Game Tape #10: Knowledge Creators

Joanna Stern and the changing shape of independent media businesses

We wordcels of the media industry love to name things. There’s a gradation of independent media happening in real-time, which can feel something like the evolutions of a Pokemon: influencers and creators and knowledge creators and independent journalists and “new media” and B2B media and, ultimately, a whole lot of overlap in between. But it’s not pedantry! There’s a reason why TBPN can get acquired for >$100M by OpenAI while most influencers aren’t making a living wage. It’s a multi variable problem, but I’ve been stewing on two in particular: access and lifetime value.

The ability to increase prices for a media business scales on a spectrum from broad audiences with little or no buying power (“influencers”) all the way to niche audiences with significant buying power (“B2B media”). That’s one reason why a company like Vanta with a >million dollar average deal size would want to pay the Acquired podcast >$500K for a midroll ad to reach their audience of C-suite executives.

For this Game Tape I spoke to Abby Gordon, a creator manager at the fantastic Smooth Media, an agency that specializes in talent that wins on substance instead of pure entertainment. We spoke about knowledge creators broadly, but anchored our discussion around Joanna Stern’s new independent media company, which Abby helped launch:

I. After over a decade as The Wall Street Journal’s senior tech columnist, Joanna left to launch New Things, which will be medium-agnostic across writing, video, and live events.

II. At the same time, she also joined NBC News as their Chief Technology Analyst, which will give her an opportunity to syndicate her independent work through NBC’s network.

III. It’s a bet that institutional media and alternative media can work together to create a new sort of independent media business.

It’s exciting to see independent media businesses embracing all available options to make money (which I’ve circled around here and here). It feels like half the battle is just creatively finding new buyers/financiers: if you’re selling a traditional TV show in 2026, you’ve basically got, what, Apple, Netflix, and Hulu? Meanwhile Smooth worked with over 500 brands last year for their portfolio of knowledge creators. There’ll probably always be a buyer for a media business with a hard-to-access audience.

[This interview is a transcribed and lightly edited voicenote conversation. We’re recreating podcasting from first principles.]  

SHAIYAN

This is going to sound so basic as to not be helpful at all. But I’ve been thinking a lot about business models lately, especially in the context of independent media, and maybe more specifically in the context of creators. It’s exciting that new business models might unlock new types of art. There are constraints to, for example, only exclusively doing the brand deal model. Obviously it can be lucrative depending on who the creator is and what they’re talking about, but it can have implications on what you can actually create. And, though it’s not perfect either, that’s why the subscription model can work. Subscriptions become “salary” in the context of your independent media, which lets you take riskier swings elsewhere in your business. So when I look at, for example, this fantastic launch with Joanna, or knowledge creators at large, it seems that knowledge creators just have more flexibility on their business model than most creator businesses. I don’t know exactly why, maybe they just have a higher ARPU (average revenue per user)? Maybe that’s the tech industry way to frame it. But they’re effectively selling to B2B or prosumer audiences, who just have a higher propensity to pay. You know this world better than I do, so correct me if I’m wrong, but because of that, it’s cool to see all these creative ways they’re able to make money. Like Joanna with the work she’s doing at NBC News. You’re seeing it elsewhere with CBS news hiring this cast of Substackers to do TV segments. And in many ways, this business model is just the same that we’ve seen for public intellectuals forever, right? They’re doing speaking tours, and they do a book, and they have syndication deals. One idea and lots of ways to make money off it.

ABBY

It’s exciting that we are able to see these quote unquote new business models, but I don’t actually view them really as new. Most businesses have their core product that then lets them take risks elsewhere, I’m just really excited that it’s catching up to the creator economy. For a documentary production company—because that’s the world I came up in—we always wanted to sell a baseline commercial show, like that “22 episode, repeat for 10 seasons on Discovery” show, just for the steady income. And then we could do risky shows that are less sellable or commercial or, you know, go do that Sundance film. That’s exactly what’s happening with Joanna and other creators like her. I think it’s very nerve wracking, especially for someone like Joanna who has had so much infrastructure behind her at the Wall Street Journal to ultimately take this risk and go independent. And one of the reasons why she’s really able to do so is because of the NBC deal. Her business will soon be up and running and making a lot of money on its own, but it’s not necessarily just the financials, it’s also just peace of mind. Knowledge creators in general are in this interesting middle ground where they obviously have the “creator” label, which is, you know, still close to the influencer label. And I don’t think that a lot of the older marketing departments and at these NBCs and CBSs of the world are totally onboard with that shift yet? There’s still some looking down on the idea of a creator and an influencer. But when you come at it as a knowledge creator, as someone who is an expert in their field, people in traditional media landscapes feel safer taking a bet on you. Knowledge creators specifically speak to a higher earning individual, so they’re talking to the viewers who are actual decision makers, people who are actually going to buy that software, etc. The people who we work with, like the AI companies of the world, they know that their bet is a good bet because these creators have access to the right audiences. Knowledge creators are also just steadier businesses because they know that there are always gonna be advertisers available, it’s not as finicky as some other sectors of the creator business. In general, I’m excited about traditional and “new” media coming together to create great work, because you need the balance. Even if it’s innovative, even if it’s original, everything is still grounded in the marketplace.

SHAIYAN

Yeah, I think there’s no future where these two worlds are adversarial. I loved your point about influencers versus knowledge creators, and I forget that at some point influencers were rebranded into creators. The language is important! Even the name “creators” is this flattening of mediums, like you’re not a writer anymore, you’re a creator, you’re not a filmmaker, you’re a creator…everything is just medium-agnostic. But I wonder at what point that flattening breaks. An influencer for example—say, a classic broad lifestyle influencer like Alix Earl—could sign a brand deal theoretically for anything that they’re happy to talk about, right? Sure there’s like ethical boundaries and brand boundaries or whatever, but theoretically they could sign a deal for anything. Versus a journalist, right? Like it would be a faux pas for an independent journalist to be shilling some sort of software that they’re gonna be eventually writing about. Imagine you do a brand deal for Noam Chomsky…he’s not really a journalist but that would seem silly, right? But knowledge creators sit between this gap of influencer and B2B media. I wonder the theoretical limit you could push that to. Could a knowledge creator who’s effectively doing video journalism about AI…could they sign a brand deal with an AI lab? Is it just depending on how they frame it? I wonder how far this flattening could actually go before the lines are blurred to the point of being unhelpful.

ABBY

On a basic level, journalism has always been funded by brand deals in a way, like just traditional advertising, right? News stations make money through commercials. But as a creator or influencer putting your face behind an ad, it does become a lot trickier. You yourself are promoting it, not just your company. But in general journalism and the support of it and who owns it has also just gone through a massive change…I mean, the fact that Bezos owns the Washington Post, that says something, right? Or the fact that TBPN just got bought by OpenAI. It’s not exactly the same because they’re not claiming to be journalists like, say, a Johnny Harris or a Joanna Stern. So for Joanna, for example, we have such strict guidelines of what ads she will take, what ads she won’t take, because she does not want her journalistic integrity questioned. But creators aren’t the first people to have this conversation. Going back to documentaries, a really good example for this is the Fyre Festival documentaries. There were two Fyre Festival documentaries: one was Hulu, one was Netflix. One was made by Fuck Jerry, which was the production company that also put on the festival. At some point it’s up to the public to be media literate enough to discern what they’re seeing and hearing. There are always going to be blurred lines. There’s also a big spectrum: journalists like Joanna, who are very set on having journalist integrities, but then there are also knowledge creators who are talking about software or something like that, and it’s okay that they’re being paid to do that because that’s their core media product.

SHAIYAN

Yeah the reality is that the people who have integrity over a long enough period of time are going to show through. This is maybe only slightly adjacent, but there’s a really good Eliza McLamb post about the music industry and its scaled UGC campaigns. Companies who you can hire to make fake accounts and run campaigns and spam fake fan accounts in your comments, things like that. But my, like, one sentence take on it is, yeah, you ultimately can do all these things, but at some point you need people to actually like you, like you need your product to actually be good, because you’re not gonna be selling out seats at stadiums wherever, unless the eventually have real fandom. And in some adjacent way, it’s similar to all the knowledge creators we’re talking about, where the people who are actually doing good reporting and have integrity and are not shilling every single brand deal…they’re going to eventually rise to the top and people will figure out the grifters. And, again, maybe only slightly adjacent to that is the TBPN thing, which of course I’m sure you and I could talk about forever. To me the recurring meta joke of their whole schtick was shilling ads to the point of it being farcical, like the whole screen was literally a ticker of ads. And in some ways even though the whole newscast model was part of the joke, like it unlocked scrolling ads in the ticker format for them, which is inventory that most people just can’t have without looking like sellouts. So for them to actually be bought by Open AI honestly is just the most exaggerated version of the joke. It’s like, oh, we love tech ads so much that we’re actually now owned by a tech company. There’s some meta irony in that.

Email me at shaiyankhan@gmail.com if you see any interesting media businesses that you think I should discuss on Game Tape.