Complex’s Next Chapter
01:22:44 Share

You're the only Moksha I know. That's true, because, you know, my mother thought it would be really interesting to give me a Hindu name, but apparently it's a popular woman's name in India. Really? Yeah.

It's great. Intersection. When did you discover that? Just like randomly someone on LinkedIn reached out to like sell me software or something. And it was a woman named Moksha. And I was like, oh, interesting. It's been good for business because there's only one of me. So it's, you know, at least memorable. If I was John Smith, I think there would be a tougher path. All right. Well, you're in the right business because like media is tough enough as a path as it is. Thank you.

I wanted to start by going through, because I feel like Complex has had, I don't want to say nine lives, but it's close to nine lives. So run through all of the iterations before we get into what Complex is now, right? Because I mean, Marc Ecko started it. You were there pretty much at the beginning. Yeah, yeah.

So make sure, make sure, by the way, that you pay all like the right amount of attention to Rich's role in the creation and the rise to greatness. The founding. Yeah. The founding. Yes. I'll make sure to make sure to hit that. Sort of the way I sort of came into the Mark Echo and his partners at the time fold, I was a young sales rep at the Source magazine. They were my clients.

And they were like, hey, we want to launch the world's first digital magazine. And the way we're going to distribute it is through Sony mini discs on hang tags for all of our garments. I was like, yeah, great idea. Let's do it.

That failed super quick. That then iterated into, hey, let's do a print magazine, which worked for a while. It never really scaled huge, but it was pretty, I would say, commercially successful in terms of actually attaining profitability. Then the 2008-2009 recession came and just decimated that business. Thankfully, we had...

Probably six or eight months before the recession struck, we in earnest started investing in digital. Basically, the print revenues went from $20 million to $6 million in a year, but the inverse happened for digital. We started really focusing on digital and then through digital iterations, it was like

you know, sort of like an ad network blog era to sort of a socially distributed video era. Yeah, because you were an ad, there was an ad network, right, during the blog era. It sort of pivoted into that because I just always think of like Complex just kept leaping from like thing to thing and was like, it's like an ultimate survivor brand.

Yeah. They had that bar. Do you remember the bar they had at the bottom of all the sites that showed all the sites in the network? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that was a branding initiative and also a way to like lock those, those sort of blog sites from, you know, third party selling to people that might be competitive with us or letting in programmatic that would erode our CPMs. But that was also a mask, right? Like,

The complex brand was so strong and so powerful that we basically had more sales demand than we had inventory. So we needed that extension through all of those blog sites to deliver the inventory demands and also gave us time for Noah and team to build up.

All the socials, the dot-com traffic at the time, and really get it to a place where the complex brand was as big as the sales demand. We then sold the business. There was a bunch of funny money going around with Go90, and we sold the business to a joint venture between Hearst and Verizon in 2016.

I left in 2017, sort of after like an earn out period. And then I think the business sold again to BuzzFeed when they did that SPAC, which I think, I'm not sure the exact date, but let's just say 2020-ish. They orphaned the brand, didn't really understand it. I'd say, you know, without being super critical, just mismanaged it.

That's pretty critical, actually. He's got worse things to say. I could say more pointed things. At the time, Jonah Peretti, I have to say his last name, Kelsey Peretti's brother was

was saying that this is going to be the bellwether. I mean, this is the crazy SPAC era. This is going to be the bellwether, like digital media company. And there was this talk, Brian Goldberg talked about it, about there being this consolidation roll-up of all of these different digital brands to make something bigger. It didn't work.

Yeah, it didn't work. Their SPAC didn't work. It put them in a challenging financial position and they needed to unwind some of those assets to satiate their debt burden. And we were able to sort of negotiate over the last probably a year leading into the sale, but we acquired the business.

business back in late February of this year and merged it with another business we had started in 2018, which was an e-commerce business called Network. So that's been the- Yeah. So just explain Network for those who do not know. I remember I sent you a Network billboard in New York City at some party one time. I saw it out the window.

Yeah. Network is a business we launched in 2018. It is a marketplace business where the world's best brands and creators come to sell their most highly coveted product in a live stream environment. It's really sort of taking some nodes of the popularity of live stream shopping and

In Asia, we definitely were working and tracking super well during COVID, but the live stream shopping piece never took off to the same degree here in the States as it has in Asia.

It has, you know, had really, you know, sort of strong following from a consumer and, you know, sort of audience perspective. But we really needed something with that business to transform it. You know, we're spending tens of millions of dollars a year driving downloads and acquisitions on, you know, various meta platforms. And this opportunity with Complex, we're both excited.

serving the same audience from different perspectives, you know, network with commerce and complex with content. Moksha, network wasn't incubated in complex, right? It was a separate business. No, it was a separate business, but a lot of people from complex were part of that, you know, and- The complex and form, like the thesis, but I mean, look, I know like with network, there's a big thing going on in Asia with live shopping. It's never really taken off here. I don't know if it really will. You can-

Tell me I'm wrong. But I mean, there's some action on TikTok, right? Yeah, there's some. I think it will be part of the mix. We were betting that it would be the mix. And, you know, I don't think it will be the mix, not anytime soon, but I think it will be part of it. You know, it's not something that we're abandoning, but we're also leaning into more traditional e-commerce, having sort of flat experiences across, you know,

the .com, the app, all of the social platforms where previously we were really solely focused on the live streaming piece. But yeah, just to get back to it, Troy, like Network was launched by Jimmy Iovine and Aaron Levant, who was sort of part of the original ComplexCon team and Complex, that sort of the audience that Complex serves, Network really aimed to serve that audience, but from a commerce perspective versus...

you know, complex business model, which was content and advertising and a little bit of, you know, ticketing. So the commerce business with, I guess, influential founders and raised a fair amount of money, then decided that complex would be the media company would be a sensible extension of that business. It was that to get at the complex con opportunity, which is basically a commercial fair, right?

Was it to, what was the thesis? Was it that it was customer acquisition? It would be a funnel for network? Yeah, customer acquisition. Exactly, customer acquisition. So globally between .com and social complexes, just around 100 million users monthly. And-

on the network side, you know, we've spent five to $10 million a year on meta driving acquisition. And the bet is that if we, you know, put the products in front of the complex audience, we'll be able to convert at a much more efficient rate versus, you know, spending all that money on sort of Instagram ads. And all of it was super synergistic. We felt like we had sort of

the technology, the commerce, really like sort of innovative entrepreneurial spirit on the network side. With Complex, we had, you know, a great brand really connected to that 18 to 34 year old audience, super authentic, good scale, but lacked, you know, some innovation, lacked some entrepreneurialistic spirit, and also was so dependent on ads as its only sort of, you know,

stream of revenue, we thought we could put these two businesses together, trade off the powerful name of Complex and the audience, bring in the e-commerce to make it much less dependent on advertising, and then build up ComplexCon and other experiences. So there's a meaningful ticketing revenue stream as well. So we would have, instead of it being sort of a one-legged stool with just advertising, now it becomes a more stable three-legged stool with

ticketing, commerce, and advertising. And I think that if we can hone and get that right over the next 18 to 24 months, it really makes the business durable for the next 20, 30, whatever years. So we've seen kind of a flip there, Moshe, where we're not abandoning the content to commerce proposition, it seems, although it's been seemingly difficult for

ranging from, you know, Houdinki to Food52 to others. But interestingly, in the Houdinki case, it was the commerce company that bought the media company in the end, not unlike your situation where Network bought Complex. Do you think, are you seeing challenges in managing, you know, because you guys had done commerce before, right? Like, you know, prior to the pandemic, you were selling products. You had a bunch of stuff going on. I remember talking to Rich about

Well, it wasn't just hot sauce. It was fashion, right? And so when I look on Complex today, you still have a fairly significant commerce effort off of Complex. Is that now managed by network or is that the same old business? No, that business that we spun up years ago,

It was, I would say the most minimal effort. You know, we partnered with a company called Banzai that was like an aggregator. They managed the whole thing. The content team at the time was not incentivized correctly to promote those products or drive audience to it as, you know, as very much an afterthought and they're,

At the time, the focus was really on this notion of being in the premium content arena and making YouTube shows become hit Netflix shows. That model, I think, well-intended, just never was going to work or never was going to prove out. So there wasn't enough effort and initiative put into commerce and

converting the, you know, the, the audience and engagement that complex has. That was just, I don't know, just super light touch and not, not sort of a well-invested into, but you'll see over the next month, the network brand will go away and it will be complex shop. You're seeing some of that on the.com today. If you check it out, it will be a, you know,

super robust initiatives we will have through our, you know, Universal Music Group is now an investor. So all of their top artists will have shop and shops within Complex Shop. So, you know, if you're a Billie Eilish fan or Olivia Rodrigo, there will be exclusive product there from those artists, which will also, you know, in turn make it sort of

easier and more relevant for the content team to promote. We've also, you know, with us buying Complex, we very much had like

you know, sort of a very specific communications with the staff, like, hey, this isn't sort of just the old complex where it's like editorial and advertising. Now we're really trying to make sort of this three-legged stool of content, commerce, and experiences. And we all need to be supportive of each other. And that does take a little bit of, you know, mind shift. And, you know, some people that probably makes them a little bit uncomfortable, you know, what does that mean? Is, you know, are we going to have to promote things that,

you know, we're not fans of. And it just takes a little bit of education. And thankfully, we're getting really great product from, you know, the Nikes of the world, the Asics, the New Balances. So it's things they would cover already. And now we have a place to drive

that consumer to from what would be traditionally organic editorial. Now we're driving them back into our store where they can actually purchase the product that they're reading about or watching about. So how do you articulate the merchandising strategy for your commerce effort? What are the things that you do and you'll not do? I see collabs on there. I see unique products. Sounds like you're doing stuff with artists to host their stores.

Is there a kind of simple merchandising vision that would help us understand what that store will be? I would say we aspire to be the best youth culture commerce experience that houses...

lots of unique collaborations. Obviously those are really big and sort of like the complex community, limited edition, collaborations between artists and brands. So you'll see a lot of that. You'll see, we do want to have an initiative where there is a reason to go there always on because a lot of these limited edition products sell out super quick. So we do want to get to a place where you do go there for the coolest black t-shirts, but there won't be a space where we're selling

you know, crest and Clorox and things of that nature. Like it'll all be within sort of the youth culture, music lifestyle lens. And I'd say, you know, we think we can build a business kind of similar to a Farfetch or a Stadium Goods, but sort of embolden it with all of the

the pieces that we can bring in through Universal Music Group they've been you know just amazing partners bringing through all of their artists and if we have like their top 30 global artists with shop in shops on Complex with a unique product that you can't get elsewhere I think that drives you know kind of a

a real reason to believe for the consumers and a reason to go there and go shopping to come with Frequency. So I have a question. When you think about the iteration of the brand, what is the role of the brand now? I mean, it sounds like I always think there's a lot of brands, particularly when they come from a magazine background that become the front end to totally different businesses, whether it's SEO driven,

affiliate businesses, or, you know, we see this a lot in lifestyle is you become the front end and you're an experiential or you're trying to drive commerce. And I think when you're getting at the sort of discomfort, maybe on the editorial side, it's like,

wait a second, we're going to lose all credibility because we're just a front to try to like move product at the end of the day. And it sounds all good that it's going to be authentic, but you saw with Hodinkee, like it didn't work for a bunch of different reasons, but it's,

It looks like they lost a lot of credibility in the process. Yeah, well, they started talking about product that was irrelevant to that audience. They made such a shift. It was just horrible execution, yeah. Where if you look at what we're, sort of the beta version of the shop, it's all things that are ultra credible and relevant that they would be covering everything.

Anyway, so we're never going to push it into a space that they would be uncomfortable with. And, you know, at its peak, 20% of all the content they create is going to drive back to e-commerce. You know, 80% plus is all going to be driven around entertainment, engagement, pop culture, the things that, you know, they're doing on a day in and day out perspective. So I don't...

I think it is a bit of a learning. It is a bit of a shift, but we also have to be honest. BuzzFeed had Complex on a downward death spiral that was going to lead to bankruptcy. And we need to rebuild this business in a way that is stable and that is healthy on all perspectives. And we have this amazing engaged audience that is out there looking to buy products. Complex's tagline is buy.

buy, obsess, collect, that going back to the print days, it was half entertainment, half buyer's guide,

we have a consumer that wants to shop. We've never given them that opportunity. It's just like before complex con, we had a consumer that was willing to come out 50, 60,000 kids, buy tickets to go to an experience. And we didn't, before that, we didn't do anything in that space. And now that we have, we we've given them a place to come and engage with the brand and spend time and money with the brand. So it's a,

similar strategy. And I think the fact that, you know, it's like if we all of a sudden spun up a store that was selling Tide and Crest, that would never work, but Nike, New Balance, Fear of God, Hidden, that should work. And based on all the tests we've done, the products have been selling quite well. They have been limited edition hype products. So we will see as we get into, you know, my black t-shirt example, but you know,

It's going to be hard, but we're confident there's a path there. Right. Hey, Moksha, you know how to... Sorry, go ahead, Alex. Wait, Alex has to ask him why it's relevant. I mean, I'm tracking, I'm following. But I was wondering, you know, when you look at complex.com as this kind of object that people go and visit, what's the audience that goes there? And how do you see this thing changing, you know, over the next year? Because it still feels like

When I land on a site like this, it still feels like a traditional website with a feed and some injected commerce. And somehow that type of stuff feels out of time today. It feels a little, who does that? How does that homepage even exist? Where does your content live in the future? Yeah. So the .com is still a viable piece of the mix, but where it used to probably be 80% of the mix.

Now it's 20 or 30% of the mix. And the audience engagement is largely across all of the various social and video platforms. That's where we're scaling and engaging most of the audience. And that same shopping experience that you see on complex.com, that will be mirrored on TikTok shops, Instagram shops. If you go watch one of our hit shows, Sneaker Shopping on YouTube, all of that.

All of the product is shoppable through YouTube. So you're seeing it in the show and you can shop it through the carousel below. And, you know, we've had a show about shopping for sneakers for, I don't know, 10, 15 years. And no one ever thought to make it shopping enabled. So we started to do that. And to your point about the role of the brand, I mean, that is sort of like...

you know, the ultimate expression of what the brand is all about, but the way we're connecting with consumers through these different distribution channels and those distribution channels will evolve, you know, just like many, I don't know, five, six years ago, long form YouTube video was, you know, 90% importance of everything we did. I think,

it's still super important, but vertical video has become far more important and far more engaged over the last few years. We have a show called 360. And I get all that. I think what I'm fascinated by is that I stumble on brands via TikTok, via YouTube, and then I'll go and check out their homepage. Hey, Alex. You're like droiding out, Alex. Alex, you need to shift your star link or something. Yeah.

Elon has probably heard this podcast. Yeah, my connection is terrible. I'm going to move this satellite just a little bit. Well, I don't know if you guys heard now, Elon's been taping private phone calls from Putin apparently. I'd love to overhear those. Like how do you think they begin? Yeah. You know, the NSA is all over those, right? Like they have to be.

I want to get invited to his compound that he's built for his massive family. Can you hear me now? Do you want a baby? Yeah, we can hear you. Can you repeat your point? So I'm going to try to, while the satellite's in range. Why don't you get in? You were much more pointed in the text thread. Do I need to read what you said in the text thread? Alex is being honest.

No, I mean, you know, I'm kind of trying to get into the question. You're like a middleware brand. Why middlemen are a terrible business these days, particularly in media? Why is complex still needed for a young person who's trying to understand what's cool? Won't they just follow the cool people, the influencers? How do you compete with like...

thousands and tens of thousands of these influencers and creators that seem to have a much more authentic and organic connection than a sort of institutional and fairly, it's been around a long time. They're like older brothers brand. Why is it still relevant in 2025?

Honestly, I think it's the credibility and the authenticity of the fact that the brand has always celebrated emerging talent, put emerging talent on, has always helped contextualize larger talent in a way that made it feel, you know,

sort of relevant and cool. Like it could take a more seasoned artist like an Eminem and make him relevant for a younger generation. And then they could take a more emergent artist and put them on a pedestal and help grow and build them. And there's countless examples of that. And the

I think also Complex has stood the test of time. We have always pivoted. If you look at our engagement scores, if you just go to the Instagram main account, the average post is getting 100,000 to 200,000 likes. Where you look at a GQ or a Hypebeast, the highest nobility, it's 10,000.

the team is really excellent at cultivating that relationship with the consumer. And also they're obsessed with you. Like our Instagram account is 77% males, 16 to 34. You know, like it is, they, the team is,

ludicrously obsessed with just always creating content that resonates with that younger audience and also filtering it. Yeah, you can follow all these creators, but what's real? What's really authentic? What's really credible? You need someone filtering that out. Noah and Ari and their team, they have the most excellent taste and they filter it for consumers and they contextualize it in a way that consumers can

can understand and trust. And that's, you know, that's the value of any media brand. I would agree with that. That is successful. I want to ask you about... Wait, let's get Alex here. I want Alex to disagree. Well, it's not... I mean, I don't know if I agree or... He's the voice of reason. Well, it's not that I agree or disagree. I find it... I'm fascinated with how media brands...

are using or investing in their homepage, right? Like if you kind of want to get a bird's eye view of Complex, right? Like I'm sure people engage with it through whatever social network and you can build audience through there. But like I get on a page like complex.com and it feels to me like a relic

And I don't see that kind of universe. Like, you know, I'm talking to you and you're mentioning all these things that are happening. And there's no place where I can see that. I would not disagree that in general, homepages are a time of the past, right? Like the audience that's coming in through the socials to engage with the content and the dot com.

is they're not coming to the homepage. They're coming directly into that article or directly into that shopping experience. They're not, you know, very few people are coming into a homepage. And the idea that we've organized a homepage to be like a massive traffic source, the way a Yahoo or an AOL does.

did, that's a farce, right? It's all about creating super relevant, engaging content that can be distributed with social and bring people back into that .com experience to have the full article or the full video or the full shopping experience. It's not to drive them to the homepage. Yeah. No, I mean, I know Troy is dismissive of that. The fact that the .com page is a small slice of your revenue, like

I guess where I'm at usually, if something isn't being actively developed, usually, I mean, in my kind of philosophy, you're kind of sunsetting it. A lot of the platforms you're dealing with, you're trying to get them to the page. You're trying to get them into the commerce page, into those kind of places that you own and control, right? And sometimes, and it happens to a lot of media brands,

When I get in touch with a brand on Instagram, et cetera, there's very little pathways out of it. They try to make sure that you don't link out of it. Say, "I really like this brand. I really like Complex. I want to see what Complex is all about. Where is the place that I can go?" And it's usually still to this day the homepage or some type of webpage. And I will get there and the story that I see on the homepage is different than the story that I'm being told by the people building these media brands. Does that make sense?

And that to me is interesting because I gather that there's still some value to be gotten out of the homepage with the feed and the article pages, but it doesn't represent the modern media brand or the modern strategy. And I always found that confusing, if that makes sense.

I can see your point, but I don't think that you're looking at it from the way consumers use media. Consumers are watching shows we produce on YouTube and they're full-length sort of shows.

view. But then oftentimes they're consuming way more of that content in shorter vertical video clips on TikTok and Instagram, right? Or, you know, they're seeing something we post about a news breaking story on Instagram, and then they're clicking through link in bio to see the whole thing, or they see, Hey, we did an interesting collaboration with Livia Rodrigo. I want to shop it. I'm

The majority of the scale and engagement is happening on the different distribution channels and

we're using different devices to bring them back into the shopping experience or into the full video experience or to the full text experience through those various channels. So it's like, because you can't, those channels all have limitations in terms of the length of content or the type of content they can deliver. And, you know, the younger consumer is in a constant scroll and we

We catch them with something interesting and then we pull them in to shop it, watch it, read it. What is your revenue mix going to be? How do you break it out? Brand partnerships, experiential, and commerce? Correct. Within commerce, it'll largely be marketplace. We won't hold the inventory. We'll just take a bait on all the transactions.

The goals are for the marketplace to be 75% of the business, the sponsorship and media to be, let's say, 20% of the business and then the experiential 5%. I mean, those percentages can be off a little bit, but the marketplace over time, they're just...

way more opportunity there to scale than there is, you know, like complex is never going to be a half a billion dollar advertising brand. You know, it's just not going to get that big. Hey Moksha, what have you noticed there? You're no stranger to the ad hustle, right?

And, you know, coming back into the complex world, what's selling? Are you using your commerce assets to create interest with advertisers? How important is the event proposition in selling packages? And what other surface area are you selling or packages are you selling these days?

Yeah. So a lot of people are interested in doing things in commerce, you know, like a lot of brands say they're in the CPG or the spirit space. They want to do unique collaborations and partnerships that package their brand with, say,

say, you know, apparel merch, things like that and special packages and sell it both on .com and at their physical retail. So those are a lot of things we're developing right now. We have done quite a few pairings of like creators or designers with various brands to make a unique collaboration and then that's supported by, you know, custom content, branded content, traditional media. That drives a lot of it. I'd say, you know, the over...

About 75% of everything we do is custom. So it's some form of custom integration into our shows or branded content experiences. There's a decent amount tied to ComplexCon. And then the remainder is more sort of transactional media. But I think that feels like it's getting less and less and that the reason people are coming to us is, you know,

they really believe in the taste and tone of complex and complexes ability to discover what's next. And, you know, the clearly the connection with youth culture and multicultural audiences, and they want our help sort of inserting their brand incredible ways into that. And then we're using different tactics to, to help drive that engagement and authenticity. But, you know,

I don't see a world where Complex is going to have a super meaningful display business. I feel like those days are gone. Everything has to be pretty unique, pretty creative, customized. Has Noah and team materially shifted content budget allocation in the last couple of years from...

you know, text to audio to video. I mean, you guys are doing a lot of video for a long time. Yeah. How are you, how are you looking at content investment against all your channels right now? The answer is yes, we're investing a lot into video. And the big push right now is how can we, under the kind of, you know, rich thesis, there was a lot of emphasis on super high production value, pretty expensive content to produce with the hope

that hot ones or something like that, you would then resell it to a Netflix for a big payday. And unfortunately, that just didn't come to bear. So what we're really looking at is how do we make really great content that can be long form and distributed in YouTube, but it's done at a price point that's way more efficient and that

quite honestly, the majority of the scale comes through vertical video clips. And this is not a unique trend. If you go on TikTok or if you go on Reels, you see a lot of podcast content that then clip down and does tremendous amount of engagement and views. So we're looking at it through the lens of like, how can we produce more content more efficiently, you know,

where the YouTube long form is part of it, but there's a big emphasis on the shorter form pieces to drive the majority of scale and engagement. And then we're putting everything through sort of like, I guess the investment paradigm or decision-making tree, like does this drive an absurd level of audience engagement? Does it drive commerce sales? Does it drive ticketing sales or does it drive sponsorship sales? And if,

If it doesn't do one of those four things or two of those four things, we choose not to do it. So that's kind of the process we're going through. And it's a bit of a shift. They were so focused on YouTube long form and premium for a while. It is a bit of a little of a mindset shift and say, hey, you know what? Vertical video is at equal or even perhaps a bit more important than YouTube long form was historically. And that's

That's really just keeping up with consumer behaviors, how they're consuming, and particularly the younger side of the audience. If you don't keep leaning into iterative formats on Snap, on Reels, on Shorts, on TikTok, you're going to lose people.

those 16 year olds. So we have to be super conscious of that and leaning into it. But it sounds like cost is a big thing here. Do you have a KPI as far as price per programming minute that you need to take down? Because with the previous strategy, what you're saying is that's pretty expensive and you're trying to create TV shows and that's very expensive. And there was a moment where that was a good strategy.

But I mean, you have to do more with less. Do you have like a percentage you're trying to take down? Because it sounds like you need to spend less money on the absolute, you know, the creation of the program.

We do. And generally, I would say this. We want to invest the same amount of money and produce 30% more content in the video space. Okay. Yeah. That would lead us to... I know you have some thoughts, Moksha, on... I mean, there was a time when you were fairly search-dependent as a business in terms of your overall distribution. I'd love to hear your take on what media brands need to do in the new world, the new sort of platform shift world, and how you're thinking about...

the role of AI in a business like yours, which is IP video, you know, brand taste making. Yeah. I think you guys had a pod recently, the death of text or something like that. Wasn't one of that. One of the titles is Alex's. Yeah. Alex is the grim reaper here. That resonated with me.

going through it right now and I don't see a world where it's going to really improve where, you know, SEO is way more challenging. So you have to drive the engagement in the audience off the other platforms or certainly not count on search the way you once did because, you know, you're just going to keep creating more content, put

putting more investment into that and it's going to yield less and less results. And, you know, the things we're thinking about is like, how do we defend against AI, right? Like obviously AI can crawl all of our texts and spit those answers back to you in two seconds with no,

no fee or royalty back to us. And the place that we think we can be defensive in that area is in vertical video or long form video and creating content that could be specifically deployed through video on platforms like Perplexity. I mean, they're not there yet, but that's the way we're thinking about it. It's like, how do you have 360 with Speedy Mormon that last week did 50 million views on TikTok? How do you have that content deployed on Perplexity?

or the various platforms. So it's something that's obviously super top of mind for us and we're working with it and then also using AI tools to help the content team produce more or be more creative. They did something recently with Eminem where they took his sort of alter ego, Slim Shady, and they programmed a large language model with all of those lyrics and sort of like coverage of that language

of his sort of alter ego. And then they had that alter ego interview, the real Eminem. And it was pretty interesting application of AI and pretty creative and, you know, did super well in terms of like earned media and viewership. And we had a merch collection tied to it that sold over a million dollars worth of merch. So it early days on how, you know, AI is just,

obviously in sort of like emergent state and how we'll use it creatively, we're definitely not fooling ourselves. We're not thinking like, hey, we're going to just go build back up the SEO traffic and everything's going to be great. I mean, that would be a silly notion. I always ask for the KPIs, but do you have like a number as far as like how much of outpouring

output you want to be like changing the ratio of text versus multimedia what do you mean like how much do we want to shoot like if you think about like yeah if you think about like i don't know how you like measure your output but it but it's pretty clear that you want the output to be less text heavy and more vertical video and i'm just wondering like how do you end up

How do you end up measuring that you're doing that? So part of it is like, you know, the resource allocations. And then there's another part of it where it's like...

There is a minimal viable level of content, both from text or video that needs to be produced to maintain the audience and engagement. And our thinking is that the growth of audience is going to come through, you know, largely through right now, through socially distributed vertical video that ties back to either entertainment or commerce. But, you know, that also we have to be prepared to ship just as quickly

Complex was a physical magazine at one point and then an ad network at one point and then sort of a traditional dot com and then a YouTube publisher. We just have to keep, stay iterative and keep sort of weaving through this spectrum. Do you think you can keep the media side of the business, meaning the advertising side, above 50, between 50 and 100 million dollars, which is probably where you were in the old days? Or does it... Yeah, I think we can get it back...

to a hundred plus, I think beyond that, it becomes super challenging. I just don't, you know, it's like there's a pretty clear path to over a hundred, but I think it, you know, just if you think about the universe of brands that find, um,

you know, males 18 to 24, multicultural, like their core, core target, it starts to compress. And, you know, we can win big there. There's obviously way less competitors than there once was. So I think we can have a strong business there, but that's, you know, in terms of growing the overall business, you know, we think commerce is,

on a GMV perspective, will be a half a billion dollar business in a few years if we do it right. So the focus in terms of top-line growth is going to be much more pronounced on the commerce side. Yeah. Media has a lower ceiling now, right? I mean, that's basically, I mean, we talk about it a lot on this podcast. I mean, just the ceiling for a pure media business is lower than it was before. Got to find another business.

I was delighted, Moksha, to see that there was new energy in ComplexCon this year. You're doing it in Vegas. You've got like big, big artists participating. The first time I went to ComplexCon and Rich invited me to see it, I was like blown away by it because so few media companies are able to do ticketed events at that scale. Yeah.

And it's one of the reasons I just sort of that and your ability to evolve as a company, your video franchises, all that stuff. I was just a big, big fan. ComplexCon this year is big, big, big as ever putting a lot of energy to tell us about what you're doing with, with that event. ComplexCon we're investing more than we ever have in it because we really think we need to say to the fans, to the artists, to the brands that, you know, complex is back. It's,

invigorated, you know, market goes back on, on the board and, you know, just that, you know, it's not in this buzzfeed, you know, regime where they didn't care about it. So we moved it to Vegas. We did a really interesting partnership with Travis Scott, where he's the creative director. We gave him kind of full creative purview. You know, if you notice he like put his flair on the logo and all these really interesting things. And, um,

yeah, you're a hundred percent right. I was trying, I was thinking about it the other day. It's like, there's something with complex and it's engagement with the audience, right? Like the fact that we get a hundred to 200,000 likes on an Instagram post, and I can't figure out exactly why, but it's like, we have such strong engagement there that somehow translates into the brand's ability to sell 60,000 tickets. And there's so few media brands that can do it. Like I feel the only other one I can think about is like essence with essence vest. It's just like,

They have such a strong relationship with that cohort of women and they get 100,000 of them to go to New Orleans every 4th of July. And you look at other brands, like the NBA tried to do NBA con, didn't really work out. Fanatics just did their best. It wasn't a great thing. Everybody wants to do events. Most people do events that are a couple hundred people and are sort of augmentation of ad product. Yeah.

And very few people can get consumers to reach into their wallets. And you guys are able to do it. It's, it's, it's impressive. And I think it's true. It's just like, why does all in sell out their event, you know, in their inaugural year and then follow it up with a banger the next year. It's because they have audience engagement. People really care. Yeah. People really care about it. And I think we do a good job of curation, but there's,

I wish I knew what that silver bullet was. It's like, what does Complex have and what does Essence have that ESPN never had? Because when I was a kid, ESPN was the brand of all brands, but they couldn't do an event. And if you think about the NBA or MLB, all these things, their games sell out, their competitions sell out. But if they were to do a con or some kind of consumer fan fest, it wouldn't work. NFL con would work.

Anything NFL will work. That's my belief.

Maybe. I don't know why they wouldn't do it. Is it real time, the Simpsons thing they're doing? Yeah. Have you ever seen their Nickelodeon? I ended up on a Nickelodeon broadcast, simulcast by accident one time with the green slime. Guys, I have to go, unfortunately. After we bring up Nickelodeon slime games, we've just got to go. Thank you so much. This is great. Guys, I'm a huge fan. I will say this. Also, Noah is a big fan. Troy, like Noah never sends me podcasts.

You guys are the only podcast he ever sends me. And I'm like, I didn't even know he knew about you guys. I was like, what? We've name checked him a few times. This is Noah Callahan Beaver. What is this? He runs content. He runs content at Complex. He's a cool guy, isn't he?

You nailed it back in the day, Troy. You were like, you said something to me one time. You were like, you're like, this whole shit is just a dance. And you're like, you need good dance partners. And he's like, you and Noah have figured out how to do the dance. And, you know, definitely then it was exceptionally true. But even now coming back to it, I'm like, oh, wow, that it's.

These businesses, they take like a chemistry amongst people. 100%. And BuzzFeed couldn't do that dance. They couldn't do the dance, man. And then what happens is you lose your ad revenue, right? And that's the hard part. Finding the tension between the publishing side and the content side is a dance and it's hard to do. And actually, it's what I want for you guys is that, and you won't let this happen, Moksha, I don't think, but when the focus becomes...

too narrowly on commerce revenue, you can't take your eye off the ad stuff because it's going to keep you going. You really need to sell advertising. And as we all know, the gross margin profile on...

Ads is way more positive than that on a marketplace business, but there's way more scale opportunity in a marketplace business. So it is a dance and it's interesting. It's like, it's a, it's a relationship of healthy tension on an, on a permanent basis. And I was like,

It's like you like each other, but you're also about to push each other. Now, one last question on your way out. Will Complex be endorsing a candidate for president? Yeah, absolutely not. We are not political at all. But I will say this. You're leaning a little bit more Trump, Trump, though, Moshe? We did Biden's last interview, you know, speedy.

360 was speedy. They were not happy that we published it. I like the contrast of speedy and Biden. It's nice. Yeah. I mean, there was a couple of gotcha moments there. And I think because of speedy, you know, that ushered in Kamala. And, you know, hopefully the campaign is thankful for our efforts in that area. All right. No, but on a serious note, we really try not to do anything political. It just...

Like there's enough of that out there. People aren't coming to us to like hear our opinions on politics. Like they want to know what's up with like the latest music, sneakers, art, fashion. It's just, you know. But if Travis Scott was running for president, you'd get behind that though, probably. I think they'd then cover it. But yeah, I don't know about get behind. Does that mean endorse? I don't think we'd ever endorse anyone.

And I, I rather agree with, you know, these media owners who are telling their editors, you know, like, Hey, we don't want that place for our brand. Right. Like,

It's like let the consumer make their own decision. Yeah. Awesome. On that note, thank you Moksha. Really appreciate it. Thank you Moksha. You're a good man. Appreciate it. We're not going to get to our endorsements unfortunately. We're running out. We got a hard stop and we're going to endorse a presidential candidate. Yeah. So I don't think we're going to be able to do it. Next, in four years we'll try again. Yeah, we'll do it next. I'm leaning towards Buttigieg but maybe Vance, we'll see.

Anyway, this was fun. I mean, it went through the phone. We're moving into a new topic now, aren't we? We're rushing. I thought you said you had a hard stop. Alex has a hard stop. I have a hard stop. Alex always has hard stops. I have a hard stop. That's going to be our spinoff podcast, Hard Stops with Alex.

Well, there's lots to talk about. It's like when Jenny lost- It's like when Jenny lost- ... live video commerce. This felt like live video commerce. When we have a guest and I just wanted to talk about the homepage. I don't know. What do you mean? I still find it interesting. I still find it interesting. I couldn't get in, but I still find it interesting that when you have a brand, if you look at MKBHD, if you made a media brand today, it would not express itself like this when you could do mkbhd.com, right? Yeah.

And so to me, it's like, it feels like a missed opportunity that I go there and not even the links and navigation are showing me like, here's Instagram, here's TikTok, here's the universe of that brand. There's only one place in the, like, even if they put like one of those link tree sites that says, this is what the brand is today, you know? And I still find that there's a value for,

the one kind of own piece of property that is not on their platform. And I get that people get connected to the brand like that. But if you do want to build a media brand and people have affinity with it and they say, oh, I want to see more of what these people do. There's no place to do that. Well, Alex, I can help you sharpen it. No, it's not strange. And I just want to try to bring some clarity to it. I understand what you're saying, my brother. And here's what I would say. I would say that the...

The bullets in the media gun historically are stories. Those stories are made into a feed. That feed is broken into categories or relevant, you know, more important pieces, less important pieces, hero pieces, etc.,

They're manifest on the homepage to tell a brand story, to tell people what they can get. It used to be a media distribution environment. It never really was one. It was more a kind of front window to your retail shop to say this is what we have in store. People didn't arrive that way. We've said it a million times. And so it is time to reconsider the homepage because...

As brand merchandising, I think it's still relevant, but one could argue that there's better ways to merchandise your brand these days. And I understand what you're saying, particularly when so much of what you're doing doesn't pertain to even the articles underneath the homepage. And webpages are not a particularly good distribution environment for video. Yeah.

So if your homepage was literally what you suggested, if your homepage was like navigation to all the endpoints where you really are meaningful, it's not a terrible idea. Right. It's like a B2B product almost. I mean, it's for like partners to come and see. It seems like it's less of a consumer value. To me, like a brand's website is going to be for the

People want to be super fans, but also the partners, but it also communicates stuff to the organization internally. Like this is like,

It's our front door to our building. Not everybody's going to make it through, but to me, this is where you communicate, hey, this is the activity of this brand. And I'm not kind of singling out complex here because I think a lot of media brands do that and you're hearing all these things and it's like, it's about commerce and short form video and partnerships and these things. And then you go there and you go there and you see nothing of that. And I think it's such a...

Such a missed opportunity. And to me also, you've got to make these calls where you say, okay, we're pulling all this down. This is what matters to us now. And even as a statement of intent, be able to use your homepage of saying, this is what we care about. That's all I'm saying. That's what I was trying to get to. And with that, I also have a hard stop. So why don't we go into a good product? Good.

I have a kind of a bad product actually. You know, I was just in Portugal for the last seven or eight days and it's a delightful country to visit. And, you know, I think it has about 10 million people. There's about 3 million of those in Lisbon and probably close to a million in the greater Porto area, the two places that I spent time this visit.

And, you know, it's an economy without the sort of energy and velocity of a United Kingdom and I guess a kind of emerging service. It's not emerging. There's a service sophistication, but it's, you know, it's still got, you know, a kind of, I don't know, kind of old European flair. A lot of fishing villages. One of the things that I noticed is a couple of nights we went out to dinner, we went to a couple of Michelin restaurants.

And it was myself, my wife, and one of my kids, my daughter, came from Ireland. And we were sort of all massively in agreement that Michelin restaurants suck. And it's way too much sort of ceremony and fussiness. And you're going to get like 14. Yeah, but it's no fun. Fine dining is not supposed to be fun.

Well, but like, even though there are moments when the food delights and you try the mix of like sea urchin in a truffle with blah, blah, blah, like it's all kind of interesting, but it's no fun. And we found that basically our satisfaction was inversely correlated with kind of Michelin accolades.

So that if you were going to go to like a local restaurant that serves sardines and was an intimate environment and family run and whatever, it's just like a thousand times better. Yeah. And I think it's also, it's a little out of date for modern. I think there's the fine dining era. It's so dated. The Michelin thing is so dated now. But Michelin is trying to evolve. Yeah.

To be fair, like Complex, they are evolving because they just named El Califa, which is a great taco cart in Mexico City. It was the first taco cart to get. They did do burrito tacos there. It was the first taco cart, I believe, to get a Michelin accommodation or at least a star or a star. I don't know which. But you're sitting in the restaurant, right? And you can see them trying to live up to evaluation criteria, right?

that Michelin has imposed that actually don't make you feel at home or make you feel like you belong or make you feel like you can have fun with your family. And it's also, Brian mentioned this concept of middleman brand that I had, and I still think, you know, complex is one doesn't mean they can't be successful, but like Michelin is one of those middlemen brands, right? Like I can, I can follow an influencer I like, and they'll drop, you know,

When I go to a new city, my wife and I sit down in front of YouTube and just watch a bunch of videos. And none of them are like from, you know, mostly serious publications. I think that's probably a better idea.

Yeah. Troy, when you were in Porto, where did you get your Francesina? Did you go to Gazela? Yeah, Gazela wasn't open, so we went to the place that the concierge told us. That, by the way, is an overrated fucking sandwich. I mean, maybe there's better gravy. I didn't find the gravy to be very good. Finally, we're getting hot takes. First of all, it's a heart attack. Man.

Man, we have a guest in softball after softball by talking about sandwiches and he fucking tears into them. My heart went into cramping on the walk back from Gazella. I wasn't sure. It worked out. It was fine. I'm here. Yeah.

But yeah, but Gazela is actually, the place is usually jammed. It starts, it opens at like noon or something, but there's a line out front and it's because it was featured in the Anthony Bourdain show. Well, we did make a pilgrimage to all of the greatest tart places because Jillian is a huge fan of those Portuguese tarts. Okay. Do you know what I'm talking about? No. No. I'm not a tart guy. No.

All right. I should know the name of them. I'm going to find the name right now. You guys can talk elections if you want. I'm going to hop off. Thanks, Alex. Pastis de nada. De nada. I'll see you folks later. Thank you. All right. Bye. Ciao. Troy, very quickly, Washington Post is in a new uproar over Jeff Bezos' decision, and it was his decision to not endorse Kamala Harris. Let's just stop saying that they chose not to endorse a presidential candidate. They weren't going to endorse Donald Trump. Give me a break.

My hot take on this, I want to get yours, is right decision, absolutely wrong timing. At the very least, it just gives the completely wrong impression. He should have done this a long time ago. I don't buy that he's too busy. I always see him on his yacht. He's always on his yacht. And he's even now, apparently, Semaphore incorrectly reported that he was in Venice, but he was actually in Amsterdam because they saw a canal.

But leave that aside, he wasn't even in the country. This is something that is roiling. And I think for me, the question is, what direction does the news media go if, when, whatever, Donald Trump gets reelected next week? Well, on this, a few things come to mind. So it's hard not to have anything that isn't partisan these days, right? And you would be right if you were a media owner and you wanted...

the media entity to live inside of kind of more platform dynamics than as a partisan media brand, because, um,

you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't these days. Like if meaning, wouldn't you rather be a platform for different points of view? Admittedly platforms also have bias, right. Of in some shape or form, right. They, they become places where people have a certain mindset or, or persuasion congregate like X has become a right wing environment. But you notice we don't wait for meta to issue there, you

you know, their presidential pick because it's a platform and people exist on top of it and they can do what they want at the level of the individual. I just think that today opinions more comfortably exist at the level of the individual. The problem with WAPO, I think, is that the notion of

of resistance became part of their overall ethos and marketing message and ideally, you know, connected to the product benefit, right? So obviously if resistance is your marketing message, then you should endorse a candidate. But just, I do think it points at another thing that I've witnessed firsthand on several occasions.

And you said it in your email this week. I can't remember exactly how you framed it. Maybe you can do it for us. But I think the hardest part about billionaires owning media brands is

is they're very, very hard to optimize. And the way that you would optimize anything that you bought is you'd focus on the product. Is the product delivering for the audience? If it isn't, let's modify the product. And modifying the product means changing the output of people that don't really feel like they're beholden to the owner or to the management of a media company.

Right there. They live in a different kind of high priests as Ben Smith, your friend called it. Right. And so you go in and you're like, we'll just change the, I mean, to change a media brand to more often than not, people try like when, when Benioff bought time magazine, did he change the product?

Did he change the format? Did he change the composition of the people that made the product? Did they actually change what comes out of the organization every day? And I think that you can add events or you can add list franchises or other types of accolades and you can sort of evolve the business from a monetization perspective. But the hardest part is really evolving the product, which means that you have to penetrate in the deepest possible way your technology,

talent pool, your sort of editorial mission, and...

what you put out every day. And I just think it's really, really hard for people that see their businesses as these sort of machines that you optimize. And that's what Bezos does. Yeah. So Bezos had said that the Washington Post in his response to this, he said that the Washington Post was just owning it was a complexifier for him, which I found like an interesting, because news is endlessly complex as a business because it's

operating these businesses when you're not supposed to operate the product is like what other business? Is there any other business that is that way that the person who owns the asset is not supposed to operate the product? It just doesn't really compute. Yeah. And the other thing is I think that the analogies to the past, like the Grahams may have been great owners of the Washington Post, right?

But it's really important to recognize that those were sort of days of industrial media, right?

where your business was kind of fortified. You had local monopolies, huge subscription bases, and very resilient, profitable businesses. And so you could resist the pressure from the outside in all kinds of ways and make decisions that kind of set the media brand on a long-term footing that you chose.

And so I think you could be more courageous because negotiating with a union in that context is like negotiating with a union when you own the railroad. There's a kind of industrial structure to the media and they're more resilient. Now, you know, these companies are fragile.

And we've seen that in, you know, the subscription losses at Washington Post. 250,000, I think, the last time. It's real material. It's like 10% or something like that, right? Yeah, I mean, poor Carl Wells. I hope they don't hold Carl to his, like, quota because Jeff Bezos tanked it. I just think that the current media sort of DTC dynamics where you can cancel and click a button, where there's significant, I mean, in the case of Washington Post, where you've lost...

your, your, your sort of spheres of influence in your local market to political, to punch bowl, to Axios, you know, increasingly to puck where you're, you're, you're really vulnerable. There's sort of DTC dynamics where you need to please the audience. And there's so much different than the industrial age of media. It's also, it's be careful what you wish for again, because again,

You know, everyone hates advertising until they actually have a subscription business and then they go into a churn spiral because there is clear audience capture that goes on, particularly after 2016. I don't necessarily blame them, but I had pointed out at the time that it's very short term to align yourself with the resistance. The democracy dies in darkness stuff came from Jeff Bezos.

That was from him. And you got to dance with the girl you brung, or the one you brung, I should say, because at the end of the day, no wonder people canceled. They got sold resistance.

And then you're saying, no, no, no, no, no, this isn't about resistance. Well, wait a second. You were the one who said it was about that. So I don't really blame people for canceling. I don't blame people for resigning or any of that because he kind of brought it all on himself. Now, maybe he's playing 4D chess, but if I've learned anything over the last several years is that the billionaires are not actually playing 4D chess.

They're just like regular. They're just like really, really good at what they do. But this is not 4D chess. I do not see that happening here. I don't know if you do, but I don't know why he owns the Washington Post at this point. I'm not sure what it does for him. I don't see the upside to it. It seems like nothing but headache after headache after headache.

You know, it does go to what is the purpose of a media brand in the future? What services? We talked a little about this with Moksha from Complex. Yeah.

You know, media brand has filter media brand is curator and media brand is as signifier of something else like of trust. And I think that that will actually still be important. And I think that we'll see real value in lots of media brands in the long term, even if, you know, production of media fragments to the individual, as we've been talking about for a long time.

But I think that you would like, if you were him, you might say, how do we make this more of a platform for talent, for different voices, at the same time, a very, very efficient news gathering operation? All of it needs to represent some level of trust and integrity because that's a real importance of the media brand. But I don't think that the brand itself needs to represent...

a specific political idea. Yeah. People can have different views. Institutions having one singular view is so, to me, it's just so out of date. It doesn't make sense at this time. Everything that you see in the information space is going away from that.

I would go further than saying no more endorsements. I would say the editorial board is done. Okay. If people want to, when the resignations happen, I'm going to be honest, I never heard of these people. I don't know who they are. I think they should start Substacks and make their case because I don't understand just because you got a job,

At some newspaper company, that is giving your view more, quote unquote, credibility. First of all, I think that's a good thing if that goes away. Go and fight with the overall market for your point of view. Reporting is different, and it really gets...

It really gets negatively impacted by people not understanding. I don't blame people not understanding that there's a quote unquote division between the newsroom and the editorial. Do you know how many people from the Wall Street Journal have to spend their life saying that the editorial board has nothing to do with the news organization? They have to spend so much time doing that. The problem is with these businesses is people take out subscriptions for a tribal affiliation.

You just see this with the cancellations and that's why I'm interested if Trump does win it and it's certainly I don't know the vibes tell me that he's going to win next week.

Does media take the short term, does the news media take the short term approach again and go back to resistance? Because there is an economic incentive, it seems, in a lot of these news organizations to go to the resistance. Look at The Times. The Times could not have pulled off what it did without tacking very hard against Trump. I don't think they could have. Yeah.

Well, in the meantime, I think that that four years has, you know, created an entirely new kind of media substrate where there will be no shortage of kind of resistance media, right? Obviously, that's already where we are today. And, you know, for every, you know, left wing podcast, there's, you know, Joe Rogan, right? So there's, you know, Pod Save America, and there's Rogan, and there's

So is this good for the crooked medias of the world? Like the Hedrickson? Absolutely. They're winners. And that's for sure. If Trump wins, they're winners. I mean, the post this, you know, if the election is a moment, what does it look like afterwards? And I think that, I mean, there's a lot of things that I'd be thinking about that are less partisan related. I think they're worth just kind of addressing is,

basic news, in some ways we're starting to see the last mile between AI and news close up. And we saw that with the AP announcement and their partnership with Meta.

So that, you know, AI will connect to a breadth of sort of fact-based, you know, AP-driven news. And, you know, the last mile to both search, i.e. what's in the search index of current stuff and of news is being closed by these AI partners. And I'm not sure that there's anything the media world can do to stop that.

And it's going to happen. And I think Meta is incredibly well positioned to be able to now not just take share from media and news, but take share from Google. And so I think that's going to happen. I think that you're already seeing something else really interesting is

Google has been experimenting as an aggregator by pulling more and more of the content into the SERP. So they're doing these new formats that will basically inside of the SERP let you see the pros and cons of a product or the review of a hotel or, you know, increasingly stuff that was the province of the thing under the link.

And so they're reaching out increasingly to media companies to say, we want you to be manifest on our layer and we will share revenue with you there. Yeah. And so you're going to see more of that. You know how they can get a lot of leverage for that? Because like in the affiliate world, like, you know, it's changes to the SERP or like everything. No, but they'll let you keep your links in there, right? To the affiliate stuff, but on their layer, not on your layer. Right.

But like in the news business, Discover is it. It's a total black box, but so many news publishers are increasingly dependent on Discover traffic. Massive. It's huge. If Google moves to like screw with Discover,

That's going to be a tough one for a lot of these businesses. Right. And then we're also seeing, I think that the headline, what I would say to you is I would encourage you to spend more time on our headline writing for our podcast and less on having the AI do it. I thought it was complexifier. No, I don't do AI for that. Well, but like the death of text was a good headline. Well, I took that from Alex.

I think, yeah, good, good for you. I think it was a good one. Yeah. But I, you know, so you got stuff that's automated in the AI and you got stuff that's personality driven. We can see how media companies are kind of aligning to the personality driven side of this from Substack to,

you know, the kind of senior voices that someone like Puck has. Obviously, if you're sitting on top of a media company, you're wondering how much money should I put into text versus audio and video? But audio is like a really important vector to invest in currently. I just don't know how you don't have that. Well, it's cheap too. I mean, the reason that like we... It's cheap, but it's also so competitive, right? There's just like, it's really hard to build your podcast audience.

I think I referenced it last week that like 50% of podcast ad spending goes to the top 25 shows. Yeah. Like that's how competitive it is. Yeah, but I just saw a stat that you might find interesting. 47%, I guess Americans, I don't know what the age is, from Edison Research, as of October 28th, listened to a podcast in the last month. Big numbers. And you want to hear who the top 10 podcasts are in the U.S.? What's number one, Brian?

Joe Rogan. Number two. But Joe Rogan, by the way, by a factor of three or four, by a mile, 16 million. Beneath Joe Rogan. Beneath Joe Rogan? I don't know. Call Her Daddy? Yeah, Call Her Daddy at 4.3. Very good. You won't get the third one. It's Crime Junkie. Now The Daily from The New York Times has pushed to four with 2.8 million. Something called Rotten Mango I've never heard of. Theo Vaughn is number five. Oh, yeah. I support that. Sean Ryan, number six.

Is he like a Navy SEAL? Yeah, he's kind of a weird guy. I get him confused with the Dan Bongino guy. And then Dan Bongino. Yeah, and then Tucker Carlson after that. And then it falls way, way off. Why is podcasting so right-wing? I mean, I guess it's the same as talk radio. It's like talk radio was always right-wing. Is Call Her Daddy right-wing? Is The Daily right-wing?

No, but you know what I mean. Like there's more, there's more just like talk radio. I remember it was always a discussion in the nineties when I talk radio was so conservative. It was always like Rush Limbaugh and, and it had a bent towards that. Maybe CB radio is the same way. I don't know. Yeah. I did you see that Joe Rogan is, is negotiating with Kamala Harris, which is like, I don't know, this is such a weird moment. And, but I don't think we're going backwards where, you know,

We have one presidential candidate who spends three hours, misses a rally, like two hours late for a rally to go to like a podcast studio. And Kamala Harris said, I'll give you an hour, but you got to come like to like, you know, my campaign stuff, just like, you know, any other interview. And he's like, no, you got to come to come to Austin and come to the studio. And it can't be an hour.

I don't know. It's a little bit of hubris maybe, but I think it is also, I mean, it's indicative of several things, none of them quite good for the institutional news. Well, the last thing I would say, and we'll tee this up for future discussions, because I think it's really interesting and it's part of what Moksha talked about in the complex thing, but

I do think we're poised to see more change around ad product that supports media, right? So what has the last couple of years brought us between the time when Moksha ran sales at Complex to today? Well, retail media, massive sales.

Performance media, massive, way less focus on sort of display-oriented ad offerings. Video has become more important, and now we're seeing podcast advertising start to mature a little bit. Now, Ben Thompson makes this really interesting point, and I don't know if you've seen this sort of kind of announcement that Meta's been playing with the idea of injecting AI into

you know, generate a generative posts into your feed, right into your Instagram feed or your Facebook feed, right? That would feature you, like it would be Brian playing tennis, wearing a Lacoste sweater, and increasingly at the same time. So it's it's it's fake content, or it's generative content, based on everything it knows about you. And I think that, quite frankly, I think audiences will be delighted with it, because anything that's about you works.

Even if it's, you know, generated by a smart robot. Now, what you're also going to see is increasingly advertising is customized and personalized, not just in targeting, but in creatively. So increasingly in your feed, you're going to get stuff that is hyper personalized, generated, creative based on you, like you're playing tennis in your Lacoste sweater and you can click and buy that sweater.

And, and so these worlds of generative content that starts to be the actually interesting, the way that social media starts to get in the content game is through generative content. And that merging with advertising is I think what you're going to see a lot of, and it's all going to be performance based click to buy, click to call, whatever.

I think that's going to be the story of the next five years of advertising, which is hyper, hyper personalized, creative, starring you or your friends or things that you care about. I think very few people are going to be able to compete in this world because it's intensely technical and data dependent. Yeah, I think that that's part of the, that's going to be the next wave of

of weirdo media that we see in the, you know, post the election and, and in that will fuel the next election. Yeah. But that sounds like, that sounds like Jetson's level, like media. So like, it's not anymore though. No, no, that's what I mean. Like, that's good in a good way. Whereas like, I still see what's going on in the ad tech open, open web ad tech world. It's like, Oh my God. Like it's, I don't see how, how that keeps up.

Because like Masha said, with display advertising, I'm like, he's still trying to optimize display ads on webpages and fight over who can shave off a few pennies off the CPA. It's just like, I don't...

There's not a big future for that. So it'll be interesting to see what tools... To me, display on good properties like Anavo, Garnell, or whatever still feels like billboard advertising. It'll be around for a long time. It's a good reminder. Volume will be way smaller premiums. You'll see CPM premiums. But it won't drive the new sort of ad economy that needs... We need something to replace...

you know, what we have today to keep, to keep publishers, you know, in the money. Final point is I was talking with, with a big ad buying company about like the sustainable news, like forum thing that we're doing next year. And,

And they were making the point, I was like, "Look, it's not going to be a pity party. It's going to be about how to actually get these businesses growing again and sustainable and not pointing fingers." Yes, there's plenty of people to point fingers at. And this person was making the point, it's like, the ad products suck. Literally, the clients don't want them. And I think that there's a lot of blame to go around for the current state of these businesses.

But like you're saying, you have to come back to the fact that Google and Meta have created far better ad products, like not even close. The experience of going on Instagram and the experience of going on the typical news website is, it's so different and you can't get around that. That isn't like some, ultimately you compete in the market and news publishers have not kept up.

Yeah. Well, the last thing I would say that struck me about this kind of what we refer to or other people have referred to as this kind of podcast election is that

How does a medium define what works for a candidate? Right. And so if back in the day when broadcast dominated, you know, the U.S. election and Nixon faced off against Kennedy, one was, you know, photogenic and great on television and felt trustworthy and the other one didn't.

And that was obviously Kennedy versus Nixon. And today, if podcasts are defining in any way what what, you know, voters feel and believe, it's those people that do really well on podcasts that tell good stories that feel human, that know how to weave things.

And I don't know if you listen to Trump on Rogan, but I'm not- I listen to parts of it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just saying that I think a lot of people that I know, a lot of people from my town, a lot of people that are just average folks, even though it got a little kooky in some places, they would find him to be Trump, but kind of relatable. Like a guy that you could have a conversation with. And I think that that's-

Really, if podcasting is going to be the way that we get to know a candidate, it's like you better be good at it. Yeah, I think so. And I think news products have to adapt to that too. There's a lot of different tools in the journalistic toolbox. The adversarial interview, the morally safer stuff.

A lot of the things that came into media for good reason, the news media for good reason after Watergate are fairly old now, right? And then the conventions are very old and they need to be updated because if you look at this election, it's pretty clear people like Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan are, and Alex Cooper are running circles around a news media establishment, which has every sort of advantage over these individuals. They've,

So ultimately the market is saying something. So I would say publishers should listen. Anyway. Yeah. If you want more, if you're curious about that, by the way, Dylan Byers has a new podcast. I forget what it's called. Dylan Byers writes for Puck. You know who Dylan is. And he had on...

Brian Williams talking about their, and the producer that's doing the show for Amazon, the election day show. And it was pretty amazing to hear them reflect on what,

What it's like working inside of Amazon against, you know, their own project versus the time they spent at NBC. They're going to be doing it in Los Angeles. They're using the studio. Apparently, this is an incredible studio that Amazon now owns because it was an MGM studio on the lot in Los Angeles. It'll be fascinating to watch that coverage. I got to say, this is like the biggest waste in this is it are on like studios. It's so stupid.

They got one that's almost like that Vegas, what's it called? The orb thing. The sphere? The sphere. They have a sphere-like thing where they can project you into any environment instantly. Those studios are usually just a giant money pit. That's my take on it.

You know, the other interesting thing about what they're doing is they're using all kinds of the new generation of podcasters and kind of columnists from the likes of Puck and Axios to support their election broadcast. I started watching that two-way, the Mark Halperin thing. It's kind of interesting. I mean, I like it more in theory, I feel like, than in execution because it's like, it sounds great. It's like, we're going to have basically a Zoom call. It's a Zoom call. I went in once. Yeah.

But on YouTube, you see it's basically a high-end Zoom call. It's got some graphics. It's talk radio.

Yeah. And then they, they pull in like, you know, a random guy from Nevada and, and things of that nature. Sometimes it goes into, you know, like when it's like, okay, we've got 10 minutes for questions. Who has a question? And it's like, oh no, because that can go in a bad direction. Yeah. The question is, does, does that format, like it needs to be ambient, right? I'm not going to tune into that thing and sit and watch it. It needs to be sort of on the TV off to the side, just like morning television.

You know, I wonder if it becomes, for other than like a real sort of committed political nerd, whether it becomes an important, you know, media product. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to give it some try. I want to take some notes. All right, Troy, this is fun. All right. Thank you. See you. Bye. Bye.