TimeOut Magazine is making a BILLION Dollar Comeback
Time Out Market, Right Wing Media and Marketing Stunts - March 9, 2022 (about 3 years ago) • 17:01
Transcript:
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Sam Parr | So listen to this. You don't get out of your house, so this maybe won't mean anything to you. But have you ever heard of... I?
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Shaan Puri | know time out I know time out I've I've read time out | |
Sam Parr | So, Time Out started in the sixties. You know that it's from the sixties; it's been around forever. I heard that it started as basically a magazine and then a blog where it's like local markets. But what they're most known for now is, have you ever heard of the Time Out Market?
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Shaan Puri | no what is that | |
Sam Parr | okay so they do like restaurant stuff | |
Shaan Puri | right is | |
Sam Parr | that yes so tell me what you know about time out | |
Shaan Puri | So, I lived in London, and I think there I used to pick up *Time Out*. I also lived in Boulder, Colorado, and it's like, you know, if you want to see what new restaurants there are or get reviews of restaurants, it was like having a friend who's a foodie who will tell you what's up.
"Oh, you gotta check this place out! It's great! This is a great place for a date."
And then they would release it. I felt like it was updated pretty frequently, maybe every week or month or something.
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Sam Parr | and I think it's a | |
Shaan Puri | It was a lot easier to use it for that. Yeah, it was like free; it was just sitting around everywhere. I can visually see that red... it's like a red logo, right?
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Sam Parr | Time Out... Yeah, so it's a pretty timeless brand. It's been around for a long time. It started in England, actually. So if you live in London, it was probably most popular there.
But basically, in 2014 or maybe 2018, they started doing this new concept called a Time Out restaurant or a Time Out market. So, Google "Time Out market" and you'll see it.
What they do is they went into... I think the first one was in Lisbon, where I was. This is where I went to it when I was in Lisbon, but I've also gone to it in Miami. They have seven markets now.
What they did was they went to a touristy place and found the 20 most popular restaurants based on their blogs and all the touristy stuff. Like, "Oh, you gotta go to Portugal so you can taste the coffee from here, a croissant from here, and some fish from here."
They basically just created a food court in the middle of the city and gave 20 restaurants different stalls. So when you go to this different city... I went to it in Miami. Miami was cool because, you know, they say you gotta get a Cubano from this place and you gotta try the Cuban coffee from this...
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Shaan Puri | place yeah it's like I'm getting in a cab just to go get the sandwich | |
Sam Parr | Yes, and so what they did was set it up so you can go to this one food court and try all of the famous vendors and restaurants. I went to Lisbon, Portugal, and it was awesome. This place was packed!
I remember Time Out being this free thing, and I'm like, "That's kind of neat." I don't have brand affinity towards this, but when I went, the place was jam-packed with young, hip-looking people. I didn't think of Time Out as a young, hip brand, so I started researching it.
Time Out is publicly traded, and their market cap has been obliterated in the last three years. This is because, a) their digital media went to shit, as it was mostly restaurants advertising with them, and b) a lot of investors thought they were going to grow and get big through these markets, which were basically closed down all of 2020.
However, they're killing it right now! This place was packed. Basically, they had a $168 million market cap in 2019, and they did about £70 million in revenue. So what's that like? Is that times 2 for dollars? Is that like $130 million?
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Shaan Puri | it was yeah I think I don't know if it's still that | |
Sam Parr | so somewhere north but in 2021 they only did 40,000,000 in revenue | |
Shaan Puri | however. 3 x now | |
Sam Parr | 1.3x. Okay, so they were doing the equivalent of over $100,000,000 in revenue. But check this out: in 2019, pre-pandemic, their Time Out Markets did $23,000,000 in revenue. In 2020, only $12,000,000.
But they only have 7 locations, which means each one of these food courts does $3,000,000 in revenue. The reason why this is interesting is:
1. This is just awesome! I think this is an amazing example of a company that has a digital media presence and is doing a really good job of diversifying.
2. This is a really sick business because if they're only in 7 markets and they're doing, you know, $23,000,000 in revenue, there's easily a future where you could imagine 50 or 80 of these in a variety of touristy cities. It's kind of cool, right?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, this is one where the actual experience sounds **fucking awesome**. I kind of want it to be a great business. I bet in actuality it's like a good business, not a great one.
But it also feels like something that kind of anybody could spin up as a side hustle. You know, if you're in Durham, North Carolina, every city has like 15 to 20 spots that are like, "Oh, the ice cream over here," and "the sandwich over here," and "Oh, you haven't tried the bonbons over here," whatever.
Every place has that collection of stuff, and then it becomes kind of prestigious to be picked. All you're doing is basically making a pop-up tent that's like a food court, but instead of, you know, Sbarro and Cinnabon, you're putting in like cool, hip places.
In fact, this place should actually just have a Cinnabon every four stalls because that's what people really want. But, you know, besides that, I feel like this is a great little side hustle that I think anybody who's a foodie could create and do pretty well with.
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Sam Parr | I thought it was so fun. When I went there, I was like, "Oh, this is brilliant!"
So, I ended up going there when I was in Portugal. I wanted to go there just about every day. I was like, "Let's just go!" I'd rather just go here every day. It tastes like a little bit of food. I'll spend $10 here to...
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Shaan Puri | And this crowd did this in Miami. I would have paid $100 for an all-you-can-eat pass just to walk through and be able to grab stuff, you know? | |
Sam Parr | Yes, it's awesome! I went to this event and realized how much fun I had. I also did the one in Miami. I would totally do the one in New York as well.
I thought this was such an interesting, basic, simple concept, and they pulled it off really well. It was a lot of fun! I think that this could actually be an amazing business.
I believe that Time Out could be worth over $1,000,000,000 in the next two years once they open up. Right now, they're only worth $1.68, which is about £1, so it's like a stock tip.
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Shaan Puri | I think I feel like we got a stock tip here | |
Sam Parr | I'm not saying that | |
Shaan Puri | But flashing the buy signal hard, analyst Sampar projects time out. I want this to get aggregated by some random Reuters, you know? Like, you know Motley Fool is going to turn this into an article here.
Alright, and then I forgot to tell you this, but this is the most important thing. I can't believe we didn't talk about this earlier, to be honest with you.
Because if you're listening to this and you like what you're hearing right now, and you haven't gone and subscribed to the "My First Million" podcast wherever you get your podcasts, then that's the thing you've got to do. There's nothing more important than doing that right now.
And don't do it because I said to do it. Do it because you want to do it. Do it because that's who you are. | |
Sam Parr | Would you buy any Russian stocks right now? They're getting crushed, obviously.
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Shaan Puri | No, just because I'm not... I don't want to make money off this opportunity. I know this is kind of off-brand, but you know.
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Sam Parr | I'm on board with that. I'm on board with that. But let's say beyond that, let's say you're Russian and you're actually in favor of this war and you're just crazy. Do you think that would... would you have faith in...?
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Shaan Puri | The Russian stock market... well, a lot of these were getting close to zero. You know, real businesses were dropping, you know, 50, 70, 80%.
So, yeah, you're getting tremendous value. If you're a citizen there and you're a believer, you know you don't want to be in the local currency anyway. So you'd rather... if you just told me you can either stay in the ruble or you can take your ruble and turn it into something else, I'm going to always take something else.
Their options on something else got cut off. Like, okay, you can't get dollars, you can't get crypto, you can't get different things. So what are you going to buy? Because they were limited in many ways across those... some like, you know, they stopped the amount of rubles you could sell.
So, you know, if you could get into stocks, hey, it's better than staying in the paper.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, it's interesting. I wouldn't buy a Russian company just for the same reasons that you said.
But we did the episode on the oligarchs, and that was like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where Russia was going from communist to somewhat capitalist.
In my head, I'm like, "Oh, this might be another one of those opportunities where you could buy the equivalent of Exxon in Russia," which hopefully, likely won't go away. I don't care about hopefully, but it likely won't go away.
But you could get a huge discount. | |
Shaan Puri | Alright, I got a couple of things for you. But first, did you see this thing about the right-wing site that went viral?
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Sam Parr | which one | |
Shaan Puri | Okay, so check this out. I wrote this thing on our dev right wing side that goes viral. There's a link to a tweet.
So this guy, Jed Lagoon—which has to be a fake name—says, "A far-right website launched 36 days ago and it's already more popular on Facebook than The Washington Post. The DC Inquirer has executed an audacious scheme to manipulate Facebook's algorithm and ad platform, and Meta is letting them get away with it."
Basically, the article talks about this publication that was created. It's called The DC Inquirer, and they'll have articles that are like, you know, "The Freedom Convoy is on the verge of victory in Canadian provinces." They get a bunch of people to post about it.
What they showed was that they hit a lot of right-wing pages, like "Impeach Joe Biden," "I Love America," "Keep Texas Red," and "Save America." They were all posting the same thing. So that should be kind of like a coordinated ad campaign or whatever, and it started to get really, really big.
The page was created by this guy, Brandon Gill, and it has over a million followers or something like that, very quickly. It's all run under this right-wing thing that got popular.
Now, you've told me about this before, which is that extremely conservative or extremely liberal sites will get very popular very quickly, especially on Facebook.
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Sam Parr | but | |
Shaan Puri | and I was pretty surprised to see this yeah | |
Sam Parr | There's a but here. The liberal side, like, yeah, obviously polarized on one side as well. Conservatives do significantly better because this is a principle that is always true: a group of people that feel downtrodden, like they are the underdog, they band together. Outrage does more for sharing and writing in America.
So, there are groups like minorities, women, and a lot of far-right conservatives. Because media is typically left, they think, "Our voice is being stomped out," and so they band together.
If you go to HuffPost and look at the comment section, then go to Breitbart and look at how many comments there are. Have you ever been to Breitbart.com?
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Shaan Puri | yeah I've been there | |
Sam Parr | Go to Breitbart and just click a random article. Look at how many comments there are; sometimes it's 20,000 comments. It's crazy! So, I totally believe it with this website.
By the way, I'm looking up DC Inquirer. I Googled it, but I don't see a website. Is it literally just... just a...?
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Shaan Puri | So, basically, it looks like what he's done is create a web of accounts that are kind of all the same.
There's this guy's personal account, Brandon Gill, and his bio states: "I'm the founder and editor of dcenquirror.com." So that's the URL: dcenquirror, with a "to e e n q."
His bio includes: "Patriot. Proud West Texan. Businessman. Financer. Rancher. Conservative Christian. Dartmouth husband."
It's like bingo! You hit all the words. Congratulations, by the way, Sam, you are also a rancher and a husband.
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Sam Parr | I like most all those things | |
Shaan Puri | proud to texan | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, I do. Is he also a fan of corn dogs? Because this guy's like a perfect corn dog aficionado. You may have a best bud here in the way. | |
Shaan Puri | so so then like | |
Sam Parr | 2 o'clock too | |
Shaan Puri | So then he's got basically a whole bunch of other pages. I think "Red Wave," "I Love America," and all those pages are his. They've all been built up; like one's at a million, one's at 650,000, and one's at 200,000.
He's running ads that are... if you go look at Brandon Gill's ads in the ad library, it's one of the best tools available to any internet person. If you go to facebook.com or just Google "Facebook Ad Library," you can look up the ads of any brand and see what ads they're running.
If you look at the brands he's running, it'll be like a picture of Joe Biden talking at a rally, kind of confronting somebody, and it says, "If you want Joe Biden removed from office, tap the big thumbs up in the right corner." So it's clearly running political ads that are not marked as political ads, basically.
This guy was like, "Oh, he's getting away with it. Facebook, you need to shut this down." What I thought was interesting was, dude, this would be an amazing little prank. If I'm mischief or just someone out there with too much time on their hands, here's what I would do: I'd basically make an extremely conservative site, put out some articles, get the traction, and do this for like two months.
Then in the third month, I would just pull the rug on everybody and switch to an extremely liberal LGBTQ website with the same email list. I would just switch everything overnight once I get all these people subscribed.
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Sam Parr | which just messaged which for sure would make the news there's this | |
Shaan Puri | And then, that story of the prank pulled would create a news cycle of its own. You could basically go get any job you want in any marketing, PR, or whatever agency because you could be like, "Yeah, I just did this."
So instead of sending your resume and cover letter, do a stunt that shows your knowledge of how the internet works, how media works, how PR works, and how marketing works. You'll impress a lot of people with your ability to pull off a stunt like that.
That's actually how BuzzFeed started too. Jonah Peretti was pulling stunts like this. I think he did it with...
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Sam Parr | with nike | |
Shaan Puri | nike yeah what was it again | |
Sam Parr | I don't remember exactly, but he basically said he revealed a fake Easter egg. He said something like, "If you do something with this pair of shoes, something happens." Something like that.
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Shaan Puri | No, no, no. It was an email thing. It was like a sweatshop thing.
Okay, so here's what it is. He goes to Nike, and they had this feature, personalized ID, where you could write your name. I don't know if you did this, but I did this. I got my name.
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Sam Parr | yeah yeah | |
Shaan Puri | On my shoes, I thought it was so cool. He writes an email, you know, from Jonah Peretti to [email protected]. He goes, "Greetings, my order was canceled because my personal Nike ID does not violate any of the outlined rules in your message.
So, the personal ID on my custom shoes was the word 'sweatshop.' Sweatshop is not a name of another party's trademark, the name of an athlete, or profanity. I chose the ID because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately? Thanks and happy new year, Jonah Peretti."
And so then he sent that. Obviously, that's not going to go viral as an email, but he screenshots that, starts getting it out there, and then that got like a big news storm going. He was doing stunts like this before creating BuzzFeed, and it kind of showed this guy knows how to make the internet... you know, how to tickle the internet, and he did it well.
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Sam Parr | One of my favorite things to watch on YouTube is these videos where people do one of two things.
It's usually always political stuff. They go to someone and say, "Isn't this outrageous? This person said this thing," and they'll read what that person said. Then they ask, "You don't agree with that, do you?" The person responds, "Oh no, I don't agree with that at all. I'm a conservative. There's no way I would."
Then the interviewer reveals, "Oh, well this is what Donald Trump said," or something similar. They make you disagree with something that you might have otherwise agreed with.
Alternatively, they'll read out a speech from Hitler and ask, "Do you agree with this?" The person might respond, "Yeah, I totally agree with that." I'm like, "Oh, Hitler said so."
It's not that fair to do that, but...
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Shaan Puri | Well, they also go to 100 people, and 96 have a normal reaction. Then the 4 that fall for it, it's like they stitch those together, and it just makes it look like everybody at this Trump rally feels dumb and makes this mistake.
They kind of make New Yorkers or rally participants, or teens like millennials on college campuses, look like idiots. Because, you know, all you gotta do is talk to enough people, and you're gonna catch 5 people who fall for the trick.
It's like Borat, right? When he does these tricks or stunts, they do go viral, and they do make the other party look bad. But they don't show you all the people that didn't fall for it, didn't believe that, and didn't say something stupid in response.
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