How The Dispatch is diversifying beyond its subscription model

Mike Rothman spent his career building successful media brands like Thrillist and Fatherly.

The Dispatch launched in 2020 with a pretty straightforward thesis: that people would pay for quality, fact-based journalism. It certainly had a partisan lean — it was co-founded by conservative journalists Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, after all — but it steered clear of the wholesale rejection of reality that’s rampant in most pro-Trump media.

Flash forward to 2025, and that thesis has been vindicated. It recently crossed 45,000 paid subscribers without the help of huge VC investors. Now, it plans to diversify its revenue streams, and to accomplish that it brought on Mike Rothman, a longtime media veteran who helped build companies like Thrillist and Fatherly.

In a recent interview, Mike walked through his decision to join The Dispatch, what kind of advertising he wants to sell, and why brands are suddenly interested again in sponsoring politics media.

You can watch the interview over here.

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Transcript

Hey Mike, thanks for joining us. Pleasure to be here. So you're here to talk to us about your new role as president at a publication called The Dispatch, but before we get into that,

1:07

I'd love to just kind of fill people in on your background and what expertise you're You bring to that role. You have a long background in building media businesses. You've been doing it for 20 years. Let's just talk a little bit about that. For instance, you helped build the e-commerce operations for a publication called The Thrillist,

1:26

which I think, from what I remember, is one of the first publications to... to take e-commerce seriously and thinking about not just, you know, affiliate sales, but building out their own like online store and stuff like that. How did you come to work for them?

1:39

Well, I think the career actually starts probably when I was 14. I started a magazine, a print magazine, Saddle Stitched called Video Works about video games. It was like my first foray into curated content because a lot of the content was photocopied from Electronic Gaming Monthly along with my own

1:59

editorials about the latest Altered Beast or... Oh, you were a content pirate. Yeah, back then, as a 14-year-old in Ordell Public Elementary. But again, we politely call it curating now, and I would editorialize on top of that about... you know, the Zelda codes and yeah.

2:20

So you would have like, you would actually have like a cutout of, of an article and then your commentary like above or beyond it, like almost like a quote basically.

2:28

Yeah. Very, very meta. And yeah, like I like found a copy machine and we made about 50 copies and distributed it to other gamers at school. And so I think that was probably my first, the first time I got bit by the media bug. And then in college, my senior year,

2:49

teamed up with my roommate to develop a magazine about parties, not parties like who's out with whom wearing what, but more human interest stories with this through line of celebrations. And it ended up becoming a business because we thought rather than just trying to launch a newsstand publication, This is back in 2002.

3:11

We had launched this as an in-room magazine for a boutique hotel group, and we would apportion a certain percentage of edit to covering events in their properties or events in cities in which they had locations. It sounded good on paper and then worked through the Brown Alumni Network to find

3:33

out who is connected among our alumni community in the hospitality world. Cold called a number of people from our dorm room, finally got in touch with Barry Sternlicht, who at the time was the CEO of Starwood Hotel Group. which owned the W Hotels, which had about 15 properties at the time.

3:51

And he didn't actually pick up the phone, but he did forward the voicemail to someone else who forwarded it to an agency. And so we got a meeting with the agency and fast forward, we ended up winning a business plan competition that Brown put together.

4:12

And we had kind of enough validation and we had some initial startup capital to actually work on this.

4:20

uh after we graduated and so this was like brand this was like brand publishing which was what it was called i think back then almost like the in-flight magazine

4:28

but it would be for the hotels exactly and then once w pulled out funding we started pitching we pitched jet blue as a seatback magazine we pitched amex that this would be a custom publication for young people And then eventually ran out of gas, ran out of money and went in-house at Hachette, uh,

4:48

doing custom publishing for them. And at the time they were publishing like the Mercedes magazine that went to 300,000 Mercedes owners. And these were like, you know, 156 page glossy folios, uh, with professional editorial teams and, uh, and Hachette was independent. This was before it merged with, um, Hearst. I always thought it was called Hatchet.

5:15

I didn't realize it was called Hachette. Right. It's a Hatchet job. We had some Hatchet jobs at Hachette. But yeah, they had like Premier Magazine, Women's Day, Elle. And so that was like working in big publishing at the time, kind of like the last glory days of like big midtown offices with black cars idling

5:36

out front in New York. And it all felt very glamorous. And working in custom publishing was kind of like the less glamorous way into that glamorous publishing world.

5:49

And for people who don't know, custom publishing is like the precursor to modern day content marketing. Like this idea that a brand should actually create their own content and create their... own audience so that they could lower their customer acquisition cost and raise

6:05

retention rates because you have a relationship with Mercedes that talks to you through your lifestyle, not just as a transactional dealer relationship.

6:14

So you were doing brand publishing. So when did you kind of get off the print treadmill and into the internet?

6:21

So, yeah, it's a long story, but my aunt at the time, who was then younger than I am now, she was 40. She was in, this is when like the conversation takes somewhat of a darker turn. She was in a car accident. It was a fatal car accident.

6:38

And I decided after a chain of events that I would bike from New York to Los Angeles with a buddy of mine who just got into law school and had the summer off. to raise money for a scholarship in my aunt's name to benefit big brothers, big sisters.

6:57

And so at the time I thought that I would just stay in LA and that I would, most people fly to LA. We thought we would bike to LA. But the effort was we would, people would pledge a penny per mile. And because we were young and kind of dumb,

7:12

we would just do a lot of miles and hopefully those pennies added up. And this is my way of honoring my aunt, but this is also my way of getting out of New York. And I had found this Paramount, the studio had a management training program where you spend 18 months in a

7:30

rotational program learning the entertainment business. And I thought, oh, this could be really interesting. I had interviews in New York and had set up interviews in LA. I told them about this bike ride. They thought, oh, this is incredible. Like, why don't you have your final interview once you get out here two months later.

7:47

And once we got to LA, uh, realized I wanted to come back to New York. came back to New York, ended up being very fateful. I worked at an agency. I got a job at Digitas working with American Express in their custom mail direct response department.

8:08

And I promise this is all relevant to how we get to the dispatch. So I had the custom publishing experience and I was working at an agency because I thought I had some kind of deficit only working on the publishing side of the business. I thought if I'm going to really succeed in publishing, I need to understand

8:27

kind of the buyer mentality. And within three months, I realized this is not for me. This is before Mad Men came out, but my conception of what an agency was like was a bunch of like- Creative people, like just pitching, like, yeah. Pitching, like carousel. And it was really just like T's and C's in Amex direct mail.

8:49

And it was decidedly less glamorous. It was a great discipline to understand how direct marketing works. Anyway, I realized I didn't want to do this. I wanted to get back in publishing and I wanted to get in digital publishing. This is now 2005, realizing that the print days were waning.

9:06

And I made a list of everyone that I knew in digital publishing. And I had a friend who's the first hire at Huffington Post. And she suggested that I talk to her boss, this guy, Kenny Lear. who had started Huffington Post, who is a C-level executive at AOL Time Warner.

9:24

And then he suggested that I talk to his, in his words, his dopey son, Ben, who was starting this thing called Thrillist out of his office. And so I met Ben, email lifestyle-oriented newsletter, like taking a men's magazine concept, but localizing it and delivering it exclusively via email. And so like,

9:46

so like in the way that like GQ like features a lot of products and stuff like that for men, it was kind of like, it was kind of like ours,

9:52

restaurants, events for consumer focused,

9:56

consumer forward type of thing for men.

9:58

Yeah. And so at that point I was 25, he was 25, his co-founder was 26. And then our first editorial hire was, you know, our, our dad figure who is 36 and, And so we ended up building this product, which grew to a company of 200 people, primarily as an advertising business,

10:24

at least for the first five years. And we were in 15 markets around the US, and this is like mid to late aughts in New York digital publishing. So these were boom, boom times. We were sharing an office with the Huffington Post. When they were on the rise, Gawker was down the street.

10:43

The college humor guys who would go on to do amazing things on their own, they were also further down the block. Business Insider launched, initially it was called Silicon Alley Insider because we were in Silicon Alley, Lower Broadway, where all these startup companies in the digital media space were. And there were really heady times,

11:07

but because it was a direct mail product, because it was lifestyle focused, a lot of this earlier experience, even doing direct mail for Amex, doing custom publishing for Mercedes at Hachette ended up being incredibly relevant, coupled with the startup experience of having built my own magazine with the W Hotels as a custom publishing partner. So anyway,

11:33

years later, we found this company called Jack Threads, which was like a flash sale company also focused on men based out of Columbus. We had done some initial, they had advertised with us. This little amount of advertising that they had done was really successful in driving- With Thrillist. With Thrillist.

11:54

And we thought, you know what, maybe there's a deeper relationship to be had here. So we ended up, fast forward a couple months later, acquiring Jack Threads. And we had this vision that Jack Threads and Thrillist combining, it was like the equivalent of GQ merging with J.Crew.

12:15

We would sell a lifestyle fantasy and then we would actually deliver hard goods to fulfill that fantasy through Jack Threads.

12:23

And you were probably a little bit ahead of your time, but you flash forward to today and really the thesis is borne out with like Mr. Beast and Feastables and, you know, Emma Chamberlain and Chamberlain Coffee. But even like The Daily Wire, like apparently like... most of their revenue is coming through their own kind of commoditized products

12:41

like men's razors and, uh, you know, all kinds of things that people have to buy anyway. So might as well try to just use our direct, our direct relationship with the audience to just, uh, and to just promote these products. And then you get like a hundred or close to a hundred percent of the upside of

13:02

selling them rather than just like having advertisers, uh, come on and try to sell their products on your media outlet or whatever.

13:10

And often I think those business models are born out of necessity because, you know, the daily wires of the world may not be the most brand friendly to fortune 500 brands who want to steer clear from a lot of, you know, more sensational political coverage that steers more towards like ad hominem attacks and yelling and shouting.

13:32

So very wisely, those companies realized that like, okay, let's just figure out a different model that works for us where we don't have to be as reliant on advertising and have the concentration risk that comes with relying on the buying decisions of a dozen to several dozen advertisers to make our business over the course of a year

13:54

yeah and like in mr b's case his motivation was like he just had such a huge audience um that like like most advertisers couldn't even afford his rates anymore so he was like he was like well i could lower i could lower my advertising rates but then i'm not really like why am i giving them all this

14:12

free promotion that they didn't earn. So it was like, well, I might as well be promoting my own product if nobody can afford me anymore. I think that's what sunk Life Magazine. Life Magazine closed not because it lost popularity, but because It was too popular, and TV advertising came about,

14:31

and TV advertising was such a better medium for advertising that a lot of the huge advertisers that could previously afford Life magazine were then going to TV advertising, and Life was just like... It was just too popular for its own good. And I think that's what basically sunk it. At least that's based on my understanding.

14:53

Anyway, we're going on tangents. So you acquired Jack Threads. Thrillist, did it get acquired? Well, we ended up...

15:05

merging Thrillist with the Dodo with NowThis into an entity called Group9 and sold a percentage of the company to Discovery. And then we sold Group9 to Vox. So those assets now sit with Vox.

15:24

Except for NowThis, which has been spun out into a nonprofit or something like that. And then so what happened? So after Thrillist, you... You launched another company that was even more famous than Thrillist. What was that company?

15:39

It was called Fatherly. And there's this interregnum period of maybe 18 months from Thrillist to Fatherly. And in that period, I did a bunch of consulting for a number of consumer brands. uh worked specifically with betaworks which is a venture studio based in new york

16:00

at the time they had a studio that birthed giphy uh which you know became giphy dots which was an incredibly popular casual game on par with like tetris uh and we had an we also acquired uh dig speaking of curation from the top of the conversation.

16:24

And it was an interesting place to be is like an EIR at Betaworks, getting to work with all of these different companies. And each of these engagements was almost like a business school class where I got paid. And so with Giphy, you really get to understand the nuances of SEO. Dig was expert at curation.

16:45

Dots, you really understand how to launch a mobile game. I worked with the team at BarkBox, which is outside of the Betaworks world, but in the general New York tech world at the time. and got to see this relationship between pet parents and their pets,

17:03

which is not too dissimilar from the relationship and the passion that people have for their own human kids. And so I was developing Fatherly at the time as a side project while working as an in-house consultant at all these different brands and learning a lot of different

17:21

lessons from each of these different companies that we eventually applied to Fatherly. And Fatherly, for those who aren't familiar, a digital media company with a focus on dads, as the name implies. At the time, I was a single non-dad in the same way that when we launched Thrillist,

17:39

I didn't have the disposable income that our audience had for going out and going to bars and restaurants all the time. And so I feel like my professional life was always a couple steps ahead of where I was personally. And with Fatherly, it had more of an advertising model, but we launched as a newsletter.

17:57

We started with a test of 200 friends who are dads, just made a spreadsheet of everyone that I know. who has kids under two. And that's how it started. And then we didn't actually raise money until we had about 50,000 subscribers, maybe 12, 13 months later. Who was writing the newsletter?

18:18

Recruited that 35-year-old dad who was not a dad, but we affectionately called him our dad, David Blend. from Thrillist, our first editorial hire. And we would meet on a Sunday in a coffee shop. And we also took more of a curated approach. So the whole thesis behind Fatherly initially is that there isn't a deficit of good

18:39

parenting content. It's just very fragmented and widely distributed. And none of it is packaged for men, or at least the way that this contemporary young father would be comfortable consuming digital content. And so as proof of concept, we really tried hard to isolate as many variables as possible to test that specific thesis.

19:03

And so we didn't want to create original content. We just wanted to curate from the best that was out there. So we made a Feedly of about 2000 different URLs, blogs, journals, mom sites. And we found the five best, most relevant articles and packaged them in a way that we thought would be most

19:27

appealing to this initial cohort of 200 young dads with kids under two. And that was the test. And that was how we launched. And then as you've said multiple times, Publishing is really just about consistency. It's about building habits. That was kind of our secret weapon. And we just committed to doing this every Sunday.

19:49

And we had basic benchmarks around open rates, organic growth rates, number of clicks per email. And we evaluated that after eight weeks. We saw that, hey, we've gone from 200 people to 275 people organically. So this is getting out there without us really doing any kind of marketing. And so we kept going.

20:12

And then we did our first bit of marketing by teaming with this organization, the 92nd Street Y in New York, which is the oldest parenting organization in the city. They also saw that they had a glut of new dads joining their new dad workshops, and they didn't have any way...

20:30

in their like nascent CRM efforts to maintain a relationship with those dads after they left these workshops. And so they agreed to give us access to their CRM of like 5,000 dads. And so we did a dedicated email. We got 500 new dads with whom we had no direct relationship to sign up on like an

20:51

Unsplash page or an Insta page, whatever we put together, basic landing page. And now we had 750 dads on the list. And then from there, the organic growth really took off to the point where we got about 50,000. And we started changing the ratio of 100% curated content to a mix of curated and

21:13

original content when we realized that we started developing a sharper editorial point of view and what we found on the Feedly didn't necessarily serve us. And so we started developing original editorial where we found dramatically overqualified experts to give really practical advice for young dads. So it was like a Navy seal captain from seal team five,

21:36

giving tips around domestic concealment on how to win the hide and seek with your kid, or like a master architect from foster and partners giving tips on how to build the most epic pillow fort with the pillows in your living room.

21:50

And was it like still a newsletter at this point? I seem to remember that you did not. Did you expand into like to like more web based content? Because this was like the the the days of like when Facebook was still sending tons of traffic, like you eventually became like a more kind of viral site, didn't you?

22:08

Or am I misremembering that?

22:10

We we eventually leveraged Facebook. And I feel like we were one of the last publishers to really see benefits from organic Facebook traffic. And we came up with like fun viral videos of like kids doing the darndest things. And that was really more of like an upper funnel tactic to get people onto the site,

22:28

to get people signed up to the newsletter, to have a more captured relationship. But we didn't actually build a site until we had, I don't know, maybe 300 original articles. And at that point, we had a reason to build a site beyond just a landing page because we had an archive and we wanted to support the archive.

22:47

And then once we had the archive, we realized, oh, there's probably some SEO benefit that we can glean. And we were using, I mean, really being as iterative as humanly possible, like our website was a Tumblr. And then at that, and that was really what we had raised with. We were using campaign monitor for the newsletter,

23:06

got to 50,000 and that that campaign monitor was pushing to a Tumblr. And then finally we're like, all right, let's go raise seed capital and went to all the founders that I was working with as this like EIR and said, Hey, you know, this thing fatherly that I've been building, I think, you know, we've been able to,

23:25

get editorial proof of concept. We want to raise money. Can you introduce us to your investors who you think would be relevant? And, uh, and so we ended up raising 2 million bucks within, I'd say 90 days of starting the process.

23:37

And like, were you selling native ads within the newsletter? Like what was that?

23:41

Native ads, some event sponsorships. We worked with like plum organics originally. And so we get, we got the profitability pretty quickly. because it was a small team in the same vein that it took us 12, 13 months to start slow rolling the editorial product. We started slow rolling relationships with advertisers. Fortunately,

24:02

because I had seven years of building Thrillist, I had all of these really great relationships with brands. Brands were reaching young men. And so it wasn't much of a stretch when you're reaching, you're marketing a product to young men for seven years. that those young men grow up, they become dads.

24:19

Those same marketers that we were working with were probably also in some rotational program at P&G and Unilever. And so I would go to them, went to Cincinnati a couple of times to visit P&G, gave them presentations about what we were building at Fatherly. So by the time that we really flipped the lights on and said, okay,

24:40

we're open for business, we had a relationship that With Fatherly, it was 12 months old. And then I had relationships that at that point were five to seven years old. And so we were able to, in many ways, short circuit what would otherwise be like a 12,

24:55

18 month sales cycle by involving these brands in the R&D process of the editorial product.

25:03

So I think there's a theme in your career between the custom publishing and then Thrillist and now at Fatherly where my guess is you probably don't have a very high opinion of programmatic ads, display advertising, all those kinds of ads at scale. The kind of through line is like...

25:21

All the publications you worked for were some kind of advertising, but it was a kind of editorial content-based, editorial-first type of advertising. And obviously this will, I'm guessing this through line will run through to what you're going to be doing with the dispatch, but would you say that's kind of a... accurate depiction of your worldview?

25:41

Yeah, I would say that programmatic kind of rounded out the revenue picture. We didn't entirely rely on it, in part because we wanted to create a consumer product that we actually enjoyed. And no one loves an editorial product that's stuffed chock-a-block full of programmatic ads. slows the experience and it's visually less compelling. And so there is,

26:07

you know, call it like a snobbishness or just a desire to come up with something that felt a bit more premium. And we can rationalize that premium product by charging premium rates with premium advertisers.

26:18

I was just ranting on social media with screenshots today, like I'm a paying subscriber to Business Insider. And like at some points, depending on the article you're on, At every single point as you're scrolling through the article, 60% of the page is covered in ads.

26:34

You have this little tiny content slit that you're trying to read the content through as there's an ad here, there's a pop-down ad here, and you're just trying to scroll and read this little tiny bit of text that's surrounded. It's just such a terrible user experience, especially for...

26:52

Yeah, you're reading through a knight's helmet. And like squinting, you're like, I'm a paying member.

26:59

Yeah, I'm paying for this right now. So anyway, so you grow farther, you raise some money. How big was it by the time it sold, like in terms of like staff count and stuff like that?

27:13

We were about 30 when we sold, and we were always very prudent about capitalizing the business for what we actually needed. So we raised about 6 million in equity in total at a moment when most publishers in our general cohort were raising 50 to 500 million. And that was all by design.

27:33

We wanted to make sure that we didn't have this impossibly high preference stack, mindful of what potential outcomes would look like.

27:42

I've developed a thesis that no digital media company should raise more than seven figures. Anytime you're raising more than that, you're just getting too ahead of your skis. I think that's exactly right.

27:54

Yeah. And I think now there's much more of a trend around seed strapping, raising just enough bootstrapping and light seed capital to get to a point where you can be... And this is for a lot of consumer products in particular, not just media,

28:11

to get to proof of concept and profitability within 12 to 18 months to be able to control your destiny, to decide whether you have unit economics and moat advantages that... justify a big infusion of capital to let your flywheel spin. But I think so many people think they have a flywheel before

28:35

before that's actually borne out and then they get over their head very quickly. So you sold to Bustle Digital Group what year? Eventually, we sold, well, we merged with a Sumspider, which was a holdco that operated Scary Mommy, which was the largest kind of mom site in our competitive set. We found that we were selling against them.

29:00

We were competing for audience because so much of our audience were moms that were consuming for themselves or moms consuming for the men in their lives. And so the thesis was, why don't we just combine the biggest digital brand for dads and the biggest digital brand for moms? Interestingly, our management team, our operational team were very complimentary.

29:21

And so our whole management team came over, just about everybody on the operational team came over. And this was end of 2019 that we had a term sheet. And then interestingly, we had like two and a half months of confirmatory diligence that ended March 12th

29:39

at like 11 o'clock at night of 2020 at a moment when the entire city was shutting down. And the very first day of the combined company was the very first day that both companies were working remotely. And obviously working remotely now is just like, look at us, like we're calling from our rooms.

30:00

But at the time it was kind of a novelty. And everyone was a bit scared what's happening to the world. And I would say that the pandemic was actually incredibly, I mean, it wasn't positive for anybody, but it was positive for our business in the sense that it really impacted parents in particular who came to Fatherly,

30:19

came to Scary Mommy for advice, for product recommendations, for entertaining kids that are now like not at school and stuck at home. I mean,

30:29

there really was a time there where actually media companies were doing okay, because suddenly everybody was at home, so they had a lot of free time, so they could consume a lot of media. And there was a dip in the economy briefly, but then the Trump administration passed some $3 trillion stimulus bill,

30:48

and interest rates were at zero. So it was kind of the perfect, frothy... environment where there were a lot of people online and there was a lot of extra money to go in and obviously e-commerce was a huge boom so the online sales were suddenly like more important than ever it was kind of like the perfect environment

31:08

for some media companies you know circa like June for June to December of 2020 basically

31:16

Right. And we were well positioned. The founders of Sumspider, Mark Laurie and Vinnie Bahara, founded diapers.com. At the time, Mark Laurie was the CEO of walmart.com while he was an owner at Sumspider. And so it felt like we had a real advantage with Mark, with his panopticon view of e-commerce across America as CEO of walmart.com and all

31:44

the knowledge and insight that comes from running that business and running diapers, which sold to Amazon, that we were pretty well equipped. And our affiliate business did really well during that time. We leaned into that. And so we got the business to a combined 50 million in revenue.

32:01

We were like, you know, that like 10 million in EBITDA. And so it was a, it was a healthy business. And then we eventually sold to BDG about 18 months later, um, with the expectation at the time that BDG was going to SPAC back when SPACs were SPACing. And after that I'd been, you know,

32:19

nine years building this company and I was ready to do, to do something else.

32:23

Yeah. So I know you've done lots of consulting for companies and stuff like that and continue to do after you left that. But obviously we want to talk about the dispatch here. So the dispatch launched in, it did a soft launch, I think in 2019 and October, 2019.

32:39

And then a more kind of hard launch in like early 2020. Let's just like briefly go through the history of the dispatch. And then we'll get to like what you're doing for them. So it was started by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg was a star columnist at,

32:59

or maybe it was an editor at the National Review. And then Steve Hayes was the former editor of the Weekly Standard, which was kind of a publication, I think, that was subsidized by billionaires or something like that. And obviously they were kind of famously what were called never-Trumpers, whereas parts of right-wing media went to the pro-Trump side.

33:26

They had kind of carved out this uh this this space in the center right um but the there wasn't like a lot of hunger in right-wing media like fox news and stuff like that for that kind of coverage so they they developed this thesis that there was actually this like huge

33:43

cohort of centrists center right centrists center left who would be interested in a kind of fact-based center-right, original journalism, basically online magazine. Was that kind of summing up their thesis? That's correct.

33:57

Yeah, they would bring original reporting that was down the middle, you know, facts or facts, combined with analysis. from a center-right perspective. And part of the thinking was at least just admitting that your analysis is coming from more of a center-right predisposition as a way to help engender more trust in this particular institution.

34:20

Because I think at the time where a lot of media went wrong, you know, the New York Times saying like, oh, like in our opinion section is balanced. We don't have a lien. And consumers kind of read that differently. They're like, no, no, there seems to be a definitive lien in your in your opinion coverage,

34:38

or the way that media was kind of unbundled, you would just see articles, opinion, or reported pieces kind of indiscriminately in your feed. And so you would just assume that, okay, this this outlet has more of a left-leaning bias. And so we thought, hey, let's just admit that our analysis has its predisposition.

35:03

Let's also make sure that we're taking the most charitable interpretation of opposing arguments and let our audience make their own decision. Let's not confirm their existing biases, which is what we thought was bedeviling a lot of other media outlets, particularly other political media outlets. So I met Jonah and Steve in 2019.

35:24

We should also, I erased one of the co-founders, Troy something? Toby Stock. Toby Stock, yeah. Okay, keep on going. I didn't want to take him out of the history of the dispatch.

35:36

Yeah, Toby's great. He had more of a background in fundraising and development. uh and so he was like the you know the nominal business guy at the time and then really helped corral the original investors um whereas the weekly standard really had concentration risk in a single billionaire investor uh part of the design of

35:59

the dispatch is to have many many investors none of whom owns more than like a single digit percentage of the company. So there's no undue influence that anyone has on the editorial of the company, which is really important as a way to just kind of build institutional journalistic independence. Another point of differentiation from other media companies,

36:24

certainly on the right, and now on the left and center left that really are owned entirely by a billionaire and kind of rely on the benevolence of a billionaire. And you see that that doesn't necessarily work that well. If you're the LA Times, you're the Post, Time Magazine,

36:43

when that billionaire realizes that media is hard or it becomes distracting from other business interests that they have. So 2019, I met Jonah and Steve. They came to the Fatherly offices. They initially envisioned the dispatch as something probably more akin to like a HuffPo model, which as you said, was more like digital publishing at scale.

37:07

And then my advice to them was, I think you should focus on being a bit newsletter first. Certainly that was the history that I had had with Thrillist and Fatherly, but I also recognize that email in its own way is like the cockroach of the internet. It's always there.

37:22

It's like you can't get rid of it, always kind of relevant. And it's also a way to capture an owned audience. And Jonah and Steve had owned audiences that they had cultivated over, at that point, 25 years as columnists and journalists. And Jonah had a podcast and they had a newsletter already that they could port over.

37:46

And so they came back three months later and they said, hey, we decided to take your advice. We connected with this company, Substack. At the time, they were one of the first media companies on Substack. And as an advisor, you're always keen to work with people who find value in your advice.

38:02

And so that was really how the relationship started. And so they soft launch in October of 2019.

38:09

And they really leaned into subscriptions to start with for a variety of reasons. I think they liked that whole kind of relationship with the reader where kind of going back to what you're saying that like no one person would have undue influence on them.

38:22

So if you just had a bunch of different people paying you $100 and there was then that kind of that relationship was kind of spread out over. a lot of different people but i think also obviously this was an environment where this this was like there's a huge anti-trump backlash there was you know

38:40

organizations like sleeping giants and stuff like that that were targeting advertisers and trying to pressure them to move off of like well it started with with partisan right-wing media but i think you know as i've written about in my newsletter that Instead of being more selective,

38:56

the advertisers just started doing keyword blocking and just basically took out all politics-related news and stuff like that. So it didn't go the way that I think a lot of those organizations hoped it would. But I think my guess is their thinking was that the environment just wasn't great for politics-based advertising at that point.

39:19

And that's part of the reason why they leaned into subscriptions early on.

39:22

Yeah. And also they just didn't have that background. And also if you don't have to rely on advertisers, probably for the better to build an ad sales infrastructure is expensive. It also like, you know, ad salespeople invariably will demand more of the product to like serve the interest of advertisers versus the interest of readers.

39:47

And Steve and Jonah and Toby wisely wanted to keep product focus on the reader. And also that was Substack at the time. didn't allow advertisers. You could probably sneak in some native ads, but it wasn't really a feature of the product. It was a feature rather than a bug to be ad free at the time.

40:09

Obviously, things have changed with them. But nevertheless, there was a lot of inbound commercial interest because the type of reporting that the dispatch was producing early on through today High quality, rigorous. And while Steve and Jonah had certainly come out very critical of Trump, they resisted and still to this day resist the painting of just being anti-Trump.

40:38

as like a broad kind of categorical description, just because one, in a way it's like anti-Dispatchian. I think Jonah has been very long on owning Greenland. And so you don't want to, as an example, I mean, there are certain policies that make sense and certain policies that might seem crazy,

41:00

but the dispatch is always more than just like a finger-waggy publication of like, oh, what did Trump do today? And in fact, you know, through present day, it's much more focused on like national security and economic policy and culture all through like the lens of policy, not just through the lens of personality of like, uh-oh,

41:28

what did this person do today? And that's really the value prop at the dispatch is like, We are going to cut through all of the noise and provide the news that actually matters despite everything that you might see in your feed and all of the other distractions that come with another Trump administration.

41:46

And so that strategy worked. It's been tremendously successful. I know it had some investors, but it's quasi-bootstrapped, seed-strapped, as you phrased it. And I think it has now, last reported number was something over 40,000 paid subscribers. What was the last... What was the last announcement that you guys made in terms of subscriptions?

42:09

I think it was about 45,000 that Adweek generously rounded up to 50. But again, we'll get there. State to where the puck is going. But 600,000 subscriptions, and that's our top of funnel. And in many ways, we're really just getting started. And so for me, I had been an advisor since 2019. I was always really impressed.

42:34

through present day of how far it had gotten without any real meaningful business infrastructure, both in terms of product and internal operations. And the company is almost entirely, almost entirely consists of editorial FTEs. And so I realized, oh, wow, like, if we actually hired a couple of key people on the business side and adopted a

42:59

couple of key funnel marketing best practices and adjusted our strategy here and there, this could be a really significant business, particularly at this fraught moment with fragmented news and a crazy news cycle.

43:14

And so you came on as president in 2024?

43:20

Correct. And didn't really make like a bigger public announcement until, you know, a couple of weeks ago.

43:27

And so you obviously like you're working on the business side, I think, mainly that's kind of your purview. And I think I'm guessing like, obviously, you're taking over subscriptions and are probably going to try to figure out how do you how do you increase subscriptions or even more? Can you improve the funnel, different stuff like that?

43:47

But it seems like a big part of your kind of mandate going forward is to grow the advertising side of the business.

43:53

It's to grow revenue. And I think there are a number of, I mean, I wrote an article back in 2020 of like all of the ways a media company can monetize without ads. And I think even at that time there were like 32 different tactics and now there's probably 42 different tactics.

44:13

I think there's a lot of business model innovation. I think there's a lot of opportunity for us that's like very unique for us. And I think it's actually really important for our business model to be weird in the sense that it's just very unique to us, the particular collection of assets that we have,

44:31

human capital and digital assets. So I think advertisers play a part in that. We have a number of advertisers that want to underwrite new content verticals for us that want to participate in live events and virtual events. And so to the extent that we'll work with advertisers,

44:51

it's gonna be like larger 360 programs that involve digital integrations into our products, offline components to work with our senior talent directly, our dedicated audience members, there's probably some research, but that's not gonna be, the focus will always remain on membership revenue. That'll probably still be like 85% of where revenue comes from

45:16

And so there's a number of strategies for how do you increase average revenue per user and events is one tactic, just providing more opportunities for our members to engage with dispatch talent. We have, uh, a big on-campus program that we're planning because we see a lot of demand for the type of rigorous reporting and, you know,

45:42

good faith opinion on college campuses where typically the only like conservative movements are like Turning Point and Charlie Kirk. And you have an entire generation of college students that really only know like populism as like a synonym. Culture war stuff. Yeah, culture war stuff. And again, it's all the distraction.

46:07

And I think there are plenty of other subscription publications, creator-led publications that focus more on culture war and distraction And we have an opportunity with existing members, with college students and other member cohorts to focus on what matters and monetize in interesting and unique ways.

46:28

So in terms of the timing of this, there's some discussion about... And I think it's too early to really know how much this is a real trend or not, but that a lot of these brands that were anathema to advertising on politics media, especially right of center politics media, that they're suddenly warming up to it.

46:53

somehow trump's win was kind of a waking up moment that they were maybe had swung too far away from politics and if that they wanted to reach like a huge swath of america uh that they needed to start you know there's been talk of brand

47:12

advertisers coming back to twitter um a lot of a lot are coming back to fox news and stuff like that what is your what's your viewpoint as someone who's like in these conversations

47:22

Well, I'm also in a number of Slack groups with CMOs and agency leaders. So I would say that vibe shift is real. And I think you realize that brands look to follow, not necessarily lead cultural trends. And there's certainly a change politically and culturally, more of a shift to the right. I'd say more to the center. right?

47:53

Brands also still have to be much more accountable and abide by all sorts of governance procedures about where they show up. And Brian Morrissey has always talked about the fear of the screenshot by the junior media planner, finding some you know, unsavory adjacency that gets to a CMO.

48:17

Going back to that sleeping, sleeping giants thing where they were.

48:20

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's still a real concern. You're still managing public shareholders. And so, uh, there aren't that many brand safe environments, creator led environments, I'd say that are like in the center center, right. Where a brand can feel like they're, You know, they're leaning into this, you know,

48:40

this kind of change in the winds while still maintaining all of their brand safety standards. And we'll see how that evolves. But I'm certainly hearing this and all these like WhatsApp Slack groups where, you know, agency leaders and brand marketers feel like they have to adapt in some form.

49:02

And they know that they can't just abandon politics and news media altogether just because there's still a ton of consumption there. It's, there's a lot of engaged consumption. It's not passive. It's still very, it's media that's very shareable. Unfortunately, a lot of that media that's very shareable, like reinforces like confirmation bias.

49:27

And so we expect that we'll be able to provide a brand safe environment that allows brands to get involved in more like policy oriented discussions. And so as an example, we've worked with this trade organization, the AP CIA, that was really keen on telling a story. It's like an insurance industry trade group.

49:51

And they wanted to tell a story about how third party litigation, third party litigation financing is one of the leading causes of premium increases next to natural disasters. And so this is like outside parties financing lawsuits that eventually like insurance companies have to pay. And we also worked with another advertiser, Bureau for Capital,

50:17

which is a financier of third party litigation. And they have their own reasons why this is, you know, in a, in a free market, they should be able to participate in these types of cases. Like looking at these types of cases as like an asset class and the dispatch, you know, serves like as a platform for, uh,

50:42

kind of healthy. good faith opposing arguments. Editorially, we can also serve as a platform for these types of discussions between marketers.

50:54

So it sounds like that's advocacy-based advertising. Do you see that as a big part of it? Or do you think more standard brand, not that Coca-Cola would be one of them, but you think of the McDonald's Coca-Cola campaign of just brand awareness, like Is that going to be part of it as well?

51:13

Yeah, I think just based on what's in the pipeline right now and what you'll be seeing on the dispatch, we have Fortune 500 brands that are interested in sponsoring new verticals that we're standing up around conservationism. So like policy around clean air, clean water, river rights, that kind of thing.

51:33

We have a new vertical that we're launching around education. around the future of work, uh, again, through more of a policy oriented lens that's relevant for a national consumer audience. So we have a lot of brands that are interested in these areas, like adjacencies in these areas. And also just the audience itself, uh,

51:53

is a really committed audience of what we'd consider like main street CEO types. Uh, you're kind of classical like center right conservative, a guy who owns a law firm or a hedge fund or a small business owner who owns like a series of car dealerships. And that's about 85% of our member base.

52:15

And so we have advertisers that just want to reach those consumers as affluent, high net worth people living in, not just on the coast, but across the country. And then about 15% of the audience are more you know, call it like opinion elite, like media types or people who work in and around government.

52:37

And that caters more to like the, you know, public affairs cohort of marketers.

52:44

And this is going to be, I mean, these conversations you have are kind of like for bespoke campaigns. Like I think you, I think you told me in a phone call, like there's only going to be a handful of advertisers you're going to be working with in any given year.

52:56

Yeah, I think we look at it as being larger 360 integrations that are maybe category exclusive for 10 to 12 brands over the course of a year. Because in that way, you don't necessarily need a gigantic ops team to support that. All of that revenue is accretive.

53:15

All of those partnerships support building out different parts of our existing membership value proposition. So launching a conservation vertical is a net benefit to a paying member. It's like, hey, you're for 100 bucks, 300 bucks a year, you're already getting Kevin Williamson, Jonah Goldberg, reporting from Steve Hayes, access to Sarah Isker and advisory opinions.

53:39

This is like the equivalent of like 12 different sub stacks for the price of one. And now we're adding new topic areas or new personalities into this mix. And so these commercial partners basically sweeten the membership value proposition, and that becomes more of a virtuous cycle for us.

53:57

And I guess my final question would be, to what end in terms of you raised the revenue, what do you want to invest in, in terms of just growing out like the editorial side or the ambition of the dispatch, like what will this increase in revenue help the dispatch do?

54:16

Because like you think of it as being like kind of like a newsletter forward publication to start with. Now it's probably closer to a magazine, still kind of newsletter forward, but more thinking it more like an actual magazine. Do you see like a future where it's kind of like –

54:35

included in the same conversation as The Atlantic and The New Yorker? Or do you want to lean in? I know podcasts are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the company. What do you want to invest this money into?

54:47

Yeah, I think we want to be able to impact. One, I think in terms of soft impact or cultural impact, we want to be able to impact the cultural conversation on a regular basis or elevate the cultural conversation. by focusing on things that matter rather than cultural issues truly designed to distract.

55:11

And so we want to be able to create a product that is optimized for elevating national conversation around a number of different areas. We want to invest in reporting. We want to continue to do more reporting around policy, politics, culture, economics, law. And that could also take the form of audio products.

55:33

Right now, we only have four different audio products. There's no reason why we can't have a dozen audio products. We basically look at our offering as like a T-shaped offering where you can get on one side of the T, you have voices and that's the analysis side of the business.

55:51

And we want on the other side, you have reported topics. And so we want to be able to expand both sides of the T. And then vertically, we want you to be able to go deep in any number of these areas. So if you really want to go deeper into conservationism, we have newsletters,

56:10

we have an audio offering, and we have in-person events where you can meet and greet other people who have similar interests. You can meet our senior talent that have real depth and expertise in these areas. So that's I think ultimately what the editorial product looks like.

56:27

We also have personalities that have built their brands on TV and video. Right now we're doing very little on video aside from video podcasting. So a lot of these investments will support taking the existing personality driven products, the reporting driven products and expanding those into video as an outlet. and leaning more into offline events.

56:54

We did our first major ticketed event last year. with the Dispatch Summit, 300 people at the National Press Club in DC, people flying in from 30 different states, like real substantive conversations with big newsmakers. We want to expand that impact. And we have other businesses that we want to launch that leverage this collection

57:18

of assets in interesting and unique ways that we can talk about probably later this year.

57:22

When are you launching your line of men's racers?

57:24

Uh, well, Jonah wouldn't be the best spokesperson. We have really, uh, yeah, all of us kind of have like five to 10 o'clock shadows. So it's probably more like beard oil or Jonah branded cigars. And, uh, how big is your staff now? About 27 FTEs. Okay, cool. Well, Mike, those were all the questions I have for you.

57:45

Where can people find you online? They can find us at the dispatch.com and in all of your favorite, uh, podcast clients.

57:53

All right, this was a lot of fun.

57:53

Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Simon. Great being here.