Clark Benson Transcript
Clint Betts
Clark, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's great to meet you and connect with you. You are the CEO of Ranker. Maybe let's just start with how you became the CEO of Ranker and what Ranker is.
Clark Benson
Sure. Yeah, so I'm a lifelong entrepreneur. I'm 57 years old at this point, so I've been starting businesses since before the dot-com era. When I was starting businesses, they weren't called startups as much as they were just called small businesses.
And to sort of jump ahead into the Ranker era, I had a prior, in the 1.0 internet era, I had a company called eCRUSH that was sort of an up and down in that crazy early internet thing that had its ups and downs, but had a nice little exit, and we never raised much money, to Hearst. So this was right at the beginning of 2007 that happened, and I had always had this idea of I love lists. I've always loved lists and rankings, and I had this idea of connected rankings where the world is ranking everything. And that was the genesis of Ranker, which we launched a year and a half later.
And ranker.com has grown and grown over the years and it's still a big website. We've collected 1.6 billion votes from people across 100,000 plus different rankings. So we really aim to provide sort of the definitive answer to what is the best blank. Now, we don't do local, it's mostly pop culture stuff. We found that that was our wheelhouse, movies, TV, music, celebrities, stuff like that, food, fast food, things like that.
And from that, we've got a lot of really interesting consumer sentiment data. It's not personally identifiable; this exact person needs to be targeted with this exact ad. It's more like fans of X also like Y, they like Z, they like P and Q, and they hate X and W, right? So from Ranker, we've built some other products. Like anybody in the media space, we've got a number of YouTube channels, the biggest ones being Nerdstalgic and Weird History. And on social media channels, we've got more than 60 million social followers across different platforms.
But we've also built a TV recommender app called Watchworthy, and it's basically what I should watch next. There's too much out there. We use all the Ranker data and the Watchworthy consumer data. We're also branching out into B2B support services because if you're getting really good recommendations on your connected TV device, I'm surprised because they still haven't really solved that problem years later. So that's our latest push: having conversations with streaming services and TV manufacturers about using our data to provide better recommendations for anybody using Hulu Paramount Plus or all those different services.
Clint Betts
What's your sense of the state of media right now? And I know that's a pretty broad question, but on your own, what do you do at Ranker and being like, in a lot of ways, a publisher, right?
Clark Benson
Yeah.
Clint Betts
And publishing, but even just generally, given that you're so engaged in that and even ranking a lot of that, what do you think the state of media is right now?
Clark Benson
Honestly, it's one of those questions that doesn't have a single answer because there's so many variants and different things going on in media. But media is changing even faster in the last few years than I sort of would've anticipated.
Look, the internet has changed everything, but then social media has accelerated the internet. It's a lot harder for publishers to get traffic, or maybe it's not for a little while because a new platform comes out, and you start gaming that platform, but then something changes. The platform doesn't care if they send you traffic or not; they're just interested in monetizing their audience as best as they can.
And then, of course, the biggest change, and this is really, it's been going on for six, seven years, but I would say that in the last two years, it's been the biggest change has been the influencer economy where media organizations don't have as much... An influencer can just be an individual, and obviously, you can work with a support group that helps you sell your ads or do whatever you want. But the media is going through a lot of pain, frankly, because of that.
And I could talk a lot about the recent Zuckerberg kind of things and whatnot, but that would eat up the whole podcast if you wanted to hear my opinions about that. Let's just say this. If I was starting out fresh, I would not be... Starting a media company would not be my first pick.
Clint Betts
Why is that? Just because it's so decentralized and you're reliant so much on these huge platforms?
Clark Benson
Yeah, a platform makes an algorithm change, and your traffic-
Clint Betts
It's game over.
Clark Benson
... can go overnight and boom, your revenue's... We've seen that. We're a solid eight-figure revenue company, but we've had... If you go to Google these days, AI answers dominate the top of the search page, and there's a... Let's just say there's a Ranker list that ranks number three for a search. We've done some analysis, and some of our content is doing about 30% of the traffic for the same ranking that it did four years ago. So that's AI and ads and other garbage, or maybe not. Some of the AI is not bad, but...
There's a term that you might have to bleep out that you've probably heard from Cory Doctorow called The enshittification of big technology. And that is absolutely impacting your Facebook experience, your Google experience and everything. And I would say that none of that helps media companies. It may help individuals who are creators, but it does not generally help media companies who are trying to create quality content.
Clint Betts
Yeah, I think that's right. And yeah, you mentioned Zuck just recently came out and said he's changing the algorithm again in some way to
Clark Benson
[inaudible 00:07:06] A ton of hard work in the last two months.
Clint Betts
... [inaudible 00:07:07] free speech.
Clark Benson
Yeah, algorithm changes happen every week. Something that would've gotten this much traffic gets 5X all of a sudden or one-fifth all of a sudden. It's happening weekly, and it's strange that you can't really... You have no agency or control. You're just kind of, "Oh, look what happened."So, that's not fun to run a business when you have no control. As somebody who's interviewing CEOs and entrepreneurs all the time, we're control freaks, right?
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Clark Benson
What entrepreneur's not a control freak, right? So that's why I would not choose media if I were starting something else, but-
Clint Betts
Yeah, and to be able to own your own audience and stuff like that and not have it owned by... It really is interesting, and I wonder what you think of this. I often think of this, maybe like once a month. I wonder if 20, 30 years from now, we're going to be like, "Hey, why did we work for Zuckerberg and Elon and put all this effort into building up their platforms and their revenue?" It really is quite interesting. There are obvious reasons why we do that: because that is where everyone is. But all those who work for or build these media companies are really just working for them.
Clark Benson
Oh, everything that I'm saying, if you take, I don't know, NBC or Paramount or somebody, they feel exactly the same way in a slightly... From a different lens, but it's still the same thing. It's like, what happened? We've lost the attention game. And I don't think you'll talk for 20 years from now; I think you'll talk for two or three years from now. I really do think there's sort of a reckoning. But I think it's going to be more of a consumer reckoning because I think people are frustrated with... Consumers are frustrated with the platforms. But the hard part is that they have so much power. There's really not... It's going to take a real sea change.
And look, I don't want to sit and talk about AI because it's not an expertise of mine. We use AI, but I'm not one of these gurus about it. But even just the AI stuff this week that we've seen just rocketing the NASDAQ and whatever, this is a time of crazy disruption and disruption cuts every way, but it cuts, right?
Clint Betts
Yeah. The DeepSeek stuff is fascinating and completely changes the entire paradigm of how we once thought of AI. And it's interesting, it comes on the heels of this huge announcement of $500 billion in data centers and stuff, it's just like what [inaudible 00:09:48].
Clark Benson
You can't keep up with the news it's happening so fast. It's crazy.
Clint Betts
It's wild. I want to touch on something real quick that you mentioned before, which is this whole influencer and their role and outsized role and how they're more popular than standard media. For example, Joe Rogan is probably one of the top podcasts in the world. He's bigger than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox combined. It's crazy. Do you see that as the direction of the future of media? Or what did you mean when you said influencers?
Clark Benson
Yeah. From Joe Rogan on down to just some TikTok-er, right? That is considered the creator economy, influencers. I think there's a difference between a podcaster with a more long-form product and people making the real short-form, quick-hitting content.
But at the end of the day, look, I think the tide has already shifted heavily towards that because people, especially under 40, are mostly consuming that content. They really don't care that much about legacy media, so to speak. I don't think it's necessarily a positive thing. Literally, I'll tell you that the reason I started Ranker, this is long before influencers, but there were lists all over the web, but it was always one blogger's opinion of the top 20, blah, blah. And who's this guy? This is just somebody trying to make 50 bucks on traffic to his blog post. There's no authority there, but Google is ranking it high, and that's what people are seeing. So I said, "I'm going to fix that with crowdsourced rankings and deliver the definitive answer to whatever's asked in a list format." And we've done that. But to me, that's a better quality piece of information. But does a 22-year-old scrolling on their TikTok think that way? I don't know. It's a lot of change, and I do not think it is the creator economy trend. I love the fact that it democratizes things, and the gatekeepers aren't there saying, "This is what makes sense." But it's also like...
Well, look, I started my career in the record industry, and that's another place that's been totally disrupted. And there was a value in gatekeepers knowing this is the music that's really good. And now with everybody on Spotify making something, it's a little bit harder to really make popular music that crosses over and isn't just lowest common denominator. And the same thing is happening, I think, in the creator economy in a sort of different consumption way.
Clint Betts
Yeah, I agree with that. And then if, like we're seeing, again, recent news is like TikTok may or may not exist and all these types of... So if you built millions and millions of followers there and all of a sudden... The fact that these platforms can be turned off and their algorithms can be changed is pretty wild.
Clark Benson
Yeah, I don't think that government thinking and legislation, I just don't think anybody has a clue how to deal with algorithms, yet they control our lives. They dictate what we see and in some cases choose to do. And nobody would've envisioned that or has any idea how to handle it really, from a societal perspective. So look, it's a fascinating time to be in the middle of all this and I learn something every day. But it isn't always the funnest time to actually try to grow a business in a normal way because the rug gets pulled out from you very quickly.
Clint Betts
Have you ever ranked CEOs?
Clark Benson
Yeah.
Clint Betts
Or go into a business world based on ranking? That'd be interesting.
Clark Benson
Yeah. There are two problems that we've had with Ranker in that kind of thing. One is I never had enough; I was never raised like the... I raised venture capital money, but it was always seed-level money. Never had more than 2 million bucks to play with at a time, so you're hiring... To rank CEOs, we used to have venture capitalists always saying, "Why isn't there a ranking of VCs?" And I'm like, "Because I don't have... The young people making content for me don't know what VCs are, even let alone what VCs are good or whatever." So I could hire somebody and do that just to raise my next round from you people because you're so myopic. But that's not what I set out to build.
So we've actually found that when you try to do something that's, I guess, very highly susceptible to gaming, you also find that the bad actors come in right away. Like if we were ranking CEOs, you know those CEOs would get their publicists to try to come in and send everybody to vote on... Would the answer be good at the end of the day? I don't know. I doubt it.
Clint Betts
That's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, the business world is very gamed. People probably don't know that. I also wondered, you're talking about AI a little bit, how has it changed your workflow at Ranker? How has it changed everything, and what do you do? Has it made it easier? Faster?
Clark Benson
I will say this: Ranker is... We're a lot more robust than a WordPress kind of publisher. We actually have ingested 30 million entities in our system to rank so that they can be on any list very quickly. So, an entity needs a little synopsis, right? An entity could be a TV show, a TV episode, a celebrity, or a baseball player, and you need a little blurb about that entity. So AI is really helpful for things like that because writing blurbs about these things is costly at scale, and AI really does help us on those fronts. As long as you still have an editor who can kind of...
Let's put it this way: writing a little synopsis could take an editor 15 minutes. With the assistance of AI, it could take that person maybe two minutes. But it still isn't good to just let the AI do it all. We have not found that the AI is high-quality enough, even with the really good prompts training, to replace everything. So, I'm a big believer in human-assisted AI right now, and I think that the technology will get better. I'm not one of those AI true believers who thinks it can replace everything, but I think it can really be a productivity gain of, I would say, the sort of repetitive, kind of less nuanced tasks.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Clark Benson
I'm a dashboard guy, so I'm not like a trained analyst. I have a great analyst who's our COO. But I love just looking at numbers because, at the end of the day, I guess for better or for worse, because our industry is so rapidly changing, my day is, I would say, an hour or two of every day is sort of spent just like, "What's going on? Is there something to optimize here with this traffic source?" Or maybe the sales team is pitching over here, and we need to give them some better data to do that pitch with or whatever it may be. So, it starts with dashboards.
And I would say rather than a typical day, I kind of think of a typical week. I try to be kind of hands-on or hands-off, depending on my team and what they're working on. So I have to get into the weeds every once in a while on something that's just... Something circles back around that I'm the one who commissioned to build six years ago, and all of a sudden, it becomes a thing again, and I'm the one who has to go into the weeds and deal with it. And then, in a lot of other cases, I'm just taking half an hour meetings with my leads and getting the summary from them.
So it's really just a weird combination of priorities. I try to avoid standing meetings for more than 25% of my week because I like to call meetings on short notice when needed. And I also think that any CEO who's spending 70% of their time in meetings, at least for companies like ours, 100 person-ish companies, I don't know. To me, that's-
Clint Betts
That sounds miserable. That sounds-
Clark Benson
Yeah.
Clint Betts
It also sounds like probably something that you shouldn't be doing.
Clark Benson
Yeah, unless your business is very straightforward and isn't subject to a lot of change, in which case, more power to you, right?
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. What do you think about hiring and culture and building that culture?
Clark Benson
Well, hiring, we... Again, this might be bleeped out, but I've always kind of... I'm a Midwesterner, and although the company's based in LA, we really have always strived to hire grounded people. We've had what I call a no-douchebag policy. We just don't want hype-y hustler type people who just you have to then follow up on all the time and say, "Why didn't you do what you said you're going to do?"
So we really have just kind of found people, across the board from the get-go, and this sort of answers your culture question as well, Ranker's about kind of, whether it's Ranker or the Watchworthy TV app, it's still kind of nerdy, right? It's like you got the pop culture aficionados who really are like, "I'm making lists, I'm making rankings." They love that they're doing that for a job. So we really seek out people; in some cases, we've hired from our community; we've hired a bunch of freelance writers who started for us as freelancers and ended up as full-time content creators. And the commonality is honestly just grounded people who are really bright but might be a little nerdy.
Clint Betts
I love it. That's incredible. What are some products or apps or something like that that you just can't live without, that you use every day?
Clark Benson
I'll give you one that I feel is unsung, although I don't read a lot of B2B press, so maybe you're familiar with it. Have you heard of Loom?
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Loom's great.
Clark Benson
I think that is just the most... Once I got Loom... I used to do voice memos all the time, right? It's faster to say something than write something, so I'd be emailing people voice memos left and right. But with Loom, especially when you're working in digital media, you can just share your screen and say, "Move that thing over there." Like Loom is the... I would say it saves me half an hour a day. And I can't think of any other tool released in the last five or 10 years that has done that.
Clint Betts
That's a good answer. What do you think from, like, we're going in, it's 2025, we're in the first month of it, how are you thinking about this year from an economic standpoint, from an advertising standpoint, everything that you're focused on versus last year? Do you think it's going to be the same? Different? Better?
Clark Benson
I've kind of gotten to a place where I've been wrong too many times when I've tried to predict that. So look, Trump's doing a lot of really fast crazy things, and who knows where that's going to go. It could be a very big economic positive. It could be a short-term economic positive that changes to a negative quickly. We really don't know.
I will say that one of the key KPIs that we just have to look at is the broad internet... Well, broad advertising, and then it trickles down into broad digital media advertising. And we've actually seen some very positive, I would say, starting in the second half of last year. We have been seeing better ad dollars overall. And I thought at first, "Oh, it's an Olympics thing," right? There are always weird macro ads that spend around big worldwide events, but it's continued through that. So as of now, I'm somewhat bullish. But I've been wrong every time I've thought about that in the past, so I think anybody listening to this should pretty much ignore me on that.
Clint Betts
Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Clark Benson
I think this is a little bit cheesy, but I'm going to say that I really only worked in a corporate capacity for a few years before I went off on my own. And I was working at record labels, so it wasn't the most corporate gig to begin with. And I think that the fact that my parents, especially my father... My father was a corporate guy. He worked for AT&T, which before that, it was Illinois Bell and it was... And he was a 60-hour week, grind-it-out kind of corporate guy.
And he basically kind of said, "Listen, I will make sure that," since I'm seeing my son wanting to be an entrepreneur and go off on his own, "I will back you with it." Not just from the perspective of, "Yeah, you have my blessing," but also, if things go wrong, I can provide some financial backstop for a little while. And honestly, I didn't have a lot of money when I started my first business. And at one point in time, I had four businesses going at once.
So it's kind of cheesy to say that, but I know a lot of people find that their parents had these high expectations of them to follow in certain footsteps. And my father was kind of the opposite. He was just like, "I was a corporate guy, and I didn't like that. And I liked it for a long time until it ended, and then I got early retired, and I couldn't do another gig. So I really want you to go out and do what you want to do and be your own boss. And be your own boss. Please, be your own boss," was kind of the thing that he drummed into me. So a little cheesy to say your dad, but I'm going to say my dad.
Clint Betts
Are you kidding? It's perfect. I love it. That's the answer that everybody wishes they could say is their dad or their mom. It's wonderful. Clark, thank you so much for coming on. Congratulations on everything you built, and yeah, it really means a lot to have you here.
Clark Benson
Thanks for having me, and thanks everybody for watching.
Edited for readability.