Boring niches are extremely valuable
PLUS: YouTube’s true competitor
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Boring niches are extremely valuable
The federal government is in complete turmoil at the moment as a group of incompetent — and racist — DOGE children try to cull agencies of public servants who do important work. Even though the entire news media is covering this turmoil, a small number of extremely niche publications have landed a disproportionate number of big scoops:
While bigger, more public-facing news outlets in Washington focus on covering the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, these trade-oriented outlets pay attention to the daily changes at agencies and how employees are affected. And that means they’re uniquely well-sourced for this stressful moment.
Since November, Government Executive — comprised of three reporters and two editors — has seen “a phenomenal increase in traffic,” executive editor Tanya Ballard Brown said.
It's amazing that Washington, DC is one of the most media-saturated cities in the country and yet all these niche publications are able to outmaneuver their bigger competitors simply by focusing on the boring mechanisms of government while every mainstream publication spends so much of its resources covering extremely loud politicians who have very little to do with the day-to-day operations of federal agencies.
"Boring" niches are extremely valuable.
Should publishers have to trade quality for profitability?
The Daily Beast is now technically profitable, but achieving that profitability required that it drastically cut staff and ramp up news aggregation:
"It was very hard for employees to hear the truth that had never really been shared with them before: the Beast was on track to lose more than $36 million over the next few years. Traffic had plummeted double digits. Subscriptions were collapsing. The tech and website were broken," [Ben] Sherwood said. He and [Joanna] Coles, he added, were trying to figure out how to turn things around.
I always have mixed feelings on media "turnaround" stories like this. Is business sustainability worth it if it means sacrificing the outlet's soul? What made the Daily Beast a great publication was that it often managed to punch well above its weight, landing big scoops despite having a relatively small staff.
Weirdly enough, the company has kept its subscription model despite drastically reducing its output of original journalism. I was perusing some of its stories and immediately hit a hard paywall for a story that was just aggregating news reported by the New York Times. If it's going to lean into "smart" aggregation, then it should probably do away with its paywall completely and just focus on optimizing its advertising yield.
Has Quibi been vindicated?
60-second "mini dramas" are apparently a $6.9 billion business in China. It's basically Jeffrey Katzenberg's vision of short-form, highly produced television, except, unlike Quibi, these are actually financially successful:
“China has a strong supply chain for mini dramas — nowhere else in the world can compete,” said Reeves Deng, a former venture investor from Shenzhen who started the short-drama company Luckyshort. “What we are essentially doing is to bring people pleasure — at lower costs and higher frequencies.”
Producers in China now churn out 5,000 to 8,000 new mini-drama series a year, 10 times the tally for the rest of the world, according to Deng. Thousands of new companies registered as short-drama businesses in 2024, according to the industry report.
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How media monetization will evolve over the next five years
I got to go on the Media Moolah podcast to dive deep into media monetization models. I basically make a whole bunch of predictions on where the media is heading in the next five years, and it probably won't surprise you that many of these predictions are centered on the Creator Economy's increasing dominance within the media ecosystem.
No, the New York Times is not a “gaming” company
The New York Times once again announced a blockbuster quarter of subscriber growth. A lot of those subscribers though are for non-news products:
Of those 10.8 million subscribers, 3.5 million (or 32%) subscribed only to either its Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products.
Another 1.9 million had a conventional news-only digital subscription that provides access past the nytimes.com paywall and a further 5.4 million had either an “All Access” bundled subscription, which buys access to all the Times’ products, or some other mix of NYT subscriptions.
A lot of people like to make snarky comments like "The New York Times is a recipes and games app with a news organization attached," but I've always found this claim reductive.
If the company did away with its entire news organization tomorrow, then pretty much all its subscription growth would stall out and even reverse. Its massive newsgathering operation gives it tremendous reach and allows it to out-compete all the other games and recipe sites on the internet.
Monetizing less valuable IP
This is really interesting: Warner Brothers Discovery is taking old movies from its archive and posting them to YouTube:
To be clear, this is not the YouTube Movies service, which is fully licensed and mainly represents a pretty good add-on perk of YouTube Premium subscriptions. Instead, WBD (without notice or promotion) is dropping full-on films that it spent millions of dollars making on its own channels …
… What stands out more than anything else is that Warner Bros. released them this way, rather than in a format that limits access—something that Warner could easily do, thanks to the fact that it owns the streaming service Max, as well as Turner Classic Movies, a television channel that allows cable customers to stream.
I think this is a great idea. Most of these movies aren't considered "classics," so they wouldn't provide much value in the Max bundle, but they might find new audiences on a free app that already has a huge user base. This is basically Fox's Tubi strategy, but instead of launching a standalone app, WBD is leveraging the considerable reach of YouTube.
The hope here is that these movies can find new fandoms AND generate additional revenue through advertising.
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Behind the paywall
Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:
YouTube’s true competitor
Why creators don’t thrive within media conglomerates
TED is one of the most underrated media outlets
Substack really does help its creators with audience growth
Snapchat’s revenue share with creators is working
Let’s jump into it…