Gary Vaynerchuk is launching a new website and isn’t chasing mass

Gary Vaynerchuk and Ryan Harwood.
Gallery Media Group

• Gallery Media Group’s One37pm is launching a website
  after softly rolling out on social media in June.
• One37pm is focused on “the lifestyle of
  entrepreneurship.”
• Ralph Lauren, Belvedere, Gillette and Budweiser are
  some of the site’s first advertisers.
• The publisher is shying away from programmatic
  advertising initially to focus on branded content, much like
  the business model of PureWow, which 
  CEO
  Ryan Harwood founded and sold to Vaynerchuk in 2017.

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Gary Vaynerchuk-owned Gallery Media Group is building up a stable
of media brands — but doesn’t want to go the same route as other
digital publishers that have primarily focused on amassing huge
audiences through social media.

So it’s taking the seemingly archaic step of launching a content
website and trying to get people to visit it, rather than
flooding people’s news feeds with videos and articles.

After
softly rolling out men-focused One37pm through social media
accounts, a podcast and voice skills in June, the brand launched
its website today.

But aren’t websites over? Aren’t too many digital brands
struggling to consistently attract readers and advertisers?

CEO Ryan Harwood said the advantage of having a destination site
in addition to distributing content on platforms is to crank out
a higher volume of content than is possible on social media and
experiment with different story formats.

“In this day and age, I still think a website is very important
[because] there is an ungodly amount of content still consumed on
websites,”  Harwood said.

“From a consumer perspective, I think brands these days are built
on the platforms — that’s where you’re going to get discovered
and people are going to become infatuated with you.”

Harwood is hoping young guys become infatuated
with One37pm’s unique positive voice.

“The lifestyle of entrepreneurship and how that’s intersecting so
much with culture these days,” said Harwood about the site’s
focus. “The publication is about generally trying to make
positivity louder and give these young guys permission to do what
they love doing.”

There will be stories about how celebrities and athletes are
venturing into entrepreneurship (like the NBA’s Carmelo Anthony

investing in pizza chain Nobodys Pizza) but One37pm will
also focus on the “everyday guy coming out of college, [or the
guy who] didn’t go to college or is in his day job and isn’t
happy — we’re trying to actually inspire with those stories.”

One37pm is trying to go direct to consumers’ phones

The male-aimed site is also collecting email addresses and phone
numbers to build a database, which will be used to ping users
information and stories in the future.

“Nobody gives their cellphone [numbers] out so if you’re able to
form a one-to-one connection via text with the consumer, I think
we’ll be very precious about that and  this
will not be a daily text message in my opinion,” he said.

“I envision it being a channel that we use when we have a lot of
value-add content to give the consumer — it’s very actionable.”

The new brand is going to have a similar business model as
PureWow

Harwood founded and built women lifestyle site PureWow before

selling it to Vaynerchuk last year.

One37pm

The bulk of PureWow’s revenue comes from branded content and
sponsored articles, which is also how One37pm plans to earn
revenue.

The site will also make money from display advertising, though
Harwood doesn’t plan to run programmatic advertising initially
because “programmatic is solely dependent on how much reach and
scale you have on your website and we’re just launching.”

Ralph Lauren, Belvedere, Gillette and Budweiser are a few of
One37pm’s launch advertisers. Ralph Lauren, for example, bought a
large ad placement to promote its sponsorship as the US Open’s
official outfitter.

But won’t it be tough to attract big advertisers long term,
without racking up huge audience numbers through social media?

“When it comes to websites, I think it is a bit of an antiquated
viewpoint that in order to be a media brand that can help brands
that you need X amount of scale on a website,” Harwood said.

Instead, brands increasingly want to work with publishers that
have creative ideas for advertising and have brand equity, he
said.

“If the client wants audience or data at scale, you go to Google
or Facebook — they have all the audience every publisher has
combined and then some,” he said. 

“If a client or agency is still asking about website uniques as
the sole determining factor in collaborating together, they
likely don’t understand how the internet works anymore.”