The Puck CEO’s quest to reinvent the news business in the influencer age

Today, I’m talking with Sarah Personette, CEO of Puck, which is a fancy new media company that’s been around for just about five years now.

Puck hires big stars and gives them newsletters that are all mostly part of a subscription bundle. These newsletters are often must-reads in their categories — everyone in Hollywood reads Puck’s Matt Belloni, for instance. Those reporters then get equity in Puck and a share of the company’s revenue.

The idea is to combine the financial incentives of the influencer economy with the rigor of old-school journalism — you’ll hear Sarah say journalists were the original influencers, which is Puck’s catchphrase. Decoder listeners know that I have a lot of questions about that, and how it all fits into the modern media landscape.

The creator and influencer economy works very differently than journalism does. If you take a high-level look at the business of most creators, they all kind of look like little ad agencies, doing brand deals and negotiating rates in a way that has always felt incompatible with journalism, at least to me. I don’t begrudge anyone this reality; that’s where the money is, especially since the big platforms that distribute content tend to pay very little for it, if they pay anything at all. And since the biggest audiences are on the platforms, finding a way to bridge the gap is basically the challenge in media — how do you find new readers who are willing to pay without accidentally giving your work away for free on platforms that don’t seem to value it very much?

I’ve had versions of this conversation with a lot of media people over the years: everyone from the CEO of The New York Times and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to streaming service executives, digital media folks, and, of course, a bunch of creators. Usually these conversations are pretty loose and pretty fun, because, well, I’m also in the media, and we all have this same basic problem. I was hoping to get a fresh view from Sarah, because before she became CEO of Puck, she spent a long time working first for Facebook and then for Twitter.

So I really wanted to get into all that with Sarah, and I asked her a lot of questions about it. I have to admit, though: I’m not sure I got the answers I was looking for.

Have a listen, and let us know what you think. We really do read all the emails.

Okay: Puck CEO Sarah Personette. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Personette, you’re the CEO of Puck. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you, Nilay. What a pleasure to be here.

I’m really excited to talk to you. I have a million thoughts about the creator economy and journalism and the information ecosystem. You’re a fascinating person to talk to about all that, because you worked at the big platforms — Twitter and Facebook — and now you’re at Puck, which is a media company that has an interesting perspective on being integrated with the creator and influencer world.

I just want to start at the start. You’ve been the CEO at Puck for a little over two years now?

Correct. About two and a half.

Before that, again, you were at Facebook and Twitter during some periods of pretty rapid change there. You spent a minute at Refinery 29. Quickly describe your experiences at the platform companies.

Very different actually. When I first started at Facebook, that was back in around 2009, 2010. And so the company was around 1,000 people. And even though that sounds like a large company, it actually was more of a startup and operated with a startup mentality. You used to hear Mark Zuckerberg say a lot, “Move fast and break things.” Then fast-forward three or four years post-IPO, it was, “Move fast and build good infrastructure.” Just even in that small amount of time, seeing the maturation of the company, the growth of the company, it moved from being a singular big blue app to also being a family of apps and services. We had acquired Instagram, and we had to integrate that appropriately. We spun out Messenger into a singular application. We acquired WhatsApp. We acquired Atlas and used that as our measurement tool and foundation.

And then with that, you also had this massive technological shift, which is really applicable, I think, to the rise of the creator economy and the impact on publishers and media companies that I know we’ll get into. But during the time that I was at Facebook, which was over about an eight-year period, we also had the shift from desktop to mobile. That was a really profound technological change that had an impact, certainly on employees and the way that the company was run, and it also had a significant impact on the way that businesses operated, the way that they became mobile-first, the way that they interacted and communicated with consumers in a totally new and direct-to-consumer way. That was my Facebook experience.

At Twitter, I was the chief customer officer for about five years through to the sale of the company to the current ownership. That was really interesting because of the pattern recognition of having gone through so many different stages of growth [at Facebook] — To zoom out for a second, when you think about organizational change and organizational change theory, there’s a belief that systems, structures, and processes break in threes and 10s. When a company grows from three people to 10 people, 10 people to 30 people, 30 people to 100 people, et cetera, those systems, tools, and structures essentially need to be rewritten.

Within the Twitter sphere, I came in where we had the opportunity to rewrite a lot of those systems and structures and really rebuild the ad tech stack. We had the opportunity to really think holistically about how we were serving the public conversation in each and every engagement. We also were able to really think through how we serve and deliver value for our advertisers when they’re trying to launch a brand or connect with what’s happening in the world. That shift was really powerful because the evolution and the stages in gating that I experienced in the Facebook world were some of the things and the best practices I was able to bring to my Twitter experience, which was just truly one of the greatest honors of my life, to be able to be a leader in that company during that time.

You mentioned Twitter’s current ownership. Obviously it’s X now. It’s owned by Elon Musk. You left when Elon bought it. What was that like?

Excellent question. I can’t really speak about the current state of the company for several reasons, but what I can share with you is that during that acquisition, which was obviously a very public acquisition, I talk about it being one of the greatest honors of my life and truly it was. I think in so many ways we live in a very volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, and that acronym is not by mistake. VUCA is a type of leadership structure that I’ve used in almost the entirety of my career to help lead teams.

During that time [at Twitter], my team was around 2,000 people around the world. I was able to communicate with them about what was happening, why it was happening, how we helped customers understand the value of the acquisition and the reason to stay on the platform. Being able to navigate those types of changes is something that makes every single individual a much better leader. And as those folks have both stayed at the company and as clients have continued to stay on with the company, as well as those folks that have moved on to other roles inside of the industry, I know that they look at that time and they look at the way that I try to communicate with real deep transparency and empathy and surround things around evidence-based decisioning that has stayed with them and made them stronger leaders over the course of time. It was a powerful part of my career.

Wait, can you say what that acronym is again?

It’s called VUCA, V-U-C-A. The origins of VUCA actually come from the National War College following the Cold War. There was a realization that there’s no longer this stability in a bipolar world. When you were thinking about how to structure for a new system of enemy, if you will, you needed to be more planful and more capable of navigating within a highly volatile, again, very complex, ambiguous world.

I’ve taken that philosophy and applied that at significant moments in time in my career with my teams, because if you’re operating in a VUCA world and you’re leading in a VUCA world, you’re always really mindful of establishing a plan, communicating clearly with each other, developing trust inside of your organization so that when things like Cambridge Analytica occur or things like a public acquisition occur, that you’re ready for it. Those things can be large and globally proliferated [or] really small because in so many ways, work and business is the most personal thing and how we manage ourselves is a big part of how we also collectively manage a team.

I do like the idea that your approach to the Twitter acquisition by Elon Musk was to compare it to Cold War, bipolar power dynamics.

Not at all a comparison. I have been using VUCA well before. I actually was introduced to the concept by the CEO of Build-A-Bear, Sharon John. She’s an exceptional human and an exceptional leader. She was introduced to it at some conference and I used to sit on her board and she brought that back to a meeting and I was like, “This is something that really certainly has had staying power for me.”

Okay, now I’m just dying to know why the Build-A-Bear CEO thinks that she needs Cold War-era political philosophy, but we will do that episode. The producers will book that another time.

You should book her as a guest. She is phenomenal.

You mentioned the idea that some customers stayed on. I’m curious about this. Your roles have been more advertising focused, I would say broadly. Making people spend money on the platforms. Elon’s approach to advertisers who had concerns about that platform after he bought it was to sue them, and to threaten them, and to tear down their brand safety initiatives. That’s all stuff that, in the administration that you were a part of, Twitter actually built up, and that Facebook at some point was a big part of. The idea that “We’re going to have a wide open spread of content from our users, we will build the tools to make sure you’re in the right places at the right time, you’re not next to the bad stuff. We’ll have content moderation to make sure that people don’t see the bad stuff at high rates.”

That’s all basically been torn down, particularly on X, but even maybe on Facebook. How do you see that world playing out? Because the idea of a company like Puck or any other premium media organization, the pitch to advertisers is like, “We’re special. And X and Facebook are bad. It’s, very bluntly, noise and full of garbage and they’re tearing down the things that make your brand special. You should come over here where you have a smaller audience that cares for the kind of premium journalism we make.” But you built all that up and now it’s being torn down and now you’re at Puck trying to make that sale. How do you feel about all that stuff being torn down?

I can’t comment on the current state of the company, but what I would love to zoom out and talk about is some of the technological shifts that impacted and have impacted where we are today as a talent-led journalism organization. I’ll start you with these five numbers: 38, 14, seven, four, and months. 38 is the number of years that it took radio to hit 100 million listeners. 14 is the number of years it took TV to hit 100 million viewers. Seven is 100 million for the desktop internet. Four is the migration of 100 million to mobile, and then months is the adoption of AI by 100 million people. The reason why I bring that up and why I think those numbers matter and the progression of how they get incrementally and deeply smaller is that we have lived through in our lifetime, and certainly in our careers, some of the fastest technological shifts that have ever occurred.

Now, you might be like, “That’s great. And yes, the different platforms go through that, but why does it matter for news and media?” If you go back to the 1970s, which was the industrial media model, you had a really interesting, very neat landscape. You had 90% of viewership for news concentrated in ABC, CBS, and NBC. You had local newspapers thriving, like absolutely thriving from a circulation perspective, and it was actually a good business model to be in. And you had trust at an all time high. Trust was at 72% when Gallup was doing the research at the time. That’s particularly interesting because distribution was really scarce. It was quite controlled, but you also had a lot of these very clear shared experiences between people. When I walked through those changes and those shifts from a technological perspective, the first thing that happened was really the rise of the internet.

The internet and digital disruption didn’t just dismantle journalism. It actually rebuilt and reshaped journalism layer by layer. That’s only the first shift because that’s where new voices emerged, that’s where local stories traveled faster. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Panama Papers, but that was like a great example of the internet and journalism at its best. You had reporters from multiple different countries coming together to report on corruption. But at the same time, you had some challenges. You had the systems starting to break. That very capital-intensive world now no longer was capital-intensive. With a keyboard and with access to wifi, you could be a journalist and that was awesome, but you also had scarcity disappear, you had attention fragment, you had the gatekeepers, the editors of the world move from being capable of editing to editing being dominated by algorithms.

Just quick numbers. During a 15-year period, 2,500 local newspapers closed and 36,000 newsroom jobs disappeared. That rebuilding was just starting to get under control and then mobile disruption occurred and now all of a sudden information is in our pockets and there’s so much power in that. But what also comes with that is that now news and media, which used to be invited into our homes for the 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock news became a little bit more disruptive and interruptive. The rise of AI has experienced the steepest acceleration curve out of any technological shift and presents many powerful and very positive aspects of what it can do for workflow, what it can do for operational excellence. There are many positives, but at the same time, there was another challenge in that if anything, any object, any article can be created by something that is artificial, then who can we trust?

In 2023, Gallup did another poll, and trust had declined from that 72% in the 1970s to 32%. It’s seemingly obvious that the answer to “Who can we trust?” is “People.” That is why for Puck, being a talent-led organization, Jon Kelly, the founder of our company, had this thesis years ago. I don’t know if he went through the technological shifts that my mind goes through, but he knew that journalists were the original influencers and he knew that in order to reclaim trust for the reader, it required putting talent at the center for so many different reasons. But in particular, I think that reclaiming of trust was really, really important.

This is why Puck’s talent-first model is so influential, why we actually see others trying to copy it, because when you hear from Matt Belloni, you know that he has deep-seated relationships in Hollywood and in entertainment. You know he is extremely well-sourced. You also know that because we have a primary distribution model of newsletters, you can respond to his email and he’s going to respond back to you.

Wait, is he? Is he going to respond?

He responds to every single email?

I can’t speak for him. I don’t have access to his inbox, but he prides himself on both listening to all of his readership as well as responding to his leadership. And it’s not just Matt. Within the Puck ecosystem, we have eight different franchises that serve the professional elite. We have the entertainment franchise under Matt Belloni. We have Lauren Sherman, who leads our fashion content and our fashion franchise, and Marion Maneker, who leads our art content. We have Bill Cohan, who leads all of our finance content. Ian Krietzberg, who we just brought on last year for the introduction of our AI and technology franchise, is exceptional. All of these individuals are people who have points of view and relationships and sourcing capabilities that put the personality and the person at the center so that our subscribers, that direct reader relationship can really thrive in a high-trust community.

And that’s I think the story of how we got to a talent-led business and a talent-led business model where journalists are at the center and equity incentives are aligned. Each of our journalists have ownership inside of the company, which is not anything that used to exist in legacy media before. That is a really, really powerful sentiment and a really powerful point in where, to the top of the question, all of these technology shifts have really driven us today and why I wanted to be CEO of this company. Because you don’t have a lot of CEOs in media companies that come from technology companies, but the pattern recognition that comes in that scale and the influence of what we tried to do inside of those companies matters so much today in what we’re designing.

You’ve kind of gotten to my structure question. I ask everybody on Decoder to describe the structure of the company. It seems like you’ve got Jon Kelly, he’s the editor-in-chief, and so he operates deputy editors, it sounds like, in a bunch of verticals. And do they have reporters?

I’ll zoom out. Jon Kelly is both editor-in-chief as well as the founder of the company. He is really just one of the smartest individuals that I’ve ever worked with and I say that having worked with Jack Dorsey and Sheryl [Sandberg], and so many others. He’s really exceptional. He oversees the entirety of our content organization. That’s inclusive of Puck as a media brand and that’s inclusive of Air Mail as a media brand.

That’s with the acquisition?

Yeah, we acquired Air Mail back at the end of October, so I know you’ll have questions around that. But Air Mail is run by Editor-In-Chief Julia Vitale, who grew up underneath Graydon [Carter]. She is absolutely exceptional and she’s come over to lead that team.

One of the things that’s really interesting here is we have a young audience, a big audience. I’m not sure that they know what Puck is or what that history is, and I think this is one of the bigger questions I have for you as a whole.

This is a pretty storied legacy that you’re trading on. Buying Air Mail is a big deal that I do want to talk about because it was Graydon Carter’s venture after Vanity Fair. I’ve read his memoir, it was very fun. But I know my audience doesn’t know any of these things.

Actually, the dynamic between “Do I follow Matt Belloni,” or “Do I care about Puck as an institution?” is one of the most challenging dynamics in all of media. I will tell you, I actually disagree with a few things you’ve said already. One, I think it’s the platforms that have torn down the institutions. I don’t think that they are a good partner for any media brand. And I think the idea that journalists and influencers are the same or should be the same is actually quite dangerous.

I would pull those ideas as far apart as I can because I think journalism is a process, it’s a way of working.

Being an influencer is a way of making money. Those things are not aligned. And I’m very curious how you can pull all these ideas together and try to have the cost structure of the old way, the prestige of the old way, the Graydon Carter way, with the economics that are pulling everyone towards integrated brand deals and influencer world. Because it doesn’t matter if the journalists are influencers if they’re not doing the direct brand integrations the influencers are actually doing to support that level of work.

While I appreciate your disagreement and it makes for a very good podcast, I would disagree with your disagreement.

The thing that I would say is challenged in legacy media. You can’t really say that legacy media had it figured out because, as you look around, we’ve seen just constant layoffs happening inside of the industry for the last five to ten years. Dylan Byers, who runs our media content, has written about it.

One of the challenges with that is that the majority of layoffs were not coming from the sales teams or from the operations side. The people that were being laid off were the people that made the product, the people that influenced society. The people that helped to create a world that ideally would define what trust looked like in journalism. That was the journalist. For me, on the technology side, when I think of heroes inside of the organization, it’s usually the product and engineering folks. But for whatever reason, the way that media grew up, it wasn’t the people that were making the product, it wasn’t the journalists. It was actually those were the people that were ultimately being let go.

Right, but the reason they were being let go is because they cost money and there was no money associated with their product because their distribution was torn down by platforms.

My biggest problem in my cost structure — and my reporters know, I say this to them all the time — is that I pay them money and then they tweet for free. This is the dynamic in every newsroom in the world is that we give our work to other people’s distribution for free all the time. And I know that you have a subscription model and that’s different, but that is specifically the dynamic that has led to the hollowing out of newsrooms, that we don’t control our distribution.

Can we put the platform piece to the side for one second and just finish up the influencer?

We can try. I’m really not sure how.

No, I will address that, but I don’t think those two things are connected. And the reason for that is we do have a subscriber-based model. Our subscription revenue grew over 50% last year and that is really critical. We do control our distribution and our journalists are not a cost center. The way that we look at each franchise is thinking through the economics of each of those franchises and we do a biannual business review with each of those reporters who anchor each of our franchises.

So the operating leverage that we bring into this system still allows for the job to be done. The job to be done is not… I wouldn’t define influencers and creators only as those that do integrated brand partnerships.

But that’s how they all make their money.

That might be how they make their money, but Matt Belloni is very influential in the world of Hollywood because he’s reporting on it, and that influence matters. But so does the relationship that he has. This is why I started out by saying he goes so deep into his sourcing and this is not… Matt’s an illustration of all of our journalists. But when you are in that industry, you know you have to read him because he is reporting on the inside story. He’s giving you access to information that you would not normally have access to and he does that with a high margin business. So yes, our revenue model is two-fold. We have a subscriber revenue model and we have a commercial revenue model, an advertising model.

Those things that you’re describing, that you can’t have a profitable business that is talent-led and journalist-led, I would disagree with. I think that is absolutely possible and that is the reason why each of our journalists have equity and ownership in the company, because we want them to be incentivized to make hard decisions around cost. We are very diligent in those things. We also have the luxury of being 4.5 years old and not having been built for the last 20 years.

I consistently say that it is a real honor to be able to lead this company and to lead it through significant advancements in growth from a revenue perspective, from a content perspective, from a talent perspective and also from a subscriber growth perspective. We just hit over 100,000 paying subscribers, we have upwards of a million folks overall that are reading the publication and that’s significant.

To get to your platform piece—

Actually, can I just ask you? The last public number from 2025 was 45,000. So the 55,000 is from the Air Mail acquisition?

It is the last public number we announced with Brian Morrissey and the rebooting, I announced that we had hit 100,000. We don’t actually break out the difference between them. That 45,000 was a 2024 number. With the acquisition of Air Mail, we will exceed 100,000.

Okay. So you can just back into it. You had one public number, you made an acquisition, you had a big jump to another public number. Does Air Mail have the same structure? Do they have equity, do they have a revenue share?

Yeah. So right now with the acquisition, we’re working through all of the employee-based comp for equity and ownership. It’s all one collective company and all one same compensation structure.

Air Mail was a brand, Graydon Carter is a brand person, Vanity Fair is a brand. You were not really supposed to know who Graydon Carter was unless you were the sort of person who needed to know who Graydon Carter was and then he was very important. Air Mail was built on that model. How many people worked at Air Mail?

We have 45 to 50 people from Air Mail and 45 to 50 people from Puck. We’re about 50-50 in terms of talent overall. Although just for your listener base, as you do an acquisition, one thing that you think about is the post-merger integration and how you bring two companies together, how you think about centers of excellence where you might have four finance people on one side and you have four finance people on the other side. We did a lot of that synergy work.

Usually when people say synergy work, they mean layoffs. Did you lay people off?

We laid off a few people from the Air Mail side and a few people from the Puck side. Yes, absolutely, we did. We were thoughtful and really careful. We communicated that within the first 24 hours of the acquisition and reviewed where we felt like we had too many people within one team and then where we would port folks over from either side of the business.

And then the total split between the talent who is supposed to go out and be the face of the company and make all the money and the management is what now?

Management, we have nine people on our leadership team and then we have, across our journalist and editorial teams, probably 40. And then maybe, yeah, 40 to 50. And then the rest are in sales, marketing, our technology team. We have a very small strategy and ops team.

One of the reasons I’m asking this is I have friends who’ve left big media jobs to go to Substack or Ghost, or whatever. And then I have friends who have left Substack to go to another email provider because they think Substack’s 10% revenue cut is too much. They’re not getting the value out of Substack. You’re taking more than 10%. Just describing that overhead for an individual journalist, that’s a lot to pay into to support a sales team or whatever else you might have, compared to the revenue you might get back. How do you justify the split you’re taking from the individual reporters?

From a compensation perspective and we do, on an annual basis, we look our comps on compensation relative to the industry, and our journalists and editors—

Wait. “The industry” is the media industry, or the Substack industry, or the Instagram influencer industry…?

The media industry. And our comps are at or very much above the current comps. And then also, our journalists, but all of our employees, have equity and ownership in the company. I feel very confident that the way we pay our people is very much aligned and incentivized with the holistic company.

I think on the Substack side—

Wait, can I just ask about that equity? Are you paying dividends on that equity? Or is that just paper money?

No, we are not because we’re not a public company right now.

Sure. I’m asking what the equity is worth. I am the person who owns a bunch of paper equity in a media company, it’s great. Sometimes I think about it, it doesn’t pay the bills. Does it pay the bills for your people?

Well, I appreciate that. Not at the current moment, but the value and especially with the recent acquisition, as well as what everything was built on prior to that, has made the value of the equity significantly higher. And as someone who was also at another company pre-IPO, I believe in ownership as a component part of a compensation structure.

For your listeners, I would also encourage them to really consider that as well. There is a ton of value to think about your TTC, your total compensation package. So really, while I appreciate your point, I just want to make sure you’re guiding your young listeners to be thoughtful.

Well, sure. If you’re going to equity and it’s going to pay off a huge number, you need an exit event. What’s your exit event look like?

That’s a really good question. Right now, we are completely focused on continuing to grow the successful company that we’ve built thus far. I feel really good about that. So no exit strategy at the current—

Right. So I just want to stay focused on this for one second. We are saying, “We’re doing better than the media industry,” which is dying and pays at low rates. We’re not maybe doing as well as the influencer industry and the Substack industry which, if you’re a winner at the level that you might need people to be a winner at, pays at extraordinarily high rates. And you’re making up the gap with equity that is not liquid and there is no stated plan to be liquid. So should your employees expect an exit to pay that off?

Let me just clarify because that is not what I said. I said that the base compensation is at or above the industry level.

The media industry, correct.

People leave the media industry because they can get more money on Substack, that’s what I’m asking.

That’s very interesting because two of our acquihires prior to came from Substack and that’s because they don’t feel like they’re capable of monetizing the platform as well. It’s also because the world of Substack — I actually think Substack’s a very interesting platform; I don’t have a ton of internal knowledge about the company. What they’re trying to do in terms of democratization is really interesting. But what we’ve found is that Substack tends to be a platform of solo operators and many journalists are actually looking to be able to be independent and really be free to express the stories that they want to express. But also, to have infrastructure around them where they do have a sales team, they do have a growth marketing team and that’s the part that we’ve built out.

A lot of the calculations that you just went through are incorrect. And another example of that is each of our authors get bonused based on the subscribers that they acquire and that they retain. They are incentivized to continue to grow. We’re incentivized as a company to help them grow. And that comes back to them. So your total compensation package, I think you oriented a little bit too much around equity, but again, the purpose of ownership is that everyone should feel like they have a voice in the company. And that’s a big part of what we’re trying to create. But I think that the challenges that you’re painting relative to the broader industry are very real and I can appreciate that.

I’m just trying to understand what the value of being a part of the organization is. Matt Belloni — we’ve talked about him several times here. Hi, Matt. We’re big fans over here — he was profiled in the New York Times in November. And this is a quote. He said, “It’s safe to say I could make a lot more money if I were independent, at least in the short term, but I don’t know. Do I want to be on Substack?” That’s some ambiguity, right? The thing that you could do on that platform — and I have a lot of problems with that platform as listeners of this show know very well — but the thing you can do on that platform is collect a lot more revenue without the overhead.

All of my friends who go there say, “I don’t need all this stuff. I have fans on social media and I can convert them to get paid over here and I will make all the money for myself.” So I’m trying to really just nail down what’s the value of being part of the greater organization and paying a higher cut even than you would pay to Substack for their marketing. Is it your sales team? Is it the growth marketing team? Is it product? How does that work?

I think it’s the collective whole. And again, I don’t agree with your calculations, but that’s okay.

I’m sorry, what calculations have I made that you disagree with?

Well, I don’t think that we take a greater cut.

You don’t think the overhead of working for Puck is greater than Substack’s 10%?

I think that what we provide relative to scale from an advertising perspective and a subscriber perspective, as well as paying benefits, as well as providing bonuses. is higher. So that’s where I’m coming at it from. I appreciate you continuing to pick at it, but I disagree with that statement.

I mean, if you just said “we provide health insurance,” I think that’s meaningful for a lot of people.

We provide health insurance.

I have two kids and that’s always on my mind. Whenever someone asks me about going independent, I’m like, “No, I have two kids and I love running my newsroom.” But the dynamic for a lot of people I know thinking about this isn’t, “I should go work for another company.” It’s, “The rewards for me are very high if I go out on my own.”

I think you’re trying to sit in the middle of that and I’m just trying to find the edges of how that model works because if you end up in a traditional cost structure, it won’t work. And if you end up all the way over here, you’re competing with a cost structure where the platforms get all the content for free. Or in Substack’s case, people pay them for the content, which is maybe the best business model of them all. Somewhere in the middle is Puck and I’m just trying to figure out how that model actually works.

You are correct. We do sit in the middle. That’s why we are able to get the incredible, generationally talented individuals that we have because we support journalists. Not just Matt, but Bill Cohan. I mentioned Ian Kreitzberg on the AI front, Lauren Sherman, we just brought on Kim Masters a year ago, Marion Maneker, Dylan Byers. These are incredible journalists that have some of the foremost voices inside of the industries that they write about and that they lead. They’re a part of an organization, but they’re also able to be independent. They do get healthcare. And that does matter. And they do have bonuses and they do have feedback that they get, but they’re also not told what stories to chase. And the benefit of moving from a large media organization to a Substack of it all, the motivation for some might be money, but the motivation for many is independence.

We try to capture the balance between being able to be independent, but also having a support infrastructure in place that allows you to take some of those risks. It’s quite special. The reason why we have a subscriber base that’s also incredibly loyal and growing is that they can feel that in the authors.

When I talk to people at Substack or the people who have moved to Substack about that 10%, the justification is generally that Substack drives more subscriber growth than any other platform. And the people who’ve left Substack have seen a pretty rapid decline in how fast their subscribers grow. Substack has turned its app basically into a walled garden. They say they do email, but now you open it and it looks like Twitter and there are podcasts inside of it. They’ve made a little social network, even though they claim they haven’t made a social network. That’s fine and it’s working because it’s driving a lot of subscriber growth for a lot of their people.

When you subscribe to one Substack, they sign you up for like seven more. They have dark patterns in that app. That is their 10%. They will look you in the eye and say, “We know people think this is a high number. And we say, ‘If you leave, your rate of new subscribers will go down and that’s worth the 10%. And the second we stop delivering that, we know people are going to turn off.’” Is that the same for Puck? Is it health insurance plus subscriber growth? What’s the mechanism for subscriber growth for you?

Again, I’m not an expert in Substack. What I can say is that many of the subscribers on Substack, at least from the acquihires that we have made, are not paying subscribers. The subscription revenue that I mentioned before is from paying subscribers, and the growth is from paying subscribers. [You have] great base comp and then also equity and healthcare and health insurance and a vacation policy and all of that good stuff and folks to support you when you do want to go on vacation. Aside from all of those things, it goes back to the incentive around the subscriber bonus. As I mentioned before, our growth is driven by marketing. Our growth is driven by the content that our journalists create and the stories that they are selling. It’s also created now because we are building multimodal franchises around these individuals through event businesses.

Also, all of our talent gets bonused on the events that they are a part of. You have the subscriber acquisition bonus, you have a retention bonus, you have an events bonus, and that is our talent getting incentivized and paid for the work and the time and the energy that they’re putting in. That’s really the crux of the value proposition. But again, I would go back to like, if you have any aspiring journalists on your pod, what’s the motivation that they have around wanting to be a journalist? And if it is to be capable of reporting and telling independent stories and also being able to be financially compensated, I think that we are a rare breed of trying to create a company that fosters that. When I think about the career choice to come here versus going to another big technology company, a strong motivator for me was that mission.

Where does your growth come from? If your folks are getting paid more, if they’re getting bonuses on subscriber growth, where does the net new customer come from?

The net new subscribers come from content that is interesting and breakthrough. I think a lot of the work that has been done with—

Sub scoops. Right. I understand, but you have to distribute the scoop somewhere. Where does it come from?

Are you getting back to the platform piece where that content is distributed?

Yeah. Where is the top of the funnel? When Julia Alexander has a great story, is it search traffic that converts? Is it her tweeting about it? Is it Facebook reels? Where does the net new subscriber come from?

I would imagine you would understand this as well. It does not come from one singular place. We have the organic side of leveraging social platforms. We absolutely encourage our authors to tweet about the stories that they have. We also have a social team that develops all the organic content and leverages the various platforms for that. We also have an incredible comms team that also helps to distribute the stories that are coming out of all of our political content all the way through to all the other franchises. And then also on the experiential side, whenever we are doing any type of event that obviously is talent-centric, we’re talking about the work that they do and that those interviews are coming to life. In this environment, and I walked through at the top of the hour, the transitions that have occurred, there’s no longer a world where distribution is centralized into one, two, or three places.

There’s not a singular television network that you can advertise on and drive product and growth. There is not a singular platform that you can advertise on and drive growth. That fragmentation and disruption has been happening for over 20 years. If there’s anyone that is saying it comes from a singular source, that’s amazing. But we leverage each of the various platforms and we leverage paid and we leverage organic in order to get the work out in front of net new subscribers. Other examples of that, we—

Wait, what’s your biggest channel? If I go and ask a YouTuber, “What’s your biggest channel?” They will say, “The YouTube algorithm.” If you ask a Substacker, “What’s your biggest channel?” They will say, “Substack.” They’re integrated with their distribution in very particular ways. They don’t always love it. My joke is that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make a video about how mad they are at YouTube, right? This is a tense relationship between creators and their platforms, but if you ask them where the followers come from, it is the platforms themselves. What’s your biggest channel?

I would say our biggest paid channel would be social platforms as well as SEO. Now within the industry and the migration to zero click, we are transforming a lot of the way that even our site is developed and the way that we optimize for GEO. I mean, that’s a big shift in the industry that’s—

I just want to define some terms. I’m the person who came up with the phrase Google Zero, so I think—

That’s me. They love it.

I sure did. On this show, as a matter of fact; there’s an episode about it.

I think our listeners understand Google Zero is when Google stops sending search traffic to publishers. You’ve heard me talk about it a lot. GEO is generative search optimization, which is, I would say, as yet unproven and mostly snake oil.

I don’t know if it’s snake oil, but I do remember when I was at Facebook and many people across marketing and businesses said that social was snake oil. And then I remember that same shift happening with mobile and that no one — great example — no one would ever watch video on their mobile phones and now it’s one of the number one consumption formats. I can tell you this, as a business leader, I can’t ignore the changes that AI is driving more broadly, not just in the industry, but in consumption. You’re very correct in saying that it’s not proven out yet. It’s not the singular channel and/or the singular investment, but we are continuing to work on what it means to be organically discovered in a world that’s Google Zero. Again, that’s really neat that you actually came up with that language because it’s widespread across the industry.

You can watch Sundar Pichai react to me saying the words “Google Zero” on this very show. It was a fun moment for everyone.

I guess my question there is, you don’t have a singular top of funnel like a platform does. You don’t have the bad model the old media companies do. I’m not in any way saying that was a good model. They’re dying. We’re watching them die. You can read Matt describe how Hollywood is dying, very specifically. The cost structure there is bad. Somewhere in the middle is your cost structure, and I’m just trying to figure out where you find the big growth from, or if the plan is to remain small, because it feels like there are two choices to be made right now.

Our primary distribution model is newsletters. We’re not a technology platform. The comparisons to YouTube or Facebook or Substack — we’re not a technology company. We are absolutely a media company, a news and information company, a journalist-centric company. The primary distribution is that our talent anchors a private email or private newsletter that gets distributed to an audience that is consistently growing related to paying subscribers. And then we also have a long leads list and we use channels like CRM in order to continue to market to hot leads, new leads that come in through discovery, whether it is through our social platform leverage or through a referral that’s coming from another reader that is excited and intrigued about a story and wants somebody else in their industry to understand what’s going on. All of those things fill the top of the funnel that ultimately drive to ideally conversion of becoming a paying subscriber.

That top of funnel, the way that I think about it is really that there are paying and unpaid, and the conversion of unpaid to paid so it leads to subscribers is also a component of that.

You talked about social channels. One of the dynamics I think is really interesting in the world you’re describing is whether or not the institution is important or the talent’s important. It very much feels like your emphasis is on the talent. Do you run paid social on your talent’s social media feeds because that’s where the followers are, or do you have the Puck channel and you want people to follow that?

It’s a great question. Right now, we do not run paid social on the individual talents. And as I’m processing it, that’s a really interesting conversation to come back around on with talent internally. The way that we’ve managed in the past and through conversations with them is that a lot of talent wants to own and run their own channel. When they have questions or when they need support, they have a person that they can call on for that. Our primary growth has been through our owned and operated channels, but I like the provocation. That is something I certainly will take back if folks are open and interested in that.

This is the dynamic that I think it just is for everyone. The reason that a reporter leaves is they say, “I have however many tens of thousands of Twitter followers, I can monetize 2,000 of them and I’ll make more money than you ever paid me.” I’ve had this conversation, I’m sure you’ve had this conversation. There’s a lot of this in the world and the platforms incentivize the people to participate, right? There’s an infinite supply of teenagers who will make content for Instagram for free. They don’t want the institutions to be powerful because there’s not an infinite supply of news organizations. Once you have a little bit of power there, you might have to pay some rates.

The original sin of digital media is Jonah Peretti believing he could go so viral that Facebook would pay him money. That’s what you’re talking about, the pivot to video. That was that moment right there and it was not going to happen. And I think a lot of people knew it wasn’t going to happen and we all lived through it anyway.

How do you operate in a world where you want the brand to be central to do the audience acquisition, and the subscriber acquisition you’re describing with the methods you’re describing, when all of the platforms want all the action to be by the people?

I can’t speak to the motivation of platforms today. I think you’re correct when I was at both of those platforms. What I saw is actually a real deep desire to actually support publishers. But again, I don’t work at those companies. I can’t speak to the motivations of them today.

I think we can all see their motivations pretty plainly.

What I can say is, for us from a Puck perspective, I’m not trying to compete with YouTube. I know I’ve already said this, that we’re not a technology platform. We are focused on covering the stories inside of the industries that have the opinion elite and people that deeply care about what’s happening. That is what we are doing. And we distribute those stories, yes, through newsletters, and then also through a variety of other marketing channels. I know I’m not completely and totally answering your question.

Not really. I think you might be talking about the audience. I’m talking about the people who make the work and the economic incentives of the people who make the work.

And I mean, you’re describing Puck as the fanciest collection of trade publications that has ever existed in the world. I don’t know if that’s what people want to do. I think people want big audiences. I think every reporter wants to be the most famous reporter in the world, and that’s great. That is a perfectly aligned incentive with, go get scoops, go get attention, write the best analysis, go be famous. And that’s going to make everybody a lot of money.

A collection of small trade verticals for the opinion elite is very different from that impact. Media organizations are losing people to platforms because that impact is so alluring. There is the opportunity to do things that are not journalism, to do integrated brand marketing, to do sponsorships, to go on the job. All the stuff I won’t let my people do that I won’t do. I won’t even read the podcast ads.

But it’s all right there. You can get the big audience and you can get the big payday. And again, I’m just trying to find the boundary for Puck. You’re kind of making it smaller. I’m just wondering if that size is as lucrative, is impactful, and is incentivizing across all the metrics, as maybe the big platform exit.

For the journalists in your world, it sounds like you’re trying to encourage them to go to the platforms.

I’m just seeing what’s happening all around me. I’ve run this newsroom for like 15 years. We sell what we sell here. My joke is that we sell our ethics policy, and that’s what people subscribe to us for. Again, we just won’t do the sponsor reads. It drives my company crazy that I won’t do the sponsor reads. Everyone can see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, labeled, “Nilay does a sponsor,” but I won’t do it, because I think what the audience pays us money for is the fact that you can’t tell the newsroom what to do. I would like to believe my newsroom is bought into this, and then the economics makes sense inside of that.

But you’re describing this talent-led, “journalists as influencers” model, without the corresponding payoff that the influencers get. And that’s the tension I’m just sitting on.

I appreciate that tension. I think you’re describing a world — and again, if your listenership is relatively young — it would [tell] everybody [that] the only career that they should have is to be an influencer. And I fundamentally disagree with that.

An appropriate stat to consider: what I do know of Substack is that their top 10% of authors make 90% of the revenue. I want everyone to hear that. The model that you are describing, that everyone is getting massive paydays from these other platforms, the top 10% are making 90% of the revenue. What we provide is a “platform,” in quotes, not a technology platform, but a company that does support journalists. And yes, I would say that journalists are the original influencers, but influencers oftentimes just pop up a phone and make content about anything.

Journalism is a fundamentally different profession. You make the point from an ethics perspective, from a fact-checking perspective, from a legal perspective, knowing that if you write a story and somebody else comes after you, and that you have legal support, those things matter in journalism. That, in addition to being able to have audience growth that is a core focus of the company, being able to have commercial growth, being able to get paid for the events that you are a part of, for the subscribers that you are bringing in, I don’t think is small. I actually think it is quite exciting and can be quite large.

If you look at the various categories, within Puck, Air Mail is a little bit different. That’s the brand that drives cultural advantage. Puck is the brand that drives professional advantage, because it does go through each of these categories or industries that are anchored by our lead talent, they’re telling stories, and they’re reporting on what’s happening at the top of the companies that drive these industries and the people that are making the decisions within it.

But I don’t think any of these industries, in and of themselves, are small. The Puck portfolio is one that is not just about the individual industries, but actually about the interplay and the intersection of power and decisions that occur across each of those franchises.

And that’s also the unique value proposition that Puck, as a brand, brings. That is very much supported by our talent. I continue to be incredibly proud of the fact that I appreciate the tension between brand and talent, but I don’t feel that tension internally. I feel like we are a brand and a company that supports talent so that they can do their job, which is to report.

You mentioned Air Mail is a little different. How is Air Mail a little different?

Air Mail’s a little bit different in that it is not focused on the professionals inside of an industry. Puck will report on, again, the business of fashion, the business of art economics, things like that, for the professionals that ultimately are in those spaces, and/or those that are very curious across those industries.

Air Mail, from a cultural advantage perspective, is reporting on style, fashion, wellness. It has a global perspective on what is happening in the world, and that audience base is certainly opinionally, intellectually curious, but it’s less of a B2P, a business to professional offering, and more of a B2C, a business to consumer offering. And that was one of the reasons why, from an investment thesis perspective, it made so much sense. We had less than 6% audience overlap, even though both are very affluent and elite audiences, but they’re very limited in terms of overlap overall. It’s an awesome add to the portfolio.

Puck is a collection of trade publications that people will pay high rates for. There’s a lot of value in that. I love a good trade publication. I won’t rattle off all my favorites, but there are some very small, very focused trade publications that I think are maybe the best in the entire industry.

Air Mail is not that. Air Mail is like a big fancy culture magazine. It’s called Air Mail because I think it was meant to be read on airplanes. There is a moment for that kind of magazine to exist in first class on an airplane. Are you trying to move audience between them?

The thing you don’t have here is a bundle, right? You have a collection of individual newsletters and you can’t actually bundle them all up and say, “Here’s the whole stack of value we provide.” How do you move audience between individual trade publications where there might not be overlap, and then from that world to Air Mail, which is a glossy culture magazine?

It’s a great question. On the Puck side, we actually do have a Puck subscription that gets you access to each of the individual franchise categories that organically came up through Puck or that we’ve acquired and launched.

On the Air Mail side, you’re right that currently it’s a separate subscription, and we’re working through the product roadmap to figure out, essentially, what the bundle offering is, the sample offering. Those are all underway. Probably within the next few months, you’ll see more from us on that side.

Last few questions, we’re running out of time. Thank you for being so generous. Are you profitable right now?

We are very close to profitable.

Like a dollar away or like a million dollars away?

I’m not going to answer that question, but we’re very close to profitable. I feel very good about our operating leverage as well.

What’s the runway to being profitable?

I’m not going to answer that question, but I feel really good about where we are at, and what we will deliver this year.

The reason I ask about profitability is that profitability is usually what allows you to drive growth, or you can choose to be really unprofitable and drive a lot more growth. Are you looking at more acquisitions? Are you looking to be acquired? How is this going to work for you?

On the acquisition side — well, one on the growth side, I think it’s just good to state. For growth, total revenue, we grew at 40% last year. Ads, we grew at over 35%; sub-revenue, we grew at over 50%. And when we look at our fixed cost to recurring revenue, we’re in a really solid place.

And we also look at revenue per head, just to think about structurally whether or not the organization is lean and driving operational excellence.

We’re able to drive top line growth with real cost discipline in order to create a system that is scalable over the course of time. That’s why I feel good about being very close to profitable and the goal of that this year. Related to acquisitions, we’re actually always thinking about various brands that could be additive to the overall portfolio. As I mentioned before, we’ve done a few acquihires prior to in order, and the investment thesis behind those acquihires was really to break into a new category.

We did that with Marion Maneker coming over from Substack in order to break into the business of art, through to the acquisition of retail diaries in order to drive more coverage for the readers and the subscribers that we had with Lauren Sherman’s line sheet. Those are more like tuck-ins and smaller acquisitions.

There are transformational acquisitions like Air Mail where that is additive to the collective portfolio, and to the piece that you were getting at before, where we see that there’s opportunity certainly for bundling and for access of readership across the various media brands.

One of the reasons I ask about acquisitions is we live in a time of media mergers, like massive earth-shattering media mergers. In acquiring Air Mail, I think you have Jeff Zucker on your cap table now, because he was an investor in Air Mail. There are rumors that he wants to build a big thing. He wants to buy Versant and have a newsletter division and run a big news operation again, like he had at CNN. Is that something you’ve talked about? Is that something you would entertain?

I’m not going to talk about who’s on our cap table.

What’s next for Puck? What should people be looking for?

A few different things. First, the investments that we’ve made in DC around both our Washington correspondent with Leigh Ann [Caldwell], the experiential business that we have there, you’re going to continue to see more and more emphasis in our dedication to that market. Same thing with AI and with tech, the launch of that vertical this past year, at a moment in time that we went AI-first instead of tech-first for very specific reasons. You’ll continue to see more from us there. A lot of folks in the industry all migrated really quickly to video. I’ve been in the media landscape for quite some time and I believe deeply in video, but I also believe deeply in doing it right and doing it well. We’re spending time thinking about what that means for our talent. What does it mean for our brand? What does it mean for our portfolio? So more to come there.

I can do another full hour on how you plan to monetize video, but I won’t keep you any longer. You have been very generous and very game to answer the questions. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being on Decoder, Sarah.

Thank you. I appreciate it as well. Have a great day.

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