DIGIDAY, May 28, 2015 - Recode, which comScore said gets 1.5 million unique visitors a month over a year later, may not have been growing fast enough, which could have pressured it to find an exit. “They were stuck in the middle, neither small enough to be highly profitable nor large enough to have the scale to compete with the majors. They were smart enough to understand that,” said Kreisky Media Consultancy founder Peter Kreisky, who compared Recode to GigaOm, which attempted to grow too quickly before imploding last month. All of these concerns go away now when the site is been folded into Vox Media, which will handle the bulk of the site’s business and administrative concerns, all the while boosting its own prospects. Kreisky called it “the perfect strategy” for both sides, particularly Recode.

DIGIDAY, December 22, 2014 - Time Inc. isn’t alone in catching up to Silicon Valley in its approach to product development. Hearst Magazines’ “fail fast” mantra informs recent magazine launches including HGTV and Food Network Magazine that use lean staffs and publishing partners that have built-in awareness and audiences. Still, the MVP [Minimum Viable Product] approach is foreign to the traditional publishing culture, with its tradition of lengthy and expensive product development, said Peter Kreisky, chairman of the Kreisky Media Consultancy. “It’s fear of failure,” he said. “They have a very high profile in the marketplace, so every product they launch has high visibility. If you’re a big company like Time or Hearst, everybody sort of jumps on you.” It’s easier for Time Inc. to adopt this approach now than it would have been a decade ago, though, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of media investment bank DeSilva & Phillips. “They had a whole magazine development staff, and they were tasked with starting new magazines like InStyle and Entertainment Weekly,” he said. “The way startups were done back then, it was very slow and methodical and might have included direct-mail tests and newsstand tests. Now, it is more fast and furious. Let’s put it out there and see how people will react. A lot of these things are not going to be new magazines; they’re going to be apps and things that are more conducive to testing quickly.”

DIGIDAY, November 17, 2014 - Young revved up Hearst’s online publishing speed by getting the brands to go from “months to moments,” his signature phrase that has quickly become a ubiquitous saying throughout Hearst Tower. Still, modern-day publishing means not just mastering speed but efficiency. With its mostly women-aimed portfolio, Hearst could improve that by simply repurposing its own content. Publishing today also requires distributing on the social Web, which means reacting quickly to the news and social conversations. All of this runs counter to the way consumer publications have traditionally operated. As any print publisher knows, translating those lumbering titles to Web speed without undermining the brand is tricky. “The pure-plays do not have that issue to deal with, so they can be bolder and take greater risks,” said Peter Kreisky, chairman at Kreisky Media Consultancy, an adviser to media companies. “That’s why everyone’s watching very carefully that there’s coordination between the stakeholders.”

DIGIDAY, Oct 2, 2014 - While NYT Now is struggling to find an audience, it’s clear that the reasons aren’t because it’s a bad app. App Store reviews of NYT Now are almost universally glowing, with users praising the app’s ability to keep them informed with shorter, more digestible news nuggets. Apple even called it one of its best new news apps. “I’m surprised,” said Peter Kreisky, chairman at Kreisky Media Consultancy. “I personally love the product, use it two to three times daily, and cite it in presentations and speeches as a great example of a digital-first product developed primarily for the online-first rather than print-first audience.” For the Times, both NYT Now and NYT Opinion had been core to a digital subscription strategy centered around attracting new readers with cheaper, unbundled products rather than one large omnibus package. The Times is also using its cheaper products to upsell subscribers on its bigger, more expensive ones. The problem is that there’s no indication that the Times apps are actually succeeding in attracting new readership, which means that it’s failing to do the exact thing it was meant to. Kreisky said he had yet to meet NYT Now users who only purchased the $8-a-month subscription.