The Rebooting Show

Brian Morrissey and Troy Young are joined by CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics to break down Anthropic's S-1: nearly $20 billion in trailing revenue, 1,400% growth, $6.6 million in revenue per employee, and where the accounting makes the margins look bett...

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...

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 with...

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 ...

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 cre...

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 ...

The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson is preparing for a media business where the web plays a far smaller role. That could mean more print issues, stronger relationships between readers and individual writers, and new ways to get paid when AI agents become th...

The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson is a realist. She sees the need to prepare for when publishers are connecting information to AI pipes. “Our website may become something that is more of a service to agentic audiences rather than where you have the majorit...

Publishers are adding AI tools, but the news product remains largely unchanged. Martin Schiori, former deputy publisher and AI lead at Sweden’s Aftonbladet and now co-founder of newsletter startup Hint Media, joins Brian Morrissey to discuss where that...

Playboy is rebuilding itself as a lifestyle brand for a new era. President David Miller joins me to discuss why content is now the brand’s marketing engine, the return of the magazine, and Playboy’s expansion into licensing, events, membership and hosp...

Complex president Moksha Fitzgibbons joins Brian Morrissey to discuss the company’s evolution from an advertising-dependent publisher into a business spanning media, commerce and live events. They examine why content and commerce usually fails, how Com...

Paul Jelinek, chief business officer at EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), joined me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to lay out why CTV programmatic advertising is still in its early days — and why that's about to change fast...

Never bet against the need of young people to get out of the home and socialize. Movie theaters are seeing a revival, driven by young audiences. Geoff Schiller, CEO of movie theater ad network Screenvision, joined me to discuss why this is a long term ...

Per Sendall, co-head of ads at Spotify, joins Brian Morrissey in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to break down how AI agents are already changing the way Spotify builds and sells advertising.Sendall explains why "the v...

Famous Birthdays is a classic open web publishing success story. Evan Britton bootstrapped the publisher to fill a simple need: People were seeking out information about the new crop of influencer and creator celebrities. Traffic peaked at 25 million t...

Rob Wilk, CRO of Yahoo, joined me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to make the case that 30-year-old Yahoo is in the middle of a genuine business turnaround, not a nostalgia play. Rob breaks down Yahoo's first-party ...

Events have moved from a side business to a core commercial product at The Wall Street Journal. CRO Josh Stinchcomb says the long lead times and scarcity let publishers lock in sponsor commitments earlier, which matters when advertising budgets are vol...

Ryan McConville, chief product officer at NBCUniversal, joins me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO ( https://EX.CO ), to make the case that premium video has been underappreciated as the origin point of culture. That ends up leaving it ...

Funding investigative journalism is a unique challenge. On The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Scott Stedman, an independent investigative journalist who is using a coffee subscription service as a business model to fund his open-source investigations at Th...

Agentic advertising was the buzzword of the year at Cannes this year. It stands to reason this hype is ahead of reality. Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc, gives a reality check of where the hurdles to agentic advertising, which holds...