The Digiday Podcast

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Activision Blizzard Esports' Jack Harari on how the energy and pageantry of gaming is enduring the pandemic Nov 04, 2020

Show notes

If there was one mode of international competition that wasn't to be disrupted much by the global coronavirus pandemic, it's esports.

"One of the unique things about gaming is that our players don't have to be in the same place," Activision Blizzard Esports VP Jack Harari said on the Digiday Podcast.

Still, elite video game competition benefits from the same trappings that established league sports do, from pre-game pageantry to fan cams and a real sense that competitors are squaring off against one another even as they sit at their computers.

"It adds more energy, creates some really unique production opportunities," Harari said. He joined Activison Blizzard — the creator of esport staples like Call of Duty, Overwatch and StarCraft — after five years with the NBA.

Like most media businesses, the company hopes to resume physical events next year, the company, Harari said, hopes to resume physical events next year, but has proved highly engaging in a media economy forced to be remote.

One clear differentiator between the company's Overwatch League and a traditional sports league is that Activision Blizzard owns the game from top to bottom. Avid fans of the sci-fi shooting game can go from watching the world's best to playing the exact same game themselves, albeit with different stakes.

In a week, the average fan watches four to five hours of professional esports while playing the company's games for more than 20 hours, according to Harari.

Activision Blizzard is hoping to monetize that high level of engagement in a way other sports can't. Last year, the category brought in more than $1 billion globally for the first time.

The 74’s publisher Jim Roberts on bridging equality divides in education and making trust bonds with audiences Oct 27, 2020

Show notes

For the 74's publisher, nothing has been hit as hard by the pandemic as education: "Overnight, kids were basically told 'everything changes," said Jim Roberts, publisher of The 74, on this week's edition of the Digiday Podcast.

Launched in 2015, The 74 — short for the estimated 74 million children in the United States — is a nonprofit covering education and now, the extent it has been disrupted and transformed by the coronavirus crisis.

One of The 74's central focuses before the pandemic was the achievement gap — along socio-economic and racial inequalities —and other entrenched problems in America's education system.

"That crisis to me just exploded exponentially as a result of the pandemic," Roberts said. "If you were poor and disadvantaged before the pandemic and you were struggling to get a quality education, I can imagine that it is just exponentially more difficult now."

Roberts is new to the nonprofit game — he joined The 74 earlier this month. But he sees one common goal for any publication looking to survive — get people to click, make them feel rewarded for doing so and get them to come back for more.

The 74 is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation and other groups.

'Retention has been one of our best stories of the year': Bob Cohn on steering The Economist through the crisis Oct 20, 2020

Show notes

Bob Cohn joined The Economist Group in February after more than a decade at The Atlantic, where he served on both sides of the fence -- as its digital editor and later as its president. As president and managing director, his stated remit was to grow The Economist's global readership and open up new commercial opportunities in North America.

Of course, merely six weeks into the job, the coronavirus pandemic hit. With it came a surge of subscribers as readers looked to the Economist to unpick the impact on the economy, politics, culture and more.

"We did see, for a few months back in the spring, new subscribers coming [in] at about twice the rate that we expected," said Cohn on the Digiday podcast.

Subscriptions and circulation made up around two-thirds (£204 million;$265 million) of the £326 million ($423 million) The Economist Group generated in revenue in the year to Mar. 31 2020. In recent months, pre-pandemic, the company had already shifted its subscription strategy from focusing on acquisition to more of a retention push. The surge in subscribers during the coronavirus crisis created "a kind of urgency" to keep the newly acquired users.

"We were an acquisition machine; we were not focused as diligently as we could on retention," prior to Cohn's arrival, he said. "We came into this year with a determination to be better at that and embrace best practice and go beyond best practice."

Some of the new efforts have involved the creation of subscriber-only digital events (some 27,000 subscribers tuned in to watch a Bill Gates interview,) increasing the price of its introductory offers and exclusive subscriber newsletters. The number of subscribers in The Economist's "highly engaged" category increased 21% last year, Cohn said

Looking ahead, The Economist plans to roll out a new customer experience platform and create more products at a wider price range to tap a more diversified user base.

"Retention has been one of our best stories of the year," Cohn said.

Diversity 'is a commercial imperative now': Brand Advance CEO Chris Kenna Oct 13, 2020

Show notes

Brand Advance, the three-year-old media network that helps marketers reach diverse audiences, has marked a sharp uptick in business in 2020, according to its CEO and cofounder Chris Kenna. Advertisers spending through Brand Advance's network increased 400% between mid-March through June.

"If Brand Advance was to be formed now everybody would say 'that is the most timely company,'" Kenna said. "The need wouldn't be questioned. Back then, it was questioned. It took a global pandemic for people to actually realize that diversity [should be] a main staple of every media plan."

Kenna has unique bona fides on this front, telling Digiday he was the first Black person born on the U.K.'s the Isle of Man. "I got a certificate for that. I don't remember getting it, obviously," Kenna said.

Diversity has grown into a "commercial imperative" in the last 10 to 15 years, Kenna said. To meet it, he advises companies to create their products and campaigns with diverse consumers in mind from the start, not as an afterthought. He also said that so-called test campaigns for companies to know whether this or that segment is worth reaching often miss the mark.

"I'm not testing being Black, I was born it. And LGBTQ+ people aren't testing being LGBTQ+, they just are. We don't understand why you have to test if we're a good consumer," Kenna said.

'Scale for scale's sake is almost meaningless': Axios CEO Jim VandeHei Oct 06, 2020

Show notes

For Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, the unquenchable firehose of outrageous news from the Trump White House — and the 2020 presidential election in general— is a distraction.

"My hope is we do very little coverage or analysis after the next debate if there's nothing substantive to say," VandeHei said on the Digiday Podcast (a few days before the president's coronavirus diagnosis would put future debates into question).

He added that Axios won't be "made or broken by whether Trump wins or loses" in November.

For him, the major stories of the 21st century include artificial intelligence, climate change and China's actions on those issues — and in the world at large.

And Axios seems to be proving there is in fact a market for the concise coverage it provides on those issues and more. The company will make a small profit for the third year in a row, VandeHei said. For 2020, he forecasts revenue above the Wall Street Journal's recent estimate of $58 million.

That has made an optimistic CEO out of VandeHei, which is new. "I've been a pessimist about a lot of media for a long time," he said. "What we are seeing are a couple of trends that are really positive for high quality media companies." For one, her said, Google and Facebook have gone from threat to being "a net asset" for companies like Axios as they can bring big audiences and are themselves big sources of a specific kind of advertising.

"Call it corporate image or corporate social responsibility type advertising, which is ads from companies about something other than selling a product," VandeHei said. "It's 'what do we stand for? what are we trying to do as a company as a corporate citizen?' That's a boom market. That market has turned out to be a lot bigger than we had anticipated."

'All taking a chance on each other': Jasper Wang on Defector Media's collective ownership structure Sep 29, 2020

Show notes

In recent years, unionizing newsrooms has given journalism-focused media companies a bit more say over how their workplaces are run. But Defector Media is something else entirely.

The group of 18 former Deadspin employees — who quit the company after a bitter clash with management last year — have launched the company with a much more collective ownership structure. Like its predecessor, Defector Media focuses on sports and culture.

With a two thirds majority, they have the power to vote out the site's editor-in-chief — or this week's guest on the Digiday Podcast, Defector's vp of revenue and operations, Jasper Wang.

"Is it a little bit more stressful? Sure. But they're all taking a chance on each other, and they're taking a chance on me. So I gotta bet on myself, too," Wang said on the podcast.

"I think probably more executives should feel on their toes and beholden to the experiences that their employees are having."

For now, employees and shareholders are one and the same. Anyone who joins the company will have the same voting rights.

Defector also provides full transparency on how much everyone is making, which "has driven some awkward conversations. But you're just getting that out at the beginning rather than along the way," Wang said.

Beyond its unique housekeeping model, the site is betting on subscriptions. Defector, which launched just this month, had a "dare to dream" target of 30,000 paying members by the end of the year, Wang said, for which they're ahead of schedule.

Part of Wang's calculus is that Deadspin's brand resided not just in the Gawker umbrella that owned it, but in the names of its writers, most of whom are now at Defector.

By the same token that Substack is proving highly remunerative for certain journalists on staff and the Deadspin pedigree should attract subscribers who miss the old site's irreverence and coverage of both sports and politics.

"It was clear that the dedicated following would be there," Wang said.

'One beat in an ongoing movement': BET+ general manager Devin Griffin on the streamer's evolution Sep 22, 2020

Show notes

BET+ launched a year ago this week, making Black Entertainment Television a competitor in the increasingly crowded video streaming race.

"I think what BET means now to the younger generation is different than what it meant to me 25 years ago," Devin Griffin, the OTT service's general manager, said on the Digiday Podcast.

"At the time I was plugged into BET, there were very few images of Black people on television outside of what was happening Thursday night on NBC, and besides sports," he said.

BET helped change that when it was founded in 1980. Fast forward 40 years and market research conducted in the lead up to launching BET+ found that there's still a lot of unmet demand for stories centering on Black experiences and characters.

"Black consumers watch more long-form video content than anybody else across American society. There's a really big appetite there," Griffin, who previously worked at Netflix, said.

That isn't to say that Black viewers are the only target audience. Griffin said that non-Black viewers are tuning in, too.

BET+ is a standalone offering separate from the BET channel, though both are owned by ViacomCBS. It costs $10 a month and carries more than 2,000 hours of programming, including original programming such as "things that come from the BET 'legacy library,' things that come from VH1, TV Land, Comedy Central, other brands across the ViacomCBS family," Griffin said.

Fortune CEO Alan Murray on taking the conference business to a larger audience (and with a higher price tag) Sep 15, 2020

Show notes

There is a finite number of CEOs who can tune into Fortune’s CEO Initiative virtual conference. And there are only 50 leaders who can be on Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders list. Those communities are limited.

But communities drive revenue. And there is an entire untapped grouping of emerging and aspirational leaders that Fortune has identified who can benefit from the information it has cultivated over years of conferences and coverage — and would be willing to pay to gain access.

"In the Time Inc. era, we only had the extremes of the funnel," said Fortune CEO Alan Murray. "We had all the free content, and then we had these very expensive, $15,000 executive conferences, and we had nothing in between. One year later, we have a paywall and subscription level," he said on the Digiday Podcast.

On October 5, Fortune is launching an online learning platform and community called Fortune Connect that will target mid-tier, vp and senior manager executives in a highly monetized way. The membership to Connect is priced at $2,500 per year per person, with an option for companies with 50 or more approved employees to have an enterprise discount.

Wonder Media Network CMO Shira Atkins on making (and selling) branded podcasts Sep 08, 2020

Show notes

Scroll through Apple's list of top podcasts and you'll see a lot of big names (including actual Hollywood celebrities).

Within that landscape, Wonder Media Network has managed to make critically acclaimed podcasts without the A-listers.

"That's kind of a silly media strategy, honestly. How are you supposed to build an audience with non-celebrity?" said company CMO Shira Atkins on the Digiday Podcast. "But we're just testing to see if this is viable."

One way its managing that is by dedicating a lot of resources to branded podcasts, which offer the possibility of scale.

"The ideal scenario is, 'let's get Microsoft to sponsor a podcast and also promote the podcast.' Because they look good being attached to the show; we get the audience and we get the money so that we can create the good content and it's a beautiful cycle," said Atkins.

One recent example: Fiverr, a freelancers' platform, paid for a month-long takeover of the company's Encyclopedia Womannica podcast, a five-minute daily that tells stories of notable women in history.

For weekend episodes, they switched up the formula to focus on women involved with Fiverr instead (including the company's CMO). Fiverr also got post-rolls ads on every episode, and in addition, "we did some PR with them, and they promoted nearly every day on all of their social media," Atkins said.

Overall, Wonder Media Network, which was founded in 2018, is a purpose-driven media brand that performs a balancing act between activism and non-partisan story-telling.

"Our full mission is to amplify under-represented voices and to inspire action and promote empathy," Atkins said.

Daily Maverick founder Branko Brkic on the hard-hitting journalism that sells memberships in South AfricaBranko Brkic Sep 01, 2020

Show notes

Paywalls and digital subscriptions may be on the rise at digital media companies around the U.S., but South Africa presents a different case.

"Our competitors went behind paywalls, and they didn't have a good experience," said Branko Brkic, founder of the South African online news site Daily Maverick, which covers politics and business from their newsroom in Johannesburg.

"You can't debate the issue that you need income from your readers to be part of your stream of income. But we really do not believe that the paywall is a way to go," Brkic said on the Digiday Podcast.

The site instead relies on a model akin to the Guardian's — make the content free, but ask your readers for support at every turn.

"What we say with Maverick Insider is 'help us actually make this possible for people who cannot pay. Be part of something bigger, be part of something really beautiful,'" he said. "It's an emotional decision."

And in Brkic's telling, it's worked. Over last two years, the company has gained 13,000 paying members, each paying at least 75 South African Rand (or about $4.50) per month.

The site drew 4,500,000 this past May, its highest monthly figure.

Brkic founded the Daily Maverick in 2009, the year after the financial crisis decimated the digital advertising market and taking his previous publication — a magazine simply named Maverick —out of commission in December 2008.

The day it was announced that they were going out of business, Brkic said he began designing Daily Maverick. Employees of the defunct Maverick joined the enterprise.

The magazine's online successor delivers shoe leather reporting in a country with insular news organizations and reporters who failed to go beyond stenography. "What South African media for many, many years got used to is basically going to press conferences," Brkic said. Brkic's bolder take on journalism included an award-winning investigation into the police killing of 34 striking miners in 2012.

"South African people need to know the truth," Brkic said. "And as matter of principle, I really don't think we should let only people that have a checkbook be able to know what the truth is."

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