Semafor Builds Profits on Elite 'Anti-Scale' Journalism

Semafor’s business model splits 50/50 between journalism and profits from its elite events. Ben Smith built it there by abandoning the traffic-chasing Facebook strategies he once championed. According to The Verge, the former BuzzFeed News editor now runs what he calls an "anti-scale" company, a direct rejection of the platform dependency that devastated digital media. His pivot to a profitable model funded by high-stakes "convening" raises a stark question for the industry: Can journalism preserve its independence when half its revenue comes from hosting the very leaders it covers?

The 'Anti-Scale' Rebellion: From BuzzFeed Debris to a Niche Blueprint

The core thesis of the last decade's digital media boom was simple: the platforms would deliver massive traffic, publishers would collect pennies, and everyone would get rich. Ben Smith, who ran BuzzFeed News during that era and wrote a book titled Traffic, now calls that moment the "traffic apocalypse." His new venture, Semafor, is built on its rubble.

"We are really building an anti-scale business," Smith told The Verge’s Decoder podcast. "The luxury of starting in that moment, in the rubble of the traffic apocalypse, was obviously not the path to success."

The Semafor model hinges on a sharp turn away from chasing billions of clicks. Instead, it targets a specific, high-value audience: political leaders, business executives, nonprofit heads, and decision-makers globally. The company reaches them through email, the web, video, and, most significantly, in-person events. The goal is influence within this elite circle, not raw audience size. This thesis reflects a hard-won lesson: great stories and reporters endure, but the distribution "surface" is volatile and must be approached with pragmatic, non-ideological flexibility. As we reported in OpenAI Hits $40 Billion Revenue Run Rate, the tech landscape rewards highly focused audiences, a lesson media is learning the hard way.

Smith's partner, Justin Smith, jokes that his next book should be called No Traffic. The anti-scale shift is a deliberate rejection of the distribution-first thinking that defined BuzzFeed. For Semafor, journalism is the product, but its funding requires business-model innovation divorced from platform whims.

The 'Convening' Cash Engine: Journalism's New Lifeblood Is a Party

When Semafor launched in 2022, its stated goal was to reach 200 million college-educated readers. Its path to monetization was less clear, initially floating ideas like subscriptions. The reality four years in is starkly different: roughly half of Semafor's revenue now comes from its events business.

Smith describes this "convening" arm as the division that grew fastest and became profitable quickest, a natural fit for his partner's experience building similar models at The Atlantic and Bloomberg. These are not small gatherings. Semafor's events, like the upcoming Silicon Valley & The World conference, aim to compete with giants like Davos, featuring figures like Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella.

This creates an inherent and glaring tension. The business involves putting the subjects of coverage, tech CEOs, political leaders, Gulf royalty, on stage and, often, on event advisory boards. Smith acknowledges the conflict but defends the model as standard practice, comparing Semafor's advisory boards to The New York Times' "task forces" or The Wall Street Journal's "councils."

XOOMAR Analysis: The financial logic is sound; the perceptual risk is immense. Smith argues that independence is maintained because journalists conduct tough interviews regardless. He posits that leaders actually want to engage on hard questions, the core challenges of their roles are what they think about most. But the model's integrity relies entirely on a newsroom's willingness to publish exposés that might cause a headline speaker to cancel, potentially hurting ticket sales. It's a high-wire act where the safety net is editorial courage.

Platform Power Plays: YouTube's Design vs. Media's Survival

The conversation with Smith reveals a clear diagnosis of why the old traffic model failed beyond Facebook's fickleness. He points to YouTube as a platform structurally designed to exclude media companies.

YouTube, Smith argues, perfected a system that deals with "atomized individuals, not with collectives who have any kind of power." By empowering individual creators directly, it eliminated the need for, and leverage of, traditional media intermediaries. He cites the failure of middleman companies like Maker Studios, which Disney bought for $500 million only to see the model crumble.

"YouTube has, probably to its own benefit, and to certainly to the detriment of the media industry, built a system where it’s built for individuals, and no one has any leverage except for YouTube."

This structural reality forces monetization into specific, ethically fraught channels. On YouTube, the path to significant revenue for creators with teams often leads to integrated brand campaigns, essentially becoming an ad agency. For news organizations, this presents a fundamental conflict: "We can’t say, 'We probably shouldn’t make the advertising for the companies we cover,' but that is actually how you monetize all these platforms at scale," Smith notes.

The lesson is that platforms architect their economics, and media companies playing within those walls must adapt or perish. Semafor's anti-scale stance is, in part, a refusal to play a game where the rules force corruption.

The Gulf, Advisory Boards, and the Perception of Corruption

Semafor's global ambitions, with newsrooms in Africa, the Gulf, and plans for Europe and Asia, add layers of complexity to the independence question. The company covers regions like Saudi Arabia and the Emirates "aggressively," according to Smith, while navigating local laws that can land photojournalists in jail for distributing certain images.

The more immediate scrutiny for a Western audience surrounds the ethics of advisory boards. When Jensen Huang is both an interview subject at your Silicon Valley conference and a named advisor to the event, how does an audience trust the coverage? Smith's answer is twofold: transparency about the practice, and an insistence that the journalism remains separate. He also notes that advisory boards contain executives with "diametrically opposed interests," theoretically neutralizing any unified influence.

XOOMAR Analysis: Smith identifies a critical, corrosive trend: a "deeply baked-in sense that every institution is corrupt." In this environment, any adjacency between revenue sources and coverage subjects feeds suspicion. Semafor's challenge is to prove that its "Davos with follow-up questions" ethos is more than marketing, that the tough interview is the real product, not the access. Success means swimming against a powerful cultural tide where elite audiences, perhaps more than any other, assume things can be bought.

AI in the Newsroom: A Tool for Synthesis, Not Reporting

Smith's view on AI in journalism is pragmatic and narrowly focused. He is bullish on its utility for internal tooling and, specifically, for synthesizing vast amounts of information. He gives a revealing example: after a major multi-day event with 300 interviews, a colleague used an AI tool to ingest all transcripts and output a report on commonly made statements and key disagreements.

"We then spent a week hammering through that and actually wound up creating a lot more work for humans. But the notion of, 'What’s the takeaway from these 300 conversations?' That’s a job for AI."

His thesis is that AI excels at the "production" middle layer of media work. The core tasks of journalism, gathering new information not on the internet and communicating it, remain "pretty defensible." This aligns with a broader industry view that AI automates process, not insight.

On ethics, Smith draws a clear line at deception. Discussing AI voice correction in podcasts, he argued that fixing a mispronounced name in an intro is fine, as it's a simple edit. Fabricating or fundamentally altering a conversational exchange with a guest crosses the line. The principle is straightforward: who is being deceived?

The Populist Reckoning: Can Independence Be Sold in a 'Payola' World?

We are living, Smith argues, in a "populist moment" defined by a widespread belief that everything is corrupt. He offers a paradoxical example: when Congress mandated disclosure of stock trades to combat corruption, the resulting data allowed accounts to highlight only the successful trades, creating a narrative of widespread graft. "A transparency measure that actually showed it wasn’t [corrupt]" ended up deepening public suspicion.

This is the atmosphere in which Semafor and any outlet selling independence must operate. The audience, particularly younger demographics, has been "swimming in" a media ecosystem of undisclosed influencer marketing and algorithmically amplified outrage. Smith predicts a coming reckoning akin to the payola scandals in radio, where undisclosed political advertising and influencer kickbacks spark public backlash and regulation.

"People don’t want to be lied to and don’t want to be fed slop."

The forward-looking question for Semafor is whether it can market independence as a premium feature to an audience that may not instinctively value it. Smith believes it can, asserting that the desire for truth and tough questioning ultimately wins out. This is the bet his entire "anti-scale," convening-driven model rests upon.

Silicon Valley's New Showmen and the End of Media Paranoia

A final, telling observation from Smith signals a shift in the media-tech power dynamic. He contrasts the "deep paranoia about the media" that characterized figures like Marc Andreessen with the current crop of AI leaders.

"If you look at the really great business figures of this era... I would say Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang, these are classic showmen who love the media. Or I don’t know if they love the media or they hate the media, but they, like Steve Jobs, understand it... They’re salesmen who see the media as a very important sales channel."

These leaders represent a return to a more traditional, if transactional, relationship. They aren't trying to dismantle the media apparatus; they want to use it skillfully. This could ease the constant access wars, but it also reframes journalism's role. The journalist becomes part of a sales channel, tasked with asking the compelling questions that allow the showman to perform.

This occurs alongside a "massive structural shift": the U.S. federal government is now a huge participant in the tech economy, investing directly and shaping policy. Executives are constantly in Washington lobbying. This new axis of power, between showman CEOs and a regulator-investor state, will define the next decade of tech coverage. For Semafor and others, it provides a rich, complex field for the kind of high-stakes, elite-focused journalism their model depends on. The success of that model hinges on proving that their convening engine fuels the journalism, and never the other way around. As seen in Meta Flips the AI Script by Running Its New Model on Your PC, the tech story is moving into uncharted regulatory and hardware territory, creating the very complexity that niche, high-quality reporting can exploit.

The Bottom Line

• It signals a major shift from traffic-dependent ad revenue to more stable, high-value business models like events.
• It questions whether journalism can ethically cover elites while profiting from hosting them.
• If successful, it could offer a sustainable blueprint for other media companies struggling with platform volatility.