Facebook has become a punchline
PLUS: What happened to all the feminist blogs of the 2010s?
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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Let’s jump into it…
Quick hits
The newest AI slop on Facebook exploits suburban fear
It's almost difficult to articulate how much Facebook has become a cesspool fueled by just the dumbest, lowest-common-denominator shit to be found on the internet. — Usermag
Amazon is shutting down its Kindle Vella serialized story platform in February 2025
In 2021, Amazon made a big bet on serialized fiction with the launch of a standalone app, but it never took off. While audiences are more than willing to tune into weekly episodes of a narrative TV series, that desire doesn't really translate to written stories. — Engadget
How Two Irreverent Historians Made Their Podcast a Global Sensation
The Rest Is History podcast "gets 11 million downloads a month and 1.2 million monthly YouTube views ... People familiar with the show say that it has over 45,000 paying subscribers, who, along with advertising, make it possible for each host to earn nearly $100,000 a month." — WSJ
Rivals scramble to react to Washington Post endorsement crisis
In the wake of the bombshell news that WashPo's management had blocked the paper's endorsement of Kamala Harris, The Guardian sent an email to its audience touting its own endorsement of Harris. "[Readers] pledged more than $1.1 million between [the] email going out on Friday and Saturday evening, the biggest single fundraising day for the Guardian’s US operation."
Meanwhile, outlets are reporting that WashPo lost 200,000 paying subscribers as a result of its non-endorsement. That's something to the tune of $28 million in annual revenue. — Semafor
Evan Spiegel battles to revive Snap’s fortunes
I wonder how much time Evan Spiegel spends stewing each day that Snapchat essentially serves as the R&D lab for many of Meta's most popular features.
I think the company's biggest problem is its lack of cultural relevance. How often do you hear about Snapchat-native content compared to the stuff posted to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and even Twitter? Hell, even Reddit has a larger cultural impact than Snapchat, despite having far fewer logged-in users. — Financial Times
How the Geekout newsletter grew to 30,000 subscribers
Matt Navarra doesn’t have any secret growth hacks for Geekout, his newsletter geared toward marketers. He doesn’t spend massive amounts of money on paid acquisition or publish long Twitter threads. He doesn’t use a referral program.
Instead, he’s just incredibly consistent in curating valuable information, both for the newsletter and his social media accounts. This consistency has made him a go-to expert for every new development in the social media space, so much so that he regularly appears on mainstream news programs to comment on the world’s largest tech platforms.
In a recent interview, Matt walked through his weekly process for finding the most newsworthy information and packaging it in such a way that helps him grow his audience. The discussion touched on several topics, including how he’s often the first to discover new social media features, how he compiles the newsletter each week, how he optimizes each edition to drive people to the web version so it’s easier to share, and why he almost always agrees to interview requests from journalists.
You can watch, listen to, or read the interview over here.
More quick hits
‘Lady Blogs’ Would Have Had a Field Day With This Election
Feminist blogs were enormously influential in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but most have either shrunk or shut down entirely. It's a jarring absence given how much this election is centered on abortion rights. — NYT
As The Players’ Tribune marks first decade, publisher Minute Media plots out its future
The Players Tribune proved early on that pro athletes could forge a direct connection with fans — a bet that drew skepticism when it was first founded but seems rather anodyne now that we have so many popular athlete-hosted podcasts. Now its new owner is expanding into print and also attempting to license its IP to major Hollywood studios. —Digiday
The new dark money: How influencers get paid big bucks to court your vote
It's becoming an increasingly common occurrence for political campaigns to pay social media influencers to post positive messages about a candidate, but the regulation of this type of promotion is incredibly murky, which means many of these posts don't contain any sort of disclosure. Some creators argue they're being paid to promote candidates they support anyway, so a disclosure isn't necessary. —WashPo
The Most Opinionated Man in America
An acolyte of Peter Thiel has emerged as one of the leading media voices defending Big Tech against its liberal critics. His newsletter has amassed over 100,000 free subscribers, and though he isn't explicitly pro-Trump, his writing has been widely embraced by pro-MAGA influencers. — The Atlantic
How social media video clippers have become some of the most powerful outlets of the 2024 campaign
One of the most popular liberal blogs in the 2000s was called Crooks & Liars, and its editors simply specialized in watching all the cable news shows and posting clips of the most outrageous segments. Now, some of the most viral political accounts on platforms like Instagram and TikTok specialize in watching Trump rallies and quickly pumping out clips of his most unhinged moments. If Kamala wins next week, she'll probably owe these clippers a debt of gratitude. — CNN
I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast
One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.
In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:
Niche news sites
Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels
Podcasts
Newsletters
Affiliate/ecommerce
Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )
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