How Industry Dive grew into a B2B media empire
It eschewed subscriptions and focused on delivering niche content that's attractive to advertisers.
When we talk about the media industry, we’re usually discussing publishers that are geared toward a broad audience -- outlets like The New York Times or CNN or NPR. Even more niche publications like The Verge or Bon Appetit are designed to attract tens of millions of readers each month.
But there’s also an entire ecosystem of business-oriented publishers that operate in extremely narrow niches -- outlets aimed at sewage workers, electricians, and grocery store executives. Though their readerships are relatively small, they represent industries that collectively generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Because of this, B2B niche publishers, when run well, can be immensely profitable.
Industry Dive is one such B2B publisher. Founded in 2012, the company now produces publications that cover over a dozen industries. I sat down with one of its co-founders Sean Griffey to talk about Industry Dive’s origin story and how it bootstrapped its way to north of $22 million in annual revenue.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player, or you can play the YouTube video below. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
How Griffey and his partners founded Industry dive
Prior to founding Industry Dive in 2012, Griffey was president of FierceMarkets, another B2B media company that published industry-specific verticals in telecom and healthcare. “We saw a hole in the marketplace at the time,” he said. “We launched Industry Dive thinking that you could create really compelling mobile products for business markets. You could use design as a way to make yourself look bigger and more professional right from the start, and in these small markets, you could still monetize them by using some of the same advertising and lead generation tactics that have worked for decades now.”
Because the company was lean and relied on only a few angel investors, Industry Dive avoided chasing the shiny objects in media, eschewing expensive iPad apps in favor of a sleek site that looked good on mobile. “We spent a lot of time trying to be very disciplined about our approach and what we're doing. We launched five verticals to start with, which was really ambitious at the time. We used freelancers. We wrote some of it ourselves. We were just scrappy.” Those early verticals included electric utilities, higher education, construction, marketing, and solid waste and recycling.
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Why Industry Dive doubled down on newsletters
Back when most publishers were focused on building up their Facebook presences, Industry Dive doubled down on newsletters. This was well before the newsletter resurgence that we’re currently seeing across the industry. “It's funny to see email newsletters sort of having their Renaissance, because it's always been a big part of our strategy. It is one of the only tools that is personally identifiable, in that a unique email address signs up for something, and we can then use that email to identify you on devices and tie those devices into a single profile. So for media companies that want to create first party data based on user behavior on devices, email is the perfect tool right now to use.”
Industry Dive tries to keep its newsletters short and succinct, with the idea that the reader is scanning it on mobile. “We don't put a lot in the newsletter, in part because it goes back to our beginnings when we were thinking of mobile and how do you make things scannable and fast for people in situations where they don't have much time, and then if you click through, you can get much deeper into the content if you care. If it's a topic or story you don't care about, we don't want to make it hard for you to get to the next piece.”
How Industry Dive decides whether to launch a new industry vertical
The company now has close to 20 separate niche verticals. I asked Griffey how it makes the decision to launch a new vertical. “There are a couple things we look for. We look for business markets that are being disrupted by technology and regulation. We look for industries that have high capital spend. We are an ad supported industry, and industries where people buy things tend to make them good for advertisers. Electric utility is one of the first verticals we launched. Those guys spend billions of dollars each year to make sure the power goes on. So the CPLs and CPMs brands are willing to pay for are much higher than they are elsewhere. We look for industries where there are big trade shows as a proxy for an audience. So if there's a 50,000 person trade show, all of those people could be readers and all of those exhibitors can be advertisers. And then finally we look for industries where there's just not a lot of consolidation -- so lots of buyers and sellers.”
In the early days, Industry Dive would test the waters with a new vertical by hiring a few freelancers, but now it has the money available to dedicate more significant resources. “We do go all in and we hire at least two full time journalists to get the publication off the ground. They'll pull in some help from the existing editorial team, which is up to a little over 70 full time journalists right now. And then we also use a freelance budget.”
Why Industry Dive’s business model is so dependent upon advertising
While much of the media has been focused on diversifying its income streams with paid subscriptions and events, Industry Dive has thrived almost entirely on advertising revenue. “There's still real money when the audience is valuable. I think the media’s biggest mistake was they viewed scale as ‘let's do something that's only marginally valuable, but try to do it a lot and see if it becomes highly valuable.’ For us, scale has always meant ‘let's do something that's highly valuable in a repeatable way.’ We have zero programmatic ads. I think 80%, 90% of our sales go directly through marketers within the companies. Every now and then we'll go through an ad agency, but by and large, where we're most successful is when we can be consultative with the client, really understand the audiences they're trying to reach, what their goals are in the campaign, and then help design something that works for them and works for our audience.”
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
Image via Industry Dive