The Channel Company CEO Matt Yorke Inducted Into Folio Legends Hall Of Fame

‘It’s a tremendous honor to be recognized in this way, but really it just comes from being lucky enough to work with a lot of talented people over my career,’ says The Channel Company CEO Matt Yorke.

The Channel Company CEO Matt Yorke, a 32-year media veteran who has been the driving force behind multiple publishing company transformations, has been inducted into the inaugural Folio Legends Hall of Fame.

The award, which recognizes “decades of experience working at the intersection of media, marketing and technology,” was presented to Yorke at the Folio Eddie and Ozzie media awards gala on Oct. 6 in New York.

“It’s a tremendous honor to be recognized in this way, but really it just comes from being lucky enough to work with a lot of talented people over my career,” Yorke told CRN. “I was schooled in the culture of people and the value of creating empowered employees and a decentralized culture. … As we move into this next era, it’s my job and the job of the leadership team to make sure that we’re giving people those tools and that environment to feel empowered and to build the next 20, 30 years of their careers.”

Since taking the helm of The Channel Company, the parent of CRN, in January 2024, Yorke has overseen a global expansion that includes the launch of new publications and events in Australia, Latin America and Germany, with more to come.

In addition to the global push, Yorke said one of his proudest accomplishments so far is creating the world’s largest marketing services agency for The Channel Company customers.

“It’s a great, big world out there,” he said. “All of our customers are global to one extent or another. We have really powerful brands that move across geographies very well. I would argue that CRN is not just the most powerful brand in the channel, but I think it’s the most powerful brand in B2B [business-to-business] technology media. That gives us a bit of an unfair advantage.”

Previously, Yorke, a 17-year veteran of publishing giant IDG and the former chief revenue officer of Foundry, drove a massive global digital transformation of the IDG global business that led to the creation of its fast-growth global Foundry B2B marketing services platform, which was sold to a private equity firm in March. He received Foundry’s highest award for Outstanding Business Performance in 2021.

Yorke was also previously chief digital officer for B2B information and marketing solutions company Northstar Travel Group and chief marketing officer of Source Media, a digital business information and performance media company serving senior-level professionals in the financial, technology and health-care sectors.

Yorke is one of 55 inaugural Folio Legends Hall of Fame honorees, which also include Vox Media co-founder, Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff, EndeavorB2B founder and CEO Chris Ferrell and Jay Penske, CEO of Penske Media.

Yorke, who also received a Folio Industry Pioneer award in 2017 and a Folio C-Level Visionary award in 2011, said receiving the Legends Hall of Fame award is a special moment in his career. “There are some really very accomplished people in this class,” he said. “I’m in very, very good company indeed.”

Stephanie Cronk, brand director for 50-plus-year-old Folio, told CRN that Yorke was selected because of his leadership over the years in digital transformation and revenue growth plus the work he is doing to evolve The Channel Company. “He’s made a huge, huge impact in the industry,” Cronk said. “He is also well respected.”

In addition to Yorke’s Hall of Fame induction, CRN won multiple 2025 Folio Eddie editorial awards, including in the B2B analysis category for “The Rise Of Nvidia, The Fall Of Intel,” written by Dylan Martin, and in the B2B profile or Q&A category for “WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh: ‘We Are An AI-First Company,’” written by Mark Haranas. CRN also won in the B2B Supplemental, Annual or One Shot category for its October 2024 AI special issue.

‘A Growth Mindset’

Kumaran Ramanathan, the former president of Foundry and IDG Global Solutions who has known Yorke for three decades, said the seasoned technology publishing veteran has a growth mindset that doesn’t settle for the status quo.

“He’s an innovator,” said Ramanathan. “He can execute. He can take it out to customers and monetize. But also, he can carry an organization through that change. And I’ve seen that firsthand.”

Ramanathan, who is a member of The Channel Company’s Board of Directors, said he has always admired Yorke’s international expertise, his ability to listen and take feedback, his insatiable appetite for innovation, and his high level of curiosity about new technologies and how they change the world.

“His experience across the C-suite, it always feels like everything’s been leading to this job [as CEO of The Channel Company],” Ramanathan said. “He has run digital transformation. He’s been a CRO. He’s been a CMO. He’s been a chief development officer of a global agency network. All of those experiences really set him up for this leadership job.”

Yorke said that becoming CEO of The Channel Company “is the ultimate highlight.”

“It’s an incredible privilege to lead this organization and to work with such amazing people and with such great brands,” he said. “I’m a huge believer in the power of brands and what they mean to the market.”

Looking ahead, Yorke promises more The Channel Company brands in more markets and more career growth opportunities for his employees.

The Channel Company board member Ramanathan said that the company’s international expansion is in direct response to feedback from customers and partners that need assistance in global go-to-market. Yorke and his team’s expertise in growing internationally and understanding the nuances of individual markets is a differentiator from other companies that merely open a field office, he said.

“We’re in Southeast Asia, we’re in Australia, we’re in [Latin America], and then we’re leading with our events, with our websites, with our community, our media, our journalists,” Ramanathan said. “Running a big media organization, you’ve got to have first-class editors, journalists, contributors. Without that, you don’t have anything, you don’t have any depth to your story. Matt gets that. He’s put his money where his mouth is.”

Since taking the helm of The Channel Company, Yorke has aligned its various divisions and stakeholders under a unified culture and strategy, Ramanathan said. The Channel Company succeeding is good news for the overall channel because of the value brought by its events, research, news articles, communities, go-to-market services and more, he said.

“It’s a really important thing for the wider channel ecosystem to have a strong, independent player,” said Ramanathan. “We’re doubling down on being at the heart of the channel.”

Embracing AI

The Channel Company is also embracing AI as a means of giving readers and customers enhanced access to the company’s deep well of channel knowledge. CRN Answers, a GenAI-based search and discovery tool, launched in June to provide the ability to get answers to the ecosystem’s most pressing channel and technology questions based on the latest CRN stories as well as decades of historical content. Inside The Channel Company, teams in sales, research and elsewhere are leveraging AI tools for better analytics, proposal generation and more, Yorke said.

The Channel Company’s AI journey has parallels with the journeys of the MSPs, VARs, systems integrators and IT vendors that make up its audience, albeit at different scales, Yorke said. The Channel Company’s events have served as venues for partners and vendors to discuss successes and experiences with new AI technology.

“There’s a lot of education that’s having to come up and down the stack—from the vendors through to the MSPs and the partners—to help businesses understand what AI represents as an opportunity, but [also] how you implement an AI strategy and what those steps look like,” he said.

Yorke said his experience leading media businesses through technology shifts of print-to-digital, the embrace of mobile and smartphone technology, and the proliferation of cloud computing have helped prepare him for the AI era, he said.

“These waves are inexorable,” Yorke said. “Once they reach a certain velocity, there is no going back. You cannot take the view that that they won’t impact us. It’s just a question of how quick.”