Welcome to Media & the Machine

I analyze the space where AI & Content meet.

Who Is "Media & the Machine” for?

• Media & Content Executives: You are the owner or exec of a media/content-driven company looking for advantages on how to leverage A.I.

• A.I. Entrepreneurs: You provide A.I. technology for content/media companies.

What you get?

• AI/Content Predictions — I curate a lot of content to help figure out where AI and Content are headed. You’ll be the first to know what I think.

• First-Hand AI Learnings from a Content CEO — I use AI every day to create content and traffic for both Daily Doc (a B2C site/newsletter that recommends documentaries) and Ongig.com (a B2B AI job description writer). I’ll show you in minutes how to do things with AI that probably took me many hours to figure out.

• Proprietary Content Licensing $Deals! — One of the first things I’ll be sharing is a list of content licensing deals I’ve been keeping (how much OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc. are paying content companies for their content). This is an early example of how I’ll help you figure out how to monetize your content with AI.

Who am I?

I’m Rob Kelly — I chose to write Media & the Machine because I have these “information advantages” to share:

I know and love content (I’ve been CEO or co-Founder of these businesses):

• Hot Topic Media: This bootstrapped dating advice company generated $100 mil. in revenue from selling newsletters, audio and video content.

• Ongig: this job description writing SaaS business has generated $8 mil. of SaaS software. 95% of our leads come from our our blog (e.g. we know content marketing/SEO).

• Mojam: this “TV Guide” of concert listings generated revenue from content licensing. Mojam was sold to Wolfgang’s Vault.

I pioneered the Internet’s first content licensing/Web Distribution Deals

• First Web Portal Deals — I was the lead on the 2nd “Portal Deal” on the Web (TechWeb’s $2 million distribution partnership with Disney/Infoseek).

• First Browser Deals — I was on the team that got TechWeb on the highly coveted browser buttons on Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. These drove millions of unique viewers to CMP's Web pages helping to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

• Early Content Licensing as a Business Model — I ran the highly profitable $2 mil. per year electronic content syndication business for CMP Media (licensing CMP’s archive of one million magazine articles to partners such as Lexus-Nexus, Bloomberg and Ziff-Davis). Later, I co-founded and sold Mojam, a concert listing

I use A.I. for content all the time!

• Daily Doc — I am the founder of this newsletter to recommend documentaries (a passion of mine). I use A.I. to help me write it. In the first 12 months, for instance, I wrote 258 articles (323,158 words) in just a few hours a week. I am now 8X more productive creating content (same quality) than pre-A.I.

• I have spent 3,000 hours using ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity to create content and grow revenue in my content businesses.

My writing (while not fancy) attracts amazing tech pioneers so I get to learn from the best:

• In my first job as a journalist, I interviewed Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Andy Grove. I know. I’m old. But I still got it.

• The Software Industry Bulletin newsletter I co-wrote (with Jeff Silverstein) was read by the following:

  • Steve Case (America Online)

  • Scott Cook (Intuit)

  • Bill Campbell (Claris Go Corp)

  • Ann Winblad (Hummer Winblad)

  • John Warnock (Adobe)

  • Bill Gross (Knowledge Adventure and now ProRata!)

  • Jim Manzi (Lotus)

  • Doug Burgum (Great Plains Software)

  • Doug Carlston (Broderbund)

  • Heidi Roizen (T/Maker)

  • Fred Gibbons (Software Publishing Corp)

  • Mitch Kapor (Lotus)

  • Scott Kurnit (Prodigy)

  • Ken Williams (Sierra Online)

  • Bob Parsons (Parsons Technology GoDaddy)

  • Martin Sacks (IMSI/TurboCAD)

  • David Roux (Central Point)

  • Dan Eilers (Claris)

  • Royal Farros (T/Maker)

  • Alan Ashton Bruce Bastian Pete Peterson (WordPerfect)

  • Michael Cowpland (Corel Corporation)

  • Paul George Grayson (Micrografx)

My Promise to You

• I promise not to waste your time. You’re like me: super-busy.

• I will iterate in real-time based on your feedback. If there are certain questions you have or problems you don’t know how to solve, just ask me. I want to be creating what’s most useful to you and your goals.

If this sounds good, I look forward to e-meeting you when you subscribe.

Thanks,

Rob Kelly

To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.