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 better than they are. CJ lays out the bull and bear cases, from whether AI can find enough work to justify the buildout to why the most powerful technology in years could still end up priced like electricity.

Chapters:

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01:11 Alchemy or Commodity with CJ Gustafson

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11:23 Anthropic S1 Growth Shock

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14:48 Token Economics Moats Risks

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28:12 IPO Timeline Analyst Focus

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:

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00:09 Google Zero Reality Check

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05:31 SEO and LLM Strategy

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09:40 AI Overviews and Loyalty

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25:24 Pinterest Popularity

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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:

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01:33 Reuters at 175 Years

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03:29 Four Windows Business Model

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10:06 DTC and Interface Shift

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14:46 Journalism in an AI World

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21:55 AI Workflow Wins at Reuters

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29:00 Licensing, Protection, and 2031 Outlook

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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:

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01:32 Smooth Media Origin Story

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09:12 Video First Knowledge Creators

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14:33 Monetization And Talent Model

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27:40 Creator Equity Partner

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36:49 Events and Creator Ops

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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:

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01:33 Media Standpoint Critique

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09:40 Right vs Left Media Ecosystems

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14:15 Building Progressive Media

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21:50 Lever Reporting Playbook

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34:54 Incentives Audience Capture

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39:59 Culture Wars

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51:06 2028 Outlook

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 the audience. Recorded at TRB Audience Summit, this conversation starts with what the industry could look like in 2031 and explores how The Atlantic is positioning itself for that future, why Nick expects a new generation of media startups, and whether AI companies will build an economic system that sustains the journalism they depend on.

Chapters:

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03:21 Atlantic in 2031 Scenarios

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08:07 Print as Lifeboat

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09:32 Video Strategy

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12:43 AI Inside the Business

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17:22 Open Web

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20:02 Future Media

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 majority of human traffic,” she said. Recorded live at TRB Audience Summit on Sept 17, 2026.

Chapters:

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03:22 Traffic Drops and Direct Audiences

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05:30 Beyond Text Going Multimodal

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07:32 Building The Guardian US

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14:03 US Growth and 2031 Vision

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18:53 AI Adoption Without Losing Trust

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27:29 What Stays the Same

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 leaves news businesses. We explore the choice between becoming AI-powered information services and building around human relationships, why journalists’ identities as writers complicate adoption, and the risk of trying to do a little of everything without giving audiences a compelling reason to come back.

Chapters:

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01:33 AI Inside the Newsroom

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07:43 Future News Products and Trust

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24:58 Liquid Content

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29:32 Participatory News Interfaces

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40:53 Hint Community Model

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 hospitality.

Chapters:

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01:33 From Nat Geo to Playboy

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02:49 Rebuilding Playboy as Brand

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07:51 Audience and Cultural Moment

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16:51 Magazine Return and Business Model

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35:46 Membership Events and Future

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 Complex rebuilt its audience around video, and what it takes for a media brand to turn cultural relevance into product sales and 100,000 event tickets. The conversation explores a larger shift in publishing: Media’s value increasingly lies in what it can make happen beyond the pageview.

Chapters:

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01:31 Complex Reboot

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06:47 Staying Relevant in Youth Culture

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12:11 Live Shopping Craze

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20:27 Commerce Drops and Festivals

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35:45 Life After Traffic

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

In this TRB partner episode, Jelinek explains why he thinks agentic advertising hasn't fundamentally transformed the industry yet, how https://EX.CO's "yield engine" technology — originally built for online publishers — is now being ported to CTV and digital out-of-home, and why he believes CTV programmatic today looks like online video did eight years ago.

Also covered:

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Why AI and agentic tools are currently more useful as tactical marketing and discovery tools than as full transaction engines

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The differences between managing yield in online video versus CTV, and what's transferable

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Why hiring more salespeople isn't a scalable growth strategy for CTV publishers

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https://EX.CO's evolution from an online publishing platform (formerly Playbuzz) to a cross-channel yield technology company.

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Chapters:

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01:17 Agentic Ads Reality Check

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04:59 Exco Origins

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07:24 What Changes in CTV

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11:28 CTV Programmatic Timeline

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12:00 Cannes Memory Lane

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 trend. A veteran of digital media, Geoff has a blunt assessment of "legacy" digital media: It's mostly zombies. Instead, the bigger media opportunities lie in the renewed appeal of shared experiences. We discuss cinema’s advantages as a high-attention advertising medium, and why AI could make physical media more valuable.

This episode is sponsored by beehiiv, which powers the email of the biggest brands like Time, TechCrunch and more. See how beehiiv powers leading brands

Check out TRB Audience Summit on Sept 17.. We have over 100 participants confirmed for the event on Sept 17 in NYC. They’re senior leaders from Bloomberg Media, The New York Times, BBC, Condé Nast, The Wall Street Journal, Hearst, The New York Post, Vox Media and the Associated Press. The day is built around the issues media operators are dealing with right now: life after Google Zero, consumer revenue, AI products and audience strategy. Join us

Highlights:

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01:33 Media Shakeout Era

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05:40 Why Cinema Wins

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10:33 Gen Z Theater Revival

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15:55 Screenvision Model

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27:08 Ads Attention Future

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35:03 Future Of IRL Media

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

Sendall explains why "the vast majority" of Spotify's code is now being written by software agents, how the company built and open-sourced a CLI plug-in that lets brands buy audio ads using natural language, and why he thinks agentic negotiation is still years away — because AI models are "hard coded to be nice," making them easy for human negotiators to exploit.

Also covered:

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Spotify's rebuilt ad tech stack: its own ad server, ads manager, and programmatic exchange (SAX)

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Why audio advertising has 30-year staying power, and what that means for attribution windows

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Spotify's new generative AI creative tool, available in 12 languages with 100 voices

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The "sponsor playlist" product and how Spotify is rethinking ad load in exchange for brand takeovers

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00:00 https://EX.CO Spot

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00:38 Intro

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01:10 Welcome

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01:28 Rebuilding the Ads Stack

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03:58 Programmatic Audio Push

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07:23 Free vs Premium Ad Experience

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10:44 Agentic Ads Reality Check

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14:28 Ways Off From Agent Negotiation

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15:21 Cannes Memory Lane

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 three years ago. Evan wanted to sale it to 100 million and be a top ComScore site. Now, traffic is down to 20 million. Now, it’s focused more on “intentional” traffic and building community around that while building out a B2B information business. “A lot of those users are coming to our site because they know Famous Birthdays,” Evan told me. “They didn’t just randomly stumble onto it.”

Chapters:

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00:00 Beehiiv Spot

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01:29 Welcome

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01:56 Famous Birthdays Story

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05:27 Staying Flexible in Media

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07:43 Google Zero Reality Check

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11:29 Retention Over Scale

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14:09 Monetization Without Direct Ads

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22:52 Open Web and AI Future

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24:56 Creator Data Strategy

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29:45 Open Web Future

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35:48 Shorts Versus Longform

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38:51 Search First UX

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42:27 Copyright And AI Deals

Rob Wilk, CRO of Yahoo, joined me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by 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 data advantage across search, email, and content (with 75% of users logged in), why he calls competitors' data "a fish stew" of third-party signals, and how that data now powers Yahoo Scout — the company's first new search product in 17 years, built using a rented LLM alongside Bing's grounding API and Yahoo's own first-party data.

Chapters:

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00:00 EX.CO Spot

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00:34 Intro

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01:11 Welcome

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02:55 First Party Data Edge

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06:12 Portal to AI Era

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08:46 Yahoo Scout Search Return

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11:44 Creators and Brand Deals

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14:27 Cannes Memory Lane

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 volatile.

The event is increasingly the beginning of a larger marketing program rather than an add-on at the end. It creates the executives, conversations, video and podcast material that can then become a broader branded-content campaign.

The value is less about filling a big room than convening the right 100 or 200 people, facilitating introductions and making the event accountable to actual business outcomes.

Chapters:

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00:00 EX.CO Spot

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00:36 Intro

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01:24 Welcome

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01:45 Inside Journal House

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03:17 Convening as Strategy

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04:25 Events as Main Dish

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08:46 Stitching Dow Jones Assets

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10:38 Cannes Memory Lane

Ryan McConville, chief product officer at NBCUniversal, joins me in Cannes for TRB Conversations, powered by https://EX.CO, to make the case that premium video has been underappreciated as the origin point of culture. That ends up leaving it shortchanged by the platforms that built their businesses on top of it as advertising was subsumed by performance marketing.

“If you only feed the bottom of the funnel, you eventually run out of new customers. Brand and performance are intimately linked. If you take your foot off the gas on brand, it’s just going to raise the cost in your other channels. It’s all performance—it’s simply different parts of performance.”

Chapters:

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00:09 https://EX.CO Spot

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00:36 Intro

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01:40 Welcome

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02:28 Rebooting TV for Streaming

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05:11 Comcast Tech Stack Advantage

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06:26 Attribution and Culture Credit

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08:08 Proving TV Performance Lift

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11:25 Democratizing CTV Buying

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14:04 Agentic AI Hype Check

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19:08 Buyer Agents and Whats Next

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 hisopen-source investigations at The Newsground. He’s attempting to recreate the news subsidy that was lost with the unbundling of media. Scott and I discuss his career, why he doesn’t believe in the business model of journalism companies and why accountability journalism will find innovative models.

Chapters:

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00:00 Beehiiv Spot

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01:29 Welcome

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02:07 Why Investigative Journalism

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04:28 Making It Sustainable

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06:43 Freedom Over Newsrooms

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13:05 Creators And Video Shift

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19:03 Newsground Coffee Model

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27:48 Behind The Scenes Journalism

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32:45 Crowdfunding And Growth

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35:31 Inspirations And Future

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 the promise -- yet again -- of establishing direct paths between advertisers and publishers.

“Is this just AI jazz hands, or is there something actually there under the hood?’ Discovery and planning agents, packaging agents — those are pretty low risk, and they’re definitely possible. They make the planning process faster, while humans still set up the deals and line items. The highest-risk piece is negotiation. These models are hard-coded to be nice, and the worst thing you want to do is put a nice AI negotiator against a human on the other side. They’ll give that stuff to you for free. Humans should negotiate, but AI systems can do the heavy lifting, and we’ll crawl, walk and run into it.”

Chapters:

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00:09 https://EX.CO Spot

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00:37 Intro

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01:37 Welcome

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01:57 Agentic Advertising Hype

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05:56 Publishers and Ad Tech Tax

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07:40 Agents and the Content Bargain

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11:13 New Monetization Models

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13:38 Best Cannes Memories