Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

On stage at Edinburgh’s Leith Theatre one evening last week, the Scottish stand-up comedian Vladimir McTavish was playing his part in funding the rise of an alternative UK news media.

McTavish, a popular act on the Edinburgh Fringe, was part of the bill at the Festive Ferret Fundraiser, an event generating income for the investigative journalism website the Ferret, which launched two years ago and is already having significant impact on Scottish politics and society.

Backed by nearly 700 paying subscribers, who have input on the subjects that the site’s journalists probe, the Ferret went undercover to expose a neo-Nazi backed group, Scottish Dawn; it revealed how Donald Trump received a £110,000 hand-out from Scottish taxpayers; it disclosed how Police Scotland extracted data from 36,000 private mobile phones; and it ran a ten-story series on the potential impact of fracking.

Nearly 400 miles away another member of the new publishing breed, the Bristol Cable, lays out its investigative reporting on a sharp website, and on the 36 pages of a monthly magazine produced on high-quality paper stock and distributed throughout the city. The Bristol Cable is the product of an 1,800-strong co-operative who contribute an average £2.70-a-month and are invited to monthly meetings around Bristol to discuss the progress of the three-year-old project and where it should be directing its editorial resources.

The Cable’s impact on Bristol life has been considerable, affecting council policy on housing developments and helping to persuade Bristol University to stop investing in fossil fuels. It also uncovered the use by local police of eavesdropping IMSI-catcher devices used to intercept mobile phone messages, prompting a national news story. Operating out of an old factory building (now a community project space called ‘The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’), it is also backed by the Chicago-based Reva & David Logan Foundation, a philanthropic trust which gives grants to social justice and investigative journalism projects.

Its various income streams, including five pages of print ads sourced by Ethical Media Sales & Marketing, an agency dedicated to social justice, allow the Bristol Cable to sustain the equivalent of six full-time jobs across its team of editorial ‘co-ordinators’ and to pay its large pool of ‘contributors’ for their work on articles. The team has won a reputation for its data journalism.

But projects as ambitious as the Ferret and the Bristol Cable are isolated examples in the landscape of UK news media.

As we near the end of 2017, the overwhelming majority of news produced in the UK – including that on social media – is still the output of organisations founded before the digital revolution. The emergence of digital-native news brands has been limited in a market where audience loyalties to public broadcasters and well-established newspapers run deep.

In the United States, venture capitalists and legacy media companies have poured money into new digital news initiatives which have become part of popular culture, from trailblazers such as the Drudge Report and Slate to the likes of Vox and Mic. Some, such as HuffPost and BuzzFeed, are now major international news operations.

But the economic signals for digital news media in general have not been good. BuzzFeed has this month made major job cuts, including to its UK newsroom. Its founder, Jonah Peretti, previously a big supporter of Facebook as a distribution platform, has complained bitterly of the social media giant’s failure to share its advertising revenues with companies that provide it with content. The female-focused publisher Refinery29 last week became the latest in a long line of digital publishers to lay off staff this year.

In such a climate, projects like the Ferret and the Bristol Cable – and other UK operations that choose to emulate them – face a challenging future. But both have been careful to limit their dependency on commercial backing, in fact, neither publisher carries digital advertising.

“We had to do something that made us different, more credible, more transparent….,” explains Rob Edwards, one of the founders of the Ferret. “We had long discussions and we decided we didn’t want to use ads, we wanted to raise money by subscriptions and grants.”

Lorna Stephenson, a member of the editorial team at the Bristol Cable, says that digital ad revenues have fallen so low that “there’s almost no point” in the project even looking for clients. Furthermore, the project has an “advertising charter which is voted on and agreed by members and is quite strict”, taking business only from “local and ethical businesses”. So the site is ad-free.

The Bristol Cable launched in both digital and print form in October 2014 after a series of meetings attended by journalists and other interested parties. “People liked the idea of co-creation of the media and they liked the idea of it being independent,” Stephenson says.

The motivation for the Ferret, which was first mooted in 2012, was to create a platform for the kind of probing, in-depth reporting that the founders felt was in demise. “We were very conscious that, with the malaise that’s causing the decline of the mainstream media, investigative journalism was suffering,” Edwards says. “We all felt very strongly that a modern democracy like Scotland was incomplete without proper investigative journalism to hold power to account.”

The Ferret is run by a board of five journalists (Edwards is also the environment editor of the Sunday Herald, a Glasgow-based national Scottish paper) and four ‘reader’ board members. As well as having no advertising, it opted for a co-operative model “to show we were not-for-profit and were working together and that we were not run by some distant corporation or some media mogul”.

It publishes an annual report of its finances and editorial record. The latest records show that it has published over 330 stories and now has a base of 6,000 people signed up to receive push notifications of latest articles.

Its subscriber base – paying £3-a-month for access to a website that allows three articles free per month – is currently insufficient to sustain full-time employment of journalists or an office (the Ferret’s team mostly communicate via an online chat group). Contributors are paid £110-a-day for their journalism.

Edwards says that the Ferret is anticipating new income from grants. It already has a €50,000 grant from Google’s Digital News Initiative which funds the Ferret Fact Service, compiled by Alastair Brian. The service, which typically analyses the veracity of claims made by Scottish politicians and pundits, is also published in the Daily Record newspaper.

The Ferret might be an alternative approach to producing news but Edwards says that it is not intended to undermine existing media. It has partnered on stories with many news outlets, including the Guardian, the Times and the BBC. And it recently co-ordinated a complaint by 23 journalists from different news outlets over the Scottish Government’s failings in responding to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.

What marks the Ferret out is its openness, publishing its FoI documents and other material, provided it doesn’t reveal confidential sources. “We try to be as transparent as possible and give readers all the tools they need to make up their own minds about what we are writing about,” says Edwards. “It’s all about trying to re-establish trust with readers.”

Unlike other websites that emerged in Scotland around the time of its 2014 independence referendum – such as Bella Caledonia and Common Space – the Ferret is studiously non-partisan. “None of our journalist directors are members of any political party and we don’t do opinion or editorialising,” says Edwards. “We just look for fact-based investigative reporting.”

The climate for digital news publishers might be a harsh one, but the Ferret, with its mission of “nosing up the trousers of power”, is convinced by the evidence of its first two years that it has a viable future. “We were embarking on something that none of us had ever done before,” Edwards points out. “We have written hundreds of stories, broken dozens of exclusives, we are talked about and we are gradually raising our income to a point where we can become a sustainable operation.”

The Bristol Cable is now a fixture of the local media scene, alongside the 85-year-old Bristol Post newspaper and other outlets. Its stories evoke the campaigning spirit of the lively West Country city but Stephenson believes that its ground-breaking model is one that could be adopted elsewhere in the UK, citing Manchester, Leeds and Brighton as examples. “Bristol is a creative place but there are other very vibrant cities where you could definitely do something like this,” she says.

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AdExchanger |

The May deadline to comply with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is swiftly approaching, and ad tech and security startups are forming a new industry: privacy tech. Companies like PageFair, Evidon, Prifender, Tealium and Segment hope to capitalize with GDPR compliance solutions for brands, publishers and even other ad tech vendors. The International Association… Continue reading »

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In May, data onboarder LiveRamp announced the launch of an open digital ad consortium that would utilize a single cookie linked back to its IdentityLink ID.

This week, the Advertising ID Consortium announced the addition of 16 other demand- and supply-side members, including Videology, Kargo, Adform, AerServ, Amobee, DataXu, IgnitionOne, Sizmek and Thunder.

Additionally, demand side platform (DSP) The Trade Desk said it will make its ID compatible with the Consortium’s. In May, the t
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Harford and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi worked closely together at Expedia.

Uber is filling another key role in its executive ranks just as the year turns. The ride-hail company has hired former Orbitz CEO Barney Harford to be its first-ever chief operating officer.

Harford, who has been learning the ropes at Uber as an adviser since October, worked closely with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at Expedia. Before becoming CEO of Orbitz — which Expedia later acquired — Harford led Expedia’s push into Asia while Khosrowshahi was CEO. He begin his official work as COO on Jan. 2.

His appointment comes as Uber embarks on an important year. Coming off a year wracked with public scandal, Khosrowshahi is under a great deal of pressure to turn the company around in 2018. Adding to that, the long-time travel executive has his sights set on taking the company public in 2019.

Harford joins a growing C-suite. In October, Khosrowshahi appointed former Pepsi executive Tony West to be Uber’s chief legal officer. The next priority for the company is to fill the CFO role.

“I have never met a stronger operator or a more thoughtful strategist than Barney,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “He is able to go deep on key aspects of a business while never losing sight of the big strategic picture. He loves engaging with operations, marketing, product, and engineering teams around hard problems, and is passionate about using technology to transform the world.”

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As data management platform (DMP) Lotame gears up for compliance with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), some of the far-reaching changes are coming into focus.

First, there’s the matter of tracking consent by users across what General Counsel and VP of Global Privacy Tiffany Morris calls “the chain of custody.” This reaches from the time the user’s data is generated or collected at, say, a publisher’s website, through the various ways in which the data is use
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Lotame Ignite APAC Conference 2017: The Current State of Data in Video Advertising Across Asia, brought to you by Lotame and SpotX.
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As the e-commerce world readies itself for the last push of 2017, in-house teams and agency partners alike will be finishing up their final rounds of Cyber Weekend number crunching.

With figures now emerging, everything points towards 2017 being another bumper year. Black Friday sales up. Cyber Monday sales up. People are both buying and spending more, and, perhaps most encouragingly for our sector, an increasing proportion are doing so online.

While it’s clear that the four-day period is now a critical part of any online retailers’ success, it has equally grown to become a key indicator of how a business will perform over the Christmas period. Consequently, marketers now operate under the dual stress of trying to ensure their brand is ahead of the Cyber Weekend curve, with the additional weight of knowing that results will also forecast their festive bottom line, and they can’t afford to get it wrong.

Preparing for 2018

Challenging questions will already be starting to form in preparation for 2018. With more retailers than ever participating in some element of promotional activity, how do you address the competition and maximize revenue from your budgets without overspending? And what insights can be gleaned from 2017 to ensure you can almost guarantee the same level of performance in the years beyond, without cutting deeper into your margins?

We can’t give you all the answers; every business is different, as are the initiatives that will work best. But what we can offer is fresh a perspective on how to tackle these problems by showing you three ways in which we addressed them with our clients.

Study your audience closely

Any strong marketing strategy relies on a solid understanding of the audience your product or service attracts, as well as the levers that drive them.

While Cyber Weekend will attract your core audience, you also need to pay attention to how the gifting season influences the make-up of your customer base.

Last year, we noticed a shift in the demographics of converting users for one of our sports retail clients. The audience became more female in its breakdown (Fig. 1.1), and also swung towards older generations (Fig. 1.2) – not the characteristics typically expected when it comes to sports merchandise.

Looking at additional data, we also noticed a greater proportion of sales coming from people in a relationship or two person households (Figs. 1.3 & 1.4).

By putting all these pieces together, it became clear that women buying gifts for their partners was a significant customer segment to focus on. From these learnings, we created a campaign with tailored messaging and bidding strategies for the 2017 Cyber Weekend and Christmas period.

The next step is to look at how much a conversion costs you from each consumer group. While the bulk of your revenue may be coming from a certain demographic (perceived to be your core audience), this may be because most of your advertising is directed at this audience.  

For example, when we look at the consumer age range for a fashion retail client of ours, the majority of their revenue came from 18-34 year olds. As a result, its brand and messaging was geared towards these age groups, as were its rather expensively assembled paid search campaigns.  

When we took over their accounts, however, we learnt that over the course of the year the most cost-effective age groups to target were the ‘middle-aged’ brackets (Fig. 2.1). Bid multipliers were applied across our activity, which greatly improved results.

Nevertheless, once we entered Cyber Weekend, an interesting shift occurred. First we witnessed a significant improvement in revenue-per-click performance from 18-24 year olds, along with an uplift for 65+ users (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.3 highlights the scale of this change. Rather than sticking with the same bid multipliers, we needed to respond quickly to reflect the behavioural changes. As a result, the negative bid multipliers placed on 18-24 year olds were reduced, and the positive multipliers were increased even higher for the 65+ audience. 

Understanding your audience is key, and when it comes to promotional periods, always keep a close eye on two things: how the breakdown of your audience changes, and how this impacts the way in which you should spend your money.

Pick the moments to push

It’s Thursday evening. Campaigns have been prepared, budgets have been allocated and digital marketing managers across the land can rest easy until it’s time for those Tuesday morning reports.

Unfortunately, we all know it doesn’t quite work like that. It instead involves keeping a close eye on how much money those preciously apportioned pounds/dollars are earning you.

Even during this most promotional of promotional periods, there are still moments to pull back on advertising. Spending as much as you can (as evenly as you can) over the entire four days is a one-way street to overspending, under-delivering and sleepless nights.

So rather than sitting there fretting, why not monitor your purchasing trends to see when the best times would be to maximize spending?

A trend that we’ve really seen come to the surface in 2017 is what we have called the ‘pyjama panic buy’. As you can see in Fig. 3.1, at 11pm each night, we witnessed a spike in return on advertising spend from our campaigns. Unaware of when offers end, consumers have a tendency to purchase late at night (around 11pm) in the fear that the discount will have vanished by the time they wake up.

With retailers extending promotions across the weekend and beyond, the process repeats itself each evening. What’s more, by this point in the day a portion of your competition will have undoubtedly reached their daily spend caps too.  

Save your pennies in the morning, and push them later when it really matters.

Being the best at the bottom

With Cyber Weekend becoming an ever more permanent part of our collective consciousness, the number of people directly seeking out offers (rather than waiting for them to magically appear) continues to grow.

 Analysing Google Trend data from 2017 in comparison to 2016, Fig. 4.1 demonstrates the year-on-year growth of Black Friday related search terms. Not only did we see a general uplift over the four day weekend itself, but we also saw growth in interest in the weeks leading up to 24 November. 

What this tells us is that consumers are more proactively researching which brands will be offering discounts, and what those discounts look like – all before Cyber Weekend kicks off. We can therefore make the solid assumption that more and more people are entering the period with a pre-conceived idea of what they’re in market for.

Pull channels as a result become even more of a race to the bottom. While branding during the research phases is clearly an important exercise, advertisers should be questioning more than ever how they can get in front of the user at that final point of purchase.

One way in which we managed this was by capitalising on the uplift in volumes around Black Friday based terms. Our proprietary Google Shopping technology gives us the ability to target keywords of interest through our performance-based model. In doing so, we ensured our client dominated the space at this crucial stage. This could come in the form of specific products they stocked, or even brands that they resold (Fig. 4.2).

Every single day our platform dynamically pulled out the key terms based on recent data, and adapted campaign structures to prioritise the products that drove best performance. 

When assessing the development of Cyber Weekend as a force within the online world, it’s clear that its claws are firmly planted within our promotional calendars.

What comes with this mass awareness is mass competition, with businesses of every shape and size entering the market in an attempt to take advantage of the buying frenzy.

For digital marketers, the path to success is becoming ever more complex. Which channels do I use? What offers do I push? Which products will become best sellers? How do I keep an eye on margins?

The answer is to narrow your focus; ignore the dizzying lights of all that volume, and focus on the detail. From there, your efforts can grow.

Get your hands dirty. Get creative. Get granular. 

Alex Haynes is senior partnerships manager at international digital agency NMPi.

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“Folks really responded to [the show] the minute we went on YouTube.”

On this episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka, The Young Turks CEO Cenk Uygur talks about running an online media company for young left-wingers.

You can read some of the highlights from the interview here, or listen to it in the audio player above. Below, we’ve provided a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation.

If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Recode Media on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Peter Kafka: This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That’s me. I’m part of the Vox Media podcast network. I am here at Vox Headquarters in New York City with Cenk Uygur, CEO of Young Turks, The Young Turks, I got the title right. Did I get your name right?

Cenk Uygur: Yeah, perfect.

Hooray! Interview is over. Welcome.

That is usually the hardest part.

We’re on smooth sailing from here.

I think of you guys as the YouTube network for progressives, lefties, that gets talked about a bunch, but somehow doesn’t get to the same conversation level as some other media companies with similar aims. So you tell your story, then we can talk about how you fit into the landscape.

Sure.

Let’s go big picture. Young Turks is …

The largest online news network in the world, certainly for millennials. We beat CNN, MSNBC and Fox News combined.

I figure we should have a whole sidebar about metrics, so let’s go very big picture. You guys are primarily a news conversation on YouTube primarily, right?

Well, yes and no. Online news, yes, definitely. We started on YouTube. YouTube’s our home, but also on Facebook, Hulu, Roku, Pluto, all the different platforms.

When you say news, it’s video.

Yes.

It looks something like cable TV news, right?

It does, yep.

People at a desk, talking about the day’s news.

That’s right.

That’s your forte.

We do facts first, then commentary.

Right, but you’re not really an online news-gathering operation, right, generally?

Well, we recently started one. Normally, historically, we have not, but after Trump got elected, we raised money from the audience and started an investigative reporting team, and the audience gave us $2 million bucks, so that’s a nice start.

But you’ve also raised money from traditional venture capitalists. You also raised money from Buddy Roemer?

Roemer, yes.

Roemer.

That was a convertible note.

But again, the primary format is you, you’re the CEO but also the primary host, and you guys are talking about the news of the day. I’m a little confused. It looks like there’s a free version, and then also a paid service?

That’s right. You can watch it live, and that’s the flagship show, and all the shows. You could also watch them on Video On Demand later on YouTube and Facebook primarily, but like I said, on many other platforms too. But if you want to get all the shows ad free, anytime you want, that’s when you sign up for a subscription — on tytnetwork.com, by the way.

And there are podcasts? There’s multimedia.

Yeah, audio and video podcasts, once you’re a member.

You’ve been at this for a long time, right?

Yes.

This is not something you hatched last week.

No, no. I didn’t just graduate from Stanford with a really good idea and a good dad.

If you did, you wouldn’t be in media.

15 years, we started as the first original talk show for Sirius Satellite Radio.

Right, so you started in radio, you went online, and you’ve gone back and forth on and off TV, off traditional linear TV. Is there a traditional linear TV play today?

We do original programming, and so we did a show for Fusion in 2016 that we licensed out. We have a show coming up for Verizon Go90 called “True North” that’s going to be fantastic, so we do some deals and sometimes occasionally on TV, but …

And you’ve been a guest host on MSNBC.

Yeah, so I was their primary host for six o’clock for a year, and back in 2010, 2011, I was on as a host on “Current TV” for two more years after that, so I did some cable news, but we kept The Young Turks going as a separate show and entity throughout.

And I was looking at some of the old clips. There’s one that’s old enough that someone refers to you as “the Tila Tequila of the left.” I don’t even know if that was meant to be a compliment or not. It was confusing.

Yeah, I’m a little confused by that too, but I’m going to take …

You don’t look anything like Tila Tequila.

You think so? I’m going to take it as …

She’s also a quitter. Quitter would not be a compliment.

I’m going to take it as I’m just that sexy.

Incredibly sexy man.

What is the impetus to start the site? Traditionally, there’ve been a bunch of right-wing, conservative-leaning media companies and/or shows and/or networks for a long time, very often on radio. Periodically, someone says, “We should start one of those for the left.” It generally doesn’t work. What was your thinking when you started?

First of all, I’m always amused that like, “Oh, we should start something on the left that’s maybe news, maybe online, maybe video.” I beat you to it by about 12 years, but that’s establishment thinking, because they have never actually gone online. The furthest online that anyone in Washington has ever gone is probably a podcast, Crooked Media, good guys but that’s probably as far online as …

Which, by the way, didn’t exist until a year ago.

That’s right, and no one in Washington had ever gone online until a year ago, and they’re like, “Oh! Donald Trump beat us with half the money and he went digital. Let’s try a podcast!” We’ve been doing this a long time, so long that we didn’t conceive it as something that had to be a response to the right wing. Right wing barely even existed at the time, online.

Did you think, “I want to start something that is a news network or news conversation, and we’re going to do it online or we’ll do it on the radio,” or did you think, “I want to do something that’s a news conversation that’s lefty, and let’s find a place to do it?”

Yeah, so three different ways that I looked at it. No. 1, I’ve always wanted my own talk show, and so it’s just that simple. And it wasn’t a heroic effort to be the left of something or other. No, I love doing talk shows.

You like talking.

And I want to do a talk show. That’s how it started 15 years ago, and my co-host at the time, Ben Mankiewicz, he loved the idea of talking about the news, sports, entertainment, all the things that we care about. Then, the second portion of it was, I actually really really believed in online video.

This is, this is … what year?

Even when we started in ’02 and we were just a radio show, even back in ’98, I wrote an email to my friend saying online video is going to beat television.

So pre-YouTube …

Pre-YouTube.

By several years.

Yes. I had always …

Back when online video was really difficult to make and to distribute and to watch. You had to download a different player, depending on what the publisher was and what kind of machine you had.

And the video quality was disastrous.

Yeah, you’d download and then walk away and come back an hour later and you could watch a five-minute BMW ad.

Yeah, and we were there. We’re actually the oldest stream on the internet. We’ve been daily live since December 12th of 2005, so we were arguably way way too early, but that’s because I just believed about 20 years too early that online video was going to eventually topple TV, and we’re in the middle of it now.

The third part of it is being progressive, and what happened there was we started as a show that we described as half about politics, because that’s what we cared about, and half about J.Lo’s ass. That was back in ’02. Now it would be Kim Kardashian, but …

I don’t know why you would dismiss J.Lo.

Well, she’s still around! That’s right.

Still around.

I just saw a magazine cover of J-Rod … but then things got really serious. We invaded Iraq, we started torturing people, and there was no one on the left as far as we perceived it other than Amy Goodman, who was at a national level saying, “Wait, don’t go into Iraq. That’s a really really really bad idea.” And we did, and then we became an oasis in the media for the left, so we built that and built that and we got more and more outraged, what Bush was doing, and our audience grew and grew, and folks really responded to it the minute we went on YouTube.

I want to talk more about how you started and YouTube’s important, but I want to go again back to just scale and where you are in the media landscape. Who are you competing with for your audience’s time? Are they someone who’s going to go listen to a Crooked Media podcast and check you out and watch MSNBC? Are they relying exclusively on you? Were they someone who watched Jon Stewart, back when Jon Stewart was on TV? Who’s your audience?

Our audience is predominantly young, 70 percent 18-34, so “The Daily Show” would have been our biggest competitor if you looked at it in the old way of looking at things, but in reality, of course, you can watch both. But I do get a lot of people on the street saying, “I used to watch ‘Daily Show’ and now I watch you guys,” so we’re not competing with “CBS Evening News” with … is it Jeff Glor? That might be their new anchor.

I couldn’t tell you, which is a problem.

Exactly right. So no, those guys are 60-70 years old, their average audience, but so is cable news. Cable news is 61, 64, 68, that’s CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. They’re ancient, so it’s … but I’ll take MSNBC’s audience, literally. I will take them, and so I guess it’s a competitive set in this sense, but digital media’s so large that it’s not really a zero sum game.

And I’ve had a bunch of people in in the last year, we’ve talked about Trump and what Trump has or hasn’t done for their audience. Did you guys see a Trump bump last fall, this year?

Last fall, we saw a much bigger Bernie bump.

Because you went in hard on Bernie Sanders. You were an early supporter for Bernie Sanders. You’re a Bernie Bro.

I’m an early, middle and late supporter of Bernie Sanders. Let’s leave aside the phrase Bernie Bro.

Sure.

Okay, but it wasn’t just that we were supporters. Bernie does great online, to the great frustration of everyone in power, and then Trump of course does do better than the average incredibly dull politician, and now the Trump videos do do pretty well, yes.

So you had an audience that was increasing throughout the election, because you were riding the Bernie Sanders wave. People who were interested in Bernie Sanders were also paying attention to you, or more of those folks. Trump spurs more interest. Do you think about how you keep the people who came to you because they found out about you through Bernie, or they found out about you through Trump, or they stumbled on you through a Trump video? Are you going out of your way to think about how we serve those people, or you’re just doing what you do, and they come or they don’t?

Yes and no. The no is no, we just do the show that we do, and I would argue that we’re lucky that we happen to be on that side of the issue, and that’s where most of the online audience is, and that’s why they like us. It’s among the reasons why they like us, but if you try to cater too much to what you think the audience wants, then you’re going to lose your authenticity, so I’m willing to piss off my audience, and I have on many instances, just to make sure that they know that we’re honest, because that’s our brand.

The related question, I’m talking to you latish November, is whether your audiences in general are getting tired of Trump news, tired of politics, tired of the intensity. Every week, there’s a new outrage, there’s new alarm, there’s new terrible legislation which may or may not get passed, and that people are being asked to pay attention to. How do you keep that audience engaged and/or not fatigued?

It’s not that so much. There’s two different audiences, Peter, so one is the general broader audience, and yes, they like Trump videos. Then there’s your core audience. So for example, we have a subscription model and we have subscribers that give us $10 a month. For the core progressive audience, they don’t want to overemphasize Trump news. They would rather hear much more about the structural issues that’s wrong with our government, and change.

And we’ve been anti-establishment since we’ve started, so they get pissed if you do too much Trump news, and oftentimes I have to explain to folks, “Hey, listen guys. I hear you, and no one else is talking about Mark Warner’s financial bill, which is a giveaway to the payday loan industry, and we are, but at the same time, I do have to talk about Trump’s tweets, because he might start World War III with North Korea, and that is super important and relevant. We’re not just doing it for video count or anything like that. It’s because he’s the president, whether we like it or not.”

Yeah, he may be tweeting for the LOLs or the attention, but it’s a difficult thing for a lot of news organizations and media companies. How do we treat a Trump utterance? Is it a joke? Is it policy? The whole world has that problem right now.

Yeah, absolutely, and my argument is, “Yeah, of course it’s relevant.” If Kim Jong Un wakes up one morning and takes it the wrong way, a million people die in South Korea, so you’ve got to cover it. He’s no longer … You know, we used to have a ban on Trump, way before he ran and before he was relevant in this sphere at all. We banned him because we thought he was a poseur, not because we disagreed with him, but because we thought everything he was doing was fake, which is funny now that you look back at it. There’s only two people we’d ever banned: Him and Ann Coulter, because we just didn’t believe …

You know they’re trolls, right?

They’re just trolls.

They wanted a reaction.

Yes, so we had to un-ban him during the primaries. First we started blocking out his face, as a hybrid, and then we finally gave up.

Huffington Post tried a version of that. “We’re going to cover him, but we’re going to call him entertainment.”

And he was, he was entertainment, and then he was apparently, unfortunately entertaining enough to 35 percent of the country that he won.

There’s an Esquire writer, Charles Pierce, who will write about him but won’t refer to him by name, and he uses an asterisk, which seems beside the point. We get who he’s talking about.

Yeah.

We’re going to take a quick break. We’re going to hear from a fine sponsor, maybe two. We’ll be right back with Cenk.

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Back here with Cenk Uygur? Said it with a question mark. I’m so proud of myself.

It should have been an exclamation point, because you nailed it.

Cenk Uygur!

There you go.

From The Young Turks. You want to talk about metrics real quick? This is a pet peeve of some people who write about media or cover the media business, is someone will say, “We have this many views on YouTube. The NFL received Nielsen audience of this many people. The YouTube number is bigger than the Nielsen number. It’s a bigger audience.” Then people will say, “No, no. It’s not. You’re counting aggregate views versus an average per minute.” What do you think the best apples-to-apples comparison for your audience versus traditional TV would be?

That’s a great question.

Just for scale.

Yeah. I think that the complaint that it’s apples to oranges is fair. I also think that human beings are human beings, and if they watch you, they’re real. I also think that the online numbers are way more credible than TV numbers, and usually, the industry has it backwards. They think, “Well, Nielsen put a finger in the wind and decided that this was your TV audience.” No, no. We know with great certainty what our audience is. It is measured down to a granular level.

Sometimes, right?

Yeah.

There’s Facebook, counts a view as three seconds. Is that really a view?

Mm-hmm, right, and what does Nielsen count a view as? No one knows. You get into radio, and that’s just made up.

Yeah, yeah. People literally writing down, “I think I listened to this last night.”

Exactly. It’s just the most made-up numbers you’ve ever seen, so … And honestly …

To be fair, that stuff is getting better. They actually are measuring that stuff digitally now.

Yeah, a little bit better, that’s right, but look at that, right? They’re measuring it digitally now, hence it is better, okay? Advertisers, unfortunately — and you can tell this is a pet peeve of mine — will go, “Okay, I’m going to be incredibly demanding of you and your numbers,” which I actually think is fair, and then they’ll turn around and go, “TV, no. I don’t care. I don’t know. Bleeegh, I’m just going to give them money.” Okay, so …

Yeah, “Because I will not get fired for giving them money.”

Yeah, well, they should be, they should all be fired for it. They’re not going to like hearing that, but if your brand strategy is bleeegh, that is a terrible, terrible strategy, and I’ve talked to people that make these decisions.

I want to know what the bleeegh marketing plan is.

Yeah, okay. How do you know how many people are watching you, and how many people converted on TV? “I don’t know anything about TV, but I hear that I have to be on it.” Wow, that is trenchant. Anyway, 250 million views overall.

Per?

All of our platforms combined, YouTube/Facebook, per month. Unique viewers are much harder to measure, so we say in the ballpark of 60-70 million based on the numbers that YouTube and Facebook and others give us.

You think 60-70 million people are checking you out once a month or more.

Yes! You walk around with me in the streets of New York and you’ll see how true that is, so we are the most …

Six zero to seven zero?

Yes.

Giant numbers.

Giant numbers. We are the most famous non-celebrities in the world.

So you should have been arriving here in a helicopter, right, but I don’t think you did? You should be rolling in money if you have an audience that is that big.

And now we’re getting to the heart of the issue.

There we go.

The audiences … I’ll just give you a sense of it. One random day, I’m going to Portugal for the Web Summit, and I don’t know, I don’t look like I do necessarily on air. I don’t have a jacket on, I got glasses on, etc.

You look like a guy.

I look like a dude. So two people at the L.A. airport, two people in the Paris airport, three people in the Portugal airport all wanting to take pictures, etc., but if you don’t watch The Young Turks, you don’t know me at all, whereas no one watches Anderson Cooper but everyone knows him, so it’s an interesting phenomenon. And part of the reason for that is because TV and old media is … and it’s not because they’ve made a political decision or anything, they just live in that world. They’re biased towards old media. They think, “Oh, if you have a million people who watch you on TV, you’re a huge star, and we’re going to give you 20 magazine covers, and we’re going to talk about you non-stop.”

You think that’s why people recognize Anderson Cooper, because they’ve seen him other places than on CNN?

100 percent.

Not … That’s …

And they see CNN at the pizza shop and at the bar, and they see him out of the corner of their eye, but nobody watches Anderson Cooper.

So either they’re recognizing him for reasons other than the thing that he does, or they’re recognizing him because of the thing that he does, which has a lot of reach, and maybe TV is a bigger deal than you think.

No, no. We know what his numbers are. On a good night, he’s probably about a million people, on a good good night.

Yeah, people always overestimate the reach of cable news, but people know who Bill O’Reilly is. He, again, had a smallish audience.

Yeah. One million people is one third of one percent of the country. It is night after night. I grant him that, and he is in the pizza shops and the bars, and much more importantly, you know where he is? He’s in every radio station, newspaper and local news and congressional office. They all have TV on, and it’s all turned to the cable news guys. That’s why, in their world, they think the Anderson Coopers of the world are so so important, when in reality, no human beings watch them, and the human beings who watch them are really old, 61 years old on average for CNN. O’Reilly, you mentioned, his average age was 72 for his viewers. 72. That means if he’s got a 42-year-old watching him, that means he has to have a 102-year-old watching him to get an average of 72, so the only reason those cable news guys are relevant is because we give them relevance.

There’s also a sphere of people in politics who take them seriously, who will go on their shows, who will grant them an interview. Granted, who a president will grant an interview has changed over the last few years, both with Trump and Obama. Obama did a bunch of digital stuff. Trump randomly is doing InfoWars interviews, so there’s less of a gap between established media and digital than there used to be, but some of it is who those people grant an interview to, right?

Yeah, and so let’s take an example that’s not us that I don’t necessarily agree with all the time, and it’s just a guy rather than a network, Phil DeFranco on YouTube. His audience is clearly larger than the cable news audience. Take any show on CNN and take Phil’s show on YouTube. Phil’s show is, by any metric, larger, and he gets zero percent coverage, zero percent of zero percent. Why? Because the people in power go, “Hahahaha, this guy on YouTube, with all his audience. It doesn’t count.”

They don’t even see him, frankly.

Yeah, they don’t see him. They don’t know him. He’s invisible to them.

They might have heard of PewDiePie.

Yeah, and only because of the controversies.

And then maybe they heard of Logan Paul in the last … There’s usually one of his …

No way they’ve heard of Logan Paul. You’d poll Washington, I’d be shocked if one percent had heard of Logan Paul.

I think you’re right about that. I think generally people think, “Oh, there’s a guy out there.”

“There’s a guy out there.”

“There’s a new version of PewDiePie out there.”

Yeah, so then why hasn’t the money moved, because I am definitely the poorest famous person in the country, if I am famous. I’m not a celebrity, because again, no one that doesn’t watch us knows us.

You’re TSA famous, though.

I am TSA famous. Almost every TSA agent knows us. That’s a whole nother thing, so it’s because … people are still stuck. They’re stuck in their old ways. It’s comfortable, it’s easy. “I know Bob. I’ve been buying from Bob for 20 years. I know what Nielsen is, right or wrong. Internet numbers scare me, and it’s work. I gotta figure this out. I don’t want to figure it out. I just want to buy from Bob.”

What’s the solve here? Is it … and by the way, is your issue, “I want more respect from the establishment. I want them to pay attention to me,” or “I don’t really care if the establishment respects me. I just need some ad money because I need to keep this thing going”?

Probably the latter. Respect, who cares about their respect, we’re anti-establishment, so I don’t need them to like me. I don’t need them to give me a pat on the back, but one of the problems that it creates … There’s two different issues. One is the financial one that you were justifiably pointing out, the other’s a political one, so cable news won’t allow anyone who supports Bernie Sanders on TV, and then they’ll turn around and go, “Well, you guys don’t have any stars.” Because you didn’t put any of them on, and then you claim since you don’t know them, they’re not stars.

It’s circular reasoning, and in politics, name recognition matters a lot, so when they starved Bernie Sanders of attention in 2015, they robbed him of an equal playing field. When they showered Donald Trump with attention in 2015, they gave him an unbelievable advantage, so cable news, as little people as watch them, since they have that media multiplier effect that I’ve been talking about here, it does made a big difference.

It is funny. Mueller is spending a lot of time, and justifiably, on Russia and Facebook and the online guys and what responsibility they did or didn’t have in the election, but the whole issue of how the press covered and didn’t cover Trump, and how they treated him, that was of intense interest to us up through the election and right afterwards, and now we’ve moved on from it, but he pointed out that he got an enormous amount of publicity and air time. But the counter is people is voted for him, and he should’ve gotten a lot of air time, because he was the leading candidate.

Yeah, a lot of people voted for Bernie Sanders, and he got almost no air time in 2015, so look, you just phrased it in a way that honestly I’d never quite articulated. The thing that I talk about sometimes recently because of the Donna Brazile admissions is, you say, “Okay, the Russians meddled in the general election.” I believe that that’s true, and I think that was terrible, but the DNC meddled in the primaries far worse, admittedly worse. Russia had a small effect. The DNC had a giant effect on the primary, so why aren’t we investigating the DNC? etc., etc.

And then now, what you point out is who had a bigger effect: Russia in the general election, or cable news that gave Donald Trump billions of dollars of free media? Cable news clearly had a way way larger effect, and that was definitely pro-Trump in not their coverage editorially, but in the quantity of their coverage. If they had given the same quantity of coverage to Bernie Sanders, even if they, like they did every time, called him a socialist and they hate him and it’s unrealistic, “Trump’s okay but Bernie Sanders is unrealistic, people really really like him, but we don’t like him in Washington and New York because he threatens our power,” I don’t care. Do that, okay? And then he would have at least had a fighting change, but instead, they drowned him in silence.

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What happens for you guys the next election cycle? Do you … Bernie is still existing, but at some point, you need to move … Who carries the mantle for Bernie in your audience? Where does that energy go?

No matter what happens, whether it’s Trump or Pence, Bernie or someone else on the left, we’re the home of the revolution. We believe in the revolution, and we believe in change. We’re going to get money out of politics. We’re going to end the corruption, and we do media differently than everybody else. We give you the facts. Then we give you analysis, and then we tell you how we are going to participate in change, which makes the rest of the media very very angry.

They’re like, “No, status quo was awesome. Media is not supposed to change things. You’re just supposed to accept it and bow your head.” We don’t do that and our audience loves us for it, so likely it will be Bernie, and Bernie will be the next president of the United States. If it’s for whatever reason he decided not … If he runs, he wins. It’s a no brainer. It’s not even close.

I will bet money on that one.

Let’s do it right now, $100.

A deal.

If he runs, he wins, so it’s on air. That’s awesome.

When do I collect?

Yeah.

2017.

100 percent we’re going to collect on it, unless it’s impossible for some reason.

I just figured out a monetization strategy for this podcast, having side bets.

And for us as well. If he doesn’t run, then the Democratic primary is going to be an awesome mess, and it will likely be a progressive that most of Washington doesn’t know or care about, someone like Nina Turner running our revolution, who’ll come rise up and progressives will love her, and we’ll fight and we’ll win.

What’s your take on technology in Silicon Valley and their influence or lack of influence in politics right now? Aside from Facebook and manipulation of views, all this money, smartest people in the world in Silicon Valley, they were shocked at the Trump election. We’ve written a little bit about Reid Hoffman and some of the responses we’re seeing, but I’m surprised that there is not more, at least that I can see, moving from Silicon Valley to the rest of politics.

Well look, that’s a mixed bag. There’s the downside of Silicon Valley. One is that they’re huge funders, and they’ve funded monstrous things like Donald Trump, in the form of Peter Thiel, so that is not a positive effect in the world, but there’s a huge upside, which is that they have protected net neutrality. To me, net neutrality is everything. If you close that window, then there’s no dissent left.

I think it’s … We’re recording this, again, right before Thanksgiving. This might pop up a little afterwards, but I think they’re going to formally shut down net neutrality next week, right?

They’re going to try. I cannot emphasize enough how much we cannot let them do that.

I think it’s a done deal.

Well, we’re going to undo it then.

I think the only way you undo it is if you elect a president who feels strongly about it, and he or she appoints an FCC that responds to that.

We must, we must in 2020. If they win in 2020 and they shut net neutrality down forever, then they already have a monopoly on TV, the powerful do, and then they will have a monopoly on the internet, and then we’re done, so under … 2020 is going to be the battle of a lifetime. There’s no way we let a conservative or establishment person get the presidency in 2020, and behind me is the pitchforks. We’re not going to let it happen, under no circumstances.

How did you get to this stage in your life? What made you an angry anti-establishment person who also wanted fame?

It’s a good question. I was a liberal Republican growing up in New Jersey. That doesn’t exist anymore. If you’re a Republican, you have to think that tax cuts for the rich are awesome, torture is awesome, moral war is awesome. You get the whole picture. So there’s no liberals left in the Republican Party. There’s no moderates left in the Republican Party, and that is partly the answer.

Richard Nixon, we considered a liberal.

Oh, massively. Massively. He did price controls. That’s actually too liberal, so he started the EPA. He started OSHA, and he didn’t want to do it. He’s a bad guy. Ralph Nader made him do it. That was before money in politics. That’s why we were winning. Now with the corruption, all they do, every one of these sons of bitches works for whoever pays them. They’re all bought. It’s all bribes. We legalized bribery in this country. America, unfortunately, has become the most corrupt country in the world, because bribery at least in other countries is illegal. Here we made it legal. It’s called campaign contributions, so what made …

What was your conversion moment?

Iraq War, definitely, I’m gone. I’m gone from the … I had already voted for Gore, because I watched the debates and I said, “Well, one guy’s smart and the other guy’s an idiot. I don’t know why no one on TV will acknowledge that the guy’s an idiot!” I’m sitting there as a Republican going, “This man is a moron!”

And what were you doing? Beyond being angry about the Iraq War, what were you … how were you paying your bills?

At that point, I’m a struggling talk show host.

So you’ve always wanted to be a talk show host?

I originally started as a lawyer, but for three seconds, and then I started doing public access, then radio, weekends, fill-in radio host.

Was this in New Jersey?

No, at that point I’m in D.C. I did some fill-in stuff in Boston, then I go work in TV in Miami, and then I start The Young Turks in LA, but all the stuff that I’m describing, Peter, is my overall macro-conversion moment, so why are we going in and destroying the Middle East? It’s because Dick Cheney got a $34 million exit package from Halliburton, and he would like to give more oral contracts and defense contracts to his former work company. Yes, that’s why.

That’s why we did it. And then instability in the Middle East creates higher oil prices, and those guys bought almost every politician in the country, so screw that, and then they start torturing people, and then they never balance the budget, and the list goes on and on. And then if you follow the news and you’re at all observant, you will realize that they don’t have any principled positions. They don’t have any policy positions. They will do almost everything their donors tell them to do, so the problem is corruption. The answer is, get money out of politics, otherwise we’re all basically …

I want to go back to your bio for a second. So apparently there’s tapes of Glenn Beck in his earlier days, when he was just a regular DJ. Rush Limbaugh had another version of Rush Limbaugh before he was Rush Limbaugh. Was there a Republican version of Cenk, at some point, on air?

The old public access tapes and radio tapes, somebody already made a movie out of it, it’s called “Mad as Hell.” You should watch it.

Is it the same politics, but just with a different label, or you actually changed your politics?

It’s a little bit of both. I was always pro-sex. I want to be clear about that. I was always liberal on social issues, and you can see it in the old tapes, and they actually started losing me in the Clinton impeachment, because I didn’t like Clinton, and I think I’m still right about a lot of those issues, but I’m like, “You’re going to impeach him over that? That doesn’t seem right.” And that’s when I began to realize that they were not honest actors, and so I was for fiscal responsibility. I’m still for fiscal responsibility. It’s just the Republicans just said, “Oh, yeah. We’re just kidding.”

I mean, look at what they just did. “Oh, we’re kidding about the debt. We never cared about the debt. It was a lie. Oh, we’re going to add $1.5 trillion dollars to the debt because we want to give tax cuts to our donors.” Thank you very much for the admission/confession, so I haven’t changed that much on the issues. It’s just the Republicans have become monstrous, and they stopped pretending.

And when did you find, “Oh, there’s an audience that responds to this. We didn’t think there was, but there is”? Or did you always know that audience was out there?

Logically, I knew it was out there.

But there was no evidence of it in public, right? There was no lefty big-media organization.

That’s right, and so you look at the polling, forget … Elections are bathed in money, but you look at policy issues. This country’s about 60 percent progressive, and I can show you a dozen polls that clearly show it’s solidly 60 percent progressive, but there was no media, and so what I realized way later is the reason there was no media is because almost all the media is owned by multi-billion dollar corporations. You don’t want to rock the boat if it’s your boat, so then, when YouTube came about, they took away the gatekeepers, and that’s when we started exploding. It was one thing to try to struggle to get on air in different radio markets …

YouTube played for you.

Right, YouTube was the game changer.

It’s funny, because people are … Again, when you see discussions of YouTube in mainstream media, people get there’s PewDiePie and other weird stuff. The Times has been putting YouTube under a lot more scrutiny, both for in terms of its lack of filters for some stuff. And then I think people have started picking up on the idea that YouTube’s actually a place where a lot of folks in the right wing and very far right wing are hanging out. Again, the notion that it’s also a place for progressive politics, and there’s a big audience there, doesn’t seem to register.

Yeah, it is … I don’t think it’s conscious, but for whatever reason, we’re invisible to them. I think it’s because we’re anti-establishment, and they’re the establishment, and I think it’s not that that makes them angry, but for whatever reason, it makes them go, “Oh, that must not exist.”

Right. To be fair, you’re also not flooding the airways with fake news after a mass shooting.

Right, right. That is exactly right.

And that should be scrutinized, and people should know how that’s working, and that is a problem for YouTube, and since you’re none of those things, you shouldn’t be the subject of that story, right?

Peter, that’s a great point, because bad behavior is rewarded with media coverage, so Tomi Lahren now is very well known. She’s what … I don’t know if she’s 13 or 14, and she has no substantive opinions, but what she does is she goes out there and goes, “Okay, I don’t like black people. I think they’re terrorists.” “Oh my God! Everybody cover Tomi Lahren now! She said something outrageous.” And it gets a ton of coverage. You say something rational, people are like, “Oh, boring. That’s rational.”

“Use some better metaphors.”

That’s what the establishment says, and I get it, and I get the logic of it, but the audience actually loves it.

So you’re going to spend the next few years pushing for Bernie Sanders and/or a proxy for Bernie Sanders. On the business side, what’s the plan?

Same thing, home of the revolution, so if you believe in the revolution, and you believe in independent media, you come support us. We’ve got a subscription business, and if you want our ties to be connected to advertisers, then don’t subscribe, and then we’ll have to cater to advertisers. We still do to some degree, but I would much rather have the base of our revenue come from the audience so that we are financially tied to our audience.

I was going to say that that revolution pitch may be a problem for advertisers, right?

Yeah.

Harder to sell beer, Viagra.

We are perfectly cognizant of that. We’re aware of that, and we have made a decision to be audience first.

So the majority of your revenue right now is subscription?

Not majority, but the largest chunk of the pie.

You’d like it to be.

Yes, I’d love for most of our revenue to be tied to our audience, because you want your financial incentive aligned with your audience so that you serve them.

Okay, and you’re giving me $100 in 2020, or sooner if Bernie’s not running? I can collect sooner?

No, no. If Bernie’s not running, the bet’s off. I’m saying if Bernie runs …

Oh, if he runs.

He wins, no question about it.

But we’ll talk before then.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

I guess I’ve got to wait until election night to collect from you.

Yeah, but I’ll see you before that.

Okay.

Thanks for coming, Cenk.

All right. Thank you.

I appreciate it.

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