Can news outlets diversify away from journalism?
Can news outlets diversify away from journalism?
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Let’s jump right into it…
Can news outlets expand beyond journalism?
CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote about the LA Times’s new owner and its efforts to grow its base from 400,000 digital-only subscribers to over 1 million. The part that interested in me in particular was when the paper’s editor Kevin Merida started musing on ways that it could expand beyond journalism:
The journalism of the Los Angeles Times is "foundational," Merida told me. "We will continue to produce that great journalism -- we have some of the greatest journalists in the world -- but... there's a broader kind of ecosystem of content you can wrap around the journalism. And compete for people who would not have thought about the L.A. Times before." That's when my ears perked up -- when Merida talked about live events, audio projects, and bringing in "comedy and poetry and music."
This reminded me of a thought experiment I often have: what if news outlets decided to invest in content that isn’t necessarily fact based? Let’s use The New York Times as a hypothetical, since it’s flush with cash and could afford to experiment. What if tomorrow it announced it hired an editor away from The Paris Review and is opening itself up to submissions of short fiction and novelettes? What if it moved beyond documentaries and started commissioning short, dramatized films? What if it launched a fictional podcast, a comedy festival, or a music studio?
These ideas aren’t even that radical when you consider some of the Times’s fastest growth is now coming from two sections that have very little to do with actual journalism: cooking and games.
Will the app store tax ever come for the creator economy?
The Verge published two stories this week about creator economy apps and their exemptions from iOS and Android’s steep payment fees. The first was about how Patreon has been allowed to bypass Apple’s payment requirements completely, meaning it isn’t subjected to the 30% tax on all mobile payments:
Patreon has been one of the odd exceptions to the rule. The platform’s iOS app has been able to accept payments outside of Apple’s in-app purchase system, which lets the company walk around that 30 percent cut. [CEO Jack Conte] suggests this may be allowed because users don’t come to Patreon to discover creators and content. “A lot of the actual engagement is happening on other platforms ... So it’s just not the primary behavior that’s happening on Patreon,” Conte said. The Verge has reached out to Apple for comment.
The second was about specific carve-outs Google is implementing so that certain content apps only have to pay 15% of their proceeds, down from the standard 30%:
Google is opening up applications to a new program for developers of media apps that lets them keep more of what they earn — paying a lower 15 percent commission to Google in exchange for supporting certain platforms and features (via 9to5Google).
The Play Media Experience Program is another way to get around the company’s 30 percent service fee, and it’s also an admission that the Google had already been cutting deals with some developers behind the scenes; Google is positioning it as the global expansion of a program that was previously invite-only, though it doesn’t seem to have mentioned it before today.
What’s behind these moves?
Well, both Google and Apple are facing antitrust scrutiny right now, and Apple in particular is battling it out in a high profile lawsuit over its draconian app store restrictions, so the last thing either company needs right now is YouTubers with millions of followers blasting them for picking on independent content creators.
There’s a fair amount of anxiety in the creator economy over whether the app store tax will be applied to creators, especially now that nearly every major social platform is rolling out features that allow those creators to sell digital products to their audiences. It’s one thing when Apple is charging 30% to Uber, but when it’s taking 30 cents of every dollar out of the pocket of a struggling middle class Instagram influencer? That’s when these anti-trust discussions start becoming a lot less abstract. It doesn’t surprise me that Apple and Google are trying to figure out ways to kick the can down the road, for now.
Is there life after YouTube scandal?
Rolling Stone published a great profile of David Dobrik's vlog empire and his attempts to rehabilitate his own image.
Every celebrity wants a podcast deal
Deadline reports on how Hollywood sees podcasts as the next big gold rush, especially now that tech companies like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix seem willing to write big fat checks to celebrities.
RELATED: “Celebrities aren’t ruining podcasting – they’re opening them up to a wider audience.” I agree with this. Celebrities can help pull "normies" into the podcast listening fold, and non-celebrity podcasts can benefit from the downstream effects.
How many people will actually pay for digital news?
One depressing fact about the current subscription goldrush is that we’re all competing for a tiny portion of the population that’s willing to pay for news. According to most surveys — and depending what country you’re in — up to 80 to 90% of the population won’t buy a single news subscription.
Nieman Lab reported on one such survey from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that at least has a silver lining:
"[In the U.S.], 21% of respondents said they pay for at least one online news outlet, and for those who pay up, the median number of subscriptions is two."
Assuming my math is correct, that’s basically the same thing as saying that 42% of the population is willing to buy one news subscription, which sounds a lot less depressing than 21%.
That might not sound like a lot, but consider this: There are about 209 million adults in the U.S.. If you assume that 40% of them will purchase one digital subscription, that’s 83.6 million subscriptions. If you further assume that it takes about 1,000 subscriptions to pay for one journalism job, that’s 83,000 journalists who are employed just from digital subscription revenue alone. That doesn’t include the jobs that are funded by things like print subscriptions, print advertising, digital advertising, events, and ecommerce.
Now let’s say that your reporting niche has at least some international relevance. There are at least 1 billion English speaking adults in the world. So 40% of that is $400 million, or enough to support 400,000 journalism jobs.
I know I’m oversimplifying it a bit and that huge outlets like The New York Times will vacuum up a lot of those subscriptions, but there’s a lot of revenue out there for the taking, even with only 20% of the population open to paying.