How to Build a $5m Media Business Into a $20m Flywheel

Where is it on the scale of quality of revenue in the broader media.

And information services space? I'd say, you know, digital advertising revenue is kind of like middle of the pack, print incredibly low. You know, print tends to, I mean part of just the technology evolution, but tends to be like the most cyclical revenue stream.

But to someone who hasn't seen it before, it would shock you on the year to year volatility and imprint. So I put print at the bottom, digital in the middle and would love to talk more about the high quality revenue sources and in subscription and events that, that we've migrated to.

Yeah, when you say digital is middle of the pack, but digital is all digital sponsorship is also quite cyclical.

It's not. Okay, so there's different, like digital can take a lot of different flavors. And you look at the broader digital media field and you know that you, you hear the, the venture backed media companies who have, you know, hired thousands and fired thousands because of digital advertising volatility that is often programmatic. We have always maintained direct relationships with all of our…

Which was, was one of the really compelling diligence points when we bought the business is there's clients that we've been working with at that point for for eight years at this point, 20, nearly 20 years that we've been pretty integral parts of their, their launch and growth strategy.

So while revenue might move between digital products a lot at that time and still to this day the, the spend from certain accounts was, you know, relatively consistent. So that's why like even as we look at M and A, like a pure digital advertising business can have way more consistency than you know, the headlines would imply.

Yeah. And just for the audience, I don't know, I don't want to presume knowledge of online advertising models, but when you said programmatic acquisition, being a media guy myself, that's all very familiar concepts, but just in case. So programmatic the media business is the whatever the buzzfeeds of the world within. And that's an old story, but maybe they're more recent ones.

But these venture backed very large scale media businesses that expand and then contract. The ads that you see are generated by third parties, namely the social networks like Meta or Google. And they're not selling directly.

And selling directly means you have a direct relationship with your sponsor. And there's often some sort of kind of bespoke. Not always, but often there's a bespoke offering to them.

So like with my, my sponsors on acquiring minds, I have direct relationships with them. They're, I'm not having any sort of programmatically injected ads into the podcast, although even in podcasting land that model also exists first of a really, really big podcast. They might be able to make money that way.