The Story of Admiral: Building the Relationship Layer for the Privacy-First Internet

 

The Story of Admiral: Building the Relationship Layer for the Privacy-First Internet

The music streaming company had reached 100 million users. Grooveshark was a pioneer—streaming music before Spotify became a household name. Dan Rua and his team had built something massive. Then they sold it to the music labels.

Most founders would take a break after an exit. Dan did the opposite. He grabbed the product team and immediately started looking for the next problem to solve. What he found would reshape how the entire internet thinks about visitor relationships.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral, explained how spotting a massive disruption wave led him to pioneer an entirely new category: visitor relationship management.

Seeing the Wave Before It Hit

Dan’s background gave him an unusual vantage point. He’d spent two decades in venture capital, leading investments in roughly 40 companies across multiple funds. He’d been on both sides of the table—operator and investor. That dual perspective helped him spot patterns most people miss.

After the Grooveshark exit, he noticed something that would fundamentally break the internet’s business model. “There was a disruptive wave coming through that was around privacy user empowerment, really disrupting the core business model of the Internet, starting with ad blockers,” Dan explains.

Ad blockers were just the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. “It’s ad blockers, it’s data blockers, it’s death of the cookie, where the browsers are killing off the tracking. It’s privacy consent like GDPR and ccpa. And all of that is a massive wave that’s just kind of undercutting the traditional business model of the Internet,” he adds.

The implication was stark: websites could no longer track users around the internet and serve them ads. They actually had to build relationships. The problem was that nobody had built the tools to do it.

The Billion-Dollar Gap in MarTech

Dan’s VC experience revealed something absurd. He’d sat in countless board meetings watching SaaS companies obsess over marketing metrics. Every head of marketing tracked email addresses captured, leads generated, conversion rates optimized. They had HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce—an entire ecosystem of relationship management tools.

Media publishers had none of that.

“Picture the average SaaS company and you’re at the board meeting and the head of marketing comes in and says, hey, we got 15 million visitors last month. And you’re like, holy crap, that’s phenomenal. And you ask, you say, so how’d we do on getting email addresses or leads or what did that mean in terms of lead? And imagine the marketer says, well, no, we didn’t do anything like that,” Dan explains.

For SaaS companies, this would be unthinkable. For publishers, it was standard operating procedure. They’d celebrate traffic numbers without any mechanism to capture, nurture, or monetize those relationships beyond ad impressions.

The gap was massive. Publishers were trying to survive a privacy-first internet armed with AdTech tools built for a tracking-based world. “AdTech is there to shoot ads very efficiently, whereas martech, or marketing automation is how do you talk to people and build some sort of relationship and hopefully some sort of value exchange over time that sticks,” Dan notes.

Admiral’s founding thesis crystallized: build the relationship layer that publishers desperately needed but didn’t know how to ask for.

The Frankenstein Problem

As Dan dug deeper, he discovered publishers were already trying to solve this problem—badly. Every publisher had cobbled together what he now calls a “Frankenstein” VRM stack.

One vendor for ad block recovery. Another for email capture. A third for subscriptions. A fourth for privacy consent. A fifth for first-party data. “Their VRM stack today, or when we started was kind of a Frankenstein of five different point solutions,” Dan explains.

The problems compounded quickly. Five or six vendors meant five or six tags on the page, destroying load times and user experience. Worse, it meant five or six decision engines fighting over the same visitor journey.

“I’m sure you’ve experienced where you show up on a website sometimes and you get asked like three questions all at once. And that’s because these point solutions are stepping all over each other,” Dan says.

Admiral’s solution was architecturally elegant: one tag, one decision engine, modular functionality. Publishers could activate ad block recovery, paywalls, email capture, privacy consent, and first-party data collection—all orchestrated through a single system that understood the entire visitor journey.

The Pivot That Unlocked Enterprise

Early traction came from SMB publishers who understood the problem viscerally. They were bleeding revenue to ad blockers and needed solutions fast. But Admiral’s ambition was larger—they wanted to serve enterprise publishers like The New York Times and Washington Post.

The initial enterprise approach nearly killed their momentum. When prospects showed interest in the full platform, Admiral’s team would get excited and pull in multiple stakeholders. “We realized fairly quickly that it was actually complicating the go to market approach because now you’ve brought five decision makers in the room and there’s a whole range of questions you’re now in hoops you’re jumping through,” Dan explains.

The solution came from studying HubSpot’s playbook. “Not many people buy HubSpot all at once. They buy the sales module or the CRM module or the support module,” Dan notes. Admiral restructured around land-and-expand: solve one acute pain point first, build trust through results, expand methodically.

The shift transformed their enterprise motion. PGA Tour became an early believer, understanding VRM intuitively because relationships were core to their business. “They start relationships, you know, when someone’s a kid all the way through to where they’re, you know, golfing in their 80s and 90s. And so they have a long view on relationship,” Dan explains.

More logos followed. NBC Universal. Paramount. CBS. Gannett. News Corp. The publishers who would define the next decade of digital media were building their future on Admiral’s platform.

The Winners and Losers of the Next Decade

Dan has a clear prediction about which publishers will survive the privacy-first internet: “The sites that are going to be the winners, they’re going to look a lot like, you know, registered relationship based sites instead of transient, you know, viral sites hoping for traffic hits.”

The contrast is already playing out. Publishers like Vice and BuzzFeed, who built their models on viral social distribution, have struggled as platforms changed algorithms and business models. Meanwhile, The New York Times and Washington Post, who invested in direct subscriber relationships, have thrived.

The difference comes down to control. “If you built your model on viral social content and you had no sort of relationship with the visitor, you were just hoping that you were gonna always gonna get viral clicks from Twitter or Facebook and all of a sudden that changes, or you thought you were always gonna get search traffic from Google and that changes. Well then absolutely, you will have a rollercoaster ride of fortunes because you don’t control your most valuable asset, which is the visitors,” Dan explains.

Admiral’s vision is to help every publisher build that control through sophisticated relationship management.

The AI-Powered Future

Dan’s vision for Admiral’s future reveals ambitions beyond just being a tool—they want to become the automated relationship engine for the entire internet.

“What we haven’t done is unleashed 100% automation in it. And so this is some of the AI investments we’ve been making so that it’s no longer about what do I want to do with a given kind offer or with a given kind of visitor, or for this segment or this geo, but rather push the easy button and the journey system will take care of it,” Dan explains.

The AI layer will automatically optimize visitor journeys based on conversion propensity, lifetime value predictions, and relationship stage. Publishers will simply tell Admiral their goals—maximize email captures, increase subscriptions, boost ad revenue—and the system will orchestrate the optimal journey for each visitor.

This vision transforms VRM from a tool into an autonomous system. A visitor likely to subscribe gets one experience. Someone who’ll never pay but might provide an email address gets another. The AI determines the optimal ask for each moment, each visitor, each goal.

The foundation is already in place. That single tag tracking every visitor interaction is the data layer that makes sophisticated AI optimization possible. The modular architecture means Admiral can test and learn across millions of visitor journeys simultaneously.

“The journey system will take care of it. Just tell us what the goals are. The goals, maximum relationship, right, is that, you know, you’re getting email addresses, you’re getting ad blockers off, you’re getting subscribers, you’re getting privacy consent, you’re getting first party data and then our system will do it for you automatically,” Dan explains.

This is Admiral’s bet on the future: as the internet becomes more privacy-focused and relationship-dependent, publishers will need increasingly sophisticated tools to maximize the value of every visitor interaction. The winners will be those who can orchestrate complex, personalized journeys at scale—something humans can’t do manually but AI can optimize automatically.

From spotting a disruption wave to building the relationship layer for the privacy-first internet to unleashing AI-powered journey optimization—Admiral’s story is about seeing where the puck is going and building the infrastructure to get there first.