Hiten Samtani - The Real Estate “Media” Game - [Making Media, EP.10]

For this episode of Making Media, we spoke with Hiten Samtani, SVP of Content at The Real Deal. Now, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but real estate media is everywhere and, to me, The Real Deal sits uniquely at the epicenter of this industry. They are the largest real estate focused publication in the US, they have over 3 million monthly visitors to their website, tens of thousands of paying subscribers, and they still maintain a print distribution of over 150,000 subscribers. But maybe what's most interesting to me is that The Real Deal was ranked as the publication with the wealthiest audience on the web. As Head of Content, Hiten has experience with deep-dive journalism and various forms of media across written word, video, and audio - so he has a full background across media. I think there are a ton of lessons for media professionals across this conversation. Please enjoy. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.  ----- This episode is brought to you by Scribe. Scribe is the presenting sponsor of this episode of Making Media and the magic behind the Colossus transcripts. One of the best decisions we made at Colossus was transcribing all of our audio into a searchable transcript library. We had been using another provider up until the summer of 2022 but we were constantly having issues with accuracy if our audio was just the slightest bit impaired. Whether it's training sessions, internal Q&As, or for media purposes, the value of transcripts is huge. And we are not alone. Scribe is the transcription service that powers all of S&P Global - like CapIQ - and the client list includes our friends at Tegus. Go to joincolossus.com/scribe to unlock 150 minutes of free transcription and test their capabilities. ----- Making Media is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Making Media, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @ReustleMatt | @domcooke | @MakingMediaPod | @JoinColossus  Show Notes (00:01:41) - (First question) - How he landed in the real estate journalism segment (00:02:41) - The history of The Real Deal as it stands out from the rest of the industry (00:06:24) - Challenges the publication faced early on that made it stronger in the long run (00:09:14) - An overview of their scale and structure (00:12:21) - Audience analytics he focuses on to track the health of the business (00:14:20) - How he tries to measure their presence in the zeitgeist (00:16:59) - His emphasis on liaising with readers (00:18:44) - The prevalence of direct website traffic versus ancillary routes to their content (00:23:15) - How he thinks about paywall and subscription models versus advertising (00:25:54) - Why they keep their editorial team and ad team separate (00:27:51) - How they develop new IP and mass media based on their popular exclusives (00:32:27) - Preserving relationships with sources while also maintaining journalistic integrity (00:36:29) - How he typically sources his most important stories (00:39:40) - His philosophies for training budding journalists joining the publication (00:41:34) - What they look for in journalists they hire (00:44:01) - Dealing with top journalists that want to leave to strike out on their own (00:49:03) - De-brief