How to put a value on a media company
What the spreadsheet doesn't show you.
If you’ve ever looked at how media properties get valued and felt like the numbers didn’t add up, you’re not wrong. They often don’t. At least not if you’re only looking at the financial statements.
The spreadsheet stuff matters. But they’re not what separates a media company someone will pay a premium for from one that sits on the market for months. The difference lives in a set of less obvious factors that are harder to measure but far more predictive of long-term value.
This letter is about those factors.
Owned vs. rented attention
This is the single biggest divide in media valuation and most people still underweight it.
If your audience reaches you through a platform, an algorithm, a feed, or a recommendation engine, you don’t have an audience. You have traffic. Traffic can disappear overnight because someone else controls the dial. We’ve watched this happen repeatedly with publishers who built enormous reach on popular social media platforms, then watched it evaporate when algorithms shifted. Creators who had millions of views on one platform and couldn’t move a fraction of that audience anywhere else.
This is why we’re seeing every creator place a newsletter link in their bio. They own that audience.
Email subscribers, paying members, direct app installs are all fundamentally different assets. It’s not just more stable. It changes the entire economics of the business. You can price differently. You can launch new products into an audience that already trusts you. You can survive platform shifts that kill your competitors.
When someone is evaluating a media company, the ratio of owned to rented attention is one of the first things that should matter. A company doing $2 million in revenue with 80% of its distribution owned is a categorically different business than one doing $2 million with 80% of its distribution dependent on a platform it doesn’t control. The second one isn’t really worth $2 million in revenue. It’s worth whatever that revenue looks like after the next algorithm change.
The dependency question
Every media company has dependencies. The question is how deep they go and how hard they are to replace.
Some dependencies are operational: a specific CMS, a particular ad network, a tool in the workflow. These are annoying to replace but survivable. Other dependencies are existential: a single writer whose voice is the entire brand, a platform that delivers 90% of traffic, one advertiser that accounts for half of revenue.
