David Ellison gets his pyrrhic victory

PLUS: The longterm risk for FAST streaming apps

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Netflix drops out of the WBD bidding war, paving the way for David Ellison’s Paramount to buy it

From Business Insider:

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery.

Netflix said Thursday it won't raise its bid, paving the way for Paramount to buy WBD and become a Hollywood behemoth.

This is a smart move by Netflix. By stepping aside, it’s effectively allowing rich failson David Ellison to overpay for Warner Bros. Discovery — a move that will saddle one of Netflix’s biggest competitors with enormous debt and weigh it down for years to come. The cherry on top is that he has to write Netflix a $2.8 billion check just to cover the breakup fee.

Ellison can talk about all the tech synergies he will drive, but in reality he’s simply mashing together two unsuccessful media conglomerates. This is the same guy who paid $150 million for a rightwing blog just so he could install someone with no broadcast or journalism experience as the head of CBS News. There’s just no scenario where he’s able to outmaneuver Netflix, Disney, and YouTube, especially if the AI bubble pops, which would then send his dad’s Oracle stock plummeting.

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“Same values, same mission, same ethics”: How the Houston Chronicle chooses creators to work with

This is a great deep dive into how the Houston Chronicle teamed up with a local food influencer to produce several videos for the outlet’s Instagram account. The newspaper essentially treated him like a freelancer — paying him a pre-negotiated fee — and then paired him with an actual Houston Chronicle food critic to go out and shoot the videos. [Nieman Lab]

The result was not only some great content, but also a cross-pollination of audiences. I’m not the first to point out that a key component to a successful subscription strategy is audience trust, and this was a great way to instill more trust into the Chronicle’s food criticism.

Mogging mainstream media

From the Rebooting:

Late last month … looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular tweeted: “Im getting emails from all these media platforms, who the fuck is rolling stone magazine LOL. Tired of these washed outlets trying to clout chase.”

What most impressed me was just how arrogantly dismissive Clavicular was of mainstream media. Here was an influencer saying that Rolling Stone — one of the most venerated institutions in all of American journalism, a publication once synonymous with what is considered cool and countercultural — was completely irrelevant to him …

Celebrities no longer need the Vogues and Esquires of the world to publicize their new project or to humanize their image. They have social media and self-produced documentary series for that.

It’s now the magazines that desperately need the celebrities. Scoring an exclusive profile of a high-profile celebrity is one of the only ways a dying magazine title can introduce itself to young audiences and claim, if just for a moment, a sliver of cultural relevance.

I'm not sure I agree with this thesis that celebrities and social media stars no longer receive much value from being interviewed by traditional media outlets. Media companies still do a good job of aggregating large audiences, and they excel at producing a contextual narrative that can lead to more cultural relevance. There are a lot of people who read Rolling Stone and don't know who Clavicular is, and being featured in its pages differentiates his brand from the millions of other streamers out there who also have relatively large audiences.

How a former 60 Minutes producer raised six figures in donations to launch an 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.

In a recent interview, Spencer walked me through how he pitched these donors, why he went the non-profit route, and how he works with other news outlets to amplify his team’s reporting. [Simon Owens]

The Athletic Welcomes New Colleagues

The Washington Post famously fired its entire sports desk, and the New York Times/Athletic just announced it’s hiring six of those journalists all at once. [NYT]

This incident reminds me of an amazing factoid I read a few years ago that the New York Times has more California-based paid subscribers than the LA Times. So here’s my question: does the NYT have more paid subscribers living in Washington, DC than the Washington Post? I bet the answer is yes.

HubSpot Acquires YouTube-Based Media Brand Starter Story

From Adweek:

On Monday, HubSpot Media, the in-house media division of the enterprise software firm HubSpot, acquired the creator-led entrepreneurship publication Starter Story, Jonathan Hunt, vice president of media and content at HubSpot, confirmed to ADWEEK. Hunt did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Starter Story, which was founded in 2017 by software engineer Pat Walls, has evolved into a video-first media brand with more than 800,000 YouTube subscribers, a 275,000-person newsletter, and a total audience of roughly 1.6 million across platforms. It is profitable and generates a “seven-figure” revenue, according to founder Patrick Walls.

If there’s one thing you can say about HubSpot, it’s that it truly eats its own dog food. The company constantly preaches the value of content as a customer-acquisition tool — and backs that up by investing more heavily than almost any other tech company in its own media properties, from the newsletter The Hustle to the My First Million podcast. I’d love to see the numbers behind it all and understand just how much business these media assets are actually driving to HubSpot’s core products.

BTW, I’ve interviewed Pat Walls about his early days building Starter Story and plan to have him on the podcast again soon to talk about his success expanding onto YouTube and the Hubspot acquisition.

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The longterm risk for FAST streaming apps

FAST channels are steadily gaining share of TV ad revenue, but their growth may be nearing a point of diminishing returns. Many of them rely on overlapping content libraries and are racing to bulk up their offerings with lower-quality programming, which risks creating a signal-to-noise problem for viewers. At the same time, as YouTube solidifies its dominance on TV screens, content suppliers may decide it’s easier to distribute their libraries there instead. YouTube already offers a 50% revenue share and has the added advantage of reaching audiences across TV, desktop, and mobile. [Puck]

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