The News
Born in 2014, the media company ATTN is the product of the Facebook video age, and was initially seen as a video-based competitor to the likes of BuzzFeed and Vice.
But unlike many others of that era, it’s a growing, going concern, after selling in 2022 for a reported $100 million to the private equity-backed media rollup Candle. In a wide-ranging interview last Wednesday at the Greenwich Hotel, ATTN co-founder and co-CEO Matthew Segal recalled the moment when his grandfather persuaded him that he needed to pivot to profitability, and transform the company from being a publisher into a creative agency for celebrities, causes, and companies.
Segal’s position gives him a comprehensive view of the shifting landscape of video platforms. He says the information environment right now is the worst he’s ever seen, and doesn’t see a regulatory solution on the horizon. He describes a possible TikTok ban as “a massive transfer of wealth and engagement to Meta, and then Google,” and predicts “huge resentment at Washington” for “literally taking away the most culturally relevant platform to young voters in society.”
Segal, whose roots are in politics, has also been focused on fighting antisemitism, and was on stage at the Adweek panel last week when Paramount Global non-executive chairwoman Shari Redstone criticized CBS over its handling of an interview about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
But his new cause is misinformation: He told Ben Smith he believes social platforms ought to be pressed to put hundreds of millions of dollars into a new digital literacy campaign — and he wants ATTN to play a central role in programming it.
Ben: When you launched back in 2014, what did you think you were going to do?
Matthew: We literally started in the heyday of Facebook video. It was actually almost perfect timing. Facebook video just started, we had just taken off algorithmically, we were an early adopter. We figured out how to program for that platform and it was a great couple of years.
What was the iconic ATTN video of those early years?
We had everyone from public figures and celebrities to — Malala did a video with us in the early days on the Syrian refugee crisis. We had Arnold Schwarzenegger do a video with us on pollution that I think did like 70 million views. A lot of them were pairing with cultural figures around the social issue or topic they carried out and finding a way to sort of package it in a more pithy short form, optimized for a shorter attention span.
Did you think, as I did at the time, that this is a fundamentally politically progressive space?
I think one of the secrets to success is that we remain fastidiously nonpartisan. That doesn’t mean that we [aren’t] liberal or conservative on certain issues over time based on where those different spectrums fall.
I think that you guys were sort of part of the Obama generation of politics during that period.
When you talk about a lot of the Israel-related work we’re doing, I don’t think it necessarily falls into the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party at the moment. We’ve done a lot of work with Schwarzenegger and people who are real Republicans. And we also made videos about health and wellness that went viral, we made videos around some lifestyle things that went viral. The first three years of operation are like 20 most viral videos and I would guess only a quarter of them were political.
Was there a moment when you were like, “OK, we have 100 billion views — it ought to be easy to monetize”?
There was a moment actually when I realized that un-monetized views were the worst business to be in in the entire world. It was when I went down to Palm Beach, Florida to visit my grandfather, who’s now passed. He was a door and window salesman.
He was like, “Explain your business model.” I’m like, “Well, we’ve raised this venture capital money and we get all these views and then ideally we’re gonna sell to advertisers,” and he goes, “So, are you making or losing money?” I said, “We’re losing money.” He goes, “I don’t understand that. What kind of business loses money?” And I was like, “It’s called venture capital.” He goes, “This is a bad business. You gotta make money, son.” And so I actually kind of had a eureka moment.
I remember going back to our management team, and this is where I was ahead of the curve. I said, “We’re done. We’re going to pivot to profitability. We are now going to prioritize a culture of making money, finding ways to get all of our content paid for by brands, third parties, platforms themselves, philanthropists, NGOs, whoever will fund it or finance it — anyone we can, but we’re not going to deficit finance.”
Did you have to swallow your pride in the ATTN brand?
We lost a little bit of the publisher bloom. But the truth is we have a great business. We get to collaborate with incredible people.
We have 40% growth here this year. This business is just on a great trajectory and we’re diversified. We get money from platforms, we get money from brands, we get money from philanthropists. We get money from triangulated partnerships where we have both a brand or a public figure that someone else sponsors, and we get originals money from streamers and platforms as well.
One of the things that I feel like you were ahead on was how celebrity-driven culture has become. What’s the trajectory of celebrity?
I think just because we based our company in LA, I realize that culture leads everything and that you have to be at the center of it. We formed good relationships with talent. But most importantly, we’ve got talent to trust our ability to help break down their stories in a more relatable way for the audiences.
But if I had to break it down to one or two things that I think has really made ATTN a successful company for a decade and it seems like we’re on a good trajectory, [an] exciting trajectory for the future: One is that we’ve done premium short-form video. We’ve never been about high volume. I always said, “I want to be HBO.” I’ve always looked at [former HBO CEO] Richard Plepler’s brand and said, “That’s where I want to be for short-form video.”
I don’t need a high volume, but I want them to all be super good — whether that’s videos that we’re doing right now with certain former presidents of the United States that you’ll soon hear about, or whether that’s stuff that we’ve made with Gen Z celebrities or stuff that we’re making with individual advocates for causes or issues or just fascinating figures in culture.
They’re all good and they’re all thoughtful and they’re not meant to be part of a volume play. They’re meant to be, how can we maximize the attention on this one short product? So that when we share it with partners and brands and stakeholders, they’re like, there’s a higher bar for social video production with this company than with other companies.
Do you think that kind of quality is a niche that you’ll hold ten years from now? Or do you think that there’s a flight to quality on these feeds where the consumer of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram will be seeing much less user-generated content, much, much higher quality?
Look where TikTok is going right now: They’re going to shows. Those are higher production quality for the platform than the creator in his basement.
Our focus has been the premium and I think that’s actually by staying disciplined there, we’ve built a reputation that we can be more expensive. We can charge a higher premium because we’re quality. And I’m like, let’s be in that quality, more premium tier, because that’s what’s going to lead to a better business.
What about the mission-driven stuff?
The other thing that’s made us successful is just the focus on putting, as I like to say, delicious chocolate on vegetables. It’s a hugely needed service because so many institutions want to get out important, complex, dense information and they need a pithy way to package it. I got into this world through more of a civic background. How do you make voting cool, interesting, and palatable for people? You have to wrap it in some kind of cultural context or you have to make it less boring.
Can you give me a tour of the social ecosystem today? When you launched and we were both doing this, Facebook was where you got scale and Twitter was where you drove buzz. What is that landscape now?
It’s TikTok and Reels and maybe YouTube Shorts, if the product continues to get investment from Google. But the truth is, it’s TikTok for 30-under. Kids are getting their news from creators on TikTok ahead of the elections. And it’s Reels too, and it’s vertical video.
So we think about it from the standpoint of vertical video optimization, taking up the full phone, and then creator-driven narration, because that seems to do well. But the same sort of standards apply, which is you’ve still got to grab people in the first three seconds. You still have to have some reason to watch. A lot of those principles that you guys talked about in BuzzFeed or we talked about at ATTN still apply. But you just have to think about it from the lens of a new algorithmic distribution that weights certain priorities over others, and those change, and then you have to talk to the platforms all the time. So you have to be analytical and in touch with sort of the best intelligence you can get from each platform, too.
Does Twitter still matter in our business or did it never matter in your business?
It was never meaningful because it was very much a breaking news platform and we never wanted to get into the breaking news game. The changes to Twitter haven’t really affected us. It’s helpful when we’ve partnered with public figures who then tweeted themselves and then everyone retweets, and that’s still relevant today, to the extent that public figures are still using Twitter.
How about the TikTok ban? What happens if TikTok is removed from the App Store [if its owners refuse to divest from it, as Congress has demanded].
It’s a massive transfer of wealth and engagement to Meta, and then Google.
And for you?
Matthew: We’ve done an amazing job hedging our business. We have direct money from Pinterest, Snap, Google, Meta and TikTok.
Does it change the digital culture, beyond the wealth transfer?
I think that there’ll be a little bit of entrepreneurial opportunity for a new distribution platform to maybe be founded. But I think in the short term, it’ll just give a mass amount of cultural cachet to Instagram in particular. Instagram is where most celebrities still spend their time. If you actually ever watch a celebrity, … the only social platform they really manage themselves is their Instagram.
Do you think TikTok is actually a national security threat?
I have mixed feelings. … It’s a super culturally relevant platform where you’re gonna have a ton of pissed off young people if it’s banned. And I think singling out a particular platform and not doing something comprehensive to create safety measures for all of them is also troubling.
There’s going to be a huge resentment at Washington in the sense that one of their top and only legislative priorities that they’ve gotten done in a bipartisan way is literally taking away the most culturally relevant platform to young voters in society.
How bad is the information environment? Worse than it’s ever been?
By far, by far. I think misinformation is one of the biggest threats to our democracy. And I think there’s a big opportunity for a company like ATTN to play a huge societal leadership role in digital literacy for people.
Who do you blame? Elon Musk?
Matthew: I think Elon Musk has actually approached it with good intentions at first, in saying, ‘I want to create an open public square to have no censorship.’ But I think what’s happened is he has ironically gone into his own echo chamber and potentially algorithmically tweaked Twitter to prioritize a certain viewpoint that is closer to his own.
What about the antisemitism on that platform?
I don’t know if Twitter was the worst of all the four or five major platforms. I wouldn’t say Meta is leaps and bounds ahead or YouTube is leaps and bounds ahead — they’re all bad. So we need a huge initiative to try to convince platforms to invest in digital literacy and put up real capital, hundreds of millions of dollars of capital.
Do you actually think that if people were more digitally literate, they would like Jews more?
Yes, 100%. That’s literally my thesis. It’s not the only reason.
But when you have greater digital literacy, … when you see things out of context, you’re more susceptible to understanding how to check your sources. You’re more susceptible to understanding who’s delivering information and how bias comes with ownership and bylines and source of content, all those things you’re not literate about now.
And therefore you ask more questions and therefore you do more diligence and therefore you come to, I think, more liberal-minded decisions — in the more traditional sense of the word, not politically liberal.
And as a result, I think that helps marginalized groups everywhere, including Jews, because I think you can look at things with a more skeptical eye.
Digital literacy sounds like a platform-friendly alternative to moderating content.
Getting Congress to pass a really content moderation policy, probably not going to happen. I think being able to work with them and publicly apply pressure on them to invest in the literacy side is something that they’re all going to have to get on board to do because I think you can amp up public pressure to do that.
I also think consumers don’t want to log on and say we’re consuming things that are biased out of context and potentially put forth by foreign state actors. So I want $100 million to $500 million investment over the next ‘X’ years on digital literacy helping people spot misinformation. I want ATTN to play a huge role in running a lot of that programming.