July 30, 2023
After selling my last company to Google in 2017, I started Distributed Media Lab with Sam Parnell, former CTO at Bleacher Report. We spent the last few years experimenting and then building a business focused on serving local news publishers.
Now it's time to expand!
So, we're launching a crowdfunding campaign. It's a mission driven play, but with a really large market opportunity.
I appreciate you giving it some thought and joining our mission as an investor!
Some current investors
Mission
It’s no secret that journalism is suffering a significant economic challenge, and as journalism goes so goes democracy. To work toward ensuring democracy survives the test of time, DML’s mission is to support journalism. We’re doing this by building technologies to power new media revenue streams that are more naturally aligned with the web’s architecture and economics and can empower the business of news.
Market
Getting started, DML built a business serving the $80B SMB market in partnership with local news publishers across North America. Working through local news publishers enables DML to engage a huge but otherwise impossibly disaggregated market. We’ve opened new revenue streams for local news organizations through strong partnerships with leading industry associations including the Local Media Association and the Local Media Consortium.
To expand the business beyond the SMB market, in 2022, we developed the platform to serve national brand, commerce and performance advertisers and corporate underwriters. Now, the DML platform is serving organizations like AARP, Deloitte Consulting, WellsFargo, and others all while providing new revenue to local news publishers nationwide.
Trends
As a SaaS platform, DML can power distributed consumer revenue models as well as advertising. However, our starting focus has been advertising related business models.
You may have read that digital advertising is suffering a corrective downturn in the shadow of dramatic growth driven by Covid lifestyles. While this is true of digital display, search and social advertising, we see content marketing is experiencing significant growth and projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.5% from 2023 to 2030.
Driving this growth, brands of all sizes are rapidly becoming publishers because they know they need to engage consumers through first party experiences. This is in part because they know that when Google joins Apple and Firefox by deprecating third party cookies in Chrome the economic underpinning of digital platforms and the open web will shift fundamentally and the current web advertising infrastructure will need to change toward a more privacy centric model. Death of Third Party Cookies
DML is built for this!
DML is custom built to provide distributed consumer engagement with first party content across the open web. We are replacing the ubiquitous display ad with compelling content experiences that serve users, brands and publishers better than the old display ad model.
DML is poised for significant growth as these market trends and moves by the major platforms continue this year and next.
Opportunity
I often think that the mission is a reason to invest a little, but the market trends we are poised to benefit from is a reason to invest a lot.
But really, any investment is appreciated.
DML is using this crowdfunding to raise a small round of capital, but more importantly, we are using this to raise awareness of our work and expand our community of engaged family, friends and colleagues as we work toward changing the game for quality original content in general and journalism in particular.
We won’t be advertising this campaign broadly like a normal crowdfunding campaign. DML is not a consumer product. Our target raise is relatively small and our outreach is limited to friends and colleagues we think would resonate with the mission and be excited about the market opportunity.
