At his SXSWi session, Ben Lerer, the co-founder & CEO of Thrillist Media Group, has introduced this new concept and talked about why advertising isn’t the answer to the future success of media companies. Thrillist started six years ago as a men’s lifestyle guide and has since built a commerce business at the back of it, leading the charge in mingling content and commerce. Lerer believes he will make more than $100 million in revenues this year (and yes, $1 billion in the near future).

But how? The model is simple, says Lerer: turning readers into buyers and buyers into readers. For years, Thrillist had built a big audience of men who trusted them, took their recommendations to heart and most importantly - acted upon them. Thrillist would tell their readers about shoes and they would leave the site to go somewhere else to buy them. They knew they were driving business to retail sites and influencing the readers’ behaviors and that’s how the idea was born: become a media business with brands paying to get access to their readers but also driving purchases to themselves.

In 2010, the company bought JackThreads, a flash sales website focusing on men’s fashion, and by adding context to the products through content delivered to their trusted audience, they increased sales from $5 million/year to a forecasted $100 million this year.

Key challenge of this model – how to recommend products while not screwing up the trust your readers have with your company? The answer is quality. And data. As long as the products Thrillist sells are exclusive and of really good quality and robust data is used to monitor the response of the audience, the future of the company is bright.

The content and commerce cronut is still in its toddler phase but as there is a limit as to how big a media organization can get when relying on advertising, subscription, licensing and events, it might just be the next big thing the media industry needs to look into and consider in order to make the big bucks.