In today’s newsletter:

• Opportunities & Updates

• Say Goodbye to Late Night TV . . .

• . . . And Hello to the Creator Economy Media

• The Opportunity for Events

• AI Crashes the Content-Search Party

• Events As ‘AI No-Fly Zones’

If you’re not already subscribed, click here:

Opportunities & Updates

• On October 7th I’ll be leading a session on M&A at the SITE (Society of Incentive Travel Excellence) C-Suite Agency Summit during IMEX America. This is a closed-door, invite-only event for 25 agency leaders to discuss strategic challenges and opportunities, exchange ideas, and build peer relationships. If you’re interested in one of the few spots remaining, email SITE CEO Annette Gregg.

• On September 15th I’ll be speaking at the Skift Meetings Forum in NYC in a session (tentatively) titled Event Entrepreneurship: Big Ideas Require Bold Moves. Heather Mason and Robyn Duda will talk about their journeys in launching their own events (The Impact Lounge and RacquetX respectively), and I’ll provide insights on how buyers value event businesses, and the state of M&A in general. Should be a fun session!

• Consolidation in the agency space continues, with two deals announced recently. Kansas City-based Bishop-McCann acquired MTI Events, an incentive travel firm, their third deal in the past five years. And One10 acquired Whistle, an employee engagement and rewards technology company.

• I’m advising an event production company (creative, scenic, staging, lighting, sound, etc.) on a roll-up. We’re looking for companies with around $1M in EBITDA. To learn more, email me here.

Say Goodbye to Late Night TV . . .

On July 17th CBS announced they were cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, effective next May, and retiring the show franchise altogether. Though there’s been much speculation that the move was politically motivated - Colbert has been a persistent Trump critic, and CBS’s parent Paramount needs FCC approval before finalizing a merger with Skydance - the show’s declining economics are more likely to blame.

The Late Show was reportedly losing $40 million a year. But the late night format as a whole has struggled. The major networks’ late night shows combined generated $220 million in ad revenue lin 2024, down from $439 million in 2018 — a staggering 50% drop. Why? People aren’t watching linear TV anymore. When Colbert debuted in 2015 the show averaged nearly 4 million viewers; now that number is closer to 2 million. And the decline is even worse for the coveted 18-49 year old demographic: a drop of 67%, from around 650,000 to 219,000. Those numbers are a death knell for ad-supported programming.

. . . And Hello to Creator Economy Media

What’s most interesting to me is what comes next. Colbert is supremely talented and has a devoted following. It’s a safe bet he’ll launch a podcast and YouTube show which will be wildly successful, but with very different economics. For whereas The Late Show employed 200 people and cost $100 million to produce, Colbert probably only needs 10 people to produce content for this new format.

The rapid democratization of podcast, newsletter and video creation and delivery tools has ushered in a new golden era in content. It’s easier than ever for someone with a voice and a following to reach that audience. Economist Paul Krugman stopped writing columns for the New York Times in December, 2024. Today his Subtack newsletter has over 400,000 subscribers.

And it can be very lucrative. When she anchored her prime time Fox show in 2017, for example, Megyn Kelly averaged 2 million viewers per episode and earned around $8 million a year. Now she’s got 3.7 million YouTube subscribers and makes $40 million a year.

The Opportunity for Events

As I noted in my recent Tailwinds article, this trend opens up a huge new opportunity in events. Thought leaders in a given sector with even a few thousand dedicated followers have a perfect ready-made audience to launch an event with, enabling their fans to come together and the hosts to monetize it.

• Dave Gerhardt leveraged a 5k membership base to host Exit Five’s first in-person event for marketers, Drive, which sold out in 24 hours. He shared how he did it on Eventastic last month, which you can view here.

• Jacob Donnelly used his experience as publisher of Morning Brew to launch A Media Operator, a newsletter analyzing trends in B2B niche media. He then leveraged his audience to host his first AMO Summit event in 2023. This year’s event at The Times Center looks to have over 225 attendees.

Media creators have an added incentive to launch events as well: building company valuation. While digital media companies might fetch 6-10x EBITDA, conference / event companies could command 8-12x. (Print alone is 2-5x).

Events and digital media also complement each other well. Event registrants are primed to subscribe to paid newsletters, and newsletter subscribers fuel early sign ups for events. Further, creators get to connect face-to-face with their audience, deepening relationships and loyalty.

AI Crashes the Content-Search Party

In addition, as with so many other areas, AI is further disrupting traditional content monetization strategies. If you’ve done a search on Google over the past year you’ve likely noticed these nifty little AI Overviews at the top of the results page, which summarize the information you would have seen had you clicked on the links that previously were the only options available. The result is, you guessed it, far fewer people are clicking on the links Google serves up when you do a search.

As the Pew Research Center data above shows, these AI summaries cut click traffic by nearly half, from 15% down to 8%, which means half as many people make it to the original content producer’s site. Which means a smaller audience to monetize through ads, and less opportunity for content creators to build subscribers through search.

[Thanks to Brian Morrissey for surfacing this insight in The Rebooting. Look for a deep dive interview I did with Brian on the intersection of new media and events soon.]

Large media companies can sue or negotiate licensing fees with AI platforms to offset this, as the NY Times has done with Open AI and Amazon respectively, but most independent content creators don’t have the resources to do so. They have to rely on putting some or all of their content behind paywalls to drive paid subscriptions, and focus on building their email databases of free subscribers to ensure they can deliver that content directly into their readers’ in boxes.

Events As ‘AI No-Fly Zones’

So where am I going with all this, and how does this lead to events? The answer is that however much AI continues to train on (read: steal) content creators’ material and undermine their search-based growth efforts, events continue to be a content and monetization sanctuary, an ‘AI No Fly Zone’ if you will.

Content delivered from a stage stays within the room - and outside the reach of AI’s claws- unless or until the creator posts it online afterwards, at which point they’ve already monetized it through registration and/or sponsorship revenue. Conference centers and meeting venues could effectively market themselves as ‘Content Fortresses’, offering force-field level protection from AI.

This of course is in addition to the numerous other benefits of in-person events, such as networking, engagement, community, hands-on product demos, education, motivation, recognition, relationship-building, etc., many of which we all desperately need in an age of social isolation and digital overload anyway.

Conclusion

I continue to be surprised by the staying power of events, in the face of ongoing disruptions to so many sectors of the economy. It used to be that you’d stock up on print magazines at airport newsstands so you’d have something to read on a long flight. Not anymore. Commercial real estate is still struggling to recover from the remote and flexible work culture. At its peak, a NYC taxi medallion went for $1 million, before Uber rolled into town. Retail has been decimated by Amazon.

And the slow death of late night television is merely the latest nail in the coffin of broadcast and cable TV, as viewers increasingly turn to streaming and apps for entertainment.

Interestingly, there’s one type of programming that still qualifies as must-watch TV: sporting events. Last year, 75 of the top-rated TV shows were sports, led by 45 NFL games. All live events.

Here’s to taking your event business to the next level!

Howard Givner
Senior Advisor | Oaklins: DeSilva & Phillips (M&A) email me
CEO | Heathcote Advisory Group (Consulting) email me

Thanks for reading! Please give me feedback by hitting reply.

Catch up on recent articles:

• Tailwinds

• The View From Private Equity

• Preparing Your Event Business For Sale

• 15 Agency CEOs Walk Into A Bar . . .

• The Silver Bullet to Doubling Your Profit Margins

• A Tale of 2 Acquisitions: Opus Group CEO Shares M&A Insights

If and when you’re ready, here are ways I work with event business owners:

• Business Coaching & Owner Accountability

• Business Diagnostic & Company Valuation

• Growth Consulting

• Exit Planning

• M&A (Buy Side & Sell Side)

Wanna chat? Email me, or schedule an intro call.

If you were forwarded this email and would like to get new weekly articles, click her to subscribe for free: