How MEL is reinventing the modern men's magazine
You won't find many articles about luxury watches or artisanal axes.
Peruse a newsstand full of men’s magazines and you’ll probably notice a few common themes. The cover either features a bikini model or a suit-clad male celebrity. Inside, you’ll find stories meant to appeal to what many in the mid-20th century would have considered the “ideal” man -- articles about scotch, cigars, and custom suits.
You won’t find any of those kinds of features in MEL Magazine, a digital-only publication that launched in 2015. Owned and operated by Dollar Shave Club, MEL aims its content at the under-40, educated, likely-urban male...a man who is less inclined to traditional gender roles, is much more in touch with his feelings, and spends an inordinate amount of time on the internet.
I recently interviewed editor-in-chief Josh Schollmeyer about how he came to define this 21st century male, where his staff sources its article ideas, and how Dollar Shave Club will profit from its investment in the magazine.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. 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How traditional “men’s magazines” became outdated
Josh spent several years at Playboy, both on the print side and also building out various digital properties. It was while there that he began to understand how anachronistic the men’s magazine industry was. “I don't know if I had anything other than frustration, frankly. I found there was no critical thinking really about where masculinity was headed. Men's lifestyle publishing has really struggled in the last decade, and yet over the last 10 or 15 years, on the women's side of the equation, there's been some really great stuff from New York Magazine's The Cut to Jezebel to The Hairpin, and I just didn't understand why we had to have this archetypal man that everything needed to ladder up to.”
Josh was especially frustrated that an iconoclastic brand like Playboy couldn’t adapt to the times. “I thought that, in terms of where gender sexuality was going, Playboy was really well positioned and suited to stake a claim on some of those conversations and really be a thought leader in the way it was in the 1950s and 1960s. I just felt like everybody was so beholden to this print magazine and didn't realize that they were storytellers first and foremost in the end, and that the medium didn't matter as much. It felt like they couldn't break from this mold of this male reader who supposedly only cared about the things that they could sell advertising against.”
Devising a new kind of men’s magazine
While he was at Playboy, Josh began experimenting with placing some of the magazine’s content on a platform run by Gawker Media “That's sort of what spurred the conversations I started having with [Dollar Shave Club CEO] Michael Dubin, who was looking to start a content wing. He wanted an Esquire-meets-Vice. And when we started talking, I said, ‘you know, I'm kind of doing that, and I'm telling you, there's something here. Not only do we know that there's an opportunity, but I have some early numbers that would seem to back that up.’”
Michael and Josh continued to talk for several months about what a hypothetical digital magazine could look like. “I remember I just had a baby and I would go out at like 9 o’clock at night and lock myself in my car to talk to him.” Ultimately, he took the job and helped launch MEL in 2015. “The first year was brutal. It's just really hard to get anything off the ground. And it's really hard to get something off the ground that's completely different, that’s not coming from a traditional media entity. It was hard to convince people to even take my calls. But I think everybody understood that the men's space really needed some reinvention, and I think once we were able to put some victories up on the board, we started proving people wrong, and that's kind of where I thrive the most. Now we have 4.5 million people coming to the site every month and tons of Twitter engagement, and so that feedback loop feels really good.”
Finding a business model
A lot of media industry watchers wrongly assume that MEL is a kind of content marketing for Dollar Shave Club, but the average consumer who lands on the magazine’s website is likely unaware that the two companies are even affiliated. “I think that this notion that we’re content marketing is kind of silly. I've never had more journalistic freedom in my life than I've had creating this site. I don't see why that's such a struggle for people to sort of wrap their mind around. We've also more than established ourselves as a very credible editorial entity, and we have a suite of awards and mentions that back that up.”
So that begs the question: what is the company’s business model? “This incubation period has been really great for us. Michael's early edict was just go out there and make great stuff and own this category, reinvent it. We have gotten to a point where, in order to really grow, it needs to be its own thing. And that's why I'm really excited for 2021. We've had a lot of opportunities that we've turned down in order to kind of get everything right and where we want it, and now we're reaching that moment when I'm very excited to see that come to fruition.”
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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.