Famous Birthdays is a classic open web publishing success story. Evan Britton bootstrapped the publisher to fill a simple need: People were seeking out information about the new crop of influencer and creator celebrities. Traffic peaked at 25 million three years ago. Evan wanted to sale it to 100 million and be a top ComScore site. Now, traffic is down to 20 million. Now, it’s focused more on “intentional” traffic and building community around that while building out a B2B information business. “A lot of those users are coming to our site because they know Famous Birthdays,” Evan told me. “They didn’t just randomly stumble onto it.”

Chapters:

• 00:00 Beehiiv Spot

• 01:29 Welcome

• 01:56 Famous Birthdays Story

• 05:27 Staying Flexible in Media

• 07:43 Google Zero Reality Check

• 11:29 Retention Over Scale

• 14:09 Monetization Without Direct Ads

• 22:52 Open Web and AI Future

• 24:56 Creator Data Strategy

• 29:45 Open Web Future

• 35:48 Shorts Versus Longform

• 38:51 Search First UX

• 42:27 Copyright And AI Deals