He gave you the finger once, the first time you saw anyone making that gesture. Gino is this thin, moustached hothead with tight stonewash jeans and big white sneakers, and a permed mullet. He looks at you—whenever you look at him, his eyes always immediately shoot back—but he leaves you alone and trots out of sight.
The wall with flickering TVs plays an MTV video, you kind of watch as you wait for your mother to return, but not really. The two year-olds have finished their game, they mumble some curses, one smacks the arcade machine, and they leave.
She passes you and you feel her eyes, but you pretend not to see her. The lady in her mobility scooter, her bags of groceries tied to the handlebars.
That would be no problem. I think increasingly what has been sold to brands and agencies as the magic salve to reach their audience is less and less true. I think we see that in many ways with what is happening with Facebook right now. Banner ads, banner impressions, are really, I think, in the long run, are much, much less valuable.
I mean, there are big, big players who can make a lot of money on that, just pure scale. We actually have more views of custom content than some of the biggest publishers in the world.
We can do millions of views on a piece of custom content, where a lot of larger publishers that have 20, 40, 50 million uniques will struggle to do , All right, you got me. How does that work? So people see How do you tell them your story? And so there was a very interesting overlap. Our demo and their demo met really nicely. When one of my former coworkers wrote about you launching this site, he referenced Monocle. I just knew about it. But the idea was this is kind of a niche product and that works, it attracts a certain kind of advertiser — which again, I get that as a physical product, it seems, in digital world, that tends to not work.
Yeah, we had an up round, we have a new valuation. There is a This is a crazy game. We just built out, we just hired a bunch of new people in the revenue side because we have an influx of proposals that we need to deal with and people who are interested in advertising with us. And the Monocle comparison is interesting, only because Monocle built a very strong brand on not every single person.
They built a really strong brand, and a valuable one, on focusing on just telling a certain kind of story to a certain kind of person. But there is, for instance, their audience is much less savvy when it comes to technology and the internet than our audience is.
It would be a really interesting differentiator there. You want to be the seat cool David Chang thing or maybe a more profitable version of that. Yeah, and yes, and that there are probably are a bunch of those that should exist in the world, not just one of them, and that is the long-term plan.
And I think that we actually have some of the raw materials really figured out. And also The Outline. As you can hear from that last smooth segue we did, this is not a subscription business Josh is running.
Everyone else except for most of my colleagues here at Vox Media, I think all of them at Vox Media, all the Vox Media properties are free. Everyone else in media has either put up a paywall or is about to put up a paywall. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. We should have one of those! That part I get. There is a lot Nick Thompson from Wired. A trade publication? He ran banners. By the way, I think a lot of ads suck and are very bad, I agree with those people.
They seem, frankly, to work better on TV. Imagine if, instead of putting a television ad in between segments of a TV show, you put a magazine ad on TV. That is what most advertising on the internet is. They also need to be doing a different You know what Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook, to some degree, and Pinterest figured out? Figuring that out is the key to unlocking what advertising should be on the internet.
And the key to unlocking what good advertising looks like, and very few people have done it well. And almost no one, I would say, zero publications have built a system that is holistically, from the ground up, designed around the marriage of both interesting digital-first content and interesting digital-first advertising.
Then you went to Bloomberg, we can talk about that. In the early days when we were building things like The Verge and when we were asking Ezra and Melissa and Matt to come and do Vox.
So that certainly informs them, how, I think. If you want the Bloomberg paywall product, I suggest you get The Terminal, it rips. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Beautiful town. I started off My first I started writing as a I made dance records for a while. I had a Top 40 hit in the U.
Just random stuff. I went around the world DJing. It seems so horrible now. This is from or something. Which was meant to emote how the song made you feel, not the actual act of pistol-whipping people.
But anyhow, so I did that for a while. My brother and I made music together, we had a studio in Brooklyn. And were you someone who aspired to write or thought it would be fun for giggles? I did some writing for music magazines, reviews, record reviews. This was back when Engadget and Gizmodo surpassed or replaced Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and all the sort of nerd blogs, or nerd publishing businesses, and gotten bigger.
This was in the age of blogs being, still, a second-class citizen. Apple was, well, they were the iPod company at that point. So yeah, I started writing part-time for Engadget and I got obsessed with it and then I took a full-time job there. And then I became the editor in chief a year later.
And then I took the entire team, we went and started The Verge. No, no, no. There I know the Vox Media corporate history.
You care a lot about the way things look, you like them to look different than the way things look on the internet. You can just go to theoutline. And check it out. While you were at Bloomberg, you guys did crazy-weird presentations. Why is I also think that the web is a very, has been a traditionally very, at least in media, not a very expressive place.
I actually have a slide in my old, my original deck from when I did my seed round of snippets of front pages from a paper in to BuzzFeed News in , and they literally, the design is basically the same idea. The web and the internet and digital technology and mobile phones have these incredible capabilities to be more than black text on a white background.
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