Daily Beast President Mike Dyer Says He Won't Worship At Facebook and Google's Altar

By Steven Perlberg 

The growing power of platforms like Facebook, Google and Snapchat has become one of the biggest topics in digital media in recent years, and some publishers have enjoyed huge growth as they pour editorial resources into content that satisfies those distributors' goals.

But Mike Dyer, president and publisher of the Daily Beast, said that he is taking a different strategy, and the IAC/InterActiveCorp.-owned news and entertainment site is not involved in programs like Facebook's Instant Articles or Google's AMP.

"If you're going to play in someone's yard, you have to play by their rules," Mr. Dyer said on the latest episode of the WSJ Media Mix podcast, adding that the extent to which publishers will be able to derive meaningful revenue from social media companies is far from clear.

"We take a contrarian, but we also think evidence-based view of social media, which is that we do not worship at the altar of the 'distributed' media or 'distributed' audience model. We're not opposed to the benefits that a Facebook or a Snapchat or a Twitter can bring to us, but we focus day in and day out on building a relationship with an audience that wants to come to us directly."

Mr. Dyer said that about half of the site's traffic is direct, meaning that people plug in the URL directly to their browsers or arrive through avenues like the Daily Beast's email newsletters or a friend texting them a link.

"What is very clear to us is that there is a difference between doing the hard spadework of building a brand that truly means something to users" and "easy audience growth for the sake of scale or for the sake of a large monthly unique number," he said. "We want to control our own destiny."

Part of that destiny is a big bet on creating sponsored content on behalf of marketers. Mr. Dyer said that more than 70% of the site's ad revenue came from such work, and that it uses data from other IAC-owned publishers such as Ask.com and About.com to help convince marketers their work is getting results.

For more with Mr. Dyer on the Beast's post-election editorial strategy and his outlook of the broader media landscape, check out the episode and subscribe to the WSJ Media Mix podcast on iTunes, Google Play Music, Spotify or Stitcher.

Write to Steven Perlberg at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 26, 2016 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)

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