a business as Digiday is.

It was important to let them grow out of the umbrella of Digiday and build their strength and their identity on their own. The only other thing that I didn’t mention before is that a big part of this now for us is obviously figuring out the organizational piece, which we’re doing, but also figuring out the culture piece, because that was one thing that we really did not do particularly well. We’re a media business, so people are your greatest asset.

We were so focused for so many years on building the outside piece, building great products that went out to the market that served our audiences that we could monetize and keep growing top line, grow bottom line, grow staff size, grow markets, grow, grow, grow. What we weren’t doing very well is we weren’t focusing in on our team and growing our team. We had a lot of turnover. We had a bit of a shaky culture. I realized that that’s actually job one for us. Figuring out your organizational system is obviously paramount, figuring out your process is paramount.

I think the thing that once you can figure that out, the thing that really matters in this front and center is that you’ve got a great plan for employee health. That’s mental health, that’s professional development and growth, and give them opportunities to grow within the organization. Help them with mobility, take them from their entry spot and then just set a path for them and figure out what they do best and help them grow. Because if you’re doing that well, I believe the rest takes care of itself. We’re really doubling down, especially now because it’s such a difficult time and we’re not all together, which makes it even more difficult.

Jacob: I want to spend a little bit more time talking about the vertical strategy, because Digiday Media is not the only B2B company that does this. Multiple B2B companies approach the same strategy of launching multiple verticals. How do you determine the right vertical to move into? Do you have a playbook that you use? What has been your approach there?

Nick: Yes. We launched everything out of Digiday. We played with these verticals, these areas, these markets inside of the Digiday brand. We launched retail coverage about four-plus, five-plus years ago. We realized that there was some appetite there, but not what it is now. We found that there was an appetite for fashion and beauty coverage. We started doing, believe it or not, just on Digiday, and the stories started to pop. I also saw that there was a seam in the market that the incumbents like Women’s Wear Daily really not covering the digital marketplace. I felt we could get in there and do that.

We jumped in there, so you’ve got your BOS and you’ve got your WWEs, and so we carved out a nice niche for Glossy and cover the transformation of the fashion beauty industries. That brand has grown really nicely and has a strong identity. We’re actually even now taking that to consumer coverage. Essentially, that was incubated outside of Digiday, out of Digiday. Then Modern Retail was just an extension of coverage that we were having through Digiday. Again, we were doing events for retail, and I just felt it was time to launch a brand around that.

A lot of it was test and learn from inside of Digiday on the event side, on the coverage side, and what the appetite was for our audience. For us, I know there are a ton of publications out there covering these spaces, but we just try and do it with our own sensibilities. There are a lot of companies out there that have found a way to differentiate and are valuable and are valuable brands and they’re growing like crazy. It’s great to see. It’s a fantastic time to be in media if you’re differentiated. That’s what we focus in on is obviously telling original reporting, high-quality journalism, having our own unique point of view and formats. Then just focusing in on our community and just operating by our own set of sensibilities.

Jacob: You used to have a financial vertical called Tearsheet that I believe you no longer publish. What did you learn running that, and why don’t you think it worked?

Nick: Yes. Oh, that was a good experience. Look, we learned a ton from that adventure. I will tell you the first mistake that I made is there was this arrogance that I had at the time that, oh, we’ve built Digiday, we’re building Glossy, we can just attack all these industries and use the same playbook and just apply it to any market. FinTech was blowing up, like MarTech was blowing up and Adtech was blowing up. I thought, “Well, if we can figure this out, we can figure that out.” I was sorely mistaken. The reason was is because it was such an amorphous industry, it’s gigantic.

For us, we really try and figure out a buy side and a sell side, and then what we do is we plant ourselves in the middle. For example, with media and marketing, you know the buy side are the brands, and the sell side are the media companies and tech companies. In FinTech, try and figure out the buy and sell side, it is really difficult. We didn’t know the industry as well as we should have. I think we just went in there with a little bit too much bluster and overconfidence, and we dabbled around for a couple of years and we did get some traction, but just not enough to create a viable business for us.

What we did is we sold the business back to partner that we launched with, and they’re still running it, but it’s going in a different direction now. I’m glad that we had that experience because you learn so much from failure. Look, we failed a ton at Digiday over the years, and that certainly was a failure. I realized a couple things have a really good plan, know the market, understand a clear buy/sell side, figure out a great niche for yourself, and then just move a little bit more slowly.

Jacob: Since you treat each publication somewhat independently. From an audience development perspective, what do you think works particularly well at the various verticals?

Nick: Yes. First and foremost, we want a direct connection with our audience. To us, the direct connection obviously is the email address, and that’s paramount. We want to have an email address from almost everybody that comes to visit Digiday. We want to try and get your email address so we can have that connection. We can invite you to try various email newsletters or briefings that we have, or invite you to events, or have you download some of our research or partner research.

A lot of what we do is try and capture email addresses and grow those. There’s a lot of tactics that we use. We use bounce exchange. We’ve got gated content, we have memberships, we do events, we do all sorts of downloads. We’ve got awards, and so we have emails that come in from all over the corners of these industries. We’ve got products that we’ve got set up to bring all that email in. The way I look at it is the top of the funnel has got to be that email address. Page view is nice, but for us, is how do we get that email address into our system, and then build a relationship with that person.

Also, we want to have a connection that means something. If someone’s not opening our emails or they’re not engaged, then we’ll just scrub them from our system because we want to make sure that we’ve got engagement. If someone hasn’t opened an email in a certain period of time, we’ll just let them go.

Jacob: I want to pivot the conversation now to talk about the actual business models that ensure that you actually have profit to run this business since most niche media companies actually try to operate from a profitable perspective. The first major part of the business is the events component, which like we discussed earlier, is how the entire business started. I’ve actually been to one of the Digiday events and was planning to go to another one before COVID hit. Can you talk through your event model and how you monetize them?

Nick: Sure. Well, we started with events, that is our legacy. It’s been a great place to start because we started with community building from the beginning. That remains a model today. It’s not really about scaled events. It’s about developing communities and we started with Digiday and we started building summits. The summits are high-level events where we bring anywhere from 150 to max size 500 executives together, higher level executives together. It’s basically a 50/50 split between the buy side and sell side. There’s lots of great networking and business gets done. That was always my primary model for the events. We need to create a community where people can do business together.

Content is nice and it’s great. To Brian’s credit and the team’s credit, they realized on the editorial side that the content was just a conduit and just bringing people together piece and learning is important. There’s no doubt about it and information is exchanged, but I think the primary thing we do at these events is the networking and the business that gets done in the hallways, at the breaks, at the dinners, after events, sitting down to breakfast first thing in the morning or the serendipitous meetings when you’re checking in to registration, things like that.

That was the business model pretty much from day one, and that hasn’t really changed other than we’ve really supercharged the meeting aspect of it. We’ve got these one-on-one meetings that we do throughout the event where if you’re an attendee, you can see who’s coming. We set up meetings for you throughout the duration of the event. That’s pretty much our view of how conferences run.

A lot of times we hear from our customers that come this is part of their marketing budget, probably comes from the cost of sales, doing sales, because they come and they’re doing real business out of these events. That’s the approach and it’s actually the approach across all three brands. We started with Digiday, we brought the same approach to Glossy, and we’re bringing the same approach to Modern Retail.

On the brand side of things, a lot of times, whether you’re a marketer or an agency, you don’t really get a chance to get out of the office and you can get a month’s worth of meetings in three days with technology vendors and media companies and what have you. There is a win-win on both sides, and then the last piece of it, we always try and find great places to hold our events. We do them everywhere from Barcelona to Vale to Kyoto, and maybe we do them all over the world.

Jacob: Now, obviously, with COVID, you’ve had to pivot to virtual events like most publishers. Since COVID started, I’ve always said that a publisher that can figure out how to run a hosted buyer event virtually would be in a very good place. Have you solved that problem?

Nick: I don’t know if we’ve solved it, but we certainly did make the pivot. We tried to take that experience that I just described at our summits and bring that to a virtual setting. The first thing we did when COVID hit, once I saw that South by Southwest was canceled in early March, I knew that was it. I knew that we were going to have to take all of our events for the rest of the year and then turn them into virtual events, and try and do them with the same spirit and form that we had been doing our in-person summits.

The key piece to that was, okay, how do we get people to meet in a virtual setting? How do you do these one-on-one meetings in a virtual setting? We built a system off of one of our partner’s platforms to conduct these one-on-one meetings. It’s worked. We were able to reallocate a lot of sponsorship dollars from our in-person events to our virtual events, a lot of our tickets to the virtual events throughout the year. We reallocated just about all of the deals that we did in our upfront period from 2019 into 2020. That was a big relief.

Now, it’s not easy to conduct these meetings virtually. It’s easy when you’re in an event venue and everyone’s together, but when people are all over the country and they have massive Zoom fatigue and the last thing they want to do is jump on the computer again and have their 12th zoom event of the day, it’s tough. We’ve been able to facilitate those meetings, but we’re not doing 12 meetings in a couple of days. We’re doing three or four, but we’re trying to make them as impactful as possible with those three to four so people can actually do business.

Jacob: Moving to another part of the, I guess you can call it the events business, is the Awards business. I’ve always found these to be interesting products because it’s effectively dependent on the strength of the brand. How do you know when it makes sense for a particular publication to launch an award? You don’t want to do it too soon and no one even care about it.

Nick: We built it in reverse order because we built it when we actually didn’t have a very strong brand. I think at the time, I launched awards in 2009 and the brand wasn’t even a year old at the time. We were able to do it because the market was so different back then. If it was today, wouldn’t even have a chance. We had a softness in the market, which gave us an opportunity to start doing award programs early on. We’ve just built them over the last 10 years. Yes, if we were to start them today, I would make sure that our brands are stable enough and mean enough to our audience in the industry at large to launch them.

Our approach has been different than what a lot of companies do. We’ve broken our award scheme essentially into these vertical markets within our vertical publications. With Digiday, we have 10 different award structures that are built into it. Glossy has two, Modern Retail has one. I think Glossy and Modern Retail may grow over time. We’ll have to see.

With Digiday, a lot of media companies just say, “Hey, we’re going to have two big award programs or one big annual award program.” Our model was, let’s have competitions throughout the year and build galas into them, because again, that’s serving particular communities like the video industry, like the content marketing industry, like the publishing industry, like the agency industry. We just targeted those verticals to go deep in those areas and reward the work that was happening at the ground level.

Jacob: Moving to the advertising business, you have a variety of products that can be sponsored from the newsletter to websites to partner research, podcasts, how do you package these to sell them? Then has COVID impacted the way you think about the advertising business?

Nick: Yes. Absolutely. Well, COVID changed our whole business. We were a company that 50% of our revenue came from events, and then the rest came from memberships and marketing services, advertising, et cetera. We basically just shut down a big part of that business because the in-person went away. We became fully digital 100%, even our events became digital. They became digital shows. They weren’t in-person meetings anymore. Everything became a sponsorship opportunity, digital sponsorship opportunity.

We leaned a lot on our custom marketing team that got involved with a lot of the reallocations, a lot of the deals during COVID to put together deeper, more integrated programs across the virtual events and the newsletters, as well as the podcasts. Doing all sorts of lead gen, because a lot of the lead gen went away because the events were shut down.

We were doing a lot more lunch workshops, and we were doing white paper downloads and all sorts of lead generation programs for our clients, but we primarily leaned into our custom marketing team to help us with that. The way that we sell it is primarily we have a very small amount of revenue that comes in from programmatic. It’s all direct-sold. We have direct relationships with all of our sellers to our clients. Either it’s client direct or directly in with the agencies.

The way that we’ve structured our sales team is that we have an enterprise group of sellers, then we have our sellers that handle specific accounts, and then we have our inside sales team that take on all these new leads that are coming in through our website and over the transom, and then builds those into more of the growth team, build accounts that go into the growth team, but then from the growth team up into the enterprise team.

Jacob: You mentioned that memberships were a decent chunk of the business. At what point did you realize you needed to have a membership component at Digiday Media and what went into building that?

Nick: Yes, it’s a great question. I knew that our team was creating just industry-leading content and I thought the stories were worth paying for. It was probably about four years ago I started socializing that idea. It was not well received in the beginning. It was just, no, we’re not ready for that, or I don’t think we should do that yet. I sat down with a person in the company and we just started to plan out what this could look like, what a membership business could look like. Funny enough, we’re doing all those things today, although that’s not actually how we entered so into the membership business.

What happened was Brian had this great idea to create a magazine out of our publishing summit. I thought it was a terrific idea. Then he and I talked about, well, what if we actually take it farther? We just developed a magazine, just a Digiday magazine, and Brian said, “Let’s create a Digiday magazine.” We decided to do that because that was form, right? People were already used to paying for magazines and things on the newsstand or subscribe to publications that would be delivered to them.

There were very few titles in our space at the time that were charging memberships. Wall Street Journal was. I don’t even think BI was doing it at the time when we launched. I think they were still mostly free. We just chose form as the first factor. I think it was $195 per year, and you would get four issues of Digiday magazine. It’s a premium price for four issues, but people paid. We built a strong community and they trusted our journalism and our reporting. That’s where it all started.

Then from there, we talked about what the next step was. It was, first, let’s do form factor, next, let’s set up member exclusive content. Then it was member exclusive content to gated content. It went from magazine to member exclusive to then gated. Then it just evolved into all three. The magazine was part of the membership, and the way that you became a member is either you wanted to get to some of this content that was exclusive to members, or you had hit the paywall and you had read your three articles or four articles and you had to convert if you wanted to get more content.

That’s how it evolved. The other way it evolved is that the management and the operations of memberships first started in editorial. This was a big change for us because editorial was now managing this business inside of its group and did a great job. They did a great job scaling the memberships business to a certain point. Then I think we realize that in order to get it to the next level because memberships are so complex, it goes so far beyond just creating content that’s worth paying for.

Memberships, it’s a business product. You have to manage it as a product. If you put memberships inside an organization, you have to have editorial, you need product, you need marketing, you need customer and client services, and you need sales and finance, all orbiting around memberships. We had to make that evolution, because running a memberships business, you can’t just have editorial managing it because they’d have to manage customer service, they’d have to manage sales, they’d have to manage marketing, they’d have to manage finance, and that’s not what the editorial team is set up to do. They’re set up to create great content and packages and form and just create deep, deep-reported stories that people want to pay for.

Then there’s this whole engine behind that that has to be managed. Obviously, audience development is a huge part of it. Insights and data and understanding what’s working, what isn’t, how to communicate that data across the groups. Creating marketing campaigns, creating a whole enterprise sales system that’s built into that. It evolves quickly once you get to a certain point.

That was not an easy transformation for us to go from, okay, membership sits in this group, now we need to evolve it and put it right in the heart of the company, in the middle of the company, and have it product-led. Look, that was a whole– we had to socialize that across the organization and it took time for it to sink in. I think now people can truly see why we made the changes that we did and how well it’s working now. How much more life and impact you can have with memberships if it’s wholly run by the product group, but supported by all these existing groups?

Jacob: What technology powers the membership business and why did you choose it?

Nick: Piano, we went in early with Piano and we just had a high degree of confidence with Trevor and his team. They’ve been great consultants to us and they’ve helped us develop the system across all of our three brands. They’ve got great consulting services, so they work really closely with the media company, with Media Operator on how to get the most out of your strategy and the tactics that are associated with it. They’re just really, really smart, and the system is reliable. We’ve stuck with it. I know other publishers have gone out and built their own systems and used other competitors, but we found a home with Piano and were really happy with them.

Jacob: Digiday was the first of the publications to have this membership, but then the others have followed. I believe I saw that Glossy now has a membership. What are some of the things you learned with that first membership that have made it easier to power memberships for the newer brands?

Nick: Yes. Obviously, there’s ongoing learning and each brand is different and has its own nuance to the audience, and what Glossy members pay for is slightly different than what Digiday members will pay for. Not everything applied from Digiday to Glossy, but one thing we decided to do from the get-go is we decided that we were going to use a metered paywall, and so that you could get four free articles a month on Glossy, and if you wanted more, you had to pay for it.

That’s that structure, that model set with Glossy, as well as the member exclusive. Those were the two things that we learned that worked well as a form factor for Digiday that we carried over to Glossy. What makes someone at Glossy buy a membership sometimes is different than what someone at Digiday will buy a membership for, because the audiences are so different.

The fashion and beauty industry has its own set of dynamics and needs versus publishers and technology companies and agencies. I think the form factor was the key for us in figuring out, okay this model of gated content using a meter plus member exclusives works and let’s carry that over to Glossy. We’ve built a very solid membership business for Glossy, as well as Digiday, and then we carried that same form over to Modern Retail.

With Modern Retail, we put it in from the get-go. We wanted to train the market that if you want content, deeply reported stories on the transformation of the retail industry, you have to pay for this content. We’re building our membership business and it’s been going well over the last year. Actually, by percentage of audience, we have more memberships with Modern Retail and Glossy than we do Digiday. The retention is actually even better with Glossy and Modern Retail right now.

Obviously, we’ve got plans to continue to increase their retention and keep more subscribers on Digiday, but there are a lot of good signals across the board and it’s one of those things, memberships, there’s never one thing that truly drives it. It’s like SEO, you have to constantly work at it, and it’s something that you have to optimize on a daily basis and think about what your product map is and how the market’s responding to it.

Jacob: Since you are the CEO of a media company that happens to report on the business of media, which has always felt kind of meta to me, what are some trends that you’re seeing today that you think will be important in media in the next couple of years? What has you excited and what has you scared?

Nick: I think memberships clearly are really exciting. I think the rush to memberships across the board is really exciting. I think it’s more of a challenge I think for companies that have general content or content that’s not differentiated, but I think those media companies that can create deeply reported stories and vibrant communities and high quality journalism with a real focus can build a great business around memberships, and the thing about memberships is it goes so far beyond just the content piece.

It’s what else can you add to your community to bring them closer? We’re constantly thinking about that and it’s such an exciting challenge to have, so that’s memberships I think is a huge trend now. Every media company has to figure out how do we get our readers to pay us for our journalism? That’s at the heart of it. I think e-commerce piece is also really exciting and publishers are just crushing it out there. I think if you look at what Neil Vogel has done with Dotdash and his organization, it’s just incredible and I love those stories.

I think e-commerce plays are really exciting for us. It doesn’t really fit in, but I think out in the consumer world, I think there’s a great opportunity around that, just look at what Food52 has done with their business and what Dotdash is doing, so I think those are great examples. Also, I think email is really exciting. You look at a Morning Brew and look at how they’ve grown their business. It’s exciting to see people come into a space and disrupt it and come in with a plan saying, “Hey, email is our form and we’re going to do it better than anyone and we’re going to scale it,” and then bang, look what happens.

I think email is also a really– I mean what’s old is new again, and with email, the cool thing is that the various forms, it’s the briefing model and it’s the newsletter model. The newsletter model is links and traffic to your O and O’s, and then the briefing is just serving the publication directly to your audience and feeding them the whole thing in that setting. I think between memberships, e-commerce, and email, those are the three things that are really exciting to me.

I think the technology piece is always interesting to me. Media companies go out and they build their own tech stack and then they go out and sell those services. They build these SaaS platforms. I’m always curious about those. More power to media companies that are successful doing that. I, as a media owner, just see that outside of what media does well and is a separate business, but, look, Washington Post is owned by Amazon, so it can build and create a tech stack and it makes a lot of sense there.

Axios HQ, I think that’s a really interesting opportunity for them to build their form factor and go out and sell it to brands. I think that’s a really cool use, but we’ll see how that goes long term. I think at the heart of what media businesses do well is build communities, and I think technology gets you away from building communities, and that’s a separate business.

Jacob: If you fast forward three years for Digiday Media, where do you see the business?

Nick: It’s a great question, and obviously I think about that pretty much every day, and I think about it at 3:00 AM in the morning when I’m staring at the ceiling in pitch darkness. I see us much as we are today, people love media company that’s focusing in on creating communities in industries that are culturally relevant and being disrupted by technology, so I think that is part of our who we are as an organization.

I think we’ll have more brands in three years. I really admire what Jay Penske has been able to do with PMC, and I see ourselves doing something similar, but really focusing on business lanes. Although we will try some consumer coverage as we go into 2021, we’ll see how that goes. I think it’s really having a media holding company with multiple brands serving multiple communities and having vibrant communities and communities that really count on us and we’re part of their everyday.

Beyond that, just having a people led organization where culture comes first and people are proud to work at Digiday and they say whether they’re at Digiday or they’ve gone somewhere else, they say, “Hey, I had a fantastic experience working at Digiday. I learned so much. It’s such a great team, and if I had a chance to do it all over again, I would do it all over again.” I think if we can do those two things, I’ll feel like we’re doing the work that we’re supposed to be doing.

Jacob: I want to finish with the same two questions I ask every operator on my show. First, looking at your career, what is a mistake you made and what did you learn from it that made you better professionally?

Nick: I think the big mistake that I made is building Digiday I thought it was going to be product first and then people, and it’s really people first and then product. I learned the hard way, and it’s painful when you’re scratching your head saying, “Why can’t I get the culture right? Why can’t I get the right fit with our team and why are we having all this disruption?” What I realized is that I realized the hard way, is that we did not have a people-led or people-first media organization.

We didn’t put growth at the center. We didn’t bring people in and onboard them into growth at Digiday Media, and it’s hard because you’re a smaller organization, you’re not a massive media organization that has tons of resources, but you have to get that right from the get-go. If I were to do it all over again, I’d start there on building the right culture with the right people, and starting with our mantra, which is hire people and build a culture with people that are humble, hungry, and smart.

I think if you’ve got people in your organization that you surround yourself with that are humble, hungry and smart, there’s nothing that can stop you. You can do whatever you put your mind to. I think that was the big mistake that I made is that I put product and performance first, and then didn’t put enough emphasis on people, and now we’re flipping that and we’ve been working on that for a number of years now, but that’s one of those things that it takes years and years and years to develop, and it’s never an easy process.

Jacob: If you could offer current or perspective media operators some advice to succeed, what would it be?

Nick: Build vibrant communities. Figure out a way to build a vibrant community where you can give that community regular connection, information that they can’t get elsewhere, and then that those members can meet one another and interact. I think that’s where it all starts, and it all begins at community and ends at community, and it’s what you do to serve them every single day, and that’s what we think about every day.