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In an era of evolving news production, everything from tone to delivery is in a constant state of influx. Led by trendsetting digital outlets like Buzzfeed and NowThis, the engagement model of news sources is steadily being rewritten.
The success of such offbeat outlets—where Urban Dictionary phrases are more common than convoluted SAT words—indicates that what the millennial consumer wants to read is far from the antiquated prose of the past. Speed, ease and a colloquial style are the crux of what young readers seek out, which 30 Under 30 Media honoree Alex Lieberman observed was missing in business news when he was still a college student.
In 2015, while Lieberman was a senior at the University of Michigan, he and classmate Austin Rief picked up on a troubling pattern in the student body: no one was enjoying the content they were reading. “We started asking the students around us: how do you keep up with the business world?” Lieberman recants, explaining how their idea for media company Morning Brew began.
“Every student we spoke with had the same canned answer: I read the Wall Street Journal, and I read it because I feel like I have to—because its a prerequisite to stay well-read in business—but it’s dense, dry and I don’t have enough time in my day to read it cover to cover.”
The two business majors decided to do something about it. That very year, he and Rief launched Morning Brew’s core product: a daily email newsletter that highlights all the business news you need in five minutes. Much like the moniker suggests, the email lands in subscribers' inboxes at 6 a.m.; to be read in the time it takes to consume that morning cup of joe. “It's quick, it's conversational and covers everything from Wall Street to Silicon Valley,” explains Liberman.
At first, it wasn’t much more than a hobby, created to solve a problem (bluntly put by Lieberman: “Traditional business news sucks”) that peers were battling with. But then the popularity of the newsletter made it quickly apparent to the guys that this “pent-up appetite” for content existed, that both engaged readers and forged a connection between future business leaders and the professional world.
Alas, juggling a new startup venture with career expectations was initially a grind. “I graduated from Michigan but didn't go straight into Morning Brew full-time because my mom would have killed me,” shares the cofounder. So it wasn’t until September of 2016 that Lieberman gave it his all. A trader at Morgan Stanley, he quit his job and committed his full attention to his and Rief’s avant-garde media company for millennials.
Fast forward two years and the email service has successfully sprung onto the biz journalism scene, reportedly growing by 35 to 40 thousand readers per week. Now a team of 11, Morning Brew has scaled their native advertising model (how they make money) and newsletter audience from 100,00 subscribers to 800,000 in eleven months.
Beyond numbers of readers, how do they measure success? For a company that prioritizes building brand loyalty with their subscribers, engagement levels are everything. The team at Morning Brew measure their audience’s propensity to read their everyday rundowns through the usual channels: traffic, daily unique open rates and story engagement figures. Right now, they're at a daily unique open rate average of 45%; almost 10% higher than the industry aggregate. They’re interested in utilizing this elevated user engagement rate by discovering the pulse of future business leaders, as well as assessing how the demographic thinks about different industries and habits.
Surveys are the method they’ve found to be most effective when seeking insight into their subscriber base. Evaluating the outcome of their latest survey—where Morning Brew paired with Visual Capitalist to explore the investment habits, views and decisions of millennial business professionals—pivotal takeaways can be drawn from the 9,000 respondents in the sample.
Considering the typecast millennial narrative, the top line summary introduces a few curveballs that reshape the stereotype.
“I think there's a lot of themes that just get thrown out about millennials, and while some of them can be true, its directional narratives like: ‘Millennials have a high B.S. meter, want to trust brands, value experiences more than they value material things and value community and social impact,’” explains Lieberman. The CEO was surprised by the fact that 34.9% of respondents said that the social impact of their investment choices wasn’t important; a figure he says he expected to be much lower. It further stresses his view that the popular narrative of the millennial generation needs to be investigated.
He also didn’t foresee that despite the availability of AI-driven investment services, people still overwhelmingly preferred the experience of human financial advisors. “The fact that the majority of our readers still say they would rather talk to a human when making investment decisions was really surprising to me,” says Lieberman. Of the respondents, 70.15% reported that they would rather not talk to robo advisors.
In the grand scheme of things, surveys like these show how the consumer-based media landscape is holistically transforming, and companies like Lieberman’s Morning Brew are capitalizing on the diversification. They plan to launch an industry-specific newsletter in 2019, with the aim to actively build new audiences. Healthcare, real estate, retail, cannabis, emerging technology, media, marketing: you name it, they'll be covering it. “On a high level, Morning Brew exists to better engage our generation with the business world.”
