The Rebooting Show

Sharon Profis, vp of audience innovation at Raptive, joins me to walk through what the company is seeing across its network of 7,000 publishers and creators. Google traffic is still declining, and the smallest sites are getting hit hardest. We get into why SEO still works, how much publishers should bother optimizing for LLMs, and why AI Overviews are showing up three times as often while their hit to clicks has actually eased. We also discuss why email, direct and social traffic are worth far more than their share of page views, what happened to Pinterest, and what a publisher's site is for now. Chapters: 00:09 Google Zero Reality Check 05:31 SEO and LLM Strategy 09:40 AI Overviews and Loyalty 25:24 Pinterest Popularity 33:31 The Future of Sites

Publishers know how to live through distribution shocks. AI is a different kind of disruption. Reuters president Paul Bascobert argues it’s a production shock, one that pushes the cost of commodity content toward zero and squeezes out any business without something unique to sell. We talk about Reuters’ “build it once, sell it four times” wholesale model, why AI companies are now publishers rather than portals, the coming push for content protection, and why he worries the news industry won’t move fast enough. Paul also makes the case that this could be a golden age of journalism, even if it isn’t one for big media companies. Chapters: 01:33 Reuters at 175 Years 03:29 Four Windows Business Model 10:06 DTC and Interface Shift 14:46 Journalism in an AI World 21:55 AI Workflow Wins at Reuters 29:00 Licensing, Protection, and 2031 Outlook 35:55 Information System and Infotainment

Adam Reek and Bradley Roe spent 16 years building Peloton magazine, sold it to Outside, and watched it get shut down. Then they started over. Fausto is a high-end print magazine about cycling as a lifestyle. Adam and Brad explain why they've opted out of the digital media rat race. We get into the newsstand economics, the Monocle and Surfer's Journal models, and why patience is the thing they learned the first time around.

Josh Kaplan is co-founder and CEO of Smooth Media, a talent management company for knowledge creators: people like Joanna Stern, Matt Wolf, Cat GPT and the Breaking and Entering guys. Smooth started out selling newsletter and consulting services to creators. It found its footing by doing the opposite: bringing in sponsor revenue and taking a 20% commission. Josh and I talk about why most of their creators are video-first, why they moved away from taking equity, what it means that a top creator now owns a piece of Smooth, and who carries the risk when creators start throwing events. Chapters: 01:32 Smooth Media Origin Story 09:12 Video First Knowledge Creators 14:33 Monetization And Talent Model 27:40 Creator Equity Partner 36:49 Events and Creator Ops 48:31 Talent Management

The Lever founder David Sirota joins me to discuss why corporate media still sets the terms of the political conversation, even as its business model weakens. We get into the opening for independent investigative outlets, why reader funding brings its own pressures, and the challenge of serving an audience that sometimes wants its beliefs affirmed more than its assumptions challenged. We also discuss what Zohran Mamdani understands about media and why the left needs to do more than copy the right’s playbook. Chapters: 01:33 Media Standpoint Critique 09:40 Right vs Left Media Ecosystems 14:15 Building Progressive Media 21:50 Lever Reporting Playbook 34:54 Incentives Audience Capture 39:59 Culture Wars 51:06 2028 Outlook