TV. Podcasts. Newsletters. Events. Inside OZY’s multi-platform strategy
When I interviewed Carlos Watson, the co-founder of the digital magazine OZY, he recounted a question he received from a colleague a few days prior. “He said, ‘BuzzFeed’s gotten a half a billion dollars from Comcast. Vox has gotten a quarter of a billion dollars, and you have more prime time TV shows than both of them combined. How has that happened?’”
The numbers are actually $400 million and $200 million, respectively, but the point still stands.
Watson was referring to the three deals OZY has inked with PBS. The first, for a show called The Contenders, ran in 2016 and focused on a series of candidates, from Barry Goldwater to John McCain, who were on the losing ends of major elections. A second show, Third Rail with Ozy, features debates among panelists on hot button issues. The third, Breaking Big, will, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “explore how some of the world’s most influential artists, innovators, athletes and leaders got their big break.”
OZY struck these deals just as other digital-first media companies have increasingly tried to break into Hollywood. The New York Times reported in October that BuzzFeed is placing significant resources into television and film production. Vice has been producing a documentary show for HBO for several years and recently launched its own cable channel.
There’s just one major difference between OZY and these other two outlets: BuzzFeed and Vice have collectively taken in over a billion dollars in venture capital investment. OZY has raised just $35 million. It also has only about 50 staffers, compared to the thousands who work for BuzzFeed and Vice.
In fact, despite being small and relatively young (it launched in 2013), OZY has been surprisingly adept at expanding into multiple platforms and mediums. It made an early bet on newsletters (before the newsletter trend came back in vogue), and its Presidential Daily Brief newsletter now has over 2 million subscribers. It launched an annual live event series that featured A-list celebrities and was attended by 5,000 people in New York. And it recently debuted a scripted podcast show that’s already amassed 1.5 million downloads and shot to the top of the iTunes charts.
I recently interviewed OZY’s co-founders, Watson and Samir Rao, about the magazine’s platform strategy. In an era when the phrase “pivoting to video” has become a punchline and publishers are trying to adapt to a world in which Facebook and Google are siphoning up nearly all the digital ad money, OZY has managed to diversify its content offerings without having a significant venture capital war chest to fall back on.
Newsletters
OZY made an early bet on newsletters. In 2013, when the site launched, most publishers were placing increased emphasis on Facebook, which at the time was still sending gargantuan amounts of traffic to their websites. Newsletters were often considered an afterthought, an antiquated medium from a bygone era (I worked at US News & World Report at the time and remember trying to convince my superiors that we should make newsletters a priority, to no avail).
One of OZY’s first editorial products was the Presidential Daily Brief, a newsletter that tries to emulate (or imagine) a briefing document that might be placed on a U.S. President’s desk every morning, informing them of that day’s most important issues and news stories. The newsletter features a countdown of 10 items, each featuring a brief, editorialized summary with links to more information. A spokesperson told me it now has over 2 million subscribers.
Watson said the Presidential Daily Brief is a group effort. “There’s a whole team of people who will spend time figuring out what are the 10 stories people should know about, and they work through the day and through the night. With the news changing up to the minute, up to the tweet, I should say, they stand at the ready to update the final 10. We probably go into a lot of mornings having started with 25 and ending up with 12 or 13, and then finally finishing with 10.”
There are a number of strategies OZY has implemented to get to that 2 million subscriber number. According to reporting from Digiday, OZY formed partnership deals with outlets like Wired and The New York Times to cross-promote its content. It’s also utilized product sweepstakes, offering up the chance to win free trips and prizes for those willing to give up their email addresses.
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Perhaps its most innovative approach to promoting the Presidential Daily Brief is how it gets celebrities, entrepreneurs, and policymakers to guest-edit the newsletter. January Jones, Tony Blair, and Chelsea Clinton have all edited issues of the Daily Brief. I asked Watson how they choose and recruit these celebrities to participate. He said that there’s a senior editor who runs point on developing a list of prospects and approaching them to gauge their interest. In some cases, however, a celebrity will pitch OZY on participating. “Von Miller, the football player, I guess was an OZY reader and fan,” said Watson. “His people reached out to us and said he loves OZY and asked if we would ever consider having him do it.”
The amount of hands-on participation from the celebrity varies; in some cases, they’ll send in items to be included throughout the week, or forward them all at once. “With Tony Blair, I think he was in multiple time zones [as he edited it], and when he finally finished it he was in Asia. He sent one edit back after another.”
Live events
OZY’s decision to do live events came out of surveys it conducted with its readers. “Our audience said, ‘We love OZY online, but we really wish we could meet OZY in person,’” said Watson. “That really led us to at first think about small gatherings and, ultimately, to really go and do something bigger, namely a festival.”
Publishers have been expanding into hosting events for years. Some, like Politico, will hold dozens of small gatherings over the course of the year. Others, like the New Yorker and Atlantic, host large, annual forums that are attended by thousands of people. OZY opted for the latter strategy. “A woman who worked for the city of New York said, ‘You guys are not being ambitious enough,’” recalled Watson. “‘SXSW used to be the coolest thing on Earth, and it’s kind of jumped the shark and become overgrown and sprawly. Instead of building something small you should build something of scale.”
The outcome was Ozy Fest, a conference that takes place in Central Park every July. Featured guests have included Malcolm Gladwell, Karl Rove, Cory Booker, and will.i.am. “It was so good that this last year, guess who popped in unannounced? Joe Biden,” said Watson. The most recent Ozy Fest was attended by 5,000 people and was watched by another 50 million people across YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms.
TV
The PBS shows came out of Watson’s already existing relationships with the network (he has an extensive background in television and radio, having served as both a guest and host for various shows on CNN and MSNBC). PBS initially ordered The Contenders, which was then later picked up by the BBC and, according to Watson, broadcast in over 100 countries. PBS ordered the second two shows based, in part, on the success of The Contenders.
I asked Watson to compare OZY’s foray into TV with the “pivots to video” that have been pursued by other publishers. Were they all part of the same trend? He didn’t think so. “It’s one thing to make cat videos, and it’s another thing to make prime time television shows that can compete with Atlanta or Insecure or Peaky Blinders, or any of the other shows we really enjoy,” he said. “You’re taking creative risks, you’re taking financial risks, you’re taking, literally, time risks. The amount of time you have to put into not knowing whether you’re going to make it, that’s an enormous amount of time. And if you’re a young company, you can’t get that time back. You don’t have 50 extra people to just work on something that may or may not work out.”
Watson explained that getting from a pitch meeting to the actual green light for a show is extremely difficult, and many publishers will struggle to convince networks to take such a huge risk. “You’re going to have to convince a sophisticated network that’s producing shows as varied as Frontline and Peaky Blinders that, rather than spend money with the folks who brought you those shows, they should spend money with you, who produces cat videos. That’s hard for people at Mic and Upworthy and Mashable and those kind of places to do.”
Podcasts
OZY’s latest podcast, a scripted show called The Thread, was an outgrowth of the magazine’s text-based reporting. “We have a section on OZY called Flashback,” cofounder Samir Rao told me. “The section is about interesting moments in history that have renewed cultural relevance and it’s based on the notion that sometimes the best way to look ahead is to look back with a different piece of context.”
A writer for The Flashback, Sean Braswell, had noted during his reporting that many seemingly unrelated historical flashpoints were, when you scratched beneath the surface, actually connected. His idea: what if you took two historical events, spanning decades apart, and, through a series of episodes, showed the chain of events that linked them together?
The first season of The Thread, hosted by Braswell and spanning six episodes, does just that. It starts with the 1980 death of Beatles legend John Lennon and, through a circuitous path that leads past J.D. Salinger, Eugene O’Neill, and Charlie Chaplin, brings us to the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.
It’s common for publications to work with podcast networks to produce their shows. The New York Times, for instance, partnered with Pineapple Street Media to put out its Still Processing podcast. But Rao told me that OZY built out The Thread in-house. “We assembled a special ops team inside,” he said. “We probably worked on it for six months prior to its launch — from germination to the iTunes store, on its way to a top 10 podcast listen.”
The Thread has already debuted a second season, and Rao said this isn’t a one-off project. “I think by this time next year we’ll have four or five podcast projects and not all of them will be narrative,” he said. “The question for me is how many and what variety, not if.”
Of course, the larger question is how all these various platform plays impact OZY’s overall business. Rao told me that having a presence in multiple mediums and platforms gives advertisers multiple options for how they can engage with the magazine. “The same people looking to advertise with us on digital are looking to advertise with us in festivals, and TV, and podcasts, and email.”
Watson explained that each platform can serve as an entry point for a brand. “Someone may decide to start with you by working with you on a festival, but may decide over time that, oh, I also want to be able to do stuff in the audio space. Big sophisticated brands often want to be very versatile in their expressions.”
Versatile is certainly one word that can be used to describe OZY. With its 25 million monthly visitors, 1.5 million podcast downloads, 2 million email subscribers, and multiple primetime television shows, it’s certainly not lacking in ways of reaching consumers.
This cornucopia of choice, according to Rao, is what audiences are increasingly coming to expect. “They expect diversity in not just the topics they’re being fed, but also the mediums they’re being fed in. Fundamentally, wherever they are, we’re going to be there too. I think that’s something that’s more broadly becoming a part of the accepted paradigm.”
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
