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Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:
THE BIG NUMBER: 80%
That's the gross margin on a well-run niche newsletter or vertical podcast business. And it's the number that's quietly changing how the smartest buyers in media are thinking about acquisitions.
The next media roll-up won't be glamorous. It won't involve a studio, a celebrity, or a streamer. It will be boring, profitable, and built on assets that look more like SaaS companies than media companies. And if you're not paying attention to this shift, you're mispricing what media assets are actually worth right now.
Here's the private-market temperature.
Dealmakers who were enthusiastic about broad, prestige-heavy media acquisitions 18 months ago are getting colder.
The roll-up thesis that said "buy scale, aggregate audiences, sell ads against the bundle" has underperformed. The companies that raised at high valuations on audience size and brand cachet are struggling to prove durable unit economics. The hype assets — the ones that got valued on potential rather than cash flow — are either flat or quietly repricing downward.
What's getting warmer: niche, vertical media businesses with high renewal rates, low churn, strong advertiser relationships, and margins that look like software, not publishing.
Newsletter and podcast businesses are being valued more like durable cash-flow businesses than hype assets.
Think about what makes a $3 million-a-year trade newsletter valuable to a buyer.
The subscribers are professionals who expense the subscription or consider it a cost of doing business. Churn is low — 85-90% annual retention in the best cases — because the content is tied to professional decision-making, not entertainment. The advertisers are B2B companies with long sales cycles who renew annually because the audience is precise and the alternatives are worse.
The content is domain-specific, which means it's hard to replicate and harder to commoditize with AI. The production cost is low — one to three writers, no studio, no talent deals, no licensing fees. And the audience data is clean because the relationship is direct: email, owned list, first-party.
That profile generates 70-80% gross margins, predictable revenue, and a moat built on expertise rather than IP rights. In a market where ad-supported businesses are being squeezed by Netflix's unsold inventory and oil-driven budget cuts, that predictability is worth a premium.
The comparison to SaaS isn't metaphorical. The best niche media businesses have the same financial characteristics: recurring revenue, high retention, low marginal cost to serve, and a switching cost built on integration into the customer's workflow. A financial professional who reads a specialized market newsletter every morning doesn't cancel it when the economy tightens — they need it more. That's counter-cyclical demand, which is the rarest thing in media.
This is where the link between old media and creator media gets interesting.
The best creator businesses are evolving toward the same profile — not because they're copying trade publishers, but because the economics force it. A YouTube creator with a strong niche audience, a newsletter, a podcast, a community tier, and brand partnerships isn't a "creator" anymore. They're a vertical media company with multiple revenue streams, direct audience relationships, and margins that improve with scale. The packaging is different. The underlying business is the same.
Beehiiv's growth tells this story from the infrastructure side. The platform expects to hit $50 million in revenue this year, pulling creators from Substack by offering flat fees and a built-in ad network. But the bigger signal is who's using it: TIME, TechCrunch, The Ringer, and 130,000 other publishers who treat newsletters as businesses, not hobbies. The platform is growing because the underlying asset class — owned-audience, direct-distribution media — is being repriced upward.
Where this gets actionable for buyers: the best acquisition targets in media right now may not be the ones with the biggest audiences. They may be the ones with the most predictable revenue, the highest retention, and the deepest expertise moats. A 50,000-subscriber B2B newsletter with 88% annual retention and $500K in recurring ad revenue is, on a risk-adjusted basis, a better buy than a 2-million-follower creator brand with volatile sponsorship income and platform-dependent distribution.
The buyers who understand this — and there are a growing number of them in private equity and family offices — are building positions in niche media while everyone else is still chasing scale. Less glamour. Better business.
So the takeaway from today's story is about what assets hold value in that environment — and the answer is: the ones with direct audience relationships, recurring revenue, and margins that don't depend on any single platform or advertiser.
If your media business has those characteristics, you're building something durable. If it doesn't, this is the week to start thinking about how to get there — before the market prices it in for you.
ALSO HAPPENING:
Every brand activation at NBA All-Star Weekend was designed to be filmed first and experienced second.
BizBash documented 40+ brand activations at All-Star Weekend in LA. The common thread: every single one was engineered for content production, not just foot traffic. Jordan Brand turned 8 retail stores into filmable sets. Foot Locker built its biggest activation ever — designed around camera angles and lighting, not just product displays.
YSL launched a creator-hosted "Love Club" tour where the event IS the distribution channel. For a creator or SMB: your next event shouldn't just be an event. If the experience doesn't produce content that lives online after it's over, you left the highest-value output on the table.
Ad Age just published a creator contract glossary. Brands are getting more sophisticated about what they're buying from you — and most creators aren't keeping up.
Usage rights. Exclusivity windows. Indemnity clauses. Whitelisting. FTC disclosures. The brand deals are getting more complex, and the contracts are getting longer. Brands are now routinely buying the right to run your content as paid ads on their own channels (whitelisting) and locking you out of competing categories for months.
Creators who understand this language have leverage. Creators who don't are signing away value they can't get back. For any creator or SMB doing brand work: the contract matters more than the rate.
YOUR NEXT MOVE: Whether you're a buyer, a builder, or an operator — audit your business against the niche media profile: recurring revenue, high retention, direct audience ownership, domain expertise moat, low production cost, and margins above 60%. Every item on that list you can check is leverage. Every one you can't is a vulnerability. The market is repricing toward predictability. Build for that.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you on tomorrow.
Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!
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This is The Inside Track: Media — short daily notes (Mon-Fri) on where attention is actually going, from the front lines at Massif & Kroo.
If you're into this, you might also like the other stuff I write:
The Weekend Essay (Saturdays) — One idea worth thinking about. Business, decision-making, building things that last.
☐ Business (M/W/F) — What happened, why it matters, what to do.
☐ Aviation (Thursdays) — Straight talk from an actual pilot.
☐ Impact (Periodically) — Doing good in education and healthcare.
You're already set for the media. Add any of those if you want deeper, more frequent updates in areas that matter to you.
— Michael
About Michael Wildes
Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.
Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]
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