Comment by magic-michael
2 months ago
sounds like things have changed a lot over the years you've been there? Interesting hearing how editorial and business teams have interacted—always feels like a tough balance when growth kicks in.
do you think the culture shift was just bound to happen as the company got bigger, or were there some key moments where things really started to shift?
I’m on the Editorial team at RV - so know the finance and insurance space well, and we deal with similar dynamics with the sales side, so I get where you’re coming from. I’ve seen stuff like this play out before, but curious to hear how it unfolded on your end.
I don’t think it was bound to happen. The company did a pretty good job maintaining the culture as we grew. Obviously as more layers of bureaucracy are added and things settle into more standardized procedures, you’re going to lose some of that scrappy feeling. Up until the end of last year, at least the energy really hadn’t changed too much.
I think the algorithm change mentioned in the article precipitated a lot of the culture shift. I think it was a failure of leadership to not have planned for something like this, and two rounds of layoff really shattered a lot of the energy that had been cultivated over the years. There isn’t much discussion these days about brand integrity or responsibility, especially from the top down. It’s very clearly coming from leadership to pursue growth and SEO is steering the ship with everyone else on the sidelines, subject to their whims. I hear from my colleagues in edit and data about some truly wild pieces they’re told to write/research. It doesn’t help with leadership being, as mentioned before, basically invisible outside of quarterly town halls (which are hilariously lacking in transparency, they refuse to even show revenue numbers to the employees).
There’s been other aspects too that contributed. They’ve built up a massive operation in India which offshored a lot of company functions. I had colleagues who had their growth paths with the company essentially halted because they decided to hire new people in India to build out teams rather than advance them and have to pay them more. There were headaches last year with hiring where management basically refused to do US hires for most teams because the UK had lower labor costs, even though a significant portion of the existing company was US based. This caused some of the cross-functional breakdown because it made it more difficult for teams to collaborate across the major timezone gaps. The India buildout exacerbated this too so stuff generally began to take longer.
It all ultimately stems from what is Leadership’s stated “growth above all” mindset. I can’t say they’re wrong from a business perspective. Obviously they’re doing extremely well and taking in a ton of revenue (little of which makes it into our paychecks based on our raises last year lol). It definitely wrung whatever joy or spark people had to try and put together something good. It’s an SEO machine at this point.
From my experience following Forbes Advisor (being a close competitor), the content actually seems to be of good quality, with experts contributing to different sections. They seem to really invest time and money into making it work, which stands out compared to other affiliate-driven sites. The editorial expertise in areas like insurance and finance is pretty evident, with professionals leading the charge.
Despite some of the concerns raised about leadership decisions and outsourcing, the quality of the content hasn’t taken a hit from what I can see.
Are they truly outsourcing everything as cheaply as possible? Or is it more nuanced, with key areas of expertise retained in-house.
It’s interesting that there’s a lot of frustration about revenue numbers being hidden. But let’s be honest, if they did expose the revenue, wouldn’t the first move be to shout it from the rooftops? People love to complain about a lack of transparency, but sometimes those same people are the first to use that info to stir things up even more.