Recurrent CEO Andrew Perlman discusses how the publishing company is focusing its niche brands increasingly on events as it retools its model from the traffic era. Affiliate revenue is now a third of what it was at its peak, while experiential has risen from "effectively zero" five years ago to 12% of overall revenue and rising.

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Welcome to the Rebooting Show.

I am Brian Morrisey.

I'm joined, by Andrew Perlman.

Andrew is the CEO of Recurrent, which, has a collection of

brands, in the automotive space.

You're in military like fill in, I know.

Business of home.

That's a little bit of

Yeah.

Uh, we have home and then we have outdoor and science.

Outdoor and science.

so I wanna talk about, All of these properties, but like at this moment

in time, you know, when you go back to the recurrent thesis, 'cause you were,

you bought a lot of properties, right?

and a lot of like funding to, to to, to roll up, maybe not roll

up the properties, but you know, basically to roll up the properties,

have a, a shared services model.

Right.

Go back to the, the, the original.

Sort of thesis, and then I want to sort of stress test it against like

everything that's happened since then in this crazy, insane environment.

A hundred percent.

So the,

I'm giving away my bias, Andrew.

Yeah, no, I mean, and, and please stress test it.

The, the original thesis was the notion that we would buy great

brands with authentic audiences.

And you're right, that we would roll 'em up and get more scale, with distribution

partners get better service when it came to get better service to the brands.

When it came to selling, when it came to things like SEO, that was

the original thesis and that we would all only focus in content verticals.

Where there was a high convergence between content and commerce,

because that gets you two things.

one, endemic advertisers, which we obviously get in military and auto

and verticals like home and outdoor.

and two, it gets you commerce opportunities, which means

something different than it did five or six years ago.

Originally that meant affiliate.

Now it means licensing and direct to consumer commerce.

Okay.

And.

Now, like how has that changed?

Because obviously SEO lot of, and look, it's, it's not, I, I heard

from a publisher this morning whose, whose traffic is up and, it's a

niche publisher in, in finance.

But, for most public then, then the publisher next to them at the, at the

breakfast is like, we're down 50%.

you know, SEO itself, it ha is obviously challenged right now.

I mean.

I was talking to one major publisher, the other day.

It was just like, you know, our programmatic business is like on its

last legs because, you know, that that was how we were monetizing.

SEO commerce has also become far more difficult.

you know, in, in many ways Commerce slash affiliate was, I was always saying

it's like when people said that they do commerce, they really meant affiliate.

And when people said they do affiliate, they really meant SEO.

Yeah, I, I, I think that's, I think that's correct framing so.

There are a couple notes that I would say on that.

SEO has always been ever changing.

The things that have changed dramatically are the introduction of things like

overlays and the way that the Google page is laid out and then on top

of it, and I think there's a deep irony in this, if you had asked any.

Anybody in the publishing space five years ago, if they would be excited

that there was a new entrant that was gonna crack Google's monopoly,

they would've been thrilled.

of course we're sitting here now open AI and other platforms in the AI space are

cracking it and publishers are complaining that the results have changed for us.

We're actually seeing an incredibly strong start of the year.

We're up year over year.

there, there has unquestionably been continued pressure.

Specifically on affiliate traffic, but not traffic overall.

Right.

so you are, let's talk about your, your core properties.

I mean, you've, you have, you've got the drive, I mean, in auto, right?

You've got the drive and you've got donut media,

Yep.

And then, and then, and then real mechanic stuff, which we, which we

launched, which is a spinoff of Donut.

Yep.

Right.

And then in, in military you have task and purpose.

The war zone.

And we, we are the mighty.

And then we have two live events.

We have mill spouse fest and we have military influencer conference,

okay, great.

And, and then you, you a popular science too,

and we have pop uh, yeah, we have pop Popular science, we have

Outdoor Life and we have futurism.

Right.

Okay.

so you, you're in niches, right?

And so that's a way better place to be.

You're not in news, thank God, right?

For you.

Like you're not in, in general interest or you're not in news and, you know,

niches are, you know, the place.

I think it's like somewhat protected.

I mean, and like B2B is probably the, the, the, the area, which is,

it's funny for me because, you know, B2B from the beginning of my career

was kind of treated by everyone else as like the backwater, you know?

And now everyone's like, we're B2B, you know, time was saying

like, we're a B2B business.

I'm like, really?

I was like, that's, that's new.

and you know, part of that is just the compression that's

happening to the overall, industry.

So how has the.

How has the revenue mix changed, say in the last like three years?

It's changed dramatically in the last three years.

So, our affiliate business used to represent almost 30% of the

overall revenue for the company.

Now that's probably about about 10% live events.

Five years ago were effectively zero this year.

My expectation is that that's gonna be about 12% of the business.

And then things like licensing, and when I say licensing, I really mean two things

inside of licensing content licensing.

And we have a great example where we packaged up donut and created

a donut fast channel for Samsung.

So that's one form of licensing.

But I also mean things like product and, and merchant.

That's a revenue line that has grown and that I would also expect to be

about 10% of the business this year.

we are still, the majority of the business is still through things

like advertising and sponsorship, and that actually has grown as a piece

of the pie as affiliate has declined.

Okay, so affiliate's gotten hit the hardest and is, and that's directly

attributed to, to the SEO challenges.

Yeah, and, and I would say, again, I think it's a little bit more specific

because people broadly paint it with this brush of saying it's SEO.

To me, it's more specific in the sense that what we're really

talking about is the way that the Google search results are laid out.

You know, we, we have to, I think at this point, almost use a way back machine

of our own minds and think about what Google looked like a couple years ago

where it was a couple sponsored links, and then you'd have the organic results.

Now you've got an AI overlay, you've got a shopping overlay.

If you're looking at travel, you've got a travel overlay.

Then you've got the sponsored results, then you've got the organic results.

So really what's happened is in a sense, Google has gobbled up the

affiliate results because it's sitting right under the search bar when

you're looking for, for products.

so that is unquestionably the component of traffic and the component of revenue

that's been under the most pressure.

Okay, so you've gotten shoved down off the page to like page two or

page three, and that, that ends up, you know, really tanking.

Not tanking, but I mean, it's down quite a bit.

and so where do you see, I mean, events are up a lot.

I mean, I hear a lot from publishers who are talking about experiential

events, however you wanna call them.

Gathering people in person.

It makes a lot of sense.

This is not something AI is gonna do unless it's gonna be a bunch

of robots gathering together.

I don't think so.

I just had a breakfast this morning, so I'm hopeful that this, this area is safe.

I've got a dog in this fight, that's for sure.

so talk to me about how, you know, going from zero, basically not

really doing much in the events business to, you know, now having.

A growing, and I assume it's gonna be probably become a

bigger part of the business.

I mean, how, how is that process and, and what are, what are the properties

that you're betting on there?

Yeah, a hundred percent.

So, I think there, first off, I think there's a big analogy with what you

were saying when you're touching on B2B because the one similarity.

With niches, but also in particular at the events is you're, you're addressing

a community or a specific need.

And so the, the biggest things that we are doubling down on this year are one

military influencer conference, and two, the events business that we've

started to build inside donut media.

and just to pull out two anecdotes and may maybe to tell you a little bit about

the events, so see of the background.

Military influencer is an event that.

Is really for the veteran or active service member that's trying to

take the next step in their own personal or career development.

We have three tracks.

We have inspirational speakers, we have a job fair, we have a pitch competition.

And to me the most, most important anecdotal thing that I've heard

outta the event is that people now feel like it's a community reunion.

So you're one leveraging that sense of community.

Two, providing value to people, and three people are now putting

it on their schedule so they know they want to come to it.

as a matter of process, you know, when we, when we bought that event, about

four years ago, it was about 400 people.

Last year we sold 2,900 tickets, and my expectation is this year

that it'll go over 4,000 attendees.

But you know, like with like, with building any business, it's been

filled with both joy and plenty of mistakes along the way too.

because

Oh, you gave me an opening.

Let's talk mistakes.

yeah.

I mean, I, I think this is, this is, this is learned pain that I would tell

anybody that's in the event space.

We,

Trust me, I've been in the event space.

I know there's, there's a lot of pain involved.

Anyone who's getting into the event space, I would always say like,

you know, we would always, when we would put like an events job up,

we get flooded with like, resumes.

And I was like, man, you people don't know what you're getting into.

This is, this is not for the faint of heart.

Go on.

Yeah, I think there's no question about that.

I think, and, and I wouldn't necessarily say this was a mistake, but I would

say in terms of optimizing the results, both for the attendees and for us as a

business, we did two years in Las Vegas.

I firmly underestimated people's, excitement about going to Vegas.

I mean, I, I personally love Las Vegas.

I don't think sponsors like Las Vegas, they think that when they

sponsor something, they're sending their people to a boondoggle.

and credit to my team for pointing out the fact.

That the endemic military community in the Las Vegas area is relatively small

compared to where we ultimately moved it to, which was Atlanta last year, and

then this fall we're moving it to Tampa, which has an even bigger community.

So I think number one thing is go where the audience is.

number two thing, which is more of a budgeting thing, you know, and I'm sure

everybody that's been in the event space that's done something in a conference

center or hotel, you gotta be really tight on your budget and who's signing

what, because hotels have a way of surprising you with, with expenses

and that's never a fun experience.

So really being buttoned up as you scale things is the number one piece

of advice that I would give people.

Yeah, and I, I definitely hear that and it's funny 'cause I always.

There's always a divide between B2B and B2C.

I feel like events in, in the margin profile, like I, I know at like breakfast

and dinners that we do when consumer publish publishers talk about the

margins that they expect on the events.

It's far lower than what is the norm in B2B.

and I think some of that is just.

The, you know, sponsorship is, are acts different and you

know, it's different when you're matching up a buying a sell side.

and I think the costs end up getting like out of control.

Yeah, what I would say is it's easy for the cost to get outta control.

and, you know, we, it's something that we've learned from and

we had a phenomenal event.

It was an incredible experience for all of our attendees last year.

and we also did generate very substantial profit off of the event last year.

But again, it's just practicing that muscle and learning from,

from mistakes in previous years.

Yeah.

And how different is it to, to f from a model perspective, to have

a he, to have an event events be an important, component?

because like, again, you were sort of architecting this with like, you

know, you centralize services, right?

So you end up.

Taking a lot of costs out of the individual brands because a lot of niche

brands, it's like, great, you have a very, you know, you have a tie, you have an to

an audience, it's a community, et cetera.

You can monetize in, in, in different ways.

you know, the problem ends up being they're inefficient businesses.

So like, small businesses are inefficient, and so you assume you, you had the,

the shared services, you're like, okay, we're gonna centralize everything other

than, than, than content, I would assume.

Are the dynamics any differently when you enter when, when you

have events as part of the model?

first of all, I think our, our central services team is a little

bit thinner than what you outlined.

So for us, I mean obviously it's things like accounting, it's things

like hr, it's things like legal.

We have a really powerful central org when it comes to marketing.

But for us, our verticals and our niches are so specific that we really do have

experts in inside each and every one of them, both when it comes to sponsorship

and and branded sales, and also the execution of an event like that.

So for us, the team that deals with the execution of that event,

event and the execution of military spouse fest sits inside of our

military and defense vertical.

The same is true for donut when we execute on donut live events.

Um.

What I would say is

they each have their own events teams,

yeah, they each have their own people that are sitting inside the vertical.

And again, that, that for us is, it's an extension of the way that we

viewed editorial and content creation, which is the verticals are

so specific, you really need people that are expert to make an event.

Awesome.

when it comes to the margin profile, I mean, event margin profiles

are, are definitely solid and.

For us, when you get to a certain level of scale, you actually are approaching

the margins that we see in digital media.

So it's something that's very profitable and I don't think it really

switches the margin that much, but it does create a very intense couple

weeks for the people that are doing those events and the run up to them.

What kind of margins do you, do you aim for?

For?

For your events.

so we're, we're above 30% when it comes to, when it comes to

our live events, so pretty solid.

Yeah.

And so how do you end up, I would assume Mo, like you, you mentioned some are

like ticketed, so you're making direct revenue, but I assume the majority of

the events business is, is sponsorship.

Yeah, sponsorship is still a bigger piece of the pie.

tickets in our case.

And this is true, whether it's military influencer conference

or something like a donut event.

Tickets are probably about 30% of the revenue mix with the remainder coming

from sponsorship or in the case of donut.

It also comes from merch sales at the event.

Right.

Yeah.

so like, how is it different, like with like the donut?

Like how there, how that, like experiential strategy versus,

you know, in the military,

It's very different and it's very specific to what the content is and, and.

Equally as important.

It's very specific to what the community is.

So with Donut, last year we ran eight live events, and last year was really a year

for us where we were playing around with formats and saying, what can we repeat?

What's the 10 pole big event?

But.

At the end of 24, and this is one of my favorite events that we've done that

we will be repeating again this year, and I love it because it's the example

of what a 360 media model should be.

So inside of Donut, one of the biggest franchises that we've built is a

show called High Low, where two teams compete with the exact same car.

One team has more money.

That's the high team, the low team has less money, and over the course

of the season, they mod their cars.

The last season of High Low we did was drag racing Ford Mustangs, and the season

finale was actually a ticketed event that was filmed at a drag strip in Arizona.

We had about 6,000 people show up, and I just love that as a concept

because to me that is really the future of where we should be going.

Where.

You're creating amazing content in front of live fans.

You are monetizing the sponsorship, both of the event and of the media.

You have the ability for fans to meet the hosts of Donut.

You have the ability for fans to see the action.

You have the ability of fans to meet the cast of Donut.

and so the dynamics are different.

I also think one of the things which, which we didn't have a chance to

talk about, which is so important about live events, particularly

when they're content based.

You know, one of the, one of the guys, Nolan from Donut said to me, you know,

when I meet a fan, I make a fan for life.

And when you think about the ever changing search algorithm

and the way that brands change.

That personal connection is absolutely critical.

If you can get somebody hooked on the brand forever and they tell their

10 friends, yeah, I, I met this guy.

We went to the event.

It was awesome.

that's really a great way of hooking people.

So that was one format that we did.

We've done cruise in events, which were basically big car shows together

with the Peterson Museum in la.

We're gonna do two of those this year.

We actually even did a collab with Bob's Big Boy last year where we also did a

cruising event, which was a blast, and we're gonna aim to repeat that this year.

So a lot of different formats, each with a slightly different revenue mix

and purpose, but again, a great way to make fans that will last forever.

Yeah, I, I like Bob's big boy, by the way.

Great buffet.

he, he used to always go there before, before high school.

so good partner, and I think one of the other things with that

kind of event is it's at scale.

Right.

Like, I mean, you can, like I talk with lots, I do lots of small

events, but you know, my business is pretty, is, is pretty lean.

you know, sometimes events and you, you see it a lot in

the, the business focus pace.

They'll be doing like hundreds of, of, of events.

is, is your strategy more to let's get to like.

Tent pole slash franchise where you know that's where you can,

you can get some kind of scale.

'cause the knock on events is they don't scale.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's obviously the goal, right?

Bigger.

would be great for the business.

I think again, the first goal for us is to do things that are in keeping

with what the brand is and make sure that it's a great experience.

In some cases, those really scale.

In some cases.

The expectation, quite frankly, is that they will be smaller.

We do small events inside the home vertical.

We did one.

Last year with Dwell, where we did a home tour of four homes that

had been featured in Dwell in the Hollywood Hills with a meet and greet

with the editorial team afterwards.

That was a sold event.

But to your point, that's smaller.

It was about 300 people.

still profitable, still monetized really well, still engaged.

The audience would love to do bigger versions of that, but

it's more challenging with some of the different niches.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, in, in home I can definitely see the, the smaller events

probably makes make more sense.

And do you, and how do you end up making sure that there.

Linked together with the overall business.

And by that I mean like sometimes ev sometimes events can, can almost

be like a separate business in some ways and they're not as like, tightly

linked with the overall media property.

And I, I mean, I definitely see this a lot of times, in, in B2B or you

know, where the, the events are.

Like at some point, like the, the publisher is like, wait, why do we,

why, why are we doing the content?

Like, I mean, the, the content is completely different than, than the event.

Yeah, in our case, because the teams are so in inextricably linked, the

content and the connection ends up being maintained in many cases.

I could definitely see that for other brands, but that

hasn't been the case in ours.

The other component of it is that the content is a great

vehicle for marketing the event.

without the content, there would be no awareness that they exist or you'd be

spending a lot in terms of your marketing budget to get people to an event.

So our audience is almost like a built-in funnel for the live event strategy.

Right.

and some of your properties are very, it's interesting 'cause you have

some that are more like, I would consider more institutional brands,

but like some are very creator

like centered.

and how do you see that?

'cause I mean, there is obviously we're going through a period where,

you know, individuals, if you will, have more leverage at least in the

marketplace than than institutions in many ca in, in many sectors.

Right.

How do you end up, how do you end up seeing that with, with

your, with your properties?

Like, are you seeing the more like creator centered, brands

end up, you know, thriving more?

The way I think about it is a little bit different than that.

So for me, right, there's, there's one key theme that underlies all

of media, which is that video seems to be eating everything right.

The engagement of video is going up and up and up.

And when you move from a text-based world, no matter how great a writer is.

To a video-based world, people feel like they know that person.

And so I wouldn't say that it's necessarily the, the creator

term is consistently used to me.

It all starts with the connection that people see when they see

a personality on video, whether it's on their phone or their tv,

or their laptop, or their tablet.

Donut is the only video first brand that we've bought.

But one of the things that we've been doing is taking a video strategy and

applying it to all of our brands.

We've been doing that.

For some time now with Outdoor Life, with really strong success, both in

terms of engagement from the audience, engagement from brands that want to

advertise and sponsor the YouTube channel.

we've seen that with task and purpose and building out that

channel and continuing to evolve it.

So inside of that, it's, it is, it is creator, but to me it all starts

with who the personalities are.

In many cases, what we've done is.

If it's a brand that started out in the text-based world, see if we can get the

editorial team in front of the camera.

a great case study on that is with the drive.

The drive actually was one of the first.

YouTube channels about cars and the channel lead dormant for

some time because we didn't know what to do with the strategy.

When we bought the drive video production costs were higher.

We couldn't figure out what the strategy was.

And then about a year and a half ago, Kyle, who's the editor

in chief, brought the channel back and he's front and center.

So he is the creator, he is the personality, and you can see in the

comments the way that people react to him.

So that's a long way of saying I, I think you're right.

But to me it's all about this personal connection that the audience feels.

So are you then changing some of the, the, the, some of these brands to be more.

Creator.

Creator, like, if you will, or have the, and I know creator

is in very imperfect term,

trust me, as someone who has been at one point labeled a B2B

creator, like I know that it's an

I think that's a fair label.

so yeah, like the, the, the, the, the term is, is, you know, I, but

how are you, are you changing some of your brands to be more lean,

more into being personality led?

Absolutely.

there, there's no question about it.

And.

It all starts with trying to understand where the audience is going and

meet the audience where they are.

And to me to say that we're in the website business, that that was a

couple years ago, now we have to be in the, in the YouTube business.

We have to be in the podcast business.

We have to be in the event business, and.

That's what we've been focused on for the better part of two years, is

how do we take those, those tactics, how do we take those strategies?

How do we implement them across the whole portfolio to really meet the

audience, see that where they are and create a connection with them.

Yeah, and I think that the challenge is that like you have to do so many different

things, that getting them all to make sense together can be a. Real challenge.

you know, because I mean, the business is just more, it's a

very, I always find media business, they're very complicated businesses.

Right.

Like they're, they're just be by their nature because there's, you've

got, you've, you know, historically you have different, you've got like

content people, you've got salespeople, you've got different groups.

And then the way you make money is in a bunch of different ways.

And sometimes you're working almost against each other in some ways.

And like, you know, just like for instance, this

breakfast this morning, like.

Trying to get people to like agree on like a common metric within these businesses

is incredibly difficult.

You know, like is it arpu?

Is it LTV?

Like nobody can agree.

yeah, I think, I think the thing that people get distracted by is you

can have a lot of pennies that you hope add up to a bigger number, and

people get distracted going down the rabbit hole of, you know, tiny micro

distribution components of the business.

At its heart, the media business is actually pretty

simple, which is audience in.

Once you have the audience, you can monetize it, whether it's through

advertising or membership or other, and so it's audience in money, in profit out.

That's the way it should work.

I think the thing that's complicated and the thing that I can share

personally, has been a challenge is when you're looking at.

A component of the business, like an affiliate business or in some

cases and, and we're fortunate enough that we exist in niches and

we have communities that have kept.

Are editorial traffic strong, but when you have a component of the business

that's falling, the thing that is very difficult to do, which we have managed

to do, is to scale up the new components of audience and new components of

revenue while managing a segment of the business that's under pressure.

That's where people get.

And, and it's not an easy thing.

it's not an easy thing 'cause you're, you're trying to keep people focused.

You're trying to keep people motivated.

You're trying to manage a p and l understanding that one segment

of your business is in secular decline while you're investing

in a new segment of the business.

And you have to keep operating them too.

You're operating the old business and while you're building the new

business and you're doing it all like in, in a chaotic atmosphere.

Right.

And you're sitting there going, well, it's down, but it's still

profitable, so I gotta keep doing that.

so those are the issues that I think is, are challenging for any management

team, regardless of its of if it's media or, or other industries that have

also gone through rapid transformation.

And for me, right.

I started my career in the music business, so we watched CD sales

drive off a cliff waiting for streaming to at some point happen.

so it's not, it's not unique to the publishing business, but

that is unquestionably an issue.

And it, it is, is a challenge just from a management perspective.

Yeah.

And where do you, like, what areas do you think are going to grow the

fastest in the next three years?

So for us, we are completely oriented around four key components of the business

for growth, video, experiential licensing.

Ai.

And when I talk about ai, it's not just AI to cut bodies, it's AI to

make content go further faster.

how do we use AI to mine the incredible catalog we have?

How do we use AI to take something that's a long form video?

Rapidly do a cut down, make sure it's on every single platform

and be able to track it.

to me those are the most compelling components of ai.

And you know, I have some very smart investors and I sat down with one of

them and his point was, you have to look at two sides of the page when it comes

to AI defensive, which is cost cutting and offensive, which is expansion.

Um, we've done a lot of the ways that we can use AI to be more

efficient, and now it's all about the offensive components of it.

Yeah, I think, and I think, I think for good reasons, a lot of, a lot of the

focus this industry has been on defensive, not like offensive, you know, because

it's, you know, trying to get payments out of, out of content that's gone.

It's been trained on et cetera, trying to get it for refresh content, et cetera.

And then there's the efficiency, which is, you know, replacing

people with software, which is, is.

You know, inevitable in, in, in some cases and, and a lot.

Look, these businesses have to get more efficient.

They just have to, and that's, you know, that's, that's how it goes.

And, and the.

The biggest input cost.

There's, there's no factories.

don't think you guys have a factory.

And so, you know, you, it's people like there's, you have to get more

efficient in that and putting it towards what is gonna be driving, the

value in these, in these businesses.

but it, it, AI has to be used to create better products at the end of the day.

It can't just be, I don't think we've seen that, you know, like, I mean.

like I understand it with like cutting videos and whatnot, but like for instance,

like the website experience, right?

Like, I don't know.

I don't know if there's a compelling rationale yet for

many publishers for people to.

To be typing the, their, it just seems very strange that they're gonna be

typing their, their URLs into, a bar.

And if they're not, like, you know, ending up there via search, I just, I don't

know if an AI enabled, search experience is on a, on a website is gonna do it.

for what it's worth, I don't think anybody knows what the.

What all the different platforms are and where, where they're

gonna be, I mean, right.

We always joke internally because we've had a, over the course of the past 12

months, we, and I would imagine many other publishers have seen this, have had

a massive regrowth of Facebook traffic.

And our joke is like, oh, it's a good zuck year, but, you know,

he'd giveth any taketh away.

Yeah.

so, you know, we, we try and be everywhere and track all platforms and

have relationships with all platforms so that we know where things are going.

AI is a great tool to help us do that.

but I think what you're saying about typing in a URL, you know, we, we

still do see a tremendous amount of direct traffic, but I still just

view it as this big macro theme.

That video is gonna get bigger and bigger and more important to the pie.

Yeah.

So is that for all brands that you, that that video is gonna be, I mean, I'd

assume, will it be central to all brands?

I would imagine it will be central to all brands over over time.

Right now we do not.

We do not publish on every brand, but we do have active video strategies

on the majority of our key brands.

so outdoor life, popular science donut, real mechanic stuff, the drive task

and purpose, the war zone is gonna start publishing in video, over the

course of the next couple months.

So it, it is very central to our strategy.

Okay.

Then can I read into that the text is less important?

I wouldn't say it's less important yet.

It may get there over time.

It may get there.

talk to me more about that.

I'm a words guy.

despite us doing this through video and, and, and, and audio.

that's why that's my, that's my off ramp.

I'm audio.

I'm not a video guy.

I, I don't know, at the end of this conversation, I might,

I might pivot the video.

We'll see.

Well, I think to me again, we're one, we're following the user

behavior, and two, when I look at where things are growing, I mean,

I'm gonna, I'm gonna again draw an analogy to where I came from, which

was starting in the music business.

If you think about.

The arc of the evolution of video, like the music business, right?

25 years ago, you had to have a record label to get a CD out.

Then streaming came along and individuals could publish through an aggregator.

Then they could publish directly and get their music direct to consumer.

A couple years ago, you still had to go through a TV network

or maybe a Netflix to get on tv.

Now, YouTube is 13% of television consumption.

It's actually almost double the amount of consumption that a Netflix is and

any individual can publish there.

So the barriers have come down on the distribution side.

Number one, and the barriers have dropped dramatically on the production side.

So there's more content being published.

That's video.

Why is there more content being published as video?

Well, that's where the consumer demand is.

so we've seen demand shift.

The second thing that I would mention, which is gonna be maybe surprising.

To people that hear this, but I think that we are still in the early

innings of major brands and agencies understanding the YouTube ecosystem.

So when I think about growth of spend and dollars that can be captured, that

is a core ecosystem to our strategy.

I just think it's where it's, again, where the eyeballs and where the money's going.

Oh, so like when you're saying video, you're saying YouTube in a lot of ways.

it's, it's gonna be YouTube and others

I mean, YouTube's tv, like it's

Yeah.

sort of universally seen almost as like tv.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I can give the, I, I can give the teaser.

It's YouTube and others we're gonna be doing some really cool stuff with

other platforms, but right now for us it's YouTube is Core Meta and Instagram

and Facebook video, and also TikTok.

Okay.

what is the, like, is the value of the brand as great now?

I mean, 'cause you, you, you have a collection of, of

really good brands, right?

and I think the question ends up being do, do the, do these kind of

institutional brands end up losing.

Value as, as people are more attached to individuals, right?

Like I'm, I'm your, your competitive set in these categories is often

a lot of individuals, as much as

Mm-hmm.

like other, you know, institutional brands.

Yep.

I, I do think that the brands matter.

I actually am bullish on the meaning of brands as AI maybe erodes consumer trust.

I think the brands as a trusted place and a trusted resource, and as a place

that consumers know they're gonna get.

Awesome content, over time is gonna be, is gonna increase, but you are

absolutely right that the competitive set right, the competitive set for

recurrent is now not just Hearst, but it's other individuals that are

publishing the automotive vertical.

That's who we're competing with.

For attention span and for eyeballs.

but I do think that the brands matter because people know what they mean.

And I don't think in the case of something like an outdoor life,

which has 150 years of brand equity, I don't think that's going away.

I think that's gonna be ever more important.

I.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that, I think that that will, that will likely happen.

Like, you know, everything's gonna get so chaotic and it already

has gotten so chaotic that.

You know, brands will, again, play a role, play an important role as a

signal of like, quality and trust.

You know, I think they always have, so they likely always will

in many cases.

cool.

So tell me about the licensing strategy.

I think this goes back to the point about brand importance.

So, the best example of things that we've done inside of licensing sit within Donut,

where for a long time we've had a big, direct to consumer merchandising business.

Two years ago we took that business and we licensed it to Zumi the mall retailer.

And that not only expanded the revenue stream, but also expanded.

The, the visibility that people have of the brand.

And that's a strategy that we're gonna continue.

If you think about what donut is, we're looking at other categories.

Even looking at things like car care, to expand into.

So really exciting way to leverage your brand, even inside Dwell.

dwell for a couple years has had its own outdoor furniture line,

which has performed really nicely.

So, you know, again, another way to diversify away from things like

SEO and being advertising reliant.

Okay, but you're not gonna like start making your own products yourselves.

No, I think for, for us, the, the way I always, I, I would love to make my

own products 'cause I think it would be super fun, but at the end of the

day, it's not something that, right.

The, the balance sheet and the capital requirements of a media business are

very different from a product business

I, yeah, I feel like that Playbook has, has, has, you know, I mean,

like, it's like sort of the, the turn in thesis, like, I don't know if it,

the thesis was, was completely wrong.

I think the results were very.

Hit and miss to become charitable, I guess, like, you know, some of these,

these businesses really struggled to, become real, like commerce.

When I say real commerce, I mean like, you've got like, you know,

ho dinky like had, you know, they, they're holding inventory and stuff.

It's not like a licensing deal.

it's, it's a different type of business food.

52. You know, these, these are, these are real.

you know, commerce businesses that have completely different dynamics,

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think, I think your point about food, sorry about hokey and again, I'm, I

guess I'm a caricature of my own self.

I'm like a watch guy and a car guy.

so the

and you're a Miami, you see you're a

Yeah, and I'm a, and I'm a, and I'm a Miami guy, so I'm, I'm, I'm way

too predictable for my own good.

but I think inside of what they own, I think you're, you're, you're probably

right about ho dinky, which is they were holding inventory and that's not a healthy

thing necessarily for a media business.

But at the other end of the spectrum.

Doug DeMuro and Cars and Bids.

I think those guys have done an exceptional job, and that's a

pure play marketplace business.

And it's one because I'm a car fanatic that I look at almost every day.

So I do think that the thesis can work.

Licensing is a little bit different than building a

marketplace business in many ways.

It's simpler, because you're, you're leveraging the brand equity and finding

the right partner to take that brand and.

Make it into a product and, and put it out into the market.

Right.

And are there other aspects of the product strategy that, that are

not just, that are not licensing?

you know, it, for us it's D two C merch and licensing.

merch is an easy one because it, again, it doesn't have that high capital

requirement to get it done, and it is a, a really easy exercise in this day

and age to figure out how you do merch.

We do it with outdoor life.

we do it inside of our military vertical.

We do it in donut, we do it in the drive.

but it really is those two components that we're focused on.

Right.

And, and are there other sort of growth opportunities that, that you

are thinking about like longer term?

I, I would say the other one.

And this has been in the market with various partners for a while.

The other one that we're focused on, on the heels of getting our

Donut Fast Channel launched is to do a lot of fast channel expansion.

We have a incredibly robust catalog of video content, across all of

our core verticals, and a lot of that catalog has not been used to

the full extent that it can be.

And so we are in the midst of packaging that.

That content up and going out to the right partners to, to maximize it.

Got it.

Okay.

Cool.

Andrew, thank you so much.

Really

Yeah.

My

pleasure.

the time.

Thanks for having me.