A better alternative to micropayments

PLUS: The platforms aren’t the only ones to blame for declining publisher traffic

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A better alternative to micropayments

Micropayments will probably never work, but what about day passes? Advance Local is experimenting with charging readers between 99 cents and $3 to access a publication for a full day, and it's seeing some interesting results:

Next, we focused on a large number of prospects with infrequent engagement. They are familiar with the brand but not necessarily ready to commit to a subscription. We needed an offer that fit between a free trial and a monthly or annual subscription.

The solution for these low-engaged prospects is our Day Pass. For the last four months, we have tested price points and segmentation to learn how day passes fit into our strategy. We have tested prices between US$0.99 and US$3 in three markets. Of the 1,826-day pass purchases,12.3% have subscribed. Interestingly, 2% of day pass purchasers are repeat buyers.

This indicates a portion of the audience rejects the commitment of a subscription. They are willing to pay a premium price to avoid commitment.

This was an idea I first saw proposed by Mark Stenberg. It’s unlikely that consumers will place much value on a single article — even if it only costs 99 cents — but they might be willing to shell out for an all-access pass that requires only a one-time payment, just as a they’ve shown a propensity to buy a single issue of a magazine or newspaper at a convenience store.

The streaming era has been good for music, actually

There's this silly narrative you see often that Spotify is somehow bad for the music industry, when in fact the rise of streaming reversed a decline in music revenue and the industry has increased in size for nearly every year of Spotify's existence:

It’s nuts to think that this ‘c’ with a circle around it – copyright – is now worth forty billion. For years music was ridiculed as the sick man of ‘media verticals.’ Now music copyright can stand tall. Some rough maths suggests spend on music is now more than twice global cinema worldwide box office, and just under half of the online video streaming market …

Annual revenue growth shows that the value of copyright swelled $5bn in 2022 – an incredible feat. More striking still is that the spoils of growth are shared evenly between labels and artists on one side, and songwriters, publishers and their CMOs on the other – both adding around $2.5bn each.

ICYMI: Was Randy Cassingham the first member of the Creator Economy?

In 1994, he launched This is True, one of the first email newsletters, and grew it into a thriving business.

Good riddance to the TikTok creator fund

TikTok’s $2 billion creator fund has long been criticized for its paltry payouts, so it’s probably a good thing that it’s shutting down:

The news comes just months after TikTok unveiled its Creativity Program, which sought to resolve some creators' initial complaints about the fund.

In a blog post about the Creativity Program in February, TikTok said creators can "earn up to 20 times the amount previously offered by the Creator Fund." Videos that are eligible for the program must be longer than a minute and earn at least 1,000 views, and they must abide by the platform's community guidelines, among other criteria.

Hopefully its shuttering is a sign that the platform will continue to get more serious about a direct revenue share with creators. The early signs are encouraging.

The rise of worker-owned media cooperatives

Several journalists who all worked for the gaming outlet Kotaku have split off to launch their own media cooperative:

Aftermath is intended to operate on a different and, hopefully, more sustainable business model than the advertising revenue-based model other online publications rely on. Instead, inspired by worker-owned outlets like Defector (which is focused on sports) and Hell Gate (focused on New York City), Aftermath wants to build its business on subscriptions and take a simpler approach to things to try and best serve readers who are paying them directly …

…As a worker-owned publication, the team gets to decide things like financial decisions, business decisions, how they grow, and what they prioritize. “I’m hoping that just by centering people in that, we’ll find success that way,” [co-founder Riley MacLeod] says.

This is at least the third worker-owned media cooperative to emerge out of the company formerly known as Gawker Media. It's kind of cool that Gawker sprouted so many bootstrapped media startups. That might end up being its greatest legacy.

How MrBeast transformed an entire economy

This is a great deep dive into how MrBeast transformed a small city in North Carolina into a kind of industry town centered around his business:

Since posting his first YouTube from his bedroom as a child, he has become a one-man driver of the local economy. One regional development official now ranks YouTube content creation among the town’s biggest businesses, alongside pharmaceutical manufacturing and the local forklift plant.

Donaldson’s contribution to North Carolina’s 12th-largest city now includes supersized production studios, a workforce-training program at the local university and a labor base of 250 contractors and employees. In one leafy neighborhood, he owns five homes where he houses friends and employees — basically an entire cul-de-sac.

It'll be interesting to see what happens there in the next five to 10 years and whether a whole new generation of creators sprouts out of the city. Wouldn't it be crazy if it ended up becoming the next Hollywood?

The platforms aren’t the only ones to blame for declining publisher traffic

Have the major tech platforms deprioritized news in their algorithms? Sure. But consumers themselves are also showing a lot less interest in news content:

Last week, the Pew Research Center published a new study showing that fewer adults on average said they regularly followed the news in 2021 or 2022 than in any other year surveyed. (Pew started asking the question in 2016.) There’s some shakiness when you break down the demographics, but overall, 38 percent of American adults are following the news closely, versus a high of 52 percent in 2018. This tracks: In 2022, Axios compiled data from different web-traffic-monitoring companies that showed news consumption took a “nosedive” after 2020 and, despite January 6, the war in Ukraine, and other major events, engagement across all news media—news sites, news apps, cable news, and social media—was in decline.

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