The secret reason why media companies make billions

DEEP DIVE

The most successful media companies fulfill simple, base desires.

For example…

The core value prop of Morning Brew and The Hustle is:

"Make me look smart in front of my boss."

They've done ~$300M+ in combined lifetime revenue by helping people do that.

Here’s proof.

This ad drove 500k-1M subscribers for The Hustle.

(I know because I worked there and saw how dominant it was).

It worked from about 2017 to 2021.

The Hustle team changed nothing about this ad except for the number of “professionals.”

The ad started with “100k professionals” then 200k and 300k.

Eventually, it grew to “1M+ professionals” and “1.5M+ professionals.”

Most of the growth came from that simple ad, which promised to fulfill a desire:

“Make me look smarter in front of my boss.”

Morning Brew also had success with many similar ads.

Another example:

The Wall Street Journal

This ad sold $2 billion worth of Wall St. Journal subscriptions and ran from 1975-2003.

It’s value proposition:

“Help me make more money in my business and career.”

The ad doesn't even mention WSJ until 50% into the copy.

Here’s another example:

Financial publishing giants

• Agora: ~$1B in revenue

• MarketWise: ~$500M in annual revenue

• The Motley Fool: ~$100M annual revenue

All of them have the same value proposition:

"Make me rich by telling me what stocks and options to buy and sell."

This desire is more base.

Stock-picking services and newsletters have been around for 100 years, and they’re not going away anytime soon.

Last example:

Netflix 

It’s value prop:

“Help me escape reality.”

Annual revenue: 36 BILLION

Notice a pattern?

The more base desire a media company fulfills, the more money they make:

• Make me look smart: $300M

• Make me rich: $1.6B

• Make me escape it all: $36B

Of course, there’s not always a pattern.

There are other factors for success.

But there’s one reason why media companies always fail:

They don't have a value proposition, and they don’t help people fulfill any base desire. 

See, most media companies, creators, and newsletters don’t solve a problem.

They create “interesting” content.

In a world with constant distractions and millions of content creators, that’s not enough.

You need to help readers:

• Solve a painful problem

• And/or achieve an important desire

That’s it.

I’ll leave you with this.

It’s a quote from copywriter and legendary direct response marketer Eugene Schwartz.

This may be about writing ad copy, but every bit of this applies to creating content and building a media company:

“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exists in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it.

Actually, it would be impossible for any one advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tried to run against it.”