“Take the money and run,” she said. “They just walked away with $3 billion: do something with it that’s proprietary, that you can use to block from others, that customers will stick with you for.”
Greenfield, for his part, thinks the acquisition landscape is simply too lumpy to make a compelling case for anything. Netflix should wait and watch the rest of the industry atomize itself into more digestible pieces, then pounce when the timing is right, according to Greenfield.
“It’s far more likely that Netflix buys nothing and waits to be opportunistic,” he said.
That strategy sounds a lot like what Netflix was doing in the months leading up to its near-purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The war room, it seems, never really closes.
Talking Heds
Events Time (Exclusive): The legacy news brand Time has nearly completed that most modern of digital media pivots: After years of gradual transformation, it has now become an events company. Chief strategy officer Dan Macsai told me that Time is on pace to generate 50% of its 2026 revenue from events alone, up from 23% in 2023. Within Time’s advertising business specifically, events make up nearly 80% of its revenue. This positions Time amid a growing cohort of publishers, including Semafor, whose primary business is an in-person extension their brand, a remarkable trend for an industry that, not even a decade ago, mostly treated the events business as an afterthought.
Bag Bunny (Exclusive): The white smoke has risen from the Playboy Mansion. On Tuesday, the iconic publisher appointed media veteran Phillip Picardi as its new chief brand officer and editor in chief. Picardi, who joins the company following a stint at Weight Watchers, is no stranger to the media business. In his first turn in the editorial world, he repositioned Teen Vogue as an arbiter of the Gen Z zeitgeist, founded the queer-focused publication them at Condé Nast, and served as editor in chief of Out Magazine. Just last week, Playboy also hired revenue executive David Miller from National Geographic. Taken together, the two hires suggest a new chapter at the Bunny is afoot.
Hustle at Bustle (Exclusive): Bustle Digital Group, which owns the editorial brands Bustle, Nylon, and W Magazine among others, plans to name Avi Zimak as its chief commercial officer on Thursday. As part of the move, the company will also be promoting Amber Estabrook to publisher of W and chief business officer of prestige revenue and partnerships. Zimak, who has previously led revenue at both The Arena Group and New York Magazine, will help BDG continue its project of transforming from a network of text-based websites into a social, creator and events-centric media operation. The company endured a lot of critical coverage as it underwent that remodel—some from yours truly—but it appears to have found its footing and now serves as a blueprint for how lifestyle media can adapt to the distributed era.
IAB on AI: Remember the IAB Tech Lab? The standard-setting body for digital advertising fell off my radar after Google reversed course on its plan to deprecate third-party cookies, news that was itself quickly overshadowed by the paradigm shift posed to the open web by answer engines. On Wednesday, though, it unveiled its Content Monetization Protocol Specification, i.e. a proposed framework for how publishers and AI firms might operate content marketplaces. The IAB Tech Lab has always had the unenviable job of trying to coordinate publishers into unified action, but such a Sisyphean task has arguably never been more necessary. The Tech Lab might have missed its hero moment with the cookie apocalypse that wasn’t, but maybe this could be its chance?
