Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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When a media company tries to become a platform company

The media company Workweek has a Puck-like business model, partnering with a small group of B2B creators and providing them with marketing, technical, and even financial support to help them grow faster than they could on a platform like Substack. According to Adweek, “two of its top creators are banking over seven figures in revenue per year, while others can make five figures annually with just one send per week.” Much of its revenue comes from high-CPM sponsorships.

Now it just raised a new funding round that will allow it to offer its publishing platform to B2B creators outside of its core network — essentially making it a competitor to companies like Substack and Beehiiv. It’s unclear though what monetization features new creators will have access to. Will Workweek sell advertising for them? If so, how does it maintain quality control if anyone can join its network? [Adweek]

After I posted about this on social media, Mike Madarasz, Workweek’s VP of marketing, chimed in with a clarification. I’m keeping my original language above so that his clarification makes sense:

Hey Simon, just wanted to fact check you on the last part. Our communities are application-only, so only those who are verified in certain industries with certain seniority are full members. The acceptance is actually less than 50% in most cases.

Workweek founder Adam Ryan also chimed in:

Big fan of your work, but this is wrong analysis. You have to apply to every network. Our acceptance rate is 28% across the 5 networks … The gate of membership and verification is what makes it all work.

So basically, if I understand them correctly, Workweek has a vetting process for allowing members of a particular industry into its online communities, and only vetted community members are allowed to launch newsletters on its platform. I’m hoping to have Adam or Mike on the podcast soon so we can dive deeper into how this works.

ICYMI: How a government contractor built a media empire around his niche content

By the time Eric Coffie launched his YouTube channel in 2016, he was already one of the most successful federal government contractors in the US and employed an entire team that specialized in erecting steel buildings. The YouTube channel came out of his frustration of having to repeat the same advice over and over again to those wanting to break into the industry; he figured he could just record some video explainers and send them to people.

But the success of the channel led to him expanding into podcasts, and then before he knew it Eric was operating an entire media company that spanned across video, podcasts, online courses, coaching, events, and even a paid community.

In a recent interview, Eric explained how he found an audience by going extremely niche and why he wants to shut down most of his media revenue streams so he can regrow his contracting business.

Quick hits

The New York Times has a great profile of a once-popular lawncare YouTuber who became an internet villain after filming his daughters in increasingly unhinged videos. As it turned out, there were YouTube representatives behind the scenes who were egging him on, encouraging him to come up with new concepts based on what the platform’s child viewers were clicking on when their parents left them unmonitored. One of his videos reached over 600 million views. [NYT] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

I follow the Creator Economy closely and even I didn’t know most of the people who appear on this Rolling Stone list of the most influential creators. That’s not to demean their accomplishments — but rather to demonstrate how diverse and varied the Creator Economy truly is. Someone can have 5 million followers while remaining virtually unknown outside that group. [Rolling Stone]

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Why fashion influencers love tennis

2. Text-based reporters are being pulled into publishers’ video strategies.

3. The problem with media outlets adopting AI disclosure policies

Let’s jump into it…

Why fashion influencers love tennis

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

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In today’s issue, we discuss how Puck will earn its $250 million valuation, why magazines like Slate are commissioning more longform pieces, and how Netflix made documentaries mainstream.

Let’s jump into it…

How does Puck justify its $250 million valuation?

Reuters reported earlier this week that an investment firm is in “advanced talks” to plow money into Puck at a valuation of $250 million. I don’t have the finance chops to really parse whether a particular company is overvalued or undervalued. Too Much TV published a good breakdown of how Redbird Capital might be approaching this deal.

What I do know is that $250 million is much higher than its $70 million valuation in 2023 — in fact, it’s roughly what Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post in 2013.

So how can Puck continue to scale so it can justify that valuation? Put another way, how will it deploy the investment capital into its own business?

As I’ve written before, Puck is somewhat unique in how it’s structured. Rather than building out a large newsroom, it goes out and hires veteran reporters across several industries, including Hollywood, traditional media, finance, art, sports, fashion, and AI. Each of these journalists has decades of experience in their respective beats. Puck bundles all their work behind a paywall — meaning a single subscription gets you access to everything — and also gives each of these journalists some equity to incentivize them to stay.

This approach allows Puck to pump out the kinds of industry scoops that drive paid subscriptions and attract high-end advertisers while staying relatively lean. It’s not trying to nurture the careers of entry-level reporters. It’s a very talent-driven model.

So that brings me back to my original question: what’s the scale play here? Is it going to expand into more industries like, say, healthcare and manufacturing, hiring whichever veteran journalists already cover those industries? Or is it going to diversify more into podcasts, video, and live events?

I’m a big fan of Puck — not only do I read its newsletters but also subscribe to multiple podcasts. But I’m also skeptical that its current model can scale that much without becoming unwieldy. In some ways it’s selling scarcity — access to a small club of insidery journalists — and its effort to grow beyond that might dilute its brand.

ICYMI: This local newsletter covering a Dallas suburb has the highest paid conversion rate on Substack

The Coppell Chronicle isn’t your average Substack newsletter. For one, the headlines are incredibly boring. Secondly, there’s really no free version of it, since every issue that’s sent out includes a paywall. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that it’s managed to convert upwards of 40% of its email list into paid subscribers, which is a conversion rate at least 10 times higher than the average Substack newsletter.

What’s more, its owner Dan Koller achieved all this while maintaining his full time job. In a recent interview, Dan explained how he launched the newsletter, why it took off in his Dallas suburb, and whether he thinks other wannabe local news entrepreneurs could copy his model.

Quick hits

Some beauty brands are giving TikTok Shop an exclusive window to sell new products, often hiring influencers to host livestreams on the brands’ official TikTok accounts. A few weeks later, those products are rolled out to more traditional retailers. [Fast Company]

More and more sports leagues are experimenting with allowing individual YouTubers to stream full games on their own channels. It’s an effort to reach audiences beyond the paywalls of traditional broadcasters and attract new fans. [The Athletic]

Want to support my work without becoming a subscriber?

I get it. We’re all succumbing to subscription fatigue, and not everyone is eager to take out their credit card and sign up for yet another monthly payment.

Luckily, there’s another way for you to financially support all the free content I publish in the newsletter and podcast.

I packaged 122 of my media entrepreneur case studies into two ebooks spanning hundreds of pages between them. I’m pretty confident there aren’t any other books on the market that are packed with this many insights for how to build a successful content business.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a YouTuber, podcaster, newsletter writer, or traditional news publisher — you’re going to find strategies here that you can incorporate into your own business.

Here are the books:

1. The Next Media Moguls, Volume 1

2. The Next Media Moguls, Volume 2

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Why media outlets are investing more in longform reporting

2. Netflix transformed the documentary into a booming format

Let’s jump into it…

Why media outlets are investing more in longform reporting

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

In today’s issue, we discuss why musicians like Harry Styles are embracing residencies, whether BuzzFeed was always doomed to fail, why YouTube really wants an Emmy, and the Wall Street Journal’s decision to allow AI-written op-eds.

Let’s jump into it…

Why the biggest musicians are embracing residencies

The New York Times reports that famous musicians are increasingly turning to residencies, where they perform dozens of shows at a single venue instead of going on tour.

The appeal is easy to understand. Residencies reduce touring costs, are less physically demanding on the artists, and allow them to invest more heavily in elaborate sets and production elements that can make each performance feel like an event.

The tradeoff is that the cost and inconvenience of travel shifts to the fans, who have to make their way to wherever the residency is taking place. [NYT] (I used a gift link so you can access this article for free.)

Was BuzzFeed always doomed to fail?

There was a time when HuffPost and BuzzFeed looked like the future of digital media. Both mastered the mechanics of internet distribution, attracted enormous audiences, and convinced investors that scale itself could become a durable competitive advantage. So how did two of the defining brands of the digital-media era end up shrinking so dramatically? Was the underlying business model always flawed, or did a series of strategic mistakes — from costly acquisitions to overreliance on platforms like Facebook — turn these promising companies into cautionary tales?

To help answer these questions, I spoke with Jason Krebs, a longtime media executive who has worked at some of the industry’s biggest companies, including Google, Disney, The New York Times, and Condé Nast. He’s spent decades watching media business models rise and fall, which makes him an especially useful person to talk to about an industry that keeps cycling through new approaches to distribution and scale.

We also discussed two very different approaches to building subscription businesses. Jason weighed in on The New York Times’ experiment with an AI chatbot trained on its own archives and whether the reputational risks are worth it. And we dug into MS NOW’s new subscription product, debating whether personality-driven hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes can convert their audiences into paying members.

Check out the discussion on YouTube. Or you can subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. [Apple] [Spotify]

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Why does YouTube want to win an Emmy so badly?

2. It’s pointless for media companies to police AI use

Let’s jump into it…

Why does YouTube want to win an Emmy so badly?

Read more

Jomboy Media began with a simple premise: build an audience first and figure out the business model later.

In 2017, Jimmy O’Brien was a Yankees fan living in California who wanted more people to talk baseball with. He started building an audience on Twitter, launched the Talkin’ Yanks podcast with his best friend Jake Storiale, and soon received a $20,000 investment from a friend that allowed him to quit his job. Another $20,000 followed when Storiale joined full time. There was no elaborate monetization strategy. As Jomboy Media CEO Courtney Hirsch put it, the bet was that “if they built a community, built an audience, that we would figure out how to make money later.”

That bet worked. What started as a Yankees podcast eventually grew into a sports media company with more than 20 channels, 14 full-time creators, roughly 60 employees, an in-house advertising operation, and an original sports franchise called Warehouse Games. Hirsch, who joined in late 2020 to build the company’s sales operation, has helped oversee much of that transformation. Now Jomboy is entering another phase. It is trying to reduce its dependence on advertising by investing in businesses it can own more completely, from apparel to original sports IP. Along the way, it has developed a playbook for how creator-led companies can scale without abandoning the personalities that made them successful in the first place.

In a recent interview, Hirsch explained why the company now builds around creators rather than individual shows, how Warehouse Games could evolve into a major entertainment franchise built on IP Jomboy owns outright, and why she believes apparel could become one of the company’s biggest businesses.

You can check out the interview on YouTube or subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. [Apple] [Spotify]

Or you can simply keep scrolling to read the key insights from our discussion.

Let’s jump into it…

Turning viral baseball videos into a national brand

Jomboy Media’s first major breakthrough came from something that was initially supposed to be marketing for its podcast.

O’Brien had already built a loyal Yankees following by obsessively participating in the online baseball conversation. He replied to reporters, published postgame recaps after virtually every Yankees game, and maintained a relentless content schedule. “The consistency and the volume of content that he was putting out made it almost impossible for him not to find a Yankee audience,” Hirsch said.

But Twitter and podcasting only took the company so far. After O’Brien began publishing his baseball breakdown videos on YouTube, Jomboy suddenly had a product capable of reaching far beyond New York.

The videos were distinctive because they weren’t merely highlights. O’Brien would slow down footage, lip-read players and managers, explain obscure bits of strategy, and turn small moments into stories. One of his videos helped audiences understand the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal by visually illustrating how the team used banging sounds to communicate pitches. Another famous clip focused on Yankees manager Aaron Boone’s “savages in the box” rant.

Some breakdowns eventually attracted more than a million views apiece. A format that had started as promotion for Talkin’ Yanks became a media franchise of its own.

The importance of that shift went beyond audience size. Jomboy was no longer merely a local Yankees podcast. It was producing baseball content that could travel nationally, which in turn attracted national advertisers like SeatGeek and DraftKings.

At the same time, YouTube and Facebook were still throwing off meaningful programmatic revenue. That money allowed the founders to hire editors and producers without first building a large sales organization. The platforms effectively financed the company’s earliest expansion.

But platform revenue alone wasn’t going to build the business Jomboy wanted to become.

Building the sales machine

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

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Let’s jump into it…

What was the point of BuzzFeed’s HuffPost acquisition?

From the Wrap:

HuffPost’s National desk has been reduced to three reporters as BuzzFeed’s latest round of layoffs took effect Monday. Management laid off 10 members of the HuffPost Union in total.

Jessica Schulberg, who was laid off after 11 years at the publication, said on X that the desk had seven reporters before Monday’s cuts. It had already been reduced from 14 reporters to seven just over a year ago.

Who’s old enough to remember when there were serious discussions in journalism circles about whether HuffPost might one day supplant The New York Times as the world’s largest and most influential news outlet? This was, after all, a news organization that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

There was never much strategic logic behind BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost, and the resources it spent buying both HuffPost and Complex Networks arguably hastened the demise of BuzzFeed News, which at the time employed some incredible journalists and had built a genuinely strong news brand.

If I were ranking Jonah Peretti’s biggest mistakes, not selling to Disney when he had the chance would be at the top of the list. Right below it would be saddling the company with enormous debt and an even higher burn rate after the venture capital spigot had already been turned off. The HuffPost and Complex acquisitions helped push BuzzFeed into a debt spiral it never managed to escape.

As a side note, while writing this I went to look up old pieces arguing that HuffPost represented the future of journalism and came across this gem from financial journalist Felix Salmon. Not only does it argue that HuffPost will eventually surpass the New York Times as a business, but also that the latter’s paywall will ultimately fail. Here’s the final paragraph:

Rather than learning from or trying to emulate HuffPo’s hugely valuable editorial technology, then, the NYT is sticking its head in the sand and retreating to a defensive stance of trying to make as much money as possible from its core of loyal readers. There’s no growth in such a strategy. Indeed, the opposite is true: the NYT is making it both hard and expensive to become a core, loyal reader. Meanwhile, the open web will become ever more accessible and social, with friends pointing friends to news in a site-agnostic manner. The NYT is distancing itself from that conversation, standing proud and aloof. It’s a strategy which is doomed to fail.

Prescient!

ICYMI: This former Amazon executive generates over $200,000 from a newsletter he sends just once a week

If you ask Dave Anderson what he does for a living, he’ll probably tell you he’s retired, but that’s not entirely true. While he did leave his last full-time job at Amazon back in 2020, he still writes a weekly newsletter on Substack about tech leadership. And even though he only works on the newsletter part time, it currently has over 2,000 paid subscribers. It turns out a lot of people want to tap into his insights gleaned from 20 years working in the tech industry, including over 10 at Amazon.

In a recent interview, Dave discussed the newsletter’s origin story, how it found its audience, and why he doesn’t have any ambitions to scale it into a larger media company.

Why do media conglomerates keep avoiding bundle economics?

From Adweek:

MS NOW has unveiled its newest direct-to-consumer product, Membership, which the network says is an additive experience to its already existing television and digital offerings …

Launching on Wednesday, Sept. 9, MS NOW Membership will be available for $7.99 per month or $79.99 annually, with an introductory annual offer of $39.99 running from launch till Sept. 30. This DTC product will offer new opportunities for the network’s members to interact directly with the brand’s trusted journalists, exclusive community features to engage with each other, a new roster of contributors and experts, original creator content, new verticals that explore how news and politics impact everyday life, and 24/7 access to live streams and television programming.

Overall, I’m fairly bearish on this subscription offering.

The one thing MS NOW has going for it is that it’s very talent-forward, with a strong emphasis on hosts who have distinct points of view. Personalities like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes have built strong parasocial relationships with their audiences, and those kinds of connections can be especially valuable when trying to convert viewers into paid subscribers.

That being said, MS NOW doesn’t have a large newsgathering operation, especially after its corporate split from NBC News, which had traditionally handled more conventional reporting. Without the ability to regularly break news, MS NOW will probably struggle to expand its subscription base much beyond its most devoted fans.

What’s perhaps most perplexing, though, is why media conglomerates like Versant refuse to take greater advantage of bundle economics. The company owns several channels focused on nonfiction programming — including CNBC, Golf Channel, and Oxygen — yet it has never pursued a unified subscription strategy that could help those brands cross-pollinate their audiences.

Instead, media conglomerates often allow their channels to operate as separate fiefdoms, each wasting resources building its own digital business. The audiences for MS NOW, CNBC, and Golf Channel certainly don’t overlap perfectly, but they don’t have to. Combining them could still create meaningful subscription synergies. In fact, those kinds of economics are a big part of what made the cable bundle so profitable in the first place!

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. X hasn’t won over many mainstream creators

2. The difficulty of converting shortform video viewers into longform video viewers

Let’s jump into it…

X hasn’t won over many mainstream creators

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

Should Netflix start licensing music videos?

That’s the interesting question contemplated in this Trapital post:

Netflix’s biggest competitor is now YouTube. Netflix’s push into video podcasts reflects that. But according to Omdia, video podcasts account for just 6% of YouTube watch time. Meanwhile, music videos account for 33%! All those video podcasts are a drop in the bucket compared to music videos. It’s hard to meaningfully compete with YouTube for viewing time without also having access to one of YouTube’s biggest categories.

Of course, the big unknown here is how Netflix could actually pay for all this music content. The large music streaming platforms like YouTube and Spotify pool all their advertising and subscription revenue and then funnel a substantial portion of it to music rights holders. This wouldn’t really work for Netflix’s current model, since most of its subscription revenue is already allocated to its TV and film content.

Here’s how it could maybe work: Netflix would add a music library and then monetize it with advertising — which will appear before and after music videos regardless of whether you’re signed up for Netflix’s ad-free tier. Then if you want to remove the ads, you have to sign up for an extra premium music tier.

Other streaming platforms carve out music tiers in a similar way. For instance, with YouTube you can either sign up for YouTube Premium or YouTube Premium Lite. If you go for the latter, you get all ads removed except whenever you’re viewing licensed music.

Spotify does something like this for audiobook subscriptions. If you’re simply signed up for a free Spotify account, you don’t have access to audiobooks, but a Spotify Premium account gets you access to 15 hours of audiobook listening. But if you want more audiobook listening hours, then Spotify offers a separate add-on subscription.

Assuming the music labels go for this sort of arrangement — and they probably would — then Netflix could significantly expand its library without eating much into its current content spend.

ICYMI: Why a marketing consultant bought the largest real estate trade magazine in Canada

Andrew Fogliato never set out to be a marketing consultant. He was simply trying to succeed as a real estate agent and began creating local online content to promote his listings. His colleagues at RE/MAX quickly noticed that his marketing savvy gave him an edge, and soon he was training other agents across Canada. Eventually, he left RE/MAX to launch his own marketing agency, where he built a strong business helping agents run Facebook ads.

In 2022, Andrew saw an even bigger opportunity. He purchased Real Estate Magazine, Canada’s largest industry trade publication, and immediately began expanding its online presence. In a recent interview, he discussed why he bought the magazine, his approach to monetization, and why he isn’t in a hurry to expand into the U.S. market.

Why does LA deserve to control all of entertainment?

Politico published a long piece on how states across the country are trying to lure film and TV productions, usually through a mix of tax incentives. California, meanwhile, is responding with subsidies and tax breaks of its own in an effort to bring those productions back. [Politico]

I should start by saying that I’m generally opposed to large corporations pitting states against one another to extract tax breaks. Studies consistently find that these incentives often fail to generate enough economic activity to offset the lost tax revenue, creating a race to the bottom in which states give away more and more just to stay competitive.

That said, I’m a little perplexed by the way large portions of the creative community treat the migration of productions out of Los Angeles as inherently bad. One of the biggest benefits of the Creator Economy is that it has democratized content production, allowing virtually anyone to pursue a creative career. You no longer need to live within a 30-mile radius of New York or LA to make content that reaches millions of people.

Spreading film and TV production across the country only extends that democratizing effect. People who don’t have the resources, connections, or ability to uproot their lives and move to California can gain access to an industry that, for decades, was largely closed off to them.

What makes the anxiety over productions leaving LA especially strange is how it contrasts with the current handwringing over so many journalism jobs being concentrated in New York City. In that case, geographic concentration is widely treated as a problem. There’s an active conversation within journalism about supporting news organizations outside New York so audiences are exposed to a broader range of perspectives and experiences.

So why wouldn’t we apply the same logic to Hollywood?

Every creator’s nightmare

This is every creator’s nightmare: an apparent automation error wipes out an entire YouTube channel, leaving its owner with virtually no recourse beyond launching a petition and hoping an actual human at YouTube sees it and intervenes. [Change.org]

Obviously, this is why creators diversify their distribution and try to build their businesses on platforms they control. But YouTube is still the largest video platform in the world, and there’s only so much creators can do to protect themselves from a catastrophe like this.

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Every streaming company suddenly wants to become a marketplace

2. Media companies probably shouldn’t launch their own AI chatbots

3. Kids’ summer camps are attracting up-and-coming musicians

Let’s jump into it…

Every streaming company suddenly wants to become a marketplace

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

Why YouTube pivoted back to upfront creator payments

From Bloomberg:

YouTube is offering millions of dollars to popular channels if they upload their videos to the site exclusively for a certain period of time, in an effort to halt Netflix Inc.’s pursuit of its biggest stars, according to people familiar with the conversations.

The payment would come in a couple of different forms. YouTube has discussed directly financing some programs, and it has also offered to allot a portion of major brand deals to creators. Though YouTube hasn’t finalized deals with any creators, it is close an agreement with several partners, said the people, who declined to be identified because the negotiations are sensitive and ongoing.

This is a pretty big deal considering that YouTube largely abandoned upfront creator payments years ago.

There were two major periods when YouTube offered creators guaranteed payments. The first came during the YouTube Originals era, when the company was funding its own programming as part of an effort to compete more directly with Netflix. YouTube largely wound down that initiative by the early 2020s.

The second came when YouTube paid large, multimillion-dollar guarantees to lure prominent live gaming streamers away from Twitch. That strategy also mostly faded around the same time YouTube pulled back from Originals.

My takeaway from these moves was that YouTube eventually figured out that its more straightforward revenue share program provided the right mix of incentives to keep creators happy. I think its executives also calculated that any major creator defection would just lead to a bunch of smaller YouTubers rushing in to take their place.

Clearly, though, YouTube has been spooked by the recent deals being struck by companies like Netflix, Disney, and Paramount. My guess is that YouTube worries the major streamers will start treating it as a farm system — letting the platform launch the careers of up-and-coming creators, then swooping in once those creators reach their maximum monetization potential.

If YouTube were only going head to head with Netflix, it probably wouldn’t be too worried. But now that every major media conglomerate is opening its checkbook, there are billions of dollars in content budgets competing for talent. And while YouTube benefits enormously from its millions of niche channels, it still needs its biggest stars to attract blue-chip brands that spend heavily on TV advertising.

ICYMI: How a professional sailing league built massive reach on YouTube and social media

SailGP is only a little over five years old, and yet the competitive sailing league has already built out a substantial fan base all across the world. Not only are its competitions broadcast on linear TV channels, it also produces an impressive amount of content that includes YouTube videos, social media clips, and podcasts. In 2022, it hired Melissa Lawton, a longtime sports broadcast producer, to run its content operations, and she’s invested heavily in everything from live streaming to highly-produced docuseries.

In a recent interview, Melissa explained how SailGP’s media operations fit within its larger business and walked through her team’s approach to producing both shortform and longform content.

Should the book industry ban AI writing?

Over the past year, book publishers have repeatedly found themselves caught in controversies over authors’ use of AI. Social media sleuths run books through AI-detection tools, accusations start flying, and in some cases publishers cancel a book’s publication altogether. But how much should readers actually care if an author uses AI for research, editing, or polishing prose? And are publishers genuinely concerned about the technology, or are they simply trying to avoid the backlash that comes with it?

To talk through those questions, I spoke with media veteran Jason Krebs, whose career has spanned some of the industry’s biggest companies and smallest startups. He’s worked across media, advertising, and content at companies including Google, Disney, The New York Times, and Condé Nast.

We also spent a large portion of the conversation digging into YouTube’s evolving strategy. The platform is making it harder for smaller creators to qualify for ad revenue, setting an especially high bar for Shorts monetization, and increasingly positioning itself as a competitor to traditional television and streaming services. Jason and I debated what these moves say about YouTube’s advertising ambitions, why Shorts may function more as a hedge against TikTok than a standalone creator business, and what happens as YouTube and Netflix increasingly encroach on each other’s turf.

Check out the discussion on YouTube. Or you can subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. [Apple] [Spotify]

Is Patreon actually helping creators find new audiences?

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

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Let’s jump into it…

Was Amazon the actual winner of the streaming wars?

While Netflix continues to duke it out with YouTube, and streamers like Paramount and Peacock fight over the leftover scraps, Amazon is quietly capturing a larger and larger share of the streaming market.

From Puck:

Prime Video Channels is now responsible for nearly 70 percent of all subscriptions to specialty premium streaming platforms—e.g., Crunchyroll, Acorn TV, Shudder, etcetera. (Note that the category doesn’t include non-specialty subs like HBO Max, Paramount, and Peacock. Disney+ and Netflix aren’t available through Prime.) Furthermore, about 20 percent of customers who sign up for any streaming service via Prime Video Channels sign up for another service within six months.

It still invests heavily in original programming, occasionally producing hits like Reacher and Project Hail Mary. But increasingly, that programming functions almost like a loss leader: It gets customers in the door, then encourages them to subscribe to other streaming services like HBO Max and Paramount+ through Amazon’s platform. Throw in the fact that Fire OS comes pre-installed on a significant share of new TVs, and Amazon’s ultimate endgame becomes pretty clear. As Puck’s Julia Alexander puts it, “Prime Video is finally becoming the Amazon of streaming.”

Amazon has also created tremendous user lock-in by bundling its streaming service with Prime’s delivery benefits. That allows many consumers to think of Prime Video as essentially a free add-on to a membership they were already paying for.

Then there was its savvy decision to automatically move subscribers onto an ad-supported tier. That sucked from a customer perspective, but most people begrudgingly went along with it. In the process, Amazon created a massive new pool of ad inventory for its already-booming advertising business.

So while other streamers continue competing by spending more and more on content, Amazon is turning itself into a marketplace for everyone else’s content. That reduces the pressure to outspend Netflix while giving Amazon a cut of an ever-larger portion of the streaming economy.

(I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

ICYMI: This Stanford lecturer co-hosts one of the most popular design podcasts

When Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter launched the Design Better podcast, they did it on behalf of InVision, a tech platform used by designers and other creatives. Aaron was the head of content at the company, and the goal of the podcast was to educate the designer community while also raising awareness of the InVision brand.

But when InVision decided to wind down its content operations, Eli and Aarron negotiated to take over Design Better, and now it’s a thriving standalone business. In a recent interview, Eli talked through everything from the evolving format of the show to how it became an independent media business to its current monetization models.

Gmail agrees to allow politicians to harass its users

From the NYT:

Google quietly rolled out a new program on Monday that will allow candidates, political parties and political action committees to more easily bypass Gmail’s spam filter and send fund-raising appeals to the inboxes of the company’s many millions of email users.

The change comes after years of complaints from Republicans that Gmail’s spam algorithm unfairly blocked their committees’ emails more than those of their Democratic counterparts, although those complaints were dismissed in court. For campaigns and PACs that meet the terms of the program, it is expected to route an influx of cash solicitations into Gmail inboxes, helping campaigns raise millions of dollars more in the final sprint to the midterm elections.

This indisputably sucks. Nearly all campaign fundraising emails are unsolicited, and they’re enabled by unethical data brokers that make it incredibly difficult to opt out of their databases. It’s pretty much the textbook definition of spam. Every day, millions of Americans are inundated with fundraising emails and text messages, and the problem seems to get worse with every election cycle. It’s disheartening to see Gmail bow to political pressure rather than take a stand against such an abusive industry. The same goes for the major phone carriers, which allow campaigns to bombard their customers with texts multiple times a day.

This is precisely why I stopped donating to political campaigns years ago. There’s been extensive reporting that Democratic leaders have explicitly endorsed these aggressive fundraising tactics. Donating simply ensures that you’ll be put on a list of targets that every campaign, no matter how small, has access to.

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. How 60 Minutes is being transformed by Bari Weiss

2. Puck’s talent-forward strategy continues to pay off

Let’s jump into it…

How 60 Minutes is being transformed by Bari Weiss

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For decades, micropayments have occupied a strange place in the publishing industry. The idea has always sounded appealing: instead of forcing every reader to buy a recurring subscription, allow them to pay a few dollars to read a single article or gain temporary access. Yet most experiments never gained much traction. Payment friction was too high, the economics were questionable, and publishers worried that cheaper alternatives would cannibalize their subscription businesses.

The Washington Post decided to revisit that assumption in 2024. Rather than simply adding a pay-per-article button to its paywall, the company spent the next two years running more than 30 tests across pricing, products, audiences, and distribution channels. The result was a flexible-access strategy built around a counterintuitive idea: micropayments work best not as an alternative to subscriptions, but as another step toward them. The Post found that the right short-term offers could attract readers who otherwise would have paid nothing, while also increasing subscription conversion and retention.

The experimentation has been overseen by Anjali Iyer, the Post’s global head of subscription marketing, who came to the newspaper after working in customer loyalty at Marriott and JPMorgan Chase. Her background helped shape the company’s approach. Rather than treating the paywall as a binary choice between free and paid, her team approached it as a customer segmentation problem: different readers have different levels of familiarity, intent, and willingness to commit. Micropayments offered a way to serve the people who fell somewhere in between.

That distinction has implications far beyond the Washington Post. Publishers have spent years trying to maximize the number of visitors who become subscribers. The Post’s experiment suggests there may be another valuable audience sitting just outside the subscription funnel: people willing to pay for journalism, but not yet willing to subscribe.

In a recent interview, Iyer discussed why the Post believes technology has finally made micropayments viable, how it discovered that anonymous visitors are the ideal audience for flexible access, and why offering a cheaper short-term option can actually improve both subscription conversion and retention.

You can check out the interview on YouTube or subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. [Apple] [Spotify]

Or you can simply keep scrolling to read the key insights from our discussion.

Let’s jump into it…

Treating content like a product

Iyer joined the Washington Post in 2022 after spending much of her career outside media. Her team now oversees subscription acquisition, paid media, engagement, retention, product innovation, and marketing operations.

“My job is not focused on how to get a customer in the door for the first time, but really how to keep them, retain them, and more importantly, get them to pay more and more,” she said.

That product mindset is important because publishers have historically placed enormous emphasis on the content itself while sometimes paying less attention to how that content is packaged and sold. Iyer approaches the problem from the opposite direction: start with customer behavior and design the product around it.

Readers now encounter articles through search, social feeds, newsletters, podcasts, AI summaries, and countless other distribution channels. The person landing on a Washington Post article through Google may know little about the publication and have no intention of building a long-term relationship with it.

Yet that same reader might still value the article enough to pay for it.

The Post started researching micropayments in 2024. The history was not encouraging. “There weren’t many success stories for me to pull from,” Iyer said.

But the market had changed since many earlier experiments.

The biggest difference was payment technology. Older micropayment systems often required users to pull out a credit card, enter billing details, and sometimes create an account with a third-party provider. That was an enormous amount of friction for someone who simply wanted to read one article.

Apple Pay and Google Pay largely eliminated that obstacle. “Now you just double click on your phone and you can purchase something,” Iyer said. Consumers had also grown accustomed to buying temporary access elsewhere, whether it was a day pass for a gym or an airline lounge.

The Post’s theory was that willingness to pay had never necessarily been the problem. Commitment was.

Building a ladder of commitment

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The book publishing industry’s AI witch hunts are silly

Over the past year, several book releases have been canceled over suspicions that the authors used AI at some point during the writing process. In many cases, the authors have denied using AI altogether or said they used it only in limited ways, such as for editing or research. That hasn’t stopped publishers from backing down in the face of public outrage. [WSJ] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

I find these public witch hunts silly. Any book released by a major publisher has already gone through some level of vetting and editing that should speak to its quality. And if the book is bad, the publisher will presumably be punished with poor sales. Many of these cancellations seem to have little to do with the quality of the work and much more to do with ideology. It reminds me of the period a decade or so ago when YA novels were repeatedly pulled from shelves over dumb controversies whipped up by social media mobs trafficking in manufactured outrage.

What makes this especially silly is that many of the books coming under scrutiny were originally self-published to great success — which means readers had already validated the work before traditional publishers ever got involved.

ICYMI: How a PR consultant launched a thriving tech news outlet

When Kevin Raposo launched KnowTechie in 2014, he had no idea it would grow into a thriving tech news outlet — he just wanted journalists to answer his emails. He was working as a PR consultant and figured reporters would be more receptive to his pitches if they considered him to be one of their peers.

But after three years of running the site, its audience blew up, and Kevin was able to hire several writers to expand its coverage. And while the rise of generative AI has eaten into its traffic, KnowTechie continues to drive meaningful revenue.

In a recent interview, Kevin walked me through his accidental entry into content marketing, his strategy for growing KnowTechie’s audience, and how running the site impacts his day job as a tech PR consultant.

AI-narrated articles are more popular than you realize

You know those play buttons appearing at the top of news articles that will allow you to listen to an AI-generated version? They’re more popular than you probably realize. The New Yorker, for instance, estimates that about 20% of its subscribers regularly listen to narrated stories. And the Wall Street Journal says the function has been used 5 million times in the last year. [CJR]

Those are incredible stats, especially when you consider how easy it is to install these players for every article. That’s some extremely low hanging fruit for publishers that want to get more engagement out of their already-existing audiences.

Currently, the Substack app allows all articles published to the platform to be played in audio form, but I can’t see any breakdown in my backend analytics of whether my followers are utilizing this feature. I’d be interested to know what percentage of the app’s daily users listen to Substack articles and whether those listeners have a higher propensity to convert into paid subscribers.

Semafor became an “anti-scale” company

In the run-up to Semafor’s launch, the company was widely mocked for its stated ambition of serving all college-educated English speakers. But in a recent Verge interview, co-founder Ben Smith said Semafor ultimately embraced what he called an “anti-scale” strategy.

Rather than hire hundreds of reporters, it recruited a small group of veteran journalists to lead individual verticals. Instead of covering everything, it focused on a handful of specialized niches. And while Semafor does sell digital advertising, a significant share of its revenue comes from invite-only events monetized primarily through sponsorships. [The Verge]

Smith’s chief advantage is that he came from a scaled media company: BuzzFeed. He saw firsthand how chasing traffic for traffic’s sake can warp incentives and ultimately put a company on a path toward collapse. BuzzFeed News — the division Smith once ran — was shuttered just months after Semafor launched. I can’t help but wonder whether that closure triggered Semafor’s strategy shift.

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Why video essays keep getting longer and longer

2. Why news aggregators keep outperforming legacy media on social media

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Why YouTube video essays keep getting longer and longer

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Audience inflation keeps getting worse

From the Verge:

YouTube will soon count a view as soon as a video starts to play, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos. The update will go into effect on August 24th, “which means creators will likely see their total view counts increase faster moving forward,” the platform says …

YouTube says it’s going to keep its original view-counting method under an “engaged views” metric in its Analytics dashboard. As my colleague David Pierce notes, it’s not entirely clear how YouTube counted views before this, but “it’s generally accepted wisdom that you have to watch 30 seconds of a standard YouTube video for it to count.”

YouTube’s 30-second rule wasn’t perfect, but it was at least a decent metric to show whether viewers were actually engaged. Now we’re just going to see a huge jump in viewership that will pad every creator’s ego while simultaneously making it harder and harder to gauge the popularity of any media.

It’s not just YouTube where this audience inflation is occurring.

When Apple updated its iOS a few years ago so that it automatically opens every single email in the inbox, it instantly rendered almost every newsletter open rate meaningless. That doesn’t stop newsletter operators today from touting their “40% open rates” as if that number represents an engaged audience. Hell, I don’t even completely trust click-through rates anymore given that a lot of email programs will automatically click on links as a security measure.

Some people might read this and ask, “who cares?” But I think a lot of business KPIs are set to these fake viewership metrics. When Facebook introduced their autoplay videos in the feed, publishers were able to raise tens of millions of dollars from venture capitalists based on the lie that these videos were pulling in huge viewership numbers.

Publishers also like to pretend they no longer care about website pageviews, but they’re still incredibly reliant on programmatic advertising that serves ads based on every individual page load. Never mind that a larger and larger portion of those pageviews are coming from bots.

And sure, any content creator worth their salt is going to utilize multiple metrics to get a better understanding of their true audience size — but most of those metrics are only accessible on the back end. For the rest of the public, they’re only going to see the public view counts on YouTube videos, and those view counts will alter our understanding of what is and isn’t popular.

That being said, I’d be lying if I claimed I’m not sort of looking forward to my own YouTube view counts going up — especially since they’ve been on the lower end lately. I am human, after all.

ICYMI: How two Hollywood writers launched one of the most popular parenting podcasts

By the time Amy Wilson and Margaret Ables came together to launch a parenting podcast in 2016, both had already achieved some mainstream success in traditional Hollywood. Amy landed multiple roles in TV sitcoms and Margaret had worked for several years as a senior writer at Nickelodeon. They teamed up on the podcast, which is called What Fresh Hell, because it offered them more creative freedom and ownership over their work. Within years, advertisers were beating down their door to reach their enormous audience, which mostly consists of moms. In 2022, they leveraged that success to launch Adalyst Media, a podcast network that sells ads for other shows targeting female audiences.

In a recent interview, Amy walked me through why she left traditional Hollywood, their decision to launch a network, and how she thinks the podcast industry will evolve in the coming years.

The Japanese animation studio that rejects innovation

Anime is one of Japan’s largest cultural exports, and much of its global popularity can be traced to Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind some of the medium’s most acclaimed films. Part of what makes Ghibli so beloved is the meticulousness of its animation process, with individual films often taking years to complete. In fact, the studio’s new CEO sees one of his primary responsibilities as protecting that approach from broader industry pressure to innovate and speed up production. “Ghibli is not a company focused primarily on profit,” he said. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.” [Bloomberg]

The long road from publication to movie adaptation

In 2023, WBD CEO David Zaslav drew widespread condemnation from Hollywood after shelving Coyote vs. Acme, even though the film was already mostly completed. It turns out producers had been trying to bring the project to the screen since the 1990s, when humorist Ian Frazier wrote the original story for The New Yorker. The New York Times has a good piece tracing its long journey from magazine story to movie adaptation to, finally, a theatrical release this year. [NYT] (I used a gift link so you can read that article for free.)

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. How Sony became an entertainment juggernaut

2. How studios are actually using AI in their filmmaking

Let’s jump into it…

How Sony became an entertainment juggernaut

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Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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Conde Nast gets into the drop shipping game

Conde Nast soft launched an online retail platform that allows pre-approved influencers to essentially set up their own online storefronts — basically an upscale version of drop shipping. Because sales go through these storefronts, there’s no ambiguity over attribution, and the creator gets a 20% commission. To make the site even more differentiated, the items for sale are curated by Vogue’s fashion director. [Puck] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Honestly, I don’t know why more publishers aren’t setting up their own drop shipping store fronts. Over the past year or two we’ve seen a number of scandals where browser shopping plugins like Honey and Phia have stripped attribution from publisher affiliate links, thereby depriving those publishers of their commissions. A dedicated drop-shipping site is the only way to ensure you get 100% attribution for the sales you drive. Yes, it takes a little extra work than simply grabbing an affiliate link, but the effort is probably worth it for any media outlet that has sufficient scale.

ICYMI: How a former 60 Minutes producer raised six figures to launch a LGBTQ-focused media outlet

Spencer Macnaughton doesn’t believe there’s a lack of LGBTQ-focused journalism in the mainstream media; as a former producer for both 60 Minutes and the Wall Street Journal, he saw a willingness from these outlets to cover anti gay and trans hate movements. He launched Uncloseted Media last year, though, because he thinks there’s a need for more concentrated, investigative reporting on this type of discrimination, and he convinced several wealthy donors to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to help him get it off the ground. Today, it publishes up to two investigative articles per week and has been syndicated by some of the world’s largest media outlets.

The acquisition that fueled Disney’s 21st-century expansion

This piece argues that Disney’s acquisition of ESPN in the 1990s laid the groundwork for it becoming the media behemoth it is today. Basically, ESPN was so profitable at its peak that it allowed Disney to not only acquire Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, but also expand its theme park operations. [WSJ] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Can AI make music creation more accessible?

Bloomberg went deep on Suno, the AI music creation app that already has 2 million subscribers paying $30 a month. Just as the iPhone made photography and filmmaking accessible to the masses, Suno is trying to do the same for music. [Bloomberg] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

As always with these kinds of tools, there’s a raging debate as to whether they hurt a particular industry or aid in its expansion. Suno believes that putting music-making tools in the hands of everyday creators will trigger an explosion of artistic expression. “It’s not going to be AI artists,” said founder Mikey Shulman. “It’s going to be artists who use AI among other things to make their art and reach their fans. There’s going to be people behind everything. I’m quite certain of that.”

Is Axios going all-in on AI?

Among media industry executives, few are more bullish on AI than Axios CEO Jim VandeHei. Not only has Axios signed a licensing deal with OpenAI, but VandeHei is also effusive in his insistence that AI will revolutionize the media industry for the better. “We were early to basically telling our staff that you don’t have a choice. If you’re scared, if you don’t like it, we don’t care—you have to embrace it.” [CJR]

Here’s the thing though: in all my reading on this subject, I haven’t come across many concrete examples of how Axios is using AI at scale. There are references to its reporters getting access to ChatGPT enterprise accounts and being encouraged to use them, but nothing to suggest that the company has been able to 10X its reporting output or anything like that. Earlier this year I interviewed the Axios Local executive editor about the OpenAI investment, and while she listed a few examples of AI use cases — basic copyediting, surfacing potential story ideas — it didn’t seem to me that any of it was particularly game changing.

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. What happens when content collaborators divorce?

2. Why Netflix is investing in so much non-exclusive content

3. The art of the news scoop

Let’s jump into it…

What happens when content collaborators divorce?

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Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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There’s growing tension between the New York Times’s opinion and news desks

CJR reports on how the NYT Opinion section has expanded into more original reporting, a shift that’s rankling news reporters who cover many of the same beats:

At the Times, the liberal tilt of the editorial board has long complicated the work of the paper’s reporters, often on the Politics desk. What has changed lately, though, are the prominence and resources of Opinion in the digital era, as well as the scale of its original reporting, leading to more overlap between the Times’ divisions and, inevitably, more hard feelings. This spring, Nicholas Kristof’s report on Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees set off a major round of recriminations. Newsroom journalists offered anonymous quotes to Puck (“I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section,” an aggrieved Times employee said). Similar blowback greeted an Opinion profile by a freelance contributor, Ankush Khardori, of Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration and senior lawyer at Goldman Sachs, who had refused to talk with the newsroom’s reporters about her friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In both cases, outraged observers have sought to diminish Opinion’s reporting by stoking an abiding misapprehension that its writers do not have to follow the same standards of accuracy as their peers in the newsroom.

I was recently surprised to learn that executive editor Joe Kahn has no sway over the opinion desk; I always assumed someone with that title would oversee all editorial content.

It’s kind of interesting to consider that a news organization can grow so large that it develops its own shadow newsroom, one that operates almost like a completely separate news outlet. So what happens if the Opinion section eventually overtakes the newsroom in influence? Will the two start competing with each other for reporting talent?

ICYMI: How investment newsletter The Daily Upside reached 300,000 subscribers

Founder Patrick Trousdale explained his growth and monetization strategies.

Is Heather Cox Richardson the most popular nonfiction writer alive?

From the Boston Globe:

Letters from an American is the most-read politics newsletter on Substack, according to a dashboard assembled by politics and media writer Kyle Tharp. The competition isn’t even close. Richardson’s estimated 2.9 million readers on Substack are nearly double that of The Free Press, the center-right site founded by Bari Weiss and now owned by CBS. That likely gives her the largest audience for any topic on Substack, and puts her ahead of every newspaper in the country not named The New York Times (13.35 million subscribers) or The Wall Street Journal (4.7 million subscribers).

She’s also third among political Substacks in revenue, behind The Free Press and The Bulwark, a news site launched by “never-Trump” conservatives. That’s impressive given that the top two are full-fledged newsrooms with reporters and editors. It’s extraordinary when you consider that Richardson’s newsletter is free; revenue comes from readers who voluntarily pay for subscriptions (which also gets them the ability to post comments). She declined to provide revenue figures, but hinted that estimates of $5 million in annual Substack income may be low.

$5 million in annual revenue would already put her in the upper echelon of nonfiction writers. But the fact that she generates that much from subscriptions alone, without a paywall or sponsorships, has to put her in the running for the most popular nonfiction writer alive, no?

To generate the equivalent amount from book sales, an author would need to sell roughly 3.8 million copies a year. Individual books certainly reach that level, but it’s rare for an author to sustain that kind of volume year after year. The only comparable example I can think of is James Clear, who reportedly sells more than 4 million copies of Atomic Habits annually.

How AI can monitor live streams for potentially newsworthy content

Wired reports that it was scooped on a major piece of news about the OpenAI hacking by an AI company that monitored the livestream of a cybersecurity conference and quickly published an article about the revelations. The entrepreneur behind the AI site “spotted an OpenAI executive posting about the conference while scrolling on X, then fed the stream’s transcript to his agents while it was still ongoing. Publication took ‘about six minutes’ from the time he sent over the transcript.” [Wired]

I’ve written before about various local newsrooms employing similar tactics for government meetings — feeding the transcripts into an AI and then tasking it with finding newsworthy stories. Given the sheer amount of taped footage that’s out there, there are probably a lot of opportunities for AI to identify stories that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Of course, identifying a story and getting it right are two different things. The publishers I’ve noticed using this as at the local level — outlets like Chalkbeat and Connecticut Public — always have a human in the loop who’s actually responsible for reporting out the story. In those cases, the AI merely alerts the journalists that something newsworthy was discussed.

BTW, after I posted the Wired story to social media, reader Sharon Goldman piped in with this observation:

This was not true, anyway. A human (me!) was in the room for the OpenAI briefing at Black Hat and I had my story up exactly one hour later (at 2:48 pm PT) with more than just the transcript - I also spoke to people in the room after to see what they thought. I was at least neck and neck with the bot, if not ahead. It was also not a surprise briefing - attending media got a heads-up that morning and I had already heard about it the day before. AND the AI newsroom only got access to the briefing because it hacked a QR code through a photo posted on X. Original on-the-ground reporting still matters!

The world’s largest YouTubers use his AI language dubbing platform

Nate Stone was still in high school when he built a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers by filming science and engineering experiments in his garage. But unlike many creators who stumble into a large audience, Stone never had much interest in turning that audience into a full-fledged media business. He eventually walked away from YouTube, studied physics, math, and computer science, worked on AI at Amazon, and then teamed up with his brother to build DittoDub, an AI-powered dubbing platform designed to help YouTubers reach audiences in dozens of languages.

In a recent interview, Stone explained how his frustrations as a teenage YouTuber helped inspire DittoDub, why the company focused on winning over large creators through product quality and word of mouth, and how multilingual audio can trigger enormous audience growth on YouTube.

Check out the interview on YouTube.

If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Has Netflix peaked as a cultural force?

2. Are affiliate platforms helping to build the Creator Economy’s middle class?

Let’s jump into it…

Has Netflix peaked as a cultural force?

Read more

Nate Stone was still in high school when he learned one of the creator economy’s most important lessons: a huge audience does not necessarily make for a satisfying business. At 15, he launched a science and engineering YouTube channel called Keystone Science, eventually attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers with videos about high-voltage electricity and homemade electronics. But as the audience grew, Stone became increasingly frustrated by the demands of feeding the YouTube algorithm. Producing a video every week left little room for the kind of ambitious projects he actually wanted to build. He eventually stopped uploading, studied physics, math, and computer science, and went to work on AI for Amazon’s Alexa team.

That experience eventually led him back to YouTube, only this time as a software founder. In 2022, Stone and his brother began building DittoDub, an AI-powered dubbing platform that helps creators translate their videos into dozens of languages while preserving the original speaker’s voice, emotion, and delivery. What began as a solution to a problem Stone encountered as a teenage creator has since grown into a profitable company used by thousands of YouTube channels, including some of the platform’s largest creators. Along the way, DittoDub has benefited from three major shifts: rapidly improving AI models, YouTube’s embrace of multi-language audio, and the realization among creators that international audiences can dramatically increase the ceiling on their growth.

In a recent interview, Stone explained how his frustrations as a teenage YouTuber helped inspire DittoDub, why the company focused on winning over large creators through product quality and word of mouth, and how multilingual audio can trigger enormous audience growth on YouTube.

Let’s jump into it…

Walking away from the creator treadmill

Stone did not start Keystone Science with a media strategy. He was building electronics projects in his garage, often breaking them in the process, and began filming himself so he could understand what had gone wrong. He uploaded those recordings to YouTube, people began finding them, and the videos gradually evolved into more polished tutorials.

The first six months brought around 10,000 subscribers. Then Stone published a video showing how to build a small electromagnetic pulse device. Over the next few weeks, he gained roughly 100,000 subscribers. Another video involving a handheld microwave device added roughly another 100,000. Stone had stumbled into the kind of viral growth that many aspiring YouTubers spend years chasing.

But he never became particularly interested in the status that came with it. Even receiving YouTube’s creator award for passing 100,000 subscribers failed to mean much to him. “When I got it, it was like, okay, I don’t really care about this at all,” he said. “Since then, it’s just been sitting in a box somewhere.”

More importantly, Stone began to dislike the production cycle required to keep growing. At the time, he felt YouTube rewarded creators who published every week. That rhythm made sense for the platform, but it did not match the kind of work he wanted to do.

“I really can’t make anything good that will actually have an impact on the world within one week,” he recalled thinking. “And so that kind of concept and that cycle started to disenchant me from the whole space.”

Stone chose not to optimize around that system. He gradually stopped publishing and shifted his attention toward machine learning. Around 2020, he worked as an AI engineer on Amazon’s Alexa team while experimenting with AI projects on the side with his brother.

The irony is that his frustration with YouTube eventually became the foundation for a company serving YouTubers.

Turning an old creator problem into a product

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YouTube still wants to prioritize longform video

Yesterday I wrote about YouTube’s announcement that it was doubling the viewership requirements for creators trying to enter its Partner Program. My theory was that the platform wants to create stronger incentives for higher-quality content and deeper engagement.

There’s already been plenty of creator backlash, much of it focused on the new requirement that Shorts creators generate at least 20 million views over 90 days to qualify for revenue sharing. As many have pointed out, that works out to more than 220,000 Shorts views every single day — an incredibly high bar.

My read is that YouTube wants most creators to think of Shorts primarily as a marketing channel for their long-form videos rather than as a standalone business.

YouTube increasingly wants viewing to happen on TVs, where audiences are watching the kind of programming blue-chip advertisers want to buy against. Shorts views, by comparison, are cheap and ephemeral, and the algorithm is relatively easy to game. The ads are also incredibly easy to skip. YouTube needs Shorts to compete with Instagram and TikTok, but its North Star is still long-form video.

Many YouTubers will continue posting Shorts because they’re useful for growing subscriber counts, which can then translate into more views for long-form videos. There’s also anecdotal evidence that a viral Short can give a creator’s long-form content an algorithmic boost.

My final observation is that many Shorts creators already cross-post their vertical videos to Instagram and TikTok, both of which pay creators very little. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people at YouTube looked at that behavior and thought, “Why are we footing the bill when creators don’t seem to care whether the other platforms pay them?”

In fact, I think creators directing their anger at YouTube should aim at least some of it toward TikTok and Instagram. I’m constantly amazed there isn’t more public pressure from the creator community over Instagram’s pathetic revenue-sharing policies, especially when hardly a week goes by without creators loudly complaining about Spotify’s payouts.

YouTube, by the way, pays more to content creators in a single year than Meta has paid out over its entire existence.

What do you think?

(You can automatically see the results when you vote.)

ICYMI: How a former Cosmo editor built Australia’s largest women-focused media company

Mia Freedman started Mamamia as a one-person blog and bootstrapped it into a multi-media outlet that reaches 7 million people.

The corruption happening in plain sight

From WSJ:

President Trump’s media company Monday said more than 10 customers have signed up to a real-time feed of top Truth Social accounts, a product that has drawn criticism that the first family is mixing its business interests and White House affairs.

Trump Media & Technology Group has marketed Truth API as faster access to posts from top accounts on Truth Social, where the president routinely shares updates about trade deals, the Iran war and more.

In Trump Media’s first-ever earnings call on Monday, Interim Chief Executive Kevin McGurn said the early sign-ups comprised primarily high-frequency trading firms paying between $60,000 and $100,000 a month.

I don’t think there’s any way to spin this as anything other than Trump selling access to insider trading opportunities tied to his market-moving Truth Social posts. It’s such blatant corruption happening right out in the open.

(I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Bluesky is losing relevance

A social network that caters to liberals is losing users at a time when Trump’s historically unpopular, all because the people who run the social network are really bad at their jobs. They’ve basically designed an app that has a sucky user experience. [Techcrunch] For those who missed it, I published a detailed critique of Bluesky’s many design flaws last week.

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Should publishers be offering multiple subscription tiers?

2. Social media influencers are bringing tax dodging to the masses

3. Why Roku sold to Fox

Let’s jump into it…

Should publishers be offering multiple subscription tiers?

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Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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Why YouTube is tightening its creator monetization requirements

From Techcrunch:

YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.

Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Currently, creators need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days.

This will probably piss off a lot of YouTubers who were on the verge of qualifying for the Partner Program, but I understand YouTube’s motivation. If it wants to keep growing, it needs to create incentives for higher-quality content that can attract blue-chip advertisers and convert more users into paying Premium subscribers. Raising the watch-time requirements makes it harder for low-quality, spammy accounts to gain traction and start monetizing.

Spammy content creators pose a real threat to any advertising platform. One of the biggest problems facing programmatic ad networks, for instance, is that they often allow in so-called Made for Advertising (MFA) websites — publishers that provide virtually no value and are designed primarily to trick visitors into viewing ads. The media industry loses tens of billions of dollars to MFA sites each year, and I’d argue that this has contributed to brands devoting a smaller and smaller share of their marketing budgets to display advertising.

YouTube wants to avoid this low-quality content death spiral and has the added benefit of controlling every aspect of its content ecosystem, which means it can be more effective at identifying bad actors and tweaking its revenue-sharing metrics to punish them. Overall, I think these changes will be good for the longterm health of YouTube’s monetization program.

ICYMI: How a college student launched one of the most influential B2B sports media companies

Adam White explains how Front Office Sports grew from a college project into a media powerhouse.

Legacy media outlets don’t know how to reward talent

Dave Jorgenson, the Washington Post’s former “TikTok guy” who struck off on his own a year ago, sat down with CJR to discuss how his independent media career is going. He had an interesting answer about what motivated him to launch an independent media venture:

At the Post, a lot of times when you do well, they want to promote you to an editor or manager role, which makes sense because they’re trying to find a way to pay you more. But I was always like, I would love you to pay me more, but I want to keep making things. I don’t want to manage people, necessarily, at least in that capacity. So it’s cool that I get to continue to do that and spend most of my time on the creative process while still having this company that we own.

I think this is a major flaw in how a lot of legacy media outlets operate. They identify their most talented journalists and then move them up to manager and editor roles, regardless of whether they show any aptitude for those jobs. And those journalists go along with it because it’s the only way to get paid more.

A major draw for independent media is you get more directly rewarded for actually creating the content. In fact, a lot of creators that scale up their businesses will hire out the managerial roles rather than assign those roles to themselves. They recognize what does and does not bring them joy and then outsource the latter.

Can fiction succeed on Substack?

MacKenzie Scott, who’s most widely known for divorcing Jeff Bezos and giving away billions to charity, is also a fairly accomplished novelist and has started serializing her latest novel on Substack. [NYT]

She’s not the first to do so — a number of high profile writers have dabbled in serialization on the platform, but I’ve yet to see any huge breakout successes. If you look at the fiction and culture leaderboards on Substack, most of the top bestsellers focus on literary criticism and aren’t publishing much actual fiction. Very few of them have the orange or purple checkmarks that denote at least 1,000 or 10,000 paid subscribers, respectively. Even the bestselling fiction authors on Substack mostly use it to publish essays and other non-fiction musings.

Every few years we get a few trend pieces about how serialized fiction is maybe making a comeback, but if it is succeeding, it’s probably on another platform that I’m only vaguely aware of.

(I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. The magazine company preparing for its post-Google future

2. The sunk cost fallacy comes for David Ellison

Let’s jump into it…

The magazine company preparing for its post-Google future

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

Publishers need to get more comfortable selling in-video sponsorships

Incoming Business Insider CEO Christian Baesler told Press Gazette that he wants to devote more effort to directly monetizing the company’s huge social media accounts:

He cited Business Insider’s more than ten million Youtube subscribers who like its serialised shows such as Risky Business and So Expensive, 11 million Linkedin followers and more than one million subscribers to flagship newsletter Business Insider Today. “That hasn’t been monetised in any meaningful way so far.” …

He explained: “Both at Complex, where I was before, but also at Buzzfeed, the main focus commercially was on the non-website-based platforms, so selling sponsorships on video and integrations, selling branded content on social, events, and more importantly, how do you integrate all these different components?

“So you’re not just selling a sponsorship on Youtube, but really sell something that’s a cross-platform partnership with brands that delivers an audience with a very clear purpose.”

Yep. In general, legacy publishers have been too hesitant to sell sponsorships directly into their social media content. They still view platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube as marketing channels to grow awareness for their brands.

Meanwhile, the Creator Economy has spent the last decade growing social media sponsorships into a market worth tens of billions of dollars. You can’t watch a longform YouTube video these days that doesn’t pause partway through so the YouTuber can thank their sponsor. That’s because brands have noticed that this type of advertising actually works — unlike the terrible programmatic display ads that most mainstream publishers currently lean on for most of their advertising monetization.

ICYMI: How a podcast for entrepreneurial parents generates $200,000 a year

Sarah Peck explains why she didn’t chase scale when building her Startup Parent podcast.

Disney’s streaming strategy has been really lackluster

From Puck:

Disney has basically slashed costs and raised prices to get to profitability. Doesn’t mean there aren’t still a bunch of hits, especially by the company’s standards. High Potential and The Rookie on ABC, Shogun and The Bear on FX/Hulu—and, yes, Murphy’s Love Story—all deliver. But after nearly seven years of Disney+ and almost three years since the company’s deal to take full control of Hulu, the services are still largely used to catch up on linear hits and watch old movies and shows. There’s no platform-defining smash, à la Landman on Paramount+ or Reacher on Prime Video or Love Island on Peacock. Disney stopped reporting subscriber numbers, so we don’t even know if the platforms are growing.

I think these problems really just stem from Disney operating three separate streamers. No single Disney TV series can build momentum because the audience is just too spread out across too many streaming apps. I technically subscribe to the Hulu/Disney+ bundle but I haven’t opened the Disney+ app in ages because there aren’t any major releases there other than the occasional bad Star Wars or Marvel show. A lot of ESPN sports watchers could probably be pulled into an FX or ABC series, but aren’t because they’re watching those sports on a completely separate app.

Disney is considered the most synergistic media company of all time — leveraging its IP across media, merchandise, and live experiences — and yet it failed to apply those same principles to its streaming strategy.

(I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Sports leagues are milking their fans dry

2. Creators are trying to create their own cinematic universes

Let’s jump into it…

Sports leagues are milking their fans dry

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

What YouTube gets out of the Peacock deal

Puck’s Julia Alexander gave a theory as to why YouTube signed a deal with Peacock that would make the latter company’s content available to YouTube Premium subscribers:

The short answer is that YouTube wants to be taken seriously as a premier destination for blue chip advertisers. As recently as 2017, an investigation into ads running next to extremist and disturbing content on the platform sparked the so-called “adpocalypse”—a boycott that resulted in hundreds of advertisers fleeing. Amid a looming A.I. content deluge, nobody at the company wants to return to those dark ages …

Indeed, YouTube’s near future will be defined, in part, by how effectively it manages the exponential increase in A.I. slop and spam. (Already, seemingly every other ad on YouTube appears to have been created entirely with A.I.) Fortifying the platform with premium content, as well as incentivizing its top creators to produce longer-form videos via algorithmic changes, is one way to counter a tidal wave of horny fruit soap operas.

I actually don’t really agree with this take. YouTube has done a tremendous job over the last year or so of changing the narrative so it’s now thought of as a TV-forward platform that’s beating out every other entertainment company for TV watch time. Brands have caught on to this narrative, and recent data shows that advertisers are moving YouTube from their “digital” budgets into their TV budgets, which tend to be much larger.

I think the real opportunity here is for YouTube to grow its Premium subscription base. Before, it had to rely entirely on simply annoying users into Premium subscriptions by inundating them with ads. Now it’ll have a real library of must-watch programming, including live sports. That improves the YouTube Premium value proposition considerably.

While we don’t know the terms of the deal, my guess is that YouTube will share revenue with Peacock only when its subscribers actually watch Peacock content, which means there’s a tremendous opportunity to first capture subscribers with the allure of NFL games and then push those subscribers into YouTube’s much wider ecosystem which, lo and behold, includes a lot of NFL-adjacent videos and podcasts. It might even help YouTube bring in older demographics who don’t typically seek out YouTuber content.

With any luck, a year from now you’ll no longer have to explain to your Boomer parents who MrBeast or iShowSpeed are.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that Puck article for free.)

ICYMI: How Starter Story grew to 1.4 million monthly visitors and $500,000 in annual revenue

Founder Pat Walls discussed how he automated his process so that the site now operates as a sort of flywheel.

LinkedIn created its own AI slop monster

From the WSJ:

Forty-one percent of long-form posts and 30% of all comments posted publicly on LinkedIn from April to June were entirely AI-generated, according to an analysis of nearly 57,000 items from AI detection startup Pangram Labs.

Another AI-detection startup, Originality.ai, examined 5,000 public LinkedIn posts in July for signs they used AI more than a “moderate” amount. It concluded that 81% likely met that threshold. Just under half of 5,500 public Reddit posts examined from July fell into the same category.

Of all the social platforms, LinkedIn is inundated with the highest volume of AI slop. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered it in my comments section and then clicked over to the user’s profile to see they’re commenting on multiple posts a minute with similar drivel. And the thing is, it’s LinkedIn’s own fault, since the platform itself constantly prompted users with the option to write something with AI. It basically trained its own users that slop was not only acceptable, but wanted.

(I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

There’s even more media news curation in my Substack Chat

This is a reminder that I’m extremely active in my Substack chat, which anyone can access. Not only am I curating media industry news there, but I’m also very responsive to user comments. Come chat with me and other media operators!

The editor behind a new crop of bestsellers

The WSJ published a great profile of Whitney Frick, the editor who’s shepherded a number of female-authored memoirs onto bestseller lists. “Frick gravitates toward books about people ‘who thought their life was going to follow a certain script, and then something shifts and the script changes.’” [WSJ] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

This newsletter for female sports fans reached 1 million subscribers

When Ellen Hyslop and her co-founders launched The Gist in 2017, none of them had worked in media or the sports industry. They were young professionals in financial services who had grown frustrated with a sports media ecosystem that largely catered to men while overlooking millions of potential female fans. What began as a side project built during evenings and Sundays has since grown into a sports media brand with more than 1 million newsletter subscribers, hundreds of thousands of social followers, a podcast, paid community, proprietary games, and partnerships with major advertisers.

In a recent interview, Hyslop explained how scrappy marketing helped attract The Gist’s first subscribers, why social media became an important source of revenue, and how the company is expanding into a paid community and launching its own games.

Check out the interview on YouTube.

If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. The Bulwark converted its YouTube success into paid subscribers

2. When you accidentally become an influencer

3. Fox zigged on its streaming strategy when all its competitors zagged

Let’s jump into it…

The Bulwark converted its YouTube success into paid subscribers

Read more

When Ellen Hyslop and her co-founders launched The Gist in 2017, none of them had worked in media or sports. They were business school graduates with careers in financial services who had begun to notice how often women were excluded from sports conversations—not necessarily because they lacked interest, but because the media surrounding sports rarely spoke to them.

What began as a side project developed during evenings and Sundays has grown into a sports media company with more than 1 million newsletter subscribers, nearly 750,000 social media followers, a podcast, proprietary games, a paid community, and partnerships with major brands. Along the way, The Gist expanded beyond its original newsletter without abandoning the audience insight that made the company distinctive.

Its story shows how a media startup can turn an underserved audience into a defensible business. The Gist did not win by producing more sports information than established competitors. It won by presenting that information through a different voice, building direct distribution, and giving advertisers access to fans they had struggled to reach.

In a recent interview, Hyslop explained how scrappy marketing helped attract The Gist’s first subscribers, why social media became an important source of revenue, and how the company is expanding into a paid community and launching its own games.

Let’s jump into it…

Finding a gap in sports media

Hyslop met co-founders Roslyn McLarty and Jacie deHoop while studying commerce at Queen’s University in Canada. After graduation, all three moved to Toronto and took jobs in financial services. Hyslop worked in insurance, DeHoop in management consulting, and McLarty in accounting.

Their corporate experience helped them understand the audience they would eventually serve. As young women working in male-dominated industries, they regularly encountered sports conversations that carried social and professional value. Yet sports media was rarely designed to help them enter those conversations.

The idea for The Gist emerged during a night of takeout and wine in February 2017. Hyslop, a lifelong sports fan, began talking about the Toronto Maple Leafs returning to the playoffs. Her friends told her the information would have been useful at work, where people were already discussing the team.

They also enjoyed the way Hyslop explained the story. “This is one of the most fun conversations I’ve ever had about sports,” they told her. Hyslop realized that other friends often came to her for similar help, whether they were filling out fantasy lineups, making NFL picks, or trying to understand a major sports story.

The three opened a Google Doc that night and started recording ideas. “We woke up the next morning and texted each other,” Hyslop recalled, “and we were like, wait, we actually think that this could be something.”

The newsletter boom provided a model. The founders subscribed to The Skimm, The Hustle, and Morning Brew. They were in their mid-20s, did not pay for cable, and consumed much of their news digitally. Email offered a low-cost way to create a sports product that fit those habits.

They spent most of 2017 researching the market before launching. The numbers confirmed that sports media was built largely by and for men. Hyslop said that, at the time, only 18% of sports journalists were women, less than 5% of sports coverage focused on women, and more than 75% of ESPN’s viewership was male.

“That seems so wild to us considering sports are supposed to be for everyone,” she said. “At the same time, what a great business opportunity, because they’re leaving out so many women.”

The founders were not interested in creating a publication that covered only women’s sports. Their larger goal was to build a general sports brand for fans who felt alienated by traditional coverage. The Gist would cover men’s and women’s sports, employ women to create the content, use an accessible voice, and meet its audience on the platforms it already used.

Launching as a side hustle

Read more

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Sign up here

Let’s jump into it…

Bluesky is anti-growth

Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, sat down for a lengthy interview with The Verge, where he discussed his plans to help the platform break out of its left-of-center bubble and evolve into a more mainstream social network with broader appeal:

We’ve made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers, and it’s worked really well. There are a ton of sports conversations now on the app, and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics. It’s possible to expand.

In politics, it’s probably our hardest challenge because we have one type of user base there that’s very active. That’s good too. They are super active, and they’re very much at the forefront of politics and very engaged and very informed. But we can just keep adding more communities so that it balances out.

While I believe him that he wants to grow Bluesky into a more general purpose social media platform, I also believe that he has absolutely no idea how to do this — mostly because he and his leadership team have refused to take some very simple steps that would make Bluesky more widely appealing.

The biggest thing holding Bluesky back is its restrictive character limit. Right now, you can’t publish anything longer than 300 characters without splitting it into multiple posts, which creates a clunky reading experience.

Nearly every other major social platform allows much longer posts. Even Twitter lets subscribers exceed 300 characters for just a few dollars a month. That makes those platforms feel more like true blogging tools, where users can share complete thoughts instead of chopping them into threads.

I think Bluesky could solve this by raising its character limit while hiding anything beyond the first 300 characters behind a simple “Read more” button. It would preserve the clean look of the feed while making the platform much more pleasant to read.

Now, whenever I share this opinion, I always get pushback from people claiming they enjoy the “forced brevity” of Bluesky. But there actually is no forced brevity on the platform, since the ability to thread long strings of posts has always been built in. Indeed, most of the app’s power users utilize threaded posting prodigiously. Bluesky’s product team is fine with you posting long content, they just want the reading experience to be as terrible as possible.

Spend any amount of time on the app, and you’ll see random threaded posts shared into your feed. These require you to click through to that post and then scroll all the way up to the top of the thread just so you can determine whether the thread itself is worth reading. If this is the sort of user experience you enjoy, then I think it’s safe to say you’re a masochist. Maybe Bluesky’s power users are fine with this dynamic, but it’s less than ideal for normie internet lurkers.

Then there’s the platform’s bizarre username tagging system. Right now, if you want to mention another Bluesky user in a post, that tag not only includes their username, but also a long string of characters. Again, this makes the site less readable and less accessible to everyday internet users.

(Yes, I know the domain affixed to the end of the handle is fundamental to how Atprotocol works, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be displayed that way in the Bluesky feed. I think it would be better if a user tag defaulted to your display name and then you see the full domain if you hover over the display name or click through to the profile.)

Bluesky has also been extremely slow to monetize — only vaguely hinting at various business models it could embrace. One consistent theme I’ve returned to again and again is that social media platforms would see more long-term growth and success if they launch meaningful revenue shares with their creators, and I think this is one way that Bluesky could differentiate itself from platforms like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok. But given that the company seems completely uninterested in monetization, any nearterm rollout of a revenue share is pretty unlikely.

Of course, Bluesky’s antigrowth mindset stretches back years. After Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter in 2022, there were millions of left-of-center Elon haters who were itching to move over to another platform. Mark Zuckerberg recognized this and accelerated the launch of his own Twitter competitor, Threads.

What did Bluesky do to capitalize on this anti-Musk sentiment? It remained in closed, invite-only Beta, which meant that Threads had something like a 7-month head start in absorbing the user exodus from Twitter. I think if Bluesky had accelerated its own public launch, it’d be much larger today.

This has all been immensely frustrating for me, since I’m rooting for Bluesky to succeed. It’s one of the few quasi-mainstream social platforms that’s not owned by a tech behemoth, and I think it would be good for the open web for it to thrive. But I’ve seen little evidence that its leadership has any real interest in growing it beyond its hardcore userbase, regardless of what its CEO says.

ICYMI: How Big Cabal Media became one of the fastest-growing news outlets in Africa

CEO Tomiwa Aladekomo walked me through the company’s origin story, explained why he joined in 2018, and outlined its monetization strategy.

David Ellison’s silly antitrust arguments

David Ellison took to the New York Times op-ed page to argue that the antitrust case launched against him by 12 state attorneys general is purely political and that his critics are wrong about his own personal politics:

I believe this fight is not really about market share. If it were, it wouldn’t have been reviewed and approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States, the European Union and China. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.

Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.

Ellison’s claim that he’s not overtly political is plainly silly. His family consists of Trump sycophants, and there’s little reason to believe he wasn’t fully on board with Shari Redstone’s decision to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit widely viewed as clearing the way for Paramount’s merger. He installed a rightwing blogger, Bari Weiss, to gut CBS News and push it to the right, and his father Larry — who is the merger’s largest financial backer — is one of Trump’s closest friends and biggest donors. Ellison recently threw an event to honor Trump and also participated in the grotesque UFC fight on the White House lawn — after all, it was streamed live on Paramount+.

Let me put it another way: Ellison used politics to accelerate the merger and ensure its approval at the federal level, so why is it suddenly bad that oppositional political forces push back at the state level? It’s not as if he’s remained above the fray.

His argument that the antitrust case against the merger is purely political also rests on a false premise: that antitrust and politics are somehow separate issues. They’re not. One of the central justifications for antitrust enforcement in media is that excessive consolidation reduces viewpoint diversity and ultimately harms consumers. The more media outlets a single company or family controls, the greater its ability to shape public discourse and insulate its own political interests from scrutiny. It’s entirely reasonable for regulators to consider whether one of the world’s wealthiest families—one that actively lobbies the government for favorable policies—should also control two of the nation’s largest news networks.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

There’s even more media news curation in my Substack Chat

This is a reminder that I’m extremely active in my Substack chat, which anyone can access. Not only am I curating media industry news there, but I’m also very responsive to user comments. Come chat with me and other media operators!

Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Spotify’s subscription strategy is underrated

2. Programmatic advertising is becoming less relevant to brands by the minute

Let’s jump into it…

Spotify’s subscription strategy is underrated

Read more