Niche Is Good. Niching Deeper into that Niche is Better
By: Christiana Sciaudone
Active Interest Media is an enthusiast publisher with brands focused on hobbies like woodworking, gardening and sailing. One of the keys to its future is getting even nichier within those niches.
Think not just of those interested in fishing, but, for example, those passionate about bass fishing in center console boats off of the coast of Massachusetts.
“You wouldn’t build a whole Substack around that, but you could build out a newsletter, you could take a lot of the content that we already have, and it would be totally appropriate for that, but you’re curating it,” Andrew Clurman, majority owner of Active Interest Media, told AMO. “There’s an underserved community of people that you narrow-cast something to them, and they’re willing to give you their time, attention and some money, which is the basis of our business.”
Active Interest Media has gone through a few incarnations since its founding in 2003. It shed off its private equity backers in 2020, as well as two-thirds of its publications, and spent much of the pandemic treading water in terms of growth, and completely renewing the business, from tech platforms to accounting and HR systems. Without raising funds, AIM bought Taunton Press, which had a number of complementary brands in woodworking, homebuilding and gardening, last year, and has already seen impressive results.
Revenue is up to above $60 million from below $45 million, and profit margins are at double digits, versus single prior to the acquisition. The team has grown by about 100 people to 285. The outlook for 2025 is even more promising, and Clurman is pivoting deeply into providing the most value for readers—and getting the most value for AIM and advertisers. Currently, about 60% of revenue comes from readers, be it via memberships, events or subscriptions. The rest is ads and marketing. In a year, Clurman forecasts that that will shift to 80% consumer, 20% with both categories growing.
The Nichiest of the Niches
AIM signed on with Omeda, an audience marketing software provider, to build a consumer data platform and marketing tech stack to get a deep understanding of audience wants, needs and behaviors to better serve them. AIM now has the ability to identify subcategories within each vertical and create content for them, providing advertisers with highly-specific audiences to cater to.
The company has built an AI tool to continually identify cohorts of customers who have specific interests and figure out how to cater to them with both advertising and content. Take Titebond Glue as an example. A couple of weeks ago, when AIM launched the AI program, they found that 2,200 people in one week had been looking at Titebond products multiple times.
“If I’m a Titebond marketer, I am super interested in presenting those people with offers and information, and getting them into their customer base, so we can then build out all kinds of marketing tools with them, for them,” Clurman said.
“I’m super excited about that, maybe too excited, but this has cost a lot of money. It’s taken a lot of time, and we’re not even halfway there yet,” Clurman said of the nascent audience parsing capabilities. “This is a huge game changer for us on the product side.”
So much so that Clurman expects those products to be pulling in revenue of “seven figures” annually a year from now.
“This is a whole new kind of opportunity that was just never there before, and from that point of view, it is kind of quite exciting,” Douglas McCabe, chief executive officer and director of publishing and tech at Enders Analysis, a subscription research service, told AMO. “Marketing generally and distribution are often the underrated part of data exploitation.”
That said, there are limits given how very niche things can get and “of course, one can take it sort of almost kind of too extremely,” McCabe said.
Commerce, Events, M&A
AIM is also investing in people and platforms to ramp up the sophistication, quality and quantity of its e-commerce stores and affiliate programs on our sites, and expects to double that line of business in 2025.
AIM once held massive events, and it’s now turning to smaller and more curated gatherings, like gardening tours to Italy or writer in residence programs in different countries. The margins are similar to big events, around 35%, but they come with less risk and participants pay higher prices.
Finally, AIM is still actively looking at acquisitions that would fit with existing verticals. They’re also not afraid to divest of titles as needed to fund the purchase of new assets.
Active Interest Media is hurtling toward the future with advanced technology and artificial intelligence that can identify the nittiest of the grittiest, but in some ways it’s still pretty old school.
Of its 1.4 million paid subscriptions, 1.1 million include a print product—which has come with unanticipated inflation of paper, postage and more.
“In our marketplace, print is still very highly valued, prized and relied on,” Clurman said. You can get every single thing we have that we do in print online. People still either want both or they want print, because that’s how they consume that kind of information.”
“People who are looking at buying or building a custom live or timber frame house, their ultimate forever dream home in northern Wisconsin, they will tear pages out of a magazine and build their own scrapbooks.”
Advertising ends up being endemic and part of the content equation that the audience wants, Clurman said.
