What Theodore Wants to Tell You about Niche Publishing

A recent feature story, The Rise of the Grandad Dog, in Australian Dog Lover magazine notes that traditional dog names like Fido and Spot are out. The new naming convention is human classics like Theodore (pictured above), Douglas, and Stanley or, for female pups, Penelope, Sophie, and Amber.

Back in the U.S., DogTipper’s online magazine, owned by Doodlebug Publishing, advises how to bake a bacon and spinach dog treat (mix 1/4 cup of cooked spinach and 3 slices of diced lean bacon and an egg into  2/3 of a cup of flour. Then shape into treats by hand and pop into an oven preheated to 374F).

Their treat recipes are divided into baked, dehydrated, cheese-only, peanut butter, and ice cream. Anyone wondering which flour to use from a dog’s perspective can learn the nuances of coconut, wholewheat, and rice.  

Readers can also shop around the 12 adult dog-themed coloring books, such as PassPort to Pugs, Doodles at the beach and RVing with Dogs, in the e-commerce store.

Hang around long enough and a pop-up tells you to “Fetch” the newsletter.

 

If the elevation of the dog’s dietary needs and naming protocols is ruff to understand, that’s because a unique cultural transformation has rewritten the economics of pet media. Here’s who owns it, how it makes money, and who’s actually winning.

Dogs unleashed

The force driving the changes in the pet media, now estimated at roughly 100 to 200 titles in the United States, can be summed up in a word: Dogs.

Dog ownership has climbed steadily for nearly three decades. Today, U.S. dog-owning households outnumber parenting households by two to one. 53% of U.S. households now own a dog, compared to 25% of U.S. households with a child under 18. 

As dogs filled the void left by lower marriage rates and social isolation, they began to be treated like family members.

In fact, the pet niche – catering to an emotionally engaged, financially empowered, and communally driven audience – has begun to look a lot like the parenting category, though with a smaller ad spend but a spikier uptick in growth.

The parallels are hard to miss. The life of a dog or cat roughly mirrors the number of years it takes to raise a child to adulthood, with distinct stages for training, nutrition, healthcare, and lifestyle needs.

It is no longer an oddity to see a baby carriage with a dog in it, too old, young, small, or tired to walk.

There are dog-friendly as well as child-friendly restaurants, activities, and events, making both categories ideal for directories, guides, and calendars.

Need to grow the owned audience? Pet photography contests, like cutest baby contests, are incredibly popular.

Top Dog, a photo contest produced by city magazine Tops in Lexington,  racks up hundreds of entries and lucrative sponsors for categories like “Only A Mother Could Love, Bigger is Better, Water Dog, and Fun Sized.” Passionate dog owners compete for prizes that include $500 cash, a pet portrait experience, free vaccines from Fayette Veterinary Clinic, and a feature in the magazine.

Cats, while still popular, have had a bumpier ride. After peaking in 2006, the U.S. cat population dropped by about  7.9 million to account for about 36% of U.S. households, still larger than the number of households with kids.

Bird ownership, fish, and small mammals such as hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, and rats have declined even further.

Beyond the increase in numbers of dogs, however, is the ever-increasing spend per dog, now about one-third of the cost of raising a child.

This has given rise to whole new ad categories. Whereas twenty-five years ago, the expense of owning a dog or cat was largely limited to dry food, an annual trip to the vet, and a leash, modern trends have expanded pet goods and services into a lifestyle category.

Even if a pet owner does not splurge $4900 on a Yorkipoo pup, the total annual cost of any dog, even one from the pound, is estimated at $1,900–$2,500 by the American Kennel Club, while Rover estimates the annual cost at $3,343.

As the veterinary industry consolidated over the past decade – Mars Petcare, yes, same as the candy company, alone now owns 2,500 vet clinics – the corporate owners raised prices.

Today, Americans spend $178 to $270 billion annually on dogs alone, and the pet industry is now one of the fastest-growing consumer sectors.

Globally, The Guardian puts the industry size at $500 billion—an economy roughly comparable to the GDP of  Norway or Austria.

Follow the Money

When Meredith Publishing, owner of People and other major magazine brands along with other media properties, partnered with Mars Petcare to sponsor the launch of its first pet media, The Daily Paws, in 2020, it was a signal to the publishing world: Big media was moving into the pet advertising market. Companies worth hundreds of millions, that owned major titles and television networks, suddenly wanted what pet media could deliver.

Even as corporate conglomerates like PetSmart, Petco, and Chewy took over the pet food market, displacing local pet stores,  whole new advertising categories were exploding.

The independent retailers that survived Costco’s pet food section began to provide unique shopping experiences.

Instead of a few choices for bagged dried food, pet chow now includes stage-of-life options such as senior diets and puppy nutrition, breed-specific foods, allergy formulas, raw and fresh diets, supplements, and specialty treats.

Beyond the tennis ball

Dog toys morphed into enrichment puzzles, plush stuffed animals that squeak or not, and an endless variety of chew products, fashion-forward collars, leashes, harnesses, beds, and accessories – all potential advertisers for a national pet media brand.

Australian Dog Lovers’ “Favorite Finds” include personalized pet portraits made from wool,  Tartan-style pet blankets, and a watermelon-flavored dog toothpaste brand called “Brighten Your Day.”

After all, says one of the founders,  every other dog toothpaste has “some version of beef, chicken, or pork…their breath would just smell like dinner, and “That’s not exactly the fresh, clean result you were hoping for.”

The global pet grooming market alone is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 6.7% through 2030, making it one of the fastest-growing local service categories, and one that cannot be disintermediated by Amazon.

Add to that daycare, mobile grooming, in-home euthanasia, and DNA testing, and what Meredith saw was a new advertising sector seeking an audience.

If anything, Meredith was late to the game.

Dogster: Facebook for Fido

Dogster, which first launched as a social network in 2004, the same year as Facebook, was the first media to clearly understand that pet owners are a different kind of audience, one that thrives on community.

Founder Ted Rheingold let pet owners create profiles for their dogs, who had their own photo albums and could “friend” other dogs. Dogster won the 2005 Webby Award for Best Community Website. At its peak, it had more than 150,000 members, 185,000 pet profiles, and more than 10 million monthly pageviews.

When pet owners eventually migrated over to Facebook groups, Dogster was forced to drop the community model and pivot. It purchased a prestigious but traditional dog print magazine, Dog Fancy, along with Cat Fancy, which it renamed Catster, and switched to editorial content, mostly human interest stories like Friendliest Dog Breeds and Why Does My Dog Tilt His Head?, along with celebrity dogs.

Meanwhile, other media companies were sniffing out opportunities in the suddenly lucrative niche.

Bellvoir, the erudite health newsletter publisher for Harvard Medical School, Tufts and Cornell Universities,  launched Whole Dog Journal  a subscription-based print newsletter in 1998, followed by Cornell DogWatch and Cornell CatWatch, Tufts Your Dog and Tufts Catnip, eventually acquiring Dogster and Catster.

And a new startup was contending for top dog of pet media: Pangolia. 

Founded by 19-year-old Danish entrepreneur Simon Treulle in 2019, the online-only Pangolia set out to build an archive of SEO-friendly articles like “Best dog food,” “Why is my cat vomiting?” and “Labrador vs. Golden Retriever.”

Within five years, Truelle had turned the start-up into a pet media empire that included a successful affiliate revenue business; an e-commerce store that sold pet furniture and accessories; PangoVet a veterinary telehealth and expert pet advice platform; and the coup de grace, the acquisition of Dogster and Catster, now online-only. Page views passed 9 million by 2022.

Niching up

Even About.com got a foothold in the pets media market.

In 2017, with the general-information-on-everything model floundering and Google rewarding deeper, more authoritative content, CEO Neil Vogel decided to split the company, then called DotDash, into seven verticals, one of which was The Spruce Pets. 

It was arguably one of the most successful digital publishing turnarounds of the last decade, proving again that the parts can be more valuable than the whole.

With its share of the 50,000 About.com article archive, Spruce Pets answered thousands of pet-owner questions, pairing articles with affiliate product reviews and veterinary expertise.

Oh, and remember Meredith? Vogel’s digital native DotDash was acquired by IAC, a huge holding company (Angi, Vimeo, Match Group/Tinder) that also bought Meredith for about $2.7 billion.

The whole thing was rebranded as People, Inc. with Vogel at the helm as the new CEO. And so it goes.

But by 2025, these huge national pet media companies faced a more awkward question: What comes after search?

Vogel told Business Insider that Google referrals companywide have dropped from 70% to 25% of the traffic mix since the advent of AI.

Like many other publishers, he is shifting focus to building the owned audience and new revenue streams that are not tied to SEO.

Buzzfeed for pet owners?

A different kind of national start-up, The Dodo, founded in 2014, escaped the SEO trap entirely. It built its audience around socially viral storytelling and video to power traffic to the site and advertisers.

What kind of pet stories can attract millions of views?

First, the pet has to be the hero of its own story with a want or an obstacle to resolve or overcome, and a photo designed to melt the human heart.

Buzzfeed–worthy viral headlines include “Blind Senior Dog gets his very first toy at 13.”  And there’s this: “No One Wanted These Pit Bull Puppies — So The Shelter Gave Them Cowboy Hats.” 

In fact, founders included the then 29-year-old Isabel Lerer, whose father co-founded HuffPost and was chairman of BuzzFeed.

Her instinct that people would share remarkable pet stories was dead on. The Dodo is now one of the largest pet media in the world.

Local Winners

The other winners in the pet category are local brands, where the competition is less intense and the revenue models less SEO-driven.

If a publisher can string enough titles together and stay digital-only, the economics start to make sense.

Most of the successful local pet media publishers are regional to acquire scale, and digital-only and newsletter-driven to avoid the expense of producing a magazine. They have a heavy focus on local utility such as pet-friendly activities, along with directories and guides.

A great example is CityDog Magazine, founded in Seattle in 2005 by Brandie Ahlgren after she adopted an eight-week-old boxer.

Like any new, inexperienced parent, she suddenly needed advice and had to rely on word-of-mouth to find local trainers, parks, and pet-friendly businesses.

She turned this information gap into CityDog Seattle Magazine. Where Dogster asked: How do you raise a Labrador? CityDog asks, “What can I do with my dog in Seattle this weekend?:

The magazine also adopted the editorial model – and a little bit of a spoof – of a city magazine, eventually expanding into roughly 20 city-specific editions like Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Like most local pet media, the magazine eventually went digital-only. Readers still find options for locally sourced, pet-friendly options for local Travel, Living, Wellness, and Baseball games in the top rail navigation bar. Yes, baseball. People need to know where they can take dogs out to the ball game.

Wait a doggone minute. What’s in it for you? 

For niche publishers weighing a pet-oriented carve-out, Theodore has some advice.

There’s a reason so many national media companies narrowed their focus to pets, beyond just the dollars and cents. People connect deeply and emotionally to stories about dogs – especially their own!

Here are some practical takeaways he recommends for publishers to consider:

1. Photo contests travel well. Categories like pet fashion, best dog-friendly patio, or “cutest shop dog,” like Tops in Lexington’s Top Dog contest, create shareable, sponsorable content and can work as an email builder, even for publishers who would never run a dedicated pet section.
2. A local pet-friendly events column can fill a real gap, especially in cities without a dedicated pet magazine or site. It’s low-lift, recurring, and builds the kind of local utility CityDog and Suncoast Pets provide. Wagazine’s regular Happy Hour for dog-owners is an idea worth stealing for local publishers interested in building engaged in-person communities.
3. Non-traditional advertisers are hiding in plain sight. Pet-resistant carpet and flooring, pet-safe landscaping, auto detailers and cargo/seat-cover retailers, pet-friendly real estate and rentals, pet insurance, and happy hours at bars and breweries are all sponsors who don’t think of themselves as pet advertisers — until someone asks.
4. Guides and directories double as market research and upsell inventory. A vets/groomers/trainers/sitters directory is cheap to build, evergreen, and a natural stepping stone to a newsletter segment if the audience justifies it and advertisers show demand.
5. The pet angle scales into B2B and trade categories, too. Farm and agricultural publications that feature working and “shop dogs” find they are more popular than imagined. Home and Garden titles cover pet-safe landscaping; auto trade pubs outline options for cargo and interior adaptations; travel pubs offer tips on pet-friendly lodging. Almost any vertical has a pet-adjacent story hiding in it.
6. Consider the style: Pet as protagonist. Poems by Pets is more interesting than poems about them. Instead of “Top 5 dog-friendly patios,” think of headlines like,”This is Biscuit’s favorite patio. Here’s why.”

Not every good idea is a moneymaker, Theodore says, but these may be worth a second look.

The throughline for both national and local publishers who win in this category is that whether they launch contests, pet event calendars, recipes, or even e-commerce stores, they all tap into the rare, atmospheric connection between pets and their owners, maybe even a sense (how did Theodore put it?) of joy.