Before she was running one of New Zealand’s most distinctive independent media companies, Amber Easby was working 18-hour days on the road with The White Stripes in the early 2000s. I spoke with her over Zoom about her role as CEO for The Spinoff. Excerpts follow.
You became the CEO of The Spinoff after founder Duncan Greive stepped down. Did you immediately say yes when he asked you to follow in his footsteps?
I was happily working as the Head of Video of The Spinoff and managing the production company, but I understood Duncan because he had been running the company for nine years and built The Spinoff from the ground up, with commercial sponsorships on different verticals. He asked if I had time for a quick call during my holiday, to run something by me.
I thought it was going to be an insignificant thing, but then he asked me to consider becoming the CEO. I just immediately started doing the job in my head and spent the rest of my holiday writing a strategy for the first 90 days, 12 months, and what I wanted to achieve long-term. So by the time I came back, my vision was clear.
What did you write in that first strategy document?
Duncan was the entrepreneur. I could never do what he did, with the tenacity it requires in the early days of the business. I saw opportunity operationally in creating a new layer of process and infrastructure that would enable the next decade of growth. One of the first things I created was an audience department with our first Head of Audience.
In the past, we’ve made great decisions based on instincts, with smart people in the room to enable that. But we were also lucky to grow the audience as significantly as we did in the heyday of social media.
Did you want to strengthen your membership model with that approach as well?
The membership model was born out of the crisis in 2019. During COVID-19, Bauer pulled out of New Zealand, and it was a concerning time for the local media. [German publisher Bauer Media Group took the abrupt decision in April 2020 to close its NZ publishing operations, axing iconic titles and resulting in roughly 250 job losses.] It helped establish our membership model further, similar to The Guardian’s donation model where the content is free for all. But in order to sustain ourselves, we needed a dual commercial and audience model. When I started, membership accounted for 30% of our revenue, whereas now it’s closer to 50%.
The Spinoff became New Zealand’s market leader in audience engagement, according to Nielsen research in 2025. Was that surprising to you?
There are much larger market players than us, but we realized that a key point of difference is our audience relationship—the stickiness and engagement metrics. Compared to others in the market, we realized how significantly we lead in that area.
How do you connect with your audience directly?
We see the feedback in real time through the comments on our members’ site. We’re fortunate that our audience is lovely and thoughtful, and want to engage meaningfully with the content and with our writers. Our membership lead Ben [Fagan] spends a lot of time responding to inbox messages, and we survey our audience regularly. It guides us in putting together next year’s strategy.
How does that translate into financial sustainability?
We’ve experienced back-to-back recessions in New Zealand. It’s a tough commercial market, and we’ve been extremely lucky that our audience has shown up in a significant way on the back of an open letter we published over a year and a half ago in which we were radically transparent. We gained 4,000 new members in three months, which was incredible and changed the course of the business. There was a lot of support and camaraderie within the industry as well.
The Spinoff is described as “politics and pop culture.” Why that particular combination?
It started as a website covering TV, in partnership with a streamer that no longer exists. Politics was one of the first verticals after that, which is now the main reason for member support. That mix and a sense of humor make us distinct in a media landscape where news avoidance is a real issue. We balance the high and the low, the light and the heavy, for an audience of which 50% are under the age of 45. It’s younger but also broader than legacy media just because of our range of products; from The Bulletin newsletter with curated news for an older audience, to social-first videos in our Now You Know explainer series, targeting 18 to 24 year olds. We meet audiences where they are.
We just launched Project Oasis in New Zealand and Australia and we noticed that the smaller, hybrid outlets aren’t always visible. They’re hard to find. Where does The Spinoff fit in the ecosystem?
New Zealand is a small market, and the overall landscape of independent digital native media is still young. But we’re entering an interesting new phase where we’re no longer in start-up mode. If you compare it to the school system with the primary, intermediate and high school years, we’re intermediate now. We can learn and take from both legacy media and creator models. We’re still relatively small and we can pivot quickly. We don’t have layers of infrastructure to go through to make something happen. Our ambition outweighs the available resources—but that’s true of people in larger organizations as well, right?
On your website it says, “You will not read words on The Spinoff that have been generated using Generative AI.” What is your vision on Artificial Intelligence?
There is a client-level expectation to see cost benefits of using AI in terms of workflow, but we’ve made a commitment not to publish any words generated by AI. We’re not a high-volume publisher and we have no ambition to be. There is an ethical stance and practical one, in that The Spinoff’s unique voice and the audience’s relationship with our writers is what defines us. It doesn’t make business sense to dilute that. We’re embracing the things that make us special, and describe ourselves as a talent-forward business. We want to help our writers develop their own careers Our audience trust rate is 93% and has maintained that level for the last two years. A lot of it comes from the actual writers and their direct relationship with readers.
If you look at independent digital native media globally, what do you think people still get wrong about sustainability?
Trying to be all things to all people is a problem. There is an abundance of media, and audiences are looking for a kind of deep and personal connection to coverage. Relying on one revenue stream too heavily is also a mistake. You need to diversify streams to protect you as things inevitably change. There is no silver bullet for passive income streams; there is constant tension.
How do you stay sane?
I don’t claim to have sorted that out. I’ve got two kids who help me stay present when I’m at home. I protect my time by limiting work bleeding into the weekend and not taking too much home at night during the week. I also moved further away, from the city out in the bush, and the commute home has become a way of processing the day. I feel decompressed when I arrive. It’s a struggle for everyone I guess; I’m tired all the time, I’m working a lot, I’ve got a big job and a big family. But I learn so much every day and I’m really inspired by the people I work with, and about what we’re going to achieve in the next couple of years. That’s incredibly motivating.
Do you ever think of your time as a merch manager for The White Stripes?
I worked on their first tour and stayed for quite a long time. I traveled the world, and it was very, very fun. In a weird way, it prepared me for all the different kinds of work I’ve done since. Working in an ever-changing, dynamic environment is certainly true of the media.