Uncomfortable Truths
It’s funny how each tech cycle brings around the uncomfortable truths that we keep avoiding. Once again, free business models collide with paid. Companies are searching for new revenue from in-product GenAI use cases. Marketers continue to want sales and not leads. Audiences want to be anything but.
Seemingly “new” challenges come up. We’ve seen this motion picture before. The answers are right in front of us every day.
In 2006 we took heat for calling Google and Yahoo! ‘competitive’ to the big aggregators — then Dialog, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis. Leaders got upset with us when we referred to the internet as the big ‘reference library’ in the sky. We told them that to an end user Google was high quality, easier, faster, more intuitive — and FREE. So why would they gravitate to harder, slower, clunkier for a fee? When you look at the world through end user’s eyes suddenly the future is clear — it’s just not the one we want.
A few years later we said JD Power’s purchase by McGraw-Hill didn’t make sense. It was a c-sat/research/licensing company and we well knew its business model. Some banker somewhere on the planet disagreed and said we were missing the boat — that the deal made sense because McGraw-Hill owned S&P. And JD Power wasn’t a research firm it was a ‘ratings company.’
JD Power was anything but. We can contort our way into any adjacency. But if we look honestly at the company and what it does, how it does it, and who it serves it doesn’t add up. It’s plain as day.
And when we said that TechTarget, and other companies like it, offering great insight to users ‘for free’ was competitive to Gartner or Forrester we were told they were definitely NOT competitive. “TechTarget was ‘a media/lead gen’ company after all. (The man-splaining tone of voice that came with that remark still makes my skin crawl.)
Here we go again. Who doesn’t like quality, easier, faster, more intuitive, and FREE? I wasn’t going to waste my time on the explanation. But I was vindicated when Gartner bought Capterra, then sold it again because they couldn’t make the blended business models add-up. Another uncomfortable truth.
It’s not about being right. It’s about looking at the world inside out and across neighborhoods, not just within them. Why didn’t AMA buy Sermo? Why did GlobalSpec end up inside IEEE then get spun back out? Why does a B2C media company buy a B2B one and then leave it without the resources to navigate while Hearst pulled off the transformation of the century — well-funded, well-executed, Herculean.100% commitment. No room to blink.
Because too often we can’t deal with the uncomfortable truth of how business models and revenue streams and user behavior and company culture outside our norms end up on a collision course and leadership won’t or can’t navigate the politics, in-fighting, resource allocation, and the them-and-us that prevents what’s possible from being fully realized.
Just yesterday I was speaking with a leader at a GenAI company making mincemeat of incumbents in the traditional information services world. The stats are staggering. I can’t discuss them because the call, as always, is confidential. Let’s just say it’s another Google/Lexis-Nexis moment playing out.
One has a billion-dollar valuation and the others don’t and won’t. One has high-tech Silicon Valley DNA, the others are traditional information services, library DNA. The speed, decision-making, break-things mentality of the tech firm? It is VC-funded, the others aren’t. The cultural differences are immense.
To look at this industry and solve real problems we have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to get out and meet with others unlike us and learn how they are solving the problems we face. We have to look and think inside-out from the customer and end user in. We have to forge alliances with unlikely partners. These new voices point the way even when they don’t know what they want yet.
Just as some paid models had their lunch eaten with the advent of the internet, it’s happening again with young firms and forward-looking ones meshing open web content, premium-licensed content, and GenAI (with amazingly frictionless UIs, and low to no cost business models) into deeply relevant vertically focused solutions that users need and want. They have no legacy and all this happens under the nose of incumbents that trudge along holding on to the past.
This is why we are admiring firms like CAS, or Wiley, and Reuters who are out in front in their respective ways. Why when we say G2 shows the way in B2B and how Gartner missed that boat we mean it. It’s why when Outsell says stop using the word audience we mean it. Inherent in that word is the mother of all paradigm blinders.
It is why when we say the next UI is no UI, old aggregation models are going away, or that companies like Harvey are going to put price pressure on firms like Thomson Reuters, we mean that too.
It’s why when we say partnerships are more critical than ever because no one will have all the content necessary to feed the beast in vertically oriented LLMs or workflows we mean that too.
And ditto when we say events are not a moat and neither is editorial by itself.
When we insist that having an AI assessment at the ready is essential as a diligence category, we mean that too. It is why we are making the Outsell Accelerate A! Assessment™ available to you. 130 Questions and an hour of your time to have an insurance policy and playbook at the ready. Contact us to take it. We mean it.
Sure, companies want to grow revenue, drive profits and value. But it won’t happen without leaps of faith, internal disruption, calculated risks, cultural change and the leadership fortitude to go against business as usual and seek input from outside the neighborhood. It means being willing to disrupt oneself and selling that to shareholders and PE owners.
It also requires the requisite data, research, and insight. If you don’t believe it, take a look at some great feedback just in the last two weeks alone:
“Outsell analysis on Anthropic was brilliant — you nailed it. It speaks to Outsell’s integrity and being bold and direct with clients. It’s not about what they want to hear; it’s about what they need to hear — very well done.”
“The custom project that Hugh and Tatiana completed (on licensing) in July 2025, was applied internally with a notable ROI. We are very happy with the outcome and found the engagement on point and very helpful.”
“Your analysis is incredibly clear and just what we need.”
“The session was extremely productive, and Grant helped guide the entire experience in terms of areas of focus and the implications of AI …. The feedback I got was that the topic was the right one at the right time.”
“The conversation was very productive, and Hugh was able to validate a number of the contractual, pricing, and positioning approaches we’ve been developing. He also highlighted some new considerations as we move toward an MCP server access layer. We’ve discussed these internally and they are helping shape our policy thinking. Thanks again for coordinating the discussion — it was very useful
This isn’t Outsell talking it’s the voice of our clients — CEOs, c-suite growing revenue, mitigating risk, and navigating the future. Their organizations are public and private; in b2b, business information, legal, health, science and engineering. Large and small. They arm themselves with real data and insights, a community of peers and a stable of SMEs surrounding it all. And they think outside the box and their neighborhood. Like the Mastercard commercial. It’s priceless.
I’ll be sharing more about these trends during my preso at RevvedUp 2026, co-produced by H2K Labs and Outsell at the Vinoy on March 23–24. Ping me to learn more and set up a time to talk. Heather and I, and our teams look forward to seeing you there!