Ben Lerer

Age: 28

Company: Thrillist

Year founded: 2005

Site: thrillist.com

What Thrillist does: Thrillist newsletters and website provide information on entertainment, new bars, local events, and cool, new gadgets; the male equivalent of DailyCandy. “We used to say, ‘City guides suck and men’s magazines suck. Why isn’t there something better?’,” saysco-founder Ben Lerer. “Now we realize that there was this legitimate gap in the market.” Thrillist, cofounded by Adam Rich, 29, targets young, upwardly mobile, urban men and today boasts more than a million subscribers. Unlike men’s magazines, Thrillist content is local and is specifically written for each of the 12 markets they serve—New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, as well as a nationwide edition.

How they’re changing the game: Most media companies use newsletters to drive traffic to their website, but Thrillist uses its website to drive newsletter subscriptions. “That’s where we see ourselves as being very different—we flipped the traditional model on its end and decided to sell our email newsletter,” says Lerer, son of Kenneth Lerer, former vice president of AOL Time Warner and co-founder of The Huffington Post. “So many web publications sell advertising by selling web placements on their splashy front page, and then they give away the newsletter as added value. But email is far and away the more efficient place to advertise. Email is where you see the return on your investment, you’re reaching an engaged person in a much more personal setting. Our website can be a small portion of our revenue, because that’s not where we’re moving the needle for our customers or our advertisers.” According to Lerer, the reason their model was engaging to advertisers was because email is an easy way to quantify the audience. The nature of a subscription carried real value with advertisers, because they could easily see exactly how many people they were reaching, whereas web tracking success is dictated by search engine optimization (SEO), or strategic partnerships where sites feed off each other’s traffic, and it can be difficult to come up with hard viewer numbers.

Recent highlights: In addition to crossing the threshold of one million subscribers, Thrillist launched its first international edition in London in late March. The newsletter racked up approximately 10,000 subscribers in the first two weeks. But getting subscribers on another continent was only half the battle. Lerer and Rich had to take a whole new approach with advertisers. When Thrillist opens in a new US market, they are able to go to their existing national advertisers and offer them an opportunity to reach the young male demographic in a new city. The Thrillist team had to start from scratch to learn about the European ad market.

What’s next: Lerer also points to the company’s investment in their technology team as a highlight of the past year. They hired several IT specialists to move their products forward. As a result, Thrillist now creates video content, and is working on iPhone and Android apps. Lerer’s goal for Thrillist is to become an “undeniable household brand for men’s lifestyles.”

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