One year in, Protocol is starting to move on its global expansion plans

By Kayleigh Barber

Protocol, like most media companies in the spring of 2020, took a hit — and one that was especially acute just months past launching in February.

It faced a coronavirus-induced layoffs of 13 employees —about half of its staff — driven by abruptly constricted advertising budgets. But almost to its first anniversary, the technology publication owned by Politico founder Robert Allbritton, is still standing with global ambitions before it.

Protocol president Tammy Wincup would not disclose the publication’s financials from the end of its first year, but said that the publication’s total readership for 2020 consisted of more than 7 million uniques viewers.

And to continue that growth trajectory in 2021, Wincup said that the focus will be on expanding its staff in order to go deep into new categories and geographic locations, starting with the launch of three verticals — Protocol China, Protocol Enterprise and Protocol Fintech — in the first quarter.

“Protocol wants to be your deep dive into specific areas of tech, not just broadly,” said Wincup. “And this vertical move to go deep is very much led by what we saw in Q4, with brands from these different types of verticals — enterprise companies, fintech and consumer tech” coming to Protocol for brand deals.

Currently, Protocol now has a staff of about 30 employees —more than half of whom identify as women and one-third identify as a person of color — with ambitions to reach 50 by early summer, according to Wincup.

“If we want a tech industry that is truly illustrative of the users of tech, then those covering tech also need to be wildly diverse,” she said. “We’ve made great progress on that, but we all have a ton of work to do on it across media.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Following the initial hit of the pandemic, which had marketers holding tightly onto their ad spend, how did Protocol come out of 2020 from a business perspective?

We beat our target for 2020 and the good news on that is that there is not one specific type of partnership product that is out-weighed on the revenue side, which as a meter is really important. A lot of companies came [into the year] with their live events business being such a big portion [of their revenue]. We have a really nice balance within our growth for products. Events was a good piece of that, but not disproportionate.

So your advertising business must not have been hit too hard?

Because tech companies rebounded early in the pandemic, we saw partners coming to us wanting to do a bundle of different things. The trend that we saw that led to the strategy in Q3 and Q4, for tech companies in particular, is the return for them actually thinking about longer-term messaging and initiatives, and that is actually really good for us. We saw this period in 2020 where you couldn’t think past a certain point because you didn’t want …read more

Source:: Digiday