A Podcast and Transcript of Peter Kafka Talking to Roger Lynch

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The Transcript of 🔗🎙️ The Podcast

Channels with Peter Kafka: Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch

From the Vox Media podcast network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. I’m also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. Today we’re talking about running the last remaining magazine empire with Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch.

Except I just looked at the transcript, and Lynch only used the word “magazine” once. These days he thinks of Condé—which for decades was the world’s most prestigious magazine publisher and probably still is—as a portfolio brand that shows up all kinds of places: on the web, on TikTok, at movie theaters, and at the mega-glamorous Met Ball.

So we skipped the question I normally ask magazine people: “What the hell is a magazine in 2026?” Instead we moved on to other topics: What’s it like to be the subject of one of the most popular movies in the world? What’s it like to run a media business when Google stops sending you traffic? And who’s going to replace Anna Wintour and David Remnick—perhaps the two most influential editors in the world?

Spoiler: Lynch doesn’t tell me where the succession list is. But you’re going to like this interview anyway.

From the Vox Media podcast network, this is channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I’m also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. And today, we are talking about running the last remaining magazine empire, with Condé Nassio Roger Lynch. Except I just looked at the transcript of this chat, and Lynch only used the word magazine once. These days, he thinks of Condé, which for decades was the world’s most prestigious magazine publisher. Probably still is. As a portfolio brand that shows up all kinds of places on the web, obviously, on TikTok, and at movie theaters, and at the mega-glamorous Met Ball. So in this conversation, we skipped the question. I normally ask magazine people, which is something like, hey, what the hell is a magazine in 2026? Anyways, when we move on to other topics like, what’s it like to be the subject of one of the most popular movies in the world? What’s it like to run a media business with Google Stop sending you traffic? And who’s going to replace Anna Windtour and David Remnick, perhaps the two most influential editors in the world, and where is that short list? Spoiler. Lynch does not tell me where the list is. But you’re going to like this interview anyway. Here’s me, talking to Condé Nassio Roger Lynch.

Peter Kafka: Roger Lynch, welcome to channels.

Roger Lynch: Thank you, Peter. Good to see you.

Peter Kafka: You are talking to me from LA, very show-bizzy of you. Speaking of show-biz, you guys just finished the Met Gala.

Roger Lynch: I think it’s an enormously successful project for you. It is, yes. It’s show-biz, it is commerce, it’s philanthropy, it’s a ton of celebrity, some controversy. It also seems like the most obvious expression of Condé Nassed as a company today. Is that a fair summation? I think it’s right, and I think it also showcases what we do best, which is create cultural moments. Events has been a strategy for us as it is for many media companies. But for us, our events are really around creating cultural moments that really break through the zeitgeist and search algorithms or whatever is happening in the headwinds of the media industry. Nothing holds back big cultural moments like the Met Gala.

Peter Kafka: How do you measure success for a big cultural moment? At some point, you’re a business, so you’re trying to make money from it.

Roger Lynch: You’re also raising money for the Met, but it’s a big dollars-and-sense event for you as well. Is that the most important thing? Is the reception it gets online? Most important, how do you measure it? Look, that event in particular, it’s different for each event. For that event in particular, it starts with a Met. That is a fund-raiser, and this year was immensely successful for the Costume Institute and the Met, and also the inauguration of the Cundymask galleries that we did the ribbon cutting for the morning of the Met Gala. From an audience standpoint, every year, it surpasses our goals. And we finish the Met and we go, how can we ever do anything like that? And then it grows another 50 or 60 percent the following year. So last year, I don’t know, we had over 2 billion total video views of the content we produced around the Met.

Peter Kafka: This year, it was 3.1 billion, another 50-something percent increase year-over-year. Does that tell you you’re getting better at making the content, or is this audience getting bigger for this stuff? You know, I think that in the earlier years for me, when I joined, I think we had a lot of room to improve in the content that we created around the event itself.

Roger Lynch: The event itself was spectacular, but how Cundymask covered it and created content around it, there was opportunity for improvement on that. And I think the team has done a fantastic job really increasing the quality and the creativity of the output around it. I think then what compounds on that is that the intrigue around this event just seems to grow every year. And yes, you mentioned this year, so there’s some controversy. That’s fine. That’s actually good.

Peter Kafka: Let’s spell out the controversy.

Roger Lynch: It’s Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sciences were sponsors and curators of the event. This event’s always been tied to extreme well. He’ve always had benefactors working with you on this project. Were you surprised at the blowback controversy you got from the Bezos' involvement? Well, to be clear, their involvement was in support of them at the Museum and the Custom Institute and the money that they gave to the Museum. So, look, I think there’s a lot of reasons you can criticize extreme wealth and people will criticize with it, but to actually criticize them for donating money to a cultural institution, to me, was a bit off base. Were you surprised because this is going to be a regular feature going forward as long as you’re working on this. You’re going to have people like the Bezos who want to be involved and they’re going to pony up a lot of money. Will that give you any pause? Like, oh, do I want to deal with this? Are you okay saying, yeah, these things come with with attendant controversy and that’s okay. That’s okay. Well put, let’s zoom out a little bit and just talk about Kandai as a business. You came in in 2019. It’s a privately held magazine publisher. In 2019, the future for privately held magazine companies didn’t look great. What’s the best way to sum up what you have done during your tenure there? Well, I had the distinct advantage of not knowing anything about the business and not having grown up in the publishing industry. So, it enabled me to come in and question everything. The first thing I questioned was how we were structured. We were structured, you know, first as two separate companies. There was an international business with its own CEO in a US business and they really acted like competitors in every way possible, including the editors competing with each other. There was so much internal competition. We had no time to focus on external. Even every country around the world where we operate were a very global company operated completely independently from each other. And you know what, that I think was probably a good strategy for many, many decades. It made Kandai NASA into a very large successful global publisher. A whole series of fiefdoms and then people were proud of the fiefdom nature. They were. They were very, very protective. But, you know, what I came in and looked at is like, okay, I can understand why in a print magazine business, why that was a successful strategy. But the world has changed. The opportunity for us going forward is really about connecting with audiences in new and different ways, using technology certainly. And also audiences have changed. Maybe is in part because of technology, but if you just look at how cosmopolitan people have become in terms of their content consumption, when, you know, some of the most popular shows you may watch come out of Sweden or Korea, Israel, wherever. And when I, when I first joined, I started looking at the data about where our visitors were coming from, each of our websites. And there was something that really struck me, which is, you know, wherever you went around the world, and you looked at the data of our websites, about 40% of the traffic was coming from outside of that country. So, you know, my first listening tour three or four weeks into joining Kadynast, you know, I’m meeting with editors around the world. And I heard, you know, sort of a similar story, which is, you know, oh, audiences in Italy only care about Italian culture and content, they don’t care about what happens or are same as France. And I’d always ask, well, then explain this, you know, why it is 40% of the traffic to the sites here come from outside of the country. And the reverse is true, which is we have a huge audience from France or Italy going to our sites elsewhere around the country. It’s because they are interested in it. We’re just not organized in a way to present the content to them the way they want to consume it. And by the way, some of your employees still tell me that this culture, the former culture is important. And by globalizing things and sort of consolidating brands globally and having shared resources for some of these companies that you’re missing out on what makes a particular title unique. And how they do speak to their core audience and whatever, whether it’s geographic or demographic. And that mushing this stuff together has been a detriment even though you’re going to say it’s successful. Well, the first thing I would say is I’ll never be someone who just admits that everything we’ve done is perfect and is right. I think you can always learn. And what I told our teams, when we made all the editorial changes now four or five years ago, the first thing I told them was assume we got it wrong. Go figure out where we got it wrong and let’s make adjustments. But don’t assume we got everything right and wait till we learn a lesson a year from now. Figure it out now. Figure out what we got wrong, what adjustments we need to make. And there’ll always be that kid. We’ll always be making adjustments to try to figure it out. And some of those adjustments, you know, it’s different brand by brand. If you take a brand like wired, you know, technology is more global. The interests, the factors that influence our lives through technology is more global in nature. Something like Vogue, there’s an element of global fashion, but then local markets, whether it’s Japan, China, India, very strong local culture and local fashion. So there’s not a one size fits all for any of our brands. You have to you have to adjust your assumptions based on that brand and the local markets. So I do feel like we have largely got it right. And you know, the results have been, you know, we’ve taken our largest brand Vogue. It has grown every year that I’ve been at the company and its profitability continues to grow. It’s reach grows. And it’s more successful and it’s ever been under my tenure. So overall, the business is profitable, which wasn’t always the case. Increasing profitability, revenue is basically where it was in 2021. If you were a public company, people would be very upset with you, but you’re not a public company, you’re owned by the new house family is sort of flat revenue and increasing profitability. Is that what they want out of this company? Well, I think if you look at what we have revenue streams that have declined structurally and revenue that has grown and they coming in to the company I came into, print advertising, print subscription, new stand revenues, that was just going to decline. We knew that and that was by far the majority of the revenue when I joined. So the real trick wasn’t to change the trajectory of that because that wasn’t going to change. It was to develop new revenue streams at a fast rate so that you can offset the decline that was going to happen in the legacy business. And we’ve done that. And so if you look at our big growth areas, certainly digital subscriptions, they grew 29% last year. I think there are not many companies that wouldn’t be thrilled to have 29% growth in digital subscription revenue or events. We started the conversation today about events. Our event strategy has really paid off. In every year, these big 10 pull events grow more than we expect. So if you look at last year, our big 10 pull events last year grew about 50% revenue year on year. Huge. And these are not small revenue activities for us.

Peter Kafka: This year, our events so far are up 60% over last year, which was up 50% over the year before.

Roger Lynch: So those strategies around leaning into digital subscriptions or commerce business for our events business has really paid dividends for us. But I guess what I’m asking is, are your owners okay? If you come back to them and say at the end of this year, say, listen, our revenue didn’t increase much or were still there where we were in 2021. I’ve had some declining businesses. I’ve replaced them with growing businesses. And you, the new house family, you get to enjoy X percent more profits. Is that a win for them? Well, let’s be clear. Our revenue is growing. Our revenue grew last year and our revenue already this year is growing again. So we do have a growing revenue. Okay. So it’s it’s it do you think you are going to if we look at the chart, right? And you’re you’re still sort of where you are in 2020 went down from 2021 and now back up to 2021 rates. I guess what I’m saying is is the expectation that you’re going to surpass where you were at 2021 at some point or is this sort of the level you’re going to be at? Oh, no, we’re definitely surpassing. Yeah. Our business is going to continue to grow. You think it is reasonable to to grow revenue and profitability because the you know, the trajectory that we had to overcome was again, the majority of the revenue of the company when I join being print advertising and print subscription new stands as the declining business. It’s a small minority of our revenue today because all of these other revenue areas have been growing and they grow every year. And so now they’ve surpassed the decline in the traditional business and they’re only going to continue to grow. So our revenue will continue to grow because these new streams like digital subscriptions and commerce and events and all of that are growing, you know, at double digit rates. And if we go back to 2019, does this look like the company you imagined you were taking over and we’re going to transform is this where you thought you’d end up? You know, I knew that we had some big challenges and frankly, that’s what attracted me to this. I, you know, like really big challenges. I like transformation. I like connecting the dots and strategies and then going executing against it. The thing I knew is that there was going to be a big messy transformation just in terms of the structure of the company and that those changes were going to be cultural as much as they were organizational and that we were going to need to do a lot of innovation around creating new businesses and revenue streams. But what gave me hope that we had that opportunity was the strength of our brands. And so the number one thing for me when I was considering whether to take this job was to try to understand where our brands becoming more connected with audiences or less. And so I asked for a lot of data on that.

Peter Kafka: I wanted to see it principally around digital platforms.

Roger Lynch: And what I really quickly realized is they’re definitely becoming more connected with audiences. We’re growing audiences. And therefore, okay, what we have is really a business model problem that is very solvable. It is because the traditional line, as you know, for every company going through analog to digital is you’re trading your analog dollars for digital diamonds pennies whatever it is. And so it’s a business problem that has really bedeviled just about every media company. That’s true. But Peter, when I joined, it’s been widely reported that the company was losing money and not a small amount of money. And today we’re profitable. Yeah. And when I joined, we were majority print revenue. And today we’re majority digital. Right. What I’m saying is when you said this is a suburb of business problem, now you can point back and say, yeah, we solved it. But in 2019, you had that same level of confidence that we’re going to figure this out where most people have not. Yes. Yeah. I did. I knew it would be tough, but I knew we’d figure it out. Yeah. I mean, most, I mean, your peers don’t really exist anymore. It was just used to be cotton asked and timing and timing doesn’t exist. It’s been chopped up and renamed a bunch of places. A lot of the most, I think of all the digital brands that we’re going to challenge the cotton day and ask the world that just wrote about basically the end of BuzzFeed yesterday. VICE has gone bankrupt. Vox Media, who makes this podcast, is splitting itself up as we talk. So I guess what I’m saying is you did a good job if you can sit here and say, yeah, it has we’ve grown revenue and we’ve grown profitability while other folks have been falling down. Not really a question, I guess that’s a compliment. I’ll just say thank you. You’re welcome. We’ll be right back with CondéNAS Roger Lynch, but first to word from a sponsor. I’m Mitch First, two-time end-to-resil champion, championship MVP, and forward for the USM’s national team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there’s a certain mentality you have to have. What people don’t know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset, and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an Elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I’m Matt Bouchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP and I’m starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don’t swipe away, it’s called that sounds like a lot. I’m going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world and then I’ll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we’re back. You mentioned cultural stuff inside the company. I was going back and listening to our 2021 conversation in the pandemic, sort of post-George Floyd reckoning. And this was a period where a lot of companies and particularly media companies have found their staff very upset with management and you guys had had to let go of a teen vogue editor that you’d hire because the staff didn’t want to work with her because of her bad tweets. When you look back at that time, that sort of pandemic, 2020-22 era, do you feel like at any point you sort of over corrected to accommodate staff? It seems now that the cultural pendulum has swung a lot and a lot of the stuff that people were complaining about in 2020-20-21, art things they would at least voice publicly now. I’m wondering if you look back at that era and go, maybe I overdid it. Well, it really hit us in 2020. And it started right around the time when George Floyd was murdered. And I knew when I joined that we had a lot of cultural issues to deal with. And you know, one of the first things that I did, again, because we had all these separate businesses around the world, there was no one company, there was no one, even executive team.

Peter Kafka: I wanted to try to find some things that I could get this newly, what was about to be combined company focused on, some global initiatives.

Roger Lynch: And it can’t be like, we’re going to be profitable, we’re going to, like, that’s not inspiring. But what I found talking to our employees was they were really interested in a couple areas. One, what are we doing on diversity? And two, what about sustainability? So I thought, great, these are really two really important issues for us to work on. And what we can do is even in advance of changing all the org structures or the, you know, how we do our editorial, I can create teams from around the world of employees who are really vested in this to help advise the company and help drive forward progress in these areas. So that work resulted in a diversity report and goals that we set in 2020. And so we were, by the time this hit us, we were already had a lot of work underway. And but it was, it was work that we needed because I think the company, you know, was, was not showing up well in these areas. And so, do I think we over corrected no? I don’t think we over corrected. I think we had a lot of room for improvement. And I think we seized the moment. And, and so today, when you’ve seen so many companies abandoning these efforts, you know, we just last month published our diversity report again. And we showed the progress that we make. And as I stood up in front of our company last month that our company meeting, I said, look, this is a core value of the company. And it’s discouraging to see all these other companies, you know, dropping these initiatives, but that only says one thing that it never was a core value. It was a convenience for us. It’s a core value. And it is a source of competitive advantage for us now. You know, I’ll talk to people who run media companies who said they were interested in diversity and now literally can’t say that out loud because the FCC might come after them or they might get some other kind of blowback in the Trump 2.0 era. And they’ll say, this is as important to me as it ever was. I just need to phrase it differently. I just can’t come out and say literally can’t say diversity. I can’t say any part of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Peter Kafka: Do you have sympathy for the folks who are running media companies who who think they’re doing the right thing, but can’t say that out loud? Look, I think there’s a couple categories of companies that have backed away from the commitments they made.

Roger Lynch: One is companies that are under threat from our own federal government and the FCC. I certainly have sympathy for the threats that they face. I wish more of them were willing to stand up because I do believe that the fears that they have are overblown in terms of what the government can really do. There are other companies that just abandoned them because the winds changed. I have no sympathy for them. None whatsoever.

Peter Kafka: Do you feel like you can make that assessment from the outside go out? These people never believe that they were just saying it and these people do mean it? Well, I think that companies that aren’t under the type of political pressure that you mentioned earlier who abandoned these, it just says one thing.

Roger Lynch: It was never really a core value. It was a response to a moment. And the thing, one of the things I’m most proud of with our company is that we’ve retained it as a core value and we report on our progress every year. Every year we make progress and we have publicly stated goals and we track ourselves to those goals. And I think our employees really appreciate it. And as I said, with fewer and fewer companies doing that, it puts us in a position of, I think, great competitive advantage. Yeah, I wanted to ask you at this. You brought up this idea that you guys have not been buffeted by the Trump, the second Trump administration, like other media companies. And you said, look, we don’t have a Warner Brothers deal to get through the FCC. We don’t have this issue. We don’t have that issue. Certainly, there’s an audience people that I work with who like hearing that. But I’m wondering why, why you make a point of bringing it up in public? Who you’ve talked about it in a couple different settings? What is the point of you saying that out loud? Who is the audience for that? The audience is our own employees and our future employees. You know, we have a talent brand that is very important to us. And I think if you’re a journalist today, I always tell our employees, our journalists, that right now, there’s fewer and fewer places where you can practice your best work without, you know, being either impacted directly by the government or by the ownership group or whatever. This is one of them. That is a source of competitive advantage. In the seven years I’ve been at the company, not once, as our owners of our owners or our board come to me and said, Hey, don’t publish this. Don’t publish that. And therefore, not once have I done that to our editors, because we have the best editors in the world. And the way to keep the best editors in the world is to stay out of their way and support them. And I really believe that that is the key to our success. And I’m fortunate that we’re owned by a family that believes in that too. And so I talk about it publicly because I want people to know, especially journalists who are maybe at places where they don’t feel that they have that freedom that should there be an opportunity to work at Connie Nass, they’d be welcomed here and they would not be interfered with. Thank you for that. That that that I really was curious about that. And it leads me to this question. And we talked about this a couple of times before, but now it’s a bigger deal than ever. A half a time, half of my show is spent interviewing people like you who run media companies, and the other half is spent talking to, we’ll just call them creatives. Increasingly, there are people who’ve left big media companies and created their own business. At the time, it was the last few times we talked about this, it was mostly theoretical. And now it’s, it’s a real thing and it’s happening a lot of places. And I’m wondering how you think about two different versions of this one.

Peter Kafka: How do you how do you work with someone like an Emily Sunberg who’s been on this show who has her own center of gravity? But she’s very adjacent to a lot of what you guys are doing and very interested in that world.

Roger Lynch: What do you do for either Emily or someone like her to say, Hey, you’re off on your own and you’re successful. But we think you can work with us. What is what is that pitch like? And the second part of that question is if you have an Emily Sunberg at Vogue before she becomes Emily Sunberg, how do you keep her there or how do you keep her advantage fair? Yeah. Look, I think that these new outlets for creatives or journalists are very good. I mean, this is an industry that’s been under pressure. There are a few fewer jobs in it than there were five years ago. That trend you’ve seen year after year. And so new outlets and new ways for for journalists or creatives to be able to develop businesses that can sustain them is only good. For us, it does make us think differently about how we how we operate and how we work with with journalists and creatives. We have to be more creative. We have to say, okay, there may be somebody who’s got a sub stack who is, you know, in an adjacent field that we can work with in some areas and they’ll have their sub stack. And it’s not necessarily competitive of what we do, but it’s not, you know, it’s not part of our business. And that’s okay. And so I think you’ll probably see us do more of that rather than less of that. What what does work with them look like? Is that you can freelance for us? I mean, could be or they can be writing a column for us as an example. And what is the upside for I’ll just keep saying Emily Sunberg. Well, she’s a generic stand-in here at this point for them who who are produced their own content get paid well for it and are profiled in the New York Times. What is what is Kondayn asked giving them by saying, you can now publish in our outlet too? Well, look, I think for them, for most of them, they may have a sub stack. Let’s take someone like Lockling Cartwright, you know, at Vanity Fair, you know, he has a breaker, which is his own. And he’s been on the show, yeah. A publication, yeah. And it’s great. And he does that. But it’s a limited audience that he’ll reach on his own. It’s also working with us at Kondayn asks or at Vanity Fair gives him access to a much broader reach audience than he would be able to develop just on his own. So to me, it’s a pretty good model to have where you can have somebody as talented as he is and connected as he is, building his own business, but all at the same time collaborating with us in a way that works for both parties. And what about the retention area idea that, you know, let’s say you’ve got a Lockling Cartwright on Vanity Fair and he goes, oh, wait, I could be making three acts what I make if I go off and do my own sub stack and podcast, et cetera.

Peter Kafka: How do you convince them to stick around? Or do you say, go off and do your own thing, but we’re going to make some arrangement with you.

Roger Lynch: Look, we haven’t had a lot of that happen, but, you know, I think that, you know, then the unfortunate case with sub stack is there aren’t that many that really can make a good living doing it. And I think those that do find that also it is hard work. It is you are constantly having to produce, you are constantly having to think about how you grow your business. And for some people that’s exhilarating and can be very successful and some it’s exhausting. And so I think there’s a limit is to how many people will be able to do that in a way that really supports, you know, their lifestyle. Yeah, there’s many more than I thought there were going to be five, six years ago, but it’s still a limited universe. I think it is. But again, it doesn’t mean there’s not an opportunity for them to do that and to work with us in certain ways. We’ll be right back, but first to work from a sponsor. And we’re back. Talk me through how you’re thinking about platforms these days. In the old days, we would say, what do you think about Facebook? What do you think about Apple News? I’m still curious about that. But I want to hear you talk about Google and the AI companies. It looks like you are what you tell me because it kind of seems like you’re washing your hands at Google, but I’m not sure if that’s the case and you’re definitely doing deals with the AI companies. And it seems like in all these cases, the platforms have something to offer you. And there’s a lot of risk of being dependent on the platforms. You know, the first thing is start with our audiences. And I’ve always been a believer in you have to observe what your audience or your customers are doing and try to craft your business model around that. And audiences are on these platforms. And so it’s very important for our brands to be where our audiences expect them to be. I think TikTok was a great example of that. When TikTok launched in the US, we saw a growth of Vogue on TikTok, but not by us. Yes, people were producing content under the Vogue name, putting it on TikTok. That was a really strong indication that audiences expected Vogue to be on there. And so we jumped in a big way. There was no revenue. There was no revenue model that we had for this. But it was important I felt for us to be there because our audiences expected us to be there. And we’d figure out, you know, that’s been the history of the internet. It starts with engagement and then monetization figures itself out later. And that’s what’s happened with us in TikTok. Because now we have ways to sell ads around our content and it’s become a good business for us. So it starts with where do our audiences expect our brands to be? Let’s make sure we’re there. Now your specific questions around AI. Well, wait, before we get to AI, though, right? Because it’s one thing to say, I want to be on TikTok or in the old days, it’s important for me to be on Facebook or pick your place and it makes that makes sense. There’s a difference between that and saying, I’m going to do a commercial deal where, you know, either I’m going to make stuff for the platform and they’re going to reward me with traffic or we don’t have a commercial deal, but also they’re using all my content and not sending me any traffic. I’m wondering how you think through all that because you do have to be there, but you can also end up just sort of building a business for someone else and getting very little in the way back. Always a risk. So as I mentioned, it starts with the audience. In terms of these platforms, I don’t believe that any of these platforms owe us an obligation to send us traffic or customers or audience. I also don’t believe that they have the right to use our content to come and compete directly with us. So, you know, if Google wants to change its search algorithms and stop sending traffic to publishers, as we’ve all seen, the amount of traffic that comes to publishers from search is declined precipitously, that’s fine. They can have their business reasons around it. It doesn’t give them the right to use our content to then come and compete with us for those audiences. That’s the rub there. And so for AI, the risk is these AI companies use the content that our journalists create and use it to compete with our core business model. Now, if they want to negotiate with us and enter into license agreements like OpenAI is done or Amazon or Microsoft or Proplexity, fine. Then we can come to terms on how that will work. Those that don’t do that or worse, frankly, in the case of Google, they tie their scraping of AI content to their search scraping. So, Google has been found to be dominant in search. They don’t let you opt out of scraping your content for AI unless you scrape opt out for search, which is very difficult for a publisher to do. I think that’s anti-competitive. I think it’s wrong that they do that. But look, these companies are also our partners. So we can have disagreements in some area of our business and strong alignment in other areas. Again, with Google, we’re one of the largest publishers on YouTube. We have a very, very good, strong relationship with YouTube, and it’s really core to our business and really important for them, too.

Peter Kafka: You’ve said Google Search is basically going to go to zero or something close to that for you, or basically stop showing up as referral traffic sooner than later because of the AI summaries they’re doing.

Roger Lynch: Google Discover is this hugely important product for publishers that I think most regular people don’t know about. That is often as big a deal or bigger than Google Search. Are you still working to get your stuff showing up on Google Discover? We do get traffic from Google Discover, but it is very different traffic than Search. Search is intent driven traffic. Google Discover traffic doesn’t convert for subscription, doesn’t convert for commerce. You may be able to sell a few ads around it, but it is far less important.

Peter Kafka: Spell out why it’s less important.

Roger Lynch: Because if somebody goes to Google and types vogue shopping recommendations, there is real clear intent with what they’re looking for. If they’re going to Google to search for something and they see an article promoted that it catches their eye and they click on it, it’s much less committed. It’s great. We love to get traffic from Google Discover, but that person is much less likely to become a vogue subscriber or your per subscriber or even transact in commerce than someone who shows much more intent through search. So it is not a replacement. Even though we’ve seen Discover traffic grow as Search traffic is decline, that’s a bad trade-off.

Peter Kafka: When we get off this call, I’m going to slack some people I work for.

Roger Lynch: I’m going to say here’s what Roger Lynch, the CEO of Candace, says about Google Discover traffic. I’ll let you know. I bet you Jim Bangkok agrees 100% with me. Jim’s one of the people I work for. At least as of today, we’re recording this on Tuesday. Right.

Peter Kafka: Did you take a look at the Vox Media podcast network, which is recording this podcast? It’s an asset that is probably going to trade hands very soon.

Roger Lynch: Yeah, I’m not going to comment on that, Peter. Fair enough. I’ll take that as a maybe.

Peter Kafka: With the AI deals, given that you’ve now gone multiple rounds with different platforms, and you’ve seen all the promise and peril and pitfall, what is most important to get out of the AI companies? Is it straight cash? Like you’re going to use our stuff, pay us, or it sounds like the referrals aren’t really a thing that most people are not clicking through those footnotes and AI results.

Roger Lynch: What is the best case scenario for you in these AI deals? First and foremost, it is to have a license arrangement, which reflects the fact that this is copyrighted content. You’re using our stuff, pay us. Yeah. Not just pay us, but agree to terms on how you’re going to use it. Just like when I was in the music industry, or we did film intelligence, these license deals, you could think about two main components. There’s the money, but there’s also the use, the grant of rights. How can you use it? Most importantly, how can you not use it? So as an example, we would never do a deal with an AI company that says, take all of our New Yorker content and just show it verbatim to your customers. That wouldn’t be in our interest. We would put conditions around it. So the terms of the license deals are just as important as the money that’s generated from them. We don’t think that they will refer traffic anywhere near the rate at which search did. But there’s an interesting dynamic that we see. You mentioned that I said search is going to go away. We chased it for a number of years and each year we do our budget and we’d say search is going to decline just because we don’t know why, but we know there will be some algorithm change, it will cause it to decline. And each of the last three years or so, we underestimated the decline. And so last year, we said, we’re going to take a different approach. I told all of our teams, you need to plan your businesses around there being no search. And if you don’t have a plan for that, you may not have a business. And we took that approach and I think it was very effective because it caused people to really think about how do we generate audiences that have strong intent and strong engagement. Now, as search to decline, we saw our direct audiences grow. I think it was in part the work that we were doing, but I think it was also in part because people, if you think about the example I gave you, I said, vogue shopping recommendations or something like that, you type that in a search algorithm. If what you get in return is an AI summary or a bunch of Google links to, you know, Walmart or whatever they are, whoever the deal is, that’s not a satisfactory help. You might just type in to searchbarvogue.com and then find it that way. So we’ve been seeing direct traffic grow dramatically where it’s, you know, it’s the majority source of our traffic now. And I think it is, you know, our teams would like to say, oh, it’s because we’ve done such a great job. You know, and I think that is largely true, but I think it is also because people are finding less relevant search results than they used to. And so where they used to use Google in some ways is a navigation tool. They’re finding that navigation. It’s very effective the AI summaries for answering really simple questions, but less so for things that involve taste. And this is one of the big things that I’ve seen in the discussions that we’ve had with AI companies three or four years ago when we started negotiating with them. It was a bit surreal because we literally, one company in particular told us, okay, we need to know how many words you have. It’s like, okay, do the words matter or just any words? Can you tell us how many words you have? Because we pay by the word. I’m like, okay, this is going to be a long discussion. But we got through it and you go see these deals. And then as these services answer engines started to become used more and more, these companies started to realize that our content was being used in their answers much more significantly. So they started coming back to us like, oh, okay, we see your content really matters in certain areas. And now there’s a whole debate about whether AI has taste or could ever replicate taste. Perfect, right? Because that is our core business. Creativity, taste. And I think that, you know, I think that creates much more opportunities for us now and how we can work with AI companies.

Peter Kafka: What about the worry that even though you’re getting paid today, even though you have restrictions and limits around how you can use your work, that inevitably what you’re doing is building up these platforms, making them more and more useful.

Roger Lynch: And certainly one of the products they might come out with one day is not their own version of Vogue, but just things that deliver enough information to people. It’s tailored the way they want that they really don’t have any need to go somewhere else most of the time. And you’re essentially building a thing that will put you out of business, which is a recurring issue with all the platforms, but it seems more likely than ever with AI. I think it is more likely that ever with AI for brands that don’t have the authority that our top brands have. I don’t worry about AI putting Vogue or the New Yorker out of business. It just will never replicate what those brands and what the editorial teams can do with those. If you have, and you mentioned some of the companies that have gone by the wayside, look, I think they were the darlings of these platforms when they were sending them all the traffic and they did a really effective job of arbitrage and taking intent-driven searches or video, whatever, and turning it into commerce transactions or ads or things like that. But they were entirely reliant on that traffic continuing. And when that traffic went away, what they didn’t have was brands that had the level of authority that, frankly, our brands have. This is what every publisher tells me is how they’re going to survive this, our brands are meaningful. People have relationships with our brand. We’re going to create even more direct relationships with our brand. People will come to us because our thing is special. Let’s stipulate that you said I think seven of your brands make 85% of your revenue. So seven of your brands, I’ll fit that category. How many other publishers do you think are going to make it through this era? How many publishers do you think realistically have brands that resonate with enough people that they can stay afloat on their own without being disaggregated by AI? Well, first of all, I wouldn’t, I would want to give the impression that it’s only very big brands that can be successful because we have some very small brands like pitchfork. You know, it’s a, it’s less than one. You fold it in the GQ. But it has a high, we put it under GQ, but it is, it has its separate editorial team and operates under its own brand and has been very successful. It actually has one of the largest direct audiences and now has a subscription product, which is doing very, very well. Like that’s a brand that will do well in this era because it has authority. It is more niche in its content area. It’s never going to be as big as Vogue, but it has a point of view and it has a loyal dedicated audience. So it’s not just big brand, small brand. It really is, does your brand have authority? Does it have connection with audience that is really deeper than search or discover traffic? Another way of putting my question, what percent of publishers, existing publishers, do you think survive this era? Well, I mean, we’ve already seen a lot of that damage done today. So, you know, of the publishers that are left, you know, it’s a higher percentage that will survive than it was five years ago, but certainly they’re not going to all survive. I think that writing is on the wall, or at least not in the form that they are today.

Peter Kafka: Speaking of the future, one day, Anna Windtour and David Remnick will no longer work for you.

Roger Lynch: They’re not young people. They’re very good at what they do and your company seems I don’t depend on them. Lean on their authority in a really meaningful way at the New Yorker and then broadly for Anna Windtour. What is the plan when they leave? How are you thinking about who’s going to take the field of issues? Well, you know, first of all, for people that are in this field, those are the pinnacle jobs they really are. And you’re talking about two of the most successful editors ever. So, it will be very, very difficult to find people who could ever replace them. But guess what? I’m sure the same was said about Grace Marabello when she ran Vogue for several decades before Anna Kim and Orteena Brown or William Shaw or any of the great editors that have been attached to these brands over many, many, many decades. Have either of them said this is who I want to replace me just don’t tell anyone yet? No, no. I mean, we, you know, it’s very funny because one of the things I also implemented when I joined was succession planning. It was very clear that this had never been done before it got an ass that it caused people to be very uncomfortable to start talking about who could ever possibly replace them. But we, you know, we always look to have a broad selection of potential people who could fulfill a role, but you never know whether they’re going to be available or what the situation is. So, you know, and we also work to bring in talent specifically with the idea of succession. So, it’s something that we run a really disciplined process every single year. We report it to my board. We spend time going through. We have our editors. Wait, so what does that look like? So, you run through a process of if David Remnick got hit by a bus today, here’s who would replace him? Look, the standard process for every company I’ve run is you have a emergency successor identified. You have a list of people who could be ready, you know, now or in the next year or two. You have a list that could be three to five years and a list that could be five plus years. So, these lists exist. The files exist. They’re on your desk, as Pamela, he would say. They are locked away. And you revise them periodically. We revise them every year. We go through a formal process where we evaluate it every year. And some names are added. And some names drop off. And do Anna and David participate in this process? They do. Okay. All right. Let’s find the list people. Conden Asmol. Conden Asmol. Send them over to that one.

Peter Kafka: Last question for you.

Roger Lynch: The biggest movie in America, I think, or biggest movie in the world, I think, is Devil Wars Prada 2. It’s about Conden Asmol. They don’t call it Conden Asmol. They don’t call it Vogue. It’s about your company. It’s owned by Disney.

Peter Kafka: Do you participate financially? I know you guys did a lot of marketing for it.

Roger Lynch: You had Anna and Merrill on the cover of Vogue.

Peter Kafka: Do you participate financially in that movie’s success? No, that movie is their movie.

Roger Lynch: It’s not our movie. And we have no direct participation in it. But we certainly have a lot of fun with it. And I think Anna and Merrill, going over on the cover of Vogue, and as you may have seen Chloe, our editor of American Vogue, had to work hard to convince Hannah to do that, because that is not who she is, was fabulous. And that cover of Vogue with the two of them was iconic. But what I would say is that movie has generated a lot of interest. Not just about Vogue, but about Conden Asmol. So it’s been good for our business. It’s certainly been good for our business.

Peter Kafka: I know for a while, every publisher, and we talked about this, said, hey, we make all this amazing.

Roger Lynch: We make great stories, et cetera, that these things are often turned into movies and television shows. We really got to lean into that and figure out ways to get these things made either by ourselves or with partners. And for a while, during the streaming boom, the extremers were buying literally anything you guys could make. That does not happen anymore. How have you rethought the sort of the business of getting into Hollywood and television and streaming? Well, you know, that business has shrunk as an industry. The number of new shows and films being produced as shrunk in the time it takes to get something approved as shrunk. But for us, you know, we had seven shows and movies premiere last year. We sold 11 new ones. So our team, it’s a very small team, but our team does, I think, a really good job punching about their weight with that. But you know, it starts with, you know, all of that starts with the IP of our journalism and our content.

Peter Kafka: What’s more important for you to figure that out or figure out like TikTok in short video that more people are consuming more often? Well, short-form video is a much bigger part of our business than film and television.

Roger Lynch: So that, you know, in terms of revenue, certainly, short-form video is very important for us.

Peter Kafka: Roger Lynch, you’ve been there since 2019. How much longer do you have? When does your succession plan kick in? You know, it’s, I always tell people, I’ve started a number of companies.

Roger Lynch: Like most of the companies I run are companies I’ve started. And even companies I’ve started, I’ve gotten bored after maybe four or five years. And I know when I get that feeling like, okay, I’m starting to get bored. Time for me to do something. I never get bored in this job. I honestly, it’s, first of all, always really challenging problems to solve. And also the most interesting intellectual people to deal with. So I have no plans on leaving. I really enjoy it. And I’m definitely not bored. There’s a bonus you get to talk to people like me.

Peter Kafka: Roger Lynch, thank you for your time.

Roger Lynch: Thanks Peter. Thanks again to Roger Lynch. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver. It produces an edits the show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. More media bosses coming your way soon. See you then..