Jun 21, 2021 · 52m · another-podcast
The Business of publishing
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Media analysts Benedict Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown join Wired UK executive editor Jeremy White to analyze the radical transformation of the publishing industry, exploring the collapse of traditional ad models, the rise of affiliate commerce, and the unbundling of media into creator platforms. They examine how publishers and creators must navigate platform privacy shifts, infinite digital discovery, and diverse monetization strategies.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 52.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.2 Guest teaching 3.0 Guest disagreement 1.6 The hosts pushing back 2.2
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 46:01 Jeremy challenges host's boutique anecdotes
Jeremy directly questions Benedict's retail examples, dismissing them as edge-case exceptions that fail to explain broader macro publishing dynamics.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 32:51 Benedict rejects simplistic newsletter privacy conclusionsBenedict firmly pushes back against broad claims about Apple Mail privacy, providing technical nuance on sponsor pricing and image pre-fetching.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 37:39 Jeremy explains tenancies and editorial compromisesJeremy pulls back the curtain on covert affiliate practices like paid inclusions and tenancy placements that bypass conventional editorial disclosures.
The host holds their own ▶ 14:04 Benedict dissects tracking rhetoric and tech targetingBenedict showcases comprehensive domain expertise by deconstructing common fallacies around targeted advertising and Apple's arbitrary privacy definitions.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Early Digital Missteps: From iPad Magazines to PDFs | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Benedict demonstrates solid publishing tech background by referencing PugPig, InDesign, and early interactive magazine failures. Jeremy shares Wired and Conde Nast's historical miscalculations with iPad editions in a collaborative manner. | |
| Unbundling Media and Reaching Niche Audiences | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Benedict conceptualizes the atomic unbundling of editorial content across platforms. Jeremy enriches the discussion with Peter Day's framework of transitioning from thousands of markets of millions to millions of markets of thousands. | |
| Demystifying Ad Tech and the Impact of Cookie Deprecation | 7 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Benedict deconstructs the digital advertising landscape, highlighting how the third-party cookie demise primarily harms independent publishers in the 'other' bucket rather than walled gardens. | |
| Targeted Advertising vs Tracking and the Cookie Dilemma | 7 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Benedict pushes back against simplistic public privacy narratives, calling out the factual inaccuracies of 'Facebook sells your data' and Apple's self-serving definitions of tracking. Jeremy offers user-centric perspective on targeted ad efficacy. | |
| The Rapid Growth and Saturation of Affiliate Marketing | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Jeremy provides concrete commercial figures regarding Future plc's affiliate revenue scale and growth metrics. The hosts listen and probe the risk of market saturation. | |
| Evolution of Product Recommendations and Curation Models | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Benedict and Jeremy compare media companies adopting e-commerce against commerce brands like ASOS building media operations. Benedict notes Wirecutter's structural origins as a counter to top-10 listicle proliferation. | |
| Creator Platforms, Luxury Publishing, and Direct Monetization | 6 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Benedict and Jeremy explore luxury monetization dynamics, contrasting How to Spend It high-ticket conversions against watch manufacturers' initial unpreparedness for online sales during lockdowns. | |
| Apple Mail Privacy and the Economics of Newsletters | 8 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Benedict provides deep domain pushback on Apple Mail's privacy impact, explaining why image caching severely disrupts ad-sponsored newsletters while leaving paid subscription models relatively unaffected. | |
| Independent Journalists, Video Pivot, and Editorial Integrity | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Jeremy educates the hosts on the hidden mechanics of paid inclusions, tenancies, and commercial threats to journalistic integrity as legacy publishers pivot aggressively toward video and affiliate deals. | |
| Tackling the Discovery Dilemma with Curation and Constraints | 7 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Benedict outlines his cyclical theory of search expanding into curation and curation requiring search, illustrating with department stores and curated apps like Mubi. | |
| Long-Form Reading Habits and Modern Media Fragmentation | 6 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Jeremy pushes back against Benedict's niche retail examples as unrepresentative anomalies, prompting Benedict to clarify his thesis around broader digital media fragmentation. |
Statements from this episode (25)
White: Condé Nast wasted heavy investment on closed iPad magazine replicas
“I remember when, at Condé Nast, we were, we went heavy on iPad editions of the magazines spent a lot of money A lot of money on trying to do this and then even try to do Kindle versions of the magazines as well, thinking this is where publishing was going, and…”
Evans: Print media decline hit crisis for newspapers in 2016, magazines today
“The lines on the chart have been going in the same direction for sort of 10 or 15 years, it's just they kind of reached a crisis point, sort of for newspapers five years ago and for magazines now.”
Evans: Simple magazine PDFs worked commercially while expensive interactive redesigns failed
“The only things that I gather actually worked were people doing PDFs. In PDF of Model Railway World, they add zero extra cost, and suddenly they can sell globally, whereas the people trying to completely reinvent Vogue or Wired, suddenly you're spending double…”
Evans: Never invest in products labeled 'virtual'
“Never invest in anything called virtual, because it's always going to be like a crap copy of something in the world rather than like a real new thing.”
Evans: The Telegraph was once the UK's largest bed linen retailer
“About 20 years ago, The Telegraph was the UK's largest retailer of, like, bed linen or towels or something.”
Evans: Tech Workers Outside Ad Teams Do Not Understand Advertising
“My basic thesis on advertising is that no one who doesn't work in ad tech understands any of it. Particularly people in tech. No one in tech who doesn't work on an ad tech team understands advertising. Like no one at Google who doesn't work on the advertising …”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
White: Consumers do not mind ad tracking if recommendations work
“What I'm convinced of is I don't think people don't want advertising, or don't want to be tracked. I personally think they want, just want, they want better advertising. They want it to actually work.”
Evans: The claim that Facebook sells user data is factually untrue
“I think the phrase Facebook sells your data is fascinating here, not primarily because it's just factually untrue, but because it's sort of an attempt to come up with a clearer way of describing what somebody thinks the problem is.”
Evans: Ad money probably will not return to Condé Nast
“Does the money all go back to Condé Nast? Probably not.”
White: Tech affiliate commission is 2-4% versus 10-12% in fashion
“In technology, for example, it's traditionally around about two or three or four percent. Whereas in the States, it would be significantly higher. Whereas in other areas like in, in makeup or fashion, it could be up to between about 10 and 12%, for example.”
White: Future generated £79M from affiliate revenue in 2020
“If you look at what Future's doing, I think in, you know, end of September last year, they or maybe the year before their affiliate marketing reached seventy-nine million pounds, and that was 23% of the total group revenue, and the number of transactions made …”
Evans: ASOS functions as a media company monetized via e-commerce
“They are a fashion company, you know, they are a media company that monetizes through e-commerce way before, an e-commerce company that made content as opposed to a content company that made e-commerce.”
Evans: Wirecutter succeeded by recommending specific products instead of top-10 lists
“So this was the origin of Wirecutter, and Wirecutter, of course, was organic, because originally it was somebody from a tech website who said, I'm fed up of reviewing everything in infinite detail and not just telling you which one to buy, so I'll make a site …”
Evans: Substack will support thousands of writers, not millions like Instagram
“I also feel like how many people can write that much once a week? How big is that going to be? I feel like that's thousands of writers, not millions of writers, whereas Instagram is millions, can be millions of creators.”
White: Patek Philippe had no e-commerce and allowed online dealer sales during COVID
“When the pandemic first hit it was the watch brands actually that that were incapable of leveraging any e-commerce whatsoever because they just weren't set up for it. Patek Philippe, for example, had no e-commerce strategy whatsoever. And so, for the first tim…”
Evans: Apple Mail and iOS represent roughly 45% of his newsletter audience
“So looking at my stats Apple and Apple mail and iOS are about 45%.”
Evans: Apple Mail automatically downloads images, masking real open rates
“So the Apple mail app will download all the images. And so it will report a hundred percent open rate for every email that you get. And so you won't know what the open rate is for 40% of your base.”
Evans: Open rate metrics matter far less for paid subscription newsletters
“Now to say that it kills newsletters is equally simplistic because clearly if you're selling your subscription and people are paying 10 dollars a month, then the open rate means is less important because the open rate will be 80 or 90% anyway. And if you're op…”
Cowan-Brown: Apple privacy changes will disrupt political campaign email operations
“That's where my head always goes when I talk about newsletters and emails, and it's just when politics, you know, what is it going to look like when politicians, when I used to work at Nationworld, that was the big thing of, we need to know how many a percent …”
White: Regulators will soon scrutinize undisclosed publisher affiliate guides
“And at some point soon I'm pretty sure that the various bodies governing sort of advertising may actually notice as well. It'd be like, hang on a minute, what's going on here? Is this properly labeled? Is this actually paid for or not?”
Evans: Search expands until curation is needed, and vice versa
“The problem is, like, all search grows until you need curation, and then all curation grows until you need search.”
Evans: Modern social media products are designed around constraints
“A lot of stuff that's happening in social now is about constraint. Like, it's only audio, or it's only these people, or you can only post pictures of other people, and your friends post pictures of you, or you can only do one picture a day, or you have to wait…”
Jeremy White: Hubbing content across titles robs publications of their distinct voice
“And the problem with, and that sounds brilliant on paper, when you think from a financial point of view, but actually what you're doing then is you're robbing those particular media channels of their own voice, where you really cannot make somebody write, rewr…”