YouTube Wants to Be a Home, Not a Launchpad

Andrew Perlman: We get time and focus. The home assets are amazing and I love that team, but we almost had two separate businesses within Recurrent. Those home assets and PopSci are a different demographic than auto and military, and the themes we’ve been pushing—events, video, the connective tissue between them—we didn’t have across both groups. The portfolio now is really male-focused, with a clear throughline in the way the sites are publishing and in our advertiser base. Most of our sites are publishing between 10 and 20 articles per day, and all of them are publishing on the open web but also in video.

Mark: You’ve said expertise matters more than scale in media right now. What does that change about how you operate?

Andrew: We see it in our military vertical, which is growing like crazy. It used to be only endemics, but non-endemics like BMW and Starbucks know that if they want to reach that audience, they have to reach it through authentic channels. If you’re in media, you can’t run a website business like you used to. As search goes down, loyalty matters and you have to look at multiple points of monetization. Our four points are video, licensing, experiential, and AI. We focus on those as opposed to broad programmatic scale.

Mark: Declining traffic has been another body blow to publishers’ affiliate businesses, which used to be a core part of your business but is less so now. What changed?

Andrew: It’s not just traffic patterns. Amazon halved the affiliate rates across the publisher ecosystem between six and eight weeks ago, which we saw coming. There’s also been a move away from search. Look at the layout of the Google homepage. Now you get AI overlays, Google Shopping results, sponsored results, and then the organic results. The business of converting organic search to affiliate has gotten super challenging. We’ve instead focused on people who are literally coming to our URL, producing great content, getting in their inboxes. 

Mark: Video has become a major line item for Recurrent. What does that business look like, and why did you choose to invest in it?

Andrew: On the video front, we’re at different levels of maturity across the brands. Donut, which started on YouTube, is at an inflection point where it’s now big enough to go beyond the platform. It has a FAST channel on Samsung TV+, and we’re co-producing exclusive content for three separate streaming platforms this year. Video is where the audience is now, and it creates a different kind of connection than text-based content, one that lets you move audiences to engage in live events.

Mark: How are you thinking about M&A from here?

Andrew: We are looking at it, but we’re not going to branch outside the verticals where we have a right to win. The things that pique our interest are smaller-scale events that we can use our audience to scale, and things in the creator universe. We would never buy an individual creator channel. Donut was unique in that it had a cast, so we don’t want to be too reliant on any one face. We might also look to acquire things to scale our production ability.