Seduction and Trust: Building a media empire

Citizen: Read this interview between @micsolana and @semaforben.

No matter your profession or interests, media is a pillar of power impacting your life. The media is power. They are information brokers and gatekeepers. Amplifiers and natural sources of esoteric knowledge.

This is also an excellent insight into an entrepreneur's mind. One who understands what makes his business successful. That is rare. I promise you.

Per usual, @piratewires produced a piece that is thought-provoking enough to induce word diarrhea.

Here's my hot take on what I took away from it:

"New Media" feels like it's in the hangover moment that 3D printing was (is) still in. But new media isn't dead. Nor is it clear that the media industry will be condemned to infinite fragmentation.

While that's interesting for lots of reasons, e.g., the Substack model already shows it's just like Spotify, and for the median Substack author, they will naturally coalesce because I can't pay $20 a month to 30 writers who may or may not publish at advertised times or who I may or may not ever read again.

But what's truly interesting is peeking inside Ben Smith's mind.

Ben has a brilliant strategy and is a founder worth studying. From what I can read between the lines, Ben is self-aware. He understands the media industry, knows its history, and knows his reader.

He has the personal constitution, vision, and patience to create the one singular attribute a media company can never sacrifice – trust. It's one of the only qualities that you can't create overnight. (No one's ever uttered, "It was trust at first sight.")

The reason demand exists for "new media" is that, for the last few decades, the media oligopoly forgot this. And that's obvious, but hard to execute. It's a daily, mundane exercise.

Trust is necessary. It is not sufficient. The second ingredient is seduction. The ability for reporters to earn the right to traffic in proprietary information before others. And when you compound the two, you get the only durable moat left in digital media: a neighborhood network where you decide who gets in.

When you combine trust and seduction, you can create a network of power-wielders. Control of the gate is a force akin to gravity. It creates push effects. Information and opportunity come to you instead of pulling it from others.

But building trust is difficult. It’s long. There’s no glory. And it's specific to the target reader. Remember the Godfather of advertising, Ogilvy: you write to one person.

In the digital age, it's even harder. So many voices, such little time. So, how did Ben build a digital media company earning $40 million per year?

Well, Ben knew his avatar.

I'll take a shot at what I think his initial avatar was – primarily millennials, intellectually curious ones who were exhausted by the effort of collecting and sorting through the infinite nodes of the internet to cover their broad and varied interests.

In essence, Ben’s avatar wanted a source that respected them in three ways.

First, admitting reporter biases and opinions. The reader wants to know whether the author is running a hit piece on the apple industry because their grandma owns an orange farm.

Second, not limiting the reader's exposure or insulting their intelligence by unilaterally assuming which topic, region, or event they want to read about. Semafor isn't placing its readers inside an algo-derived k-cluster based on cookies or Amazon purchases.

Why? Because the target reader is an aspiring polymath. They can enjoy EDM music and Bach's Cello Suites played by Yo-Yo Ma. Or want to learn about Colombian narco-terrorists and what Jensen has to say about AI, the supply chain, and China's geopolitical situation.

Third, Ben respects his reader enough not to bore him or ever be perceived as laundering trust. You want to have a conversation? Great. Semafor will ask you why you thought it was a good idea to shoot >50% of the nation's THAADs in Iran over the course of 90 days. And Semafor won't allow jargon-political bot-slop conversations on its platform.

That faux version of professionalism has become instantly intolerable for many Americans. Semafor's readers come to ingest information, be challenged, and increase their understanding of this complex, terrifying, and exciting world.

The ideal reader seeks information that gives him an advantage in the workplace, satisfies an intellectual question, or exposes him to new paradigms and interpretations of events.

Ben also clearly understands human nature – the insatiable desire for truth and justice. Which is why Semafor wants testy interview exchanges. But not for the sake of entertainment but in the authentic pursuit of comprehension.

In the interview, Ben dropped breadcrumbs on Semafor’s GTM strategy. More importantly, he highlights the power of accurately and precisely identifying the problem he wanted to solve.

He analogically mapped the disappearance of food critics to authorities driving foodies' desire to go to a certain restaurant. Customers were no longer dictated to by a single authority; instead, restaurants had to become “…a good neighborhood restaurant now."

Media is a multipolar player game now. The super-powers are bleeding viewers, losing appeal, struggling to re-establish dominance. However, media isn't going to become anarchic either. Not everyone will launch a podcast or newsletter discussing increasingly niche topics.

Semafor is becoming a regional-media hegemon of its neighborhood.

And that neighborhood isn't physical. It's across knowledge areas, and perhaps more specifically, at the intersection of power-wielders (entrepreneurs, CEOs, government officials) and world events.

He also knows the history of his industry – cycles of consolidation, or as he put it, "…bundling and unbundling...", e.g., The Free Press, Ruthless, etc.

Pulitzer bundled. Cable unbundled. Satellite bundled. Rise of podcast bros unbundled. Legacy media is starting to bundle again. And independent writers will soon bundle together to survive.

The reason is simple: humans will always take the path of least resistance.

The reader gets exhausted switching between policy think tank papers, Politico, WSJ, FT, a podcast on successful businessmen, and the NY Post for sensational headlines. Ben has identified that the cycle is coming back around. (May see some acquisitions by Semafor here in the future?)

But the linchpin of media is seduction. If trust allows the safe flight, seduction is the fuel that propels it.

The only way to break news is to report it first. And the fastest way is still through human relationships.

Can your reporters have enough charisma to be liked? Enough grit to maintain sources for years without receiving any valuable information? Can you be forward-thinking enough to provide solutions for your sources without ever asking for anything in return? And can you connect the right people to the right issues for the right reasons?

Yes. That's correct. Journalism and media are simply a massive, unclassified, human intelligence operation. Ben gets that, and says so; he's attempting to create pockets of gravity. Human network effects.

"The real action is in people meeting each other, either formally or in off-the-record sessions."

Side note: This could also be the future of mature new media. You filter who has access to your access. It becomes a joint package. Imagine if ESPN also owned every NFL stadium and exclusive media rights. You want to come to a game or hear about the outcome of a game? Meet a star QB? ESPN just became the single chokepoint into the entire ecosystem. Want to attend the draft and rub elbows? Make a bet on Polymarket? You get the point.

Ben knew his reader wanted access; he wanted to be close to gravity and access celestial bodies in the old ways. In person. At an authentic event that is exclusively inclusive.

He lists the playbook: "…look at the advisory board, Jensen, Satya...Dina Powell…" – you think that a hedge fund manager now wants to attend a Semafor event? Or a Senator gets advised that he needs to be seen on a "Semafor World Economy 2026" panel?

That is creating gravity. Building network effects in the physical and informational world. He is pulling in proprietary information and relationships.

For example, a reader knows that if he has information that is important to Satya, he can message one of Semafor's reporters, and they will go after it. And Satya knows that if he contributed to the network in valuable ways, the reporters will be incentivized to protect the relationship. (Think about how valuable just a one-hour head start is when dealing with a crisis.)

But Semafor understands that they cannot give any member a pass; the information about people inside their network will always see the light of day; otherwise, the reader won't trust them. And the new media dies the same way old media does.

The reader understands this too. Remember, he's not naïve or stupid. He's a big boy. So that line isn't crossed, the club survives, and the gravitational pull increases.

So yes, why would he ever want to charge a subscription? People may or may not read the daily newsletter. Think about the pricing model. You get one user to pay $50 a year. At the end of the year, they go, "I'm still paying for that? Claude, cancel that for me, please."

But what happens when you offer an event with a semi-private meeting where Kevin Hassett, Ken Griffin, and Mark Warner are in the same vicinity? The reader will pay $300 for that event as a lottery ticket. And he is coming to the event. He is engaged.

At the right pricing model and event pace, you'll gross 6x on one event ticket versus an annual subscription.

So, Ben knew his industry's history, understood human nature, understood himself, saw the gap, and exploited it by building a business he understood because he built it for one avatar.

As for his next phase of the business plan?

He drops it in the interview too.

"We do a fair amount of video." – Distributing the brand, new readers become aware, costs are evaporating in production, and it's the best medium to convert new acolytes. Tape a 10-minute interview. A/B test different clips, different durations, headlines, geos, posting times, etc.

Push across all social media platforms. Keep the long form on your website and YouTube. Collect data. Passive signals intelligence operation. Increasing gravity through other proprietary forms of information.

"We do events." – Close the reader. I imagine that if a reader goes to one event, it's run professionally. It's not an industry conference with 500 booths that require a map and compass to navigate. It's not too loud. And at one point during the event, the avatar no longer exists. It's just you.

The metaphysical avatar has become a physical member.

Trust and seduction have converted you from the ether into the network. You realize you're not getting pitched or pitching. It's an intellectual social event that subtly masks the fact that you're attending a tailored networking-speed dating event. The idea that you're in a room where you may hear one piece of information that unlocks alpha. Or that you may finally be able to ask Anne Wojcicki what's going on with the data at 23andMe.

"We have email." Addiction. That's the plan. See a video. Come to an event. Taste the gravity of the system Ben and Semafor are building. Capture the physical member; don’t allow them to return to the ether.

Then, for a long time, you'll open Semafor emails. You trust that Semafor won't disrespect you; the likelihood of opening the newsletter and regretting it for a few minutes is close to zero.

You think, "That event last fall was excellent; what are these guys saying today?"

You trust them to respect you and are seduced by what they've served before.

And then the Semafor data analytics team will tell advertising clients, "Look, we have a CVR that's the best in media. And if you want the best conversion rates and access to our network, you will pay us higher rates. Because they trust us. And we're not going to let [insert tabloid/ponzi scheme type-product] be associated with our name."

But seriously, read it yourself.

Ben and Mike just run an excellent carpet-bombing knowledge-bomb game.

And before you say, I run a manufacturing business, or I'm in private credit, or VC, how would the media business apply to mine?

Simple. Your business is about trust and seduction too.

And you want to become a gravity-creator that owns access.

You just have capital or technology that hides those two core functions.