Career Spotlight: with Katie Friedman

As media and consumer companies navigate a rapidly shifting landscape (where platform algorithms, AI-driven discovery, and evolving consumer habits are rewriting the rules of engagement), audience growth has become a core strategic capability. To explore how leading organizations are approaching this challenge, we spoke with Katie Friedman, former audience executive at The New York Times and Business Insider and now an operating partner with The Chernin Group, about the new playbook for building and sustaining audiences.

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You've led audience and growth functions at The New York Times and Business Insider. How has the role of audience growth evolved over the past decade?

The most notable evolution is that we've gone from an era of scale to an era of niche. The Times and Business Insider are different businesses, but they've both had to adapt to the same fundamental shift: the internet has changed dramatically, and the pace of change is only accelerating.

Gone are the days when you can get by on wide, faceless distribution. It's no longer about how many people you bring to your site. It's about who you bring, and whether you're relevant to them. Audience growth has shifted from growth for growth's sake to relationship development: how do we speak to our audience, make things personal, and get them to come back more often?

How do we create tethers to our audience through our owned assets (our app, our email) instead of relying on others to deliver them? The most important thing a brand can do, and do quickly, is recognize that audience growth is about solving a real need for a specific audience and then building a relationship with them.

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For years, many media companies relied heavily on platforms for distribution. Today we're seeing more emphasis on owned relationships: newsletters, direct visits, subscriptions, memberships. How should media leaders think about balancing platform reach with building durable, direct audience relationships?

You need both. But we have to adjust our expectations about what "reach" means. Reach no longer means a massive audience of fly-bys, but it still means you need to quite literally reach new users.

Media companies are lucky in that content (journalism, storytelling, whatever vernacular a particular organization uses) continues to be an organic top-of-funnel way to reach those new users, whereas other types of companies increasingly have to pay to reach new customers. Either way, a responsible organization has to recognize that while top-of-funnel still matters, quality now matters more than quantity.

From there, you tether your users to you. As discovery gets harder with changes to SEO, generative search, and what comes next, we have to get smarter about how we call users back. And we can't rely on those tethers alone. We also have to build products that give users a reason to want to come back on their own. Something that truly builds habit.

Put together, it goes like this: fill the top of the funnel with a high-quality audience, tether them to you so you can call them back, and give them a real reason to come back without being called. Simple, right?

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As platforms evolve and AI begins to reshape discovery and search, how should media and marketing companies think about their growth strategies? What capabilities will leading organizations need to build internally?

AI has been, and will continue to be, massively disruptive to media organizations. If an organization hasn't started building direct relationships with its audience, start now. Start yesterday. That's first and foremost. The more intermediated discovery becomes, the more valuable direct relationships become.

I'm convinced we're not at the final state of how publishers and AI platforms will work together. The relationship is symbiotic; each will need the other to survive and thrive long-term. Smart organizations will build the internal capabilities and talent not to cut deals with AI platforms on the back foot, but to negotiate strategically and set the stage for more favorable conditions for media companies as a whole over time.

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Audience teams historically focused on pageviews and traffic growth. What metrics do you believe best capture real audience engagement and long-term value today, and how should leadership teams think differently about measuring success?

In most organizations, return visitors tend to be a healthy measure of engagement and long-term value. Each company will define this a little differently depending on the product and the cadence of habit they're trying to build, but frequency is one of the clearest signals of value. People who come back more often engage with more depth and breadth, and they're more likely to pay.

This can be a difficult shift, because at many organizations the return-visitor number is much smaller than pageviews. And it moves slowly. But with patience and focus on the day-to-day metrics that ladder up, you can improve return visitors, and I can almost guarantee that translates to stronger, more durable monetization.

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If you were advising a media company CEO today who wants to accelerate audience growth over the next three to five years, where would you focus first? What opportunities do you think many organizations are still underestimating?

Build for your users, and the monetization will follow. Get really clear on who you're serving and how you're serving them. Brands that try to be everything to everyone won't succeed in this new reality. Focus is no longer a nice-to-have; it's a requirement. The companies that win will be theones that are indispensable to a specific audience, not just useful to a broad one.