Cheddar founder Steinberg talks about its strategy

Jon Steinberg is the founder, anchor and CEO of Cheddar, which broadcasts live from the New York Stock Exchange and has been described as business news for millennials.

Before starting Cheddar, he was most recently the chief executive officer of DailyMail.com North America.

Steinberg grew U.S. revenue 45 percent while at the Daily Mail and doubled direct advertising revenue. He played a leading role in building the company’s digital media assets in the U.S., including Daily Mail’s acquisition of Elite Daily.

He joined DailyMail.com from BuzzFeed where he was president and chief operating officer, responsible for business management, company operations, finance, and social advertising operations. Under his leadership, BuzzFeed became a global and profitable social advertising business working with over half of the top 100 brands.

He grew the company from 15 employees to over 500. In 2012, Steinberg was named one of Ad Age’s Media Mavens.

Steinberg was previously strategic partner development manager on Google’s SMB (small medium business) partnerships team. Prior to Google, Steinberg was the director of business development at Majestic Research and the founder of iBuilding, a commercial real estate software company.

Steinberg is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University.

He spoke Thursday with Talking Biz News about Cheddar and its strategy. What follows is an edited transcript.

How did you get the idea for Cheddar?

I always loved business news. I watched “Squawk Box” when I used to get dressed in the morning, and I had never seen anything like it. Joe Kernen and David Faber and Mark Haines sitting around a table talking. I loved everything about it. At BuzzFeed, I started doing a lot of CNBC. When I wanted to start my own company, it was a topic area that I have always been obsessed with and interested in.

And then Facebook Live came about right as we were getting ready to launch in April, which was a fortuitous instance. And we were off to the races.

Where is the funding coming from?

I raised the first $3 mullion from the original investor in Snapchat. And the most recent round of $10 million from previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with significant participation from new investors Comcast Ventures and Ribbit Capital, a fintech investor.

How is its target audience different from other business news on television?

I read this book about ESPN called “Those Guys Have all the Fun.” They have this moment where they think they can do 24 hours of sports. And people think they’re crazy.

My view is if you cover Tesla, Airbnb, Netflix, new products from Apple, new apps from Spotify, driverless cars, you can make an entire network of news on that, and on any given day, those are 30 to 40 percent of the stories that people are talking about.

What 20- or 30-year-old son or daughter isn’t interested in Elon Musk or the new phone from Apple?

My other feeling was looking at the other existing business news channels, they’re not big, but they earn enormous amounts of money. There wasn’t anything wrong with the category, but the topics and the casting of the shows needed to be much younger.

You’ve struck some unique delivery partnerships. Is that a reflection of changes in how we consume business news?

I always wanted to be in skinny bundles. Sling TV was what we envisioned. I have this view is that the future is appointment viewing and ambient background news viewing. It’s Sling TV. Having a linear network was exciting.

We want the content to be part of a bundle and be paid for. But when Facebook Live came along, we felt like we needed to have some sort of dress rehearsal before so that we could prove ourselves to Sling and Twitter, where we have that amazing experience.

The goal for us is to be in these skinny bundles that we hear about every day — Amazon Live, YouTube unbundled.

Do you have any numbers of how many people are watching on Twitter?

The number that we say now is that we have hundreds of thousands of live viewers every day. Are those three-second views? Yes. And is it like live TV? No, it is not.

But CNBC only has 33,000 people under the age of 50 watching it. People don’t recognize how small those business news audiences area. We’ve got to keep working hard. Being the leader is not millions of viewers in this category. It’s 100,000 to 200,000 and in the demo, you’re talking tens of thousands.

Do you see any true competitors for that audience?

I see things that I admire that are adjacent. I am obsessed with BarStool Sports. I think they’re doing to ESPN what we’re doing in this category.

But in this category of business and technology category? No. We’re filling six hours, and you’ve got to be passionate about business and live media and doing digital media. Vice can’t do that. Vox can’t do that. It’s a different sort of thing. It’s not like fashion or politics where there are lots of players.

What are other the types of stories that your viewers are most interested in?

Space and self-driving cars are the two topics outside of traditional tech and media companies that we’ve seen a big audience for. People are interested in science and technology if they’re interested in Netflix. Maybe we’re a little bit more science-y than I originally intended. And we’ve got some nice contributors in those area.

We’re getting the big gets. We’re getting John Legere. We had Gary Johnson on the show. It is a game of leveling up. If you have good guests, you can show them to potential guests. We have a good booking department.

Why did you decide to be an anchor for Cheddar as well as running the business?

It’s a great question. The belief was that if I was the anchor, the company would not be taken credibly. It would be viewed as a vanity project, which I didn’t want it to be. Jeremy Liew who is on my board from Lightspeed felt pretty strongly about it.

But then Facebook Live comes along and we have one anchor and one producer/reporter who joined us from CNBC, and we’re understaffed. Jeremy said you should do it. So I started doing it.

We’ve expanded hours as we have expanded the roster of talent. So Kristin Scholer, who we hired from CNBC, now does four hours live. We have hired Hope King from CNN Money and Kori Hale from CNBC.

We’re effectively understaffed, so if I don’t do one or two hours a day, we can’t do what we do. I think the right amount for me to do it is one hour each day. It keeps me incredibly close to the content. If the graphics or stock quotes aren’t right, or we struggle in a certain block, there’s a closeness that I have to how we need to get better because I’m there.

I don’t want to be Glenn Beck and The Blaze. I want to be on as little as I can. I need to hire another male anchor. We now have four female anchors.

What did you learn at BuzzFeed and Daily Mail that you’re applying at Cheddar?

The amount of emotional fortitude that you need to have in running a media company, and stability, is essential. There is always a problem, an editorial problem or a traffic distribution problem or a client ad sales issue. Even when you’re doing amazing something, you’re always getting punched in the face on something else.

Our programming they wrap fish in every night. If it’s amazing, you have to do it again tomorrow. If it’s terrible, you have to do it again tomorrow. If it’s amazing on Thursday, there’s no guarantee that it will be amazing on Friday. Every day, the show needs to be better. Every day, the graphics need to be better. It’s always five steps forward and two steps backward. If you can get out of bed in the morning and go to the office and do it again, it puts you far ahead.

What areas are you looking to expand or change? Content? Delivery?

I really am financially a long-term thinker and strategically a short-term thinker. How do I make it a little bit better tomorrow? I think of it in terms of incremental progress.

There are three things that I am focused on. The content has to get better every single day — the guests and the sources we’re using for video content. We need more distribution partners. If the content is good, we will get put on DirectTV. And the third is more branded partnerships. We announced the HP partnership today. I’d like to have five more of those.

When does Cheddar start to make money? (Cheddar has a $6.99 monthly subscription on Vimeo.)

We’ll lose money next year, not tens of millions of dollars but millions. I think that’s pretty good. The whole breaking even thing, I think Netflix has a good way of thinking about it. It’s profitable in the U.S., but it’s not profitable in other countries.

If we broadcast one hour a day, our 9 a.m. hour, we’d be profitable. We could be profitable in 2017. We could if we wanted to, but it would be a much smaller business.

To make this a good business, we need to raise $30 million. All in today, we’ve raised half of that. It’s pretty hard to build a media business and scale it and be profitable in the first or second year.