I’m joined by Matt Cronin, founding partner at House of Kaizen, which works with publishers and other companies with recurring revenue businesses to align their business goals with audience needs through customer experience frameworks. Some highlights of our conversation:

Shift to audience-centric approaches: There's a significant shift towards understanding and directly engaging audiences rather than relying on platforms for traffic, which involves a fundamental transition to being audience-centric. A key part of that: Realizing an audience is not a monolith but different groups with different needs.

The importance of intentional audiences: Publishing became a (big) numbers game. That’s changed, as every publisher now much compete for “intentional audiences.” These are people  you have a real tie to, who subscribe to a newsletter, follow a podcast, visit your site directly. This is what Business Insider is after with its shift to focus on “digital go-getters.”

Looking beyond efficiency with AI: Synthetic content is about to overwhelm the internet. Many publishers are focused now on the efficiency gains of AI, as all businesses are and need to be, but stopping there is a mistake. AI needs to be harnessed to – you guessed it – provide added value to audiences.