Many media companies may still not be consciously thinking about this a whole lot, but over the last decade or so, the fundamental business model for the media industry has shifted, particularly for brands that serve vertical markets. Where once media was simply aggregating an audience—usually the larger the better—and then selling it to advertisers, now it’s entirely different: You’re still connecting buyers and sellers, but now it’s about learning and monetizing business intelligence about that audience.
Now you use content to develop insights into reader/user behavior. You look for buying intent signals. You develop patterns of behavior and extrapolate them into audience segments. It’s a sea change. And it can be very difficult to visualize these behaviors across your audience channels—print, digital, events, newsletters, and more. As a consequence, tech is central to media success, because you need multiple departments working on the same shared objectives and relying on the same KPIs. Without a coherent tech stack, it becomes almost impossible.
In this context, we were fortunate this month to catch up with Tony Napoleone, vice president/client experience, at the audience-intelligence and data company Omeda. Tony has years of operating experience at Bobit Business Media, and he’s an accomplished public speaker and thought leader in audience engagement strategies and challenges. Two years ago, we featured Omeda CEO James Capo in Fox Tales. But two years is a long time in media technology, and catching up with Tony right now, in the middle of a period of AI disruption, is valuable for us and our readers alike. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.
Fox Tales: The basic business model in media is selling an audience to a marketer. How would you revise that description in 2026?
Tony Napoleone: For a long time the media business was described as selling access to an audience. In 2026, a more accurate description is that media companies sell trusted relationships and audience intelligence.
Tony Napoleone.
Before joining Omeda, I spent more than a decade running audience development, email marketing, and data for a media company. The shift we are seeing now did not happen overnight. Publishers have been moving away from a pure pageview model toward owned audience relationships for several years, and the acceleration of AI and changing discovery channels has made that transition more urgent.
For much of the last two decades the industry operated in what you could call a pageview economy. Success was defined by traffic and impressions. Today the industry is moving toward something different, where long-term value comes from direct audience relationships.
The internet is producing more content than ever, and generative AI is accelerating that trend. When content becomes easier to produce, the scarcity shifts. What becomes valuable is credibility, context, and a direct relationship with a specific audience.
Discovery is also changing. Zero-click search and AI-generated answers are reducing the traffic publishers receive from traditional search results. That makes direct audience relationships through registrations, newsletters, subscriptions, and communities far more important.
The media industry spent decades optimizing for scale. The next phase will be defined by how well publishers build and monetize direct audience relationships.
Fox Tales: Most media operators would agree that their audience is their most valuable asset. What are the two or three effective ways to grow that audience?
Napoleone: Growth strategies will always vary depending on the audience and market. A B2B publisher connecting buyers and sellers in a niche industry approaches growth differently than an enthusiast brand or a large consumer publisher.
What has changed across the board is the competitive landscape for attention. Media companies are no longer just competing with other publishers. They are competing with creators, brands, and algorithms.
Anyone with an iPhone and a Substack account can publish and build an audience. In many cases publishers are also competing with their own advertisers, who are launching newsletters, podcasts, and content programs that fight for the same attention across search, social, and email.
That creates both risk and opportunity. Your ideal reader simply has more choices than ever, which means the value proposition has to be clearer. It is no longer enough to ask someone to sign up for a newsletter. You have to demonstrate how your content will make them smarter, better at their job, or help them save time and money.
Most organizations already recognize the importance of audience. In our State of Audience research, nearly nine in ten media leaders say audience data is their most valuable revenue asset. Yet fewer than one in five have a formal strategy connecting audience data, content, and revenue.
That gap is where a lot of opportunity exists. At Omeda we work with publishers trying to connect audience data, content, events, and revenue systems together. One of the most common challenges is that audience strategy lives in separate teams instead of a unified plan. The publishers seeing the most success treat audience growth as a cross-functional strategy, not just a marketing or editorial initiative. They align teams around shared goals and connect audience insights to revenue outcomes.
Fox Tales: What are the best ways to further engage the audience, and what are the most important KPIs?
Napoleone: Audience engagement needs to be tied to the underlying business model, not just editorial activity. Too often publishers still default to surface metrics like pageviews or visits, which do not necessarily tell you whether you are building a sustainable audience business.
The more meaningful metrics come from unit economics. Customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and payback period determine whether an audience strategy is actually creating long-term value. That shift toward lifetime value reflects a broader transition across media. Publishers are moving away from optimizing for pageviews and toward building durable audience relationships.
To calculate those metrics, publishers need a strong first-party understanding of their audience. If you do not know who your audience members are or how they move across content, newsletters, subscriptions, and events, it becomes very difficult to connect engagement to revenue outcomes. That’s why connecting business metrics back to content is critical. If subscriptions are the goal, you need to know which content drives subscription sign-ups. If events are a major revenue stream, you need to understand which editorial topics or audience segments drive registrations.
One of the realities inside most media organizations is that every team has different priorities. Editorial may focus on audience growth, revenue teams may focus on event registrations or advertising performance, and product teams may focus on subscriptions. The challenge is aligning those efforts around shared audience outcomes rather than letting each team optimize for its own metric.
Retention is another area that many organizations underestimate. Media companies invest heavily in acquisition but often lack a structured way to understand why audiences disengage or cancel. We recently released a subscriber churn mitigation playbook that helps publishers identify early warning signals of churn and intervene earlier in the lifecycle.
There is also a practical challenge today. Many engagement signals have become less reliable. Email metrics have been distorted by privacy protections like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, while security click bots and automated activity inflate engagement data. That means publishers increasingly need to focus on behavior over time, such as return frequency and retention.
Newsletters remain one of the most important channels for building direct audience relationships, but their role is evolving. The best publishers treat newsletters as products in their own right with a clear voice, a defined audience, and a strong editorial point of view. Ultimately the most useful metrics are the ones the entire organization can align around. Otherwise we risk simply replacing one set of vanity metrics with another.
Fox Tales: Okay, it’s clear that it’s no longer enough for a media company to sell its audience as an undifferentiated mass. You need to sell insights and specific subsets. How is that done? What are the challenges?
Napoleone: This becomes clearer when you look at the different business models within media. In B2B media, publishers connect buyers and sellers within a specific professional market. The value lies in understanding buying roles, intent signals, and the broader decision-making ecosystem around a purchase. In enthusiast media, the audience may be deeply engaged in a hobby or professional interest, but they are often spending their own money. That creates opportunities around community, product discovery, commerce, and events.
Large consumer media companies historically focused on maximizing reach and monetizing it through advertising. Many of those organizations are now shifting toward subscriptions, audience-data strategies, and even licensing deals with AI platforms as they rethink how their content and audience generate value.
Across all of these models, the common thread is moving beyond selling reach to selling audience understanding. That requires unifying signals across content consumption, registration data, engagement behavior, and declared interests so publishers can identify meaningful audience segments.
The biggest challenges are data fragmentation and signal quality. Audience insights often live across multiple systems, and some engagement signals, especially in email, have become noisier due to privacy protections and bot activity. Publishers that invest in stronger audience-intelligence infrastructure can cut through that noise and deliver real insights rather than just activity metrics.
Fox Tales: Tech is the presumed most important component of a media operation. When a media company is considering tech solutions, particularly to manage and monetize audience, what are the most important considerations?
Napoleone: Technology has become central to media operations because it determines how effectively a publisher can understand, activate, and monetize its audience. The first priority is the ability to unify audience data across the organization into a single audience record. Audience signals often live across many systems, including analytics platforms, email tools, subscription systems, event platforms, and CRM databases. Without that foundation, every interaction with the audience lives in a separate system and the relationship never compounds.
Second, publishers need technology that helps them separate signal from noise. Bot traffic, automated activity, and privacy protections have made some engagement metrics less reliable, so platforms must help identify genuine audience behavior rather than simply reporting inflated activity.
Finally, the most valuable technology enables action, not just reporting. Audience intelligence should power segmentation, targeting, personalization, and monetization opportunities across advertising, subscriptions, and events. This transformation did not appear overnight. The media industry has been moving toward audience ownership and first-party data strategies for several years. Generative AI and new discovery models are simply accelerating the need for publishers to own and understand their audience relationships.