The traditional audience growth playbook — chase traffic, optimize for search, scale reach — is losing its grip. And the media executives who are winning aren’t mourning it.
At OX9, Omeda’s annual gathering for media and publishing leaders, a panel called Audience Growth: Rethinking the Traditional Playbook brought together two executives with very different businesses and surprisingly aligned perspectives: David Saaybe, CEO of Golden Peak Media (the company behind beloved crafting and arts brands in quilting, knitting, and fine art), and Chrissie Lamond, Vice President, Product at Inc. and Fast Company. The conversation was candid and practical and landed here: the executives who are growing audiences aren’t trying to reach everyone. They’re going deeper with the right people.
Here’s what stood out.
The “More is More” Fantasy is Over
Key takeaway: Volume metrics are a vanity play. The signal that matters is intentionality.
For years, audience growth meant one thing: more. More pageviews. More unique visitors. More social followers. That era is winding down — not just because search and social traffic have declined, but because the smartest publishers are realizing that mass reach was never the point.
David Saaybe put it plainly: “Lose the fantasy of more is more. The right thing is more. The right audience is what the value is.”
For Golden Peak, this isn’t abstract philosophy — it’s math. Their audiences are passionate, niche communities. Quilters. Watercolorists. Crocheters. There are only so many of them, and chasing beyond that core doesn’t create value — it dilutes it. The people Golden Peak wants are the ones who show up on purpose.
Chrissie Lamond described a similar shift at Inc. and Fast Company, where declining search and discover traffic forced a sharper focus on editorial authority. Rather than trying to compete for general entertainment eyeballs, the brands doubled down on their core domains — entrepreneurship, innovation, business leadership — and asked where they could win most credibly.
“We had to diversify into other channels,” Lamond said, “and it becomes less about a traditional funnel and more like a treble clef — your brand authority is at the center, and people dance through from Apple News, Instagram, newsletters. You have to have that presence where they’re already consuming content.”
The implication for media executives: traffic as a top-line success metric is increasingly misleading. The question isn’t how many people found you. It’s how many were looking for you.
AI Is Already Inside the Building. But Adoption Is Uneven
Key takeaway: The practical AI wins are operational. The strategic opportunity is just opening up.
Both panelists use AI actively. Neither is using it to replace editorial voice. And both are navigating the same internal friction: employees who understand AI conceptually but haven’t fully integrated it into their workflows.
At Golden Peak, AI has become a genuine operational tool — financial reporting, headline testing, market sizing, and most recently, a deep audit of a bloated AWS bill that turned up $1,000 a month in charges tied to an IT account from an employee who left in 2019. “Everything from any way we can make our business function better, we’re totally in on,” Saaybe said.
But the change management side has been harder than expected. “The part that caught me off guard was how hesitant many of our employees were to deeply engage,” he admitted. When a team member asked whether there was a course they could take to get everyone on the same knowledge base, Saaybe’s honest reaction: by the time that course gets written, the tools will have moved on again. The answer isn’t a certification — it’s a culture of experimentation.
At Inc. and Fast Company, AI strategy breaks into two distinct buckets: internal efficiency and external opportunity. Internally, the goal is giving every team — editorial, audience, marketing — the tools to work faster and smarter. Externally, the focus has been more cautious and deliberate: protecting intellectual property while testing how to surface it through AI channels without giving the whole library away for free.
One early win: using AI to identify licensing infringers — companies using Inc. or Fast Company branding for recognition programs without paying for it. The ROI model proved positive quickly, with infringers returning to renew licenses when flagged. “We could grow our brand and make some money at the same time,” Lamond noted.
Importantly, both executives drew a clear line: AI is an internal enabler, not the outward-facing product. For Golden Peak’s creative communities — audiences built around the deeply human act of making things by hand — AI-generated content isn’t just a bad look, it’s a brand risk. The human element isn’t incidental to the product. It is the product.
Real Engagement Has Three Markers (And Clicks Aren’t One of Them)
Key takeaway: If your audience won’t pay, return, or advocate, you don’t have an audience. You have traffic.
When asked what signals genuine audience connection, David Saaybe didn’t mention open rates or time-on-site. He described three things: willingness to pay, likelihood to return, and pride in the relationship.
“Are you willing to buy? Do you come back once you’ve bought? And are you so excited that you are proud of how it’s helping you?”
That third marker — pride, advocacy, emotional ownership — is the one most audience strategies ignore entirely. At Golden Peak, they track it qualitatively. Every company town hall opens with reader testimonials: the quilter whose pattern was selected for a magazine feature, the artist whose work made the cover. These aren’t PR moments. They’re signals that the brand is producing something worth caring about.
For Chrissie Lamond, the shift from unknown to known is the foundational metric. “I want to see you go from unknown to known and declare some data with me. So we can bring you back and see you coming back and engaging with the content more.”
The business model implications are significant. An audience that pays, returns, and advocates is worth far more per person than a massive audience that does none of those things. As ad revenue becomes less reliable and subscription models mature, this is the kind of audience that sustains a media business.
The New Playbook, In Short
The media executives seeing growth right now share a few things in common. They’ve accepted that organic reach is no longer a growth engine and stopped optimizing for it. They’ve defined engagement in terms that connect to business outcomes — conversion, retention, advocacy — not activity metrics. They’re using AI operationally, moving faster than any formal training program could keep up with, and staying careful about where it touches the audience relationship directly.
And they’ve gotten comfortable with a counterintuitive truth: sometimes fewer people is better, as long as they’re the right ones.
Get the full playbook: How Modern Media Companies Grow Their Audience
How Omeda Fits In
The challenges these executives described — converting anonymous visitors to known audiences, building the data infrastructure to understand who’s actually engaged, activating that data across channels — are exactly what Omeda is built to solve.
Omeda’s audience management platform helps media and publishing companies unify audience data, understand behavior, and act on it — whether that’s identifying your highest-value segments, automating re-engagement across email and web, or giving your team the clean data foundation that makes AI tools actually useful. (And Omeda is building Omeda MCP to make it even easier.)
If you’re rethinking your audience growth strategy, we’d like to show you what that looks like in practice. Book a demo →
