Google throws publishers a bone
PLUS: How Cricket fuels India’s biggest streaming platform
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Let’s jump into it…
A quick programming note
You may have noticed I haven’t published a new podcast episode in a few weeks and that the newsletter has been less substantive lately. That’s because I’ve been working on a longform piece that’s currently at 9,000 words and still growing. I hope to finish it by the end of this week, and then I’ll return to my regular programming.
My plan is to incorporate more longform reporting into my workflow, with the goal of publishing a new piece roughly every other month. I’m super excited that I’ll get to go deep on some cool stories. Stay tuned!
Google throws publishers a bone
Here's more evidence that the dip in search traffic for publishers is being made up, at least partially, by an increase in Discover traffic — at least for those publishers large enough to be included in Discover. I continue to think this is a clever way of Google tossing media companies a bone so they don't complain too loudly about generative AI results eating into their traffic:
Referral traffic data from over 4,000 global sites shows Google Search and Discover traffic hasn’t changed that much this year, according to Chartbeat media researcher Cynthia Vu. There was a 9% decrease in Google Search pageviews from January 2025 to April 2025, and about a 6% increase in Google Discover traffic during that same period, according to Chartbeat’s analysis, which showed pageviews were flat from March to April 2025 …
With AI Overviews and AI Mode threatening to carve deeper into Search traffic, Discover offers a faint but welcome flicker of hope. An uptick in pageviews from Google Discover to publishers’ sites is helping to offset some of the declines in click-throughs from search they have seen since the rollout of AI Overviews, execs said.
Ghost reaches an important milestone
Ghost predicts that publishers using its platform have generated at least $100 million in subscription revenue. For context, creators on Substack are probably generating around $500 million per year through the platform, and on Patreon that figure is somewhere north of $1 billion:
The ambition for Ghost was to create a dedicated open technology stack for independent publishers, from solo-creators to large newsrooms, to compete in a fast-moving digital media landscape – without becoming beholden to closed networks owned and controlled by private companies like Facebook and Medium.
A small band of loyal early adopters understood our ideas from the very start, but many were less convinced. They saw these large tech platforms as neutral, benevolent infrastructure providers, unlikely to screw anyone over, for it would not be in their interest to do so.
That outlook has shifted substantially after twelve years of algorithm changes, data capture, privacy scandals, and business model pivots.
The book proposal factory
In the early 90s, a Columbia journalism professor launched a course where the students spend the entire semester writing a book proposal. It's resulted in over 113 book contracts:
Freedman focuses particularly on demystifying the book proposal, a piece of writing that he likens to the albino alligators which, according to urban legend, once lived in the New York City subways — surviving without exposure to the public world, and therefore evolving to be mysterious and often misunderstood creatures. During the semester, his students draft such proposals. Afterward, he sometimes connects them to agents who he feels might be interested in their reporting topics, though he emphasizes that this won’t always lead to representation.
“He’s been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years,” said George Gibson, the executive editor at Grove Atlantic.
Is the growing popularity of IMAX a good thing for theaters?
The decline of theatrical moviegoing has ironically been good for IMAX. Those who do still go to theaters are looking for a more enhanced audio and visual experience and willing to pay top dollar for it. Some Hollywood veterans worry this trend will accelerate a death spiral for theaters as cost-conscious consumers are increasingly priced out:
“It’s great to be able to provide premium experiences to people who want it,” said Greg Marcus, chief executive of the company that operates Marcus Theaters, the fourth-largest chain in the country, but with only three IMAX screens. “But 80 to 85 percent of our business is coming from traditional theaters. And so you have to be very careful to not put down the traditional experience in promoting the other.”
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A cool new media venture
Two of the most authoritative journalists on the disinformation beat have teamed up to launch a newsletter. It'll not only report on online disinformation, but also aims to train other journalists how to spot it:
[Craig] Silverman and [Alexios] Mantzarlis plan to publish several times a week (two stories so far this week). And while it’s become de rigeur for newsletter subscriber benefits to involve video calls with the creator, Indicator plans monthly workshops for subscribers that go farther than most, featuring skills tutorials or walkthroughs of a tool or an investigation — something of interest to investigative reporters more broadly, not just those on the information beat.
How Cricket fuels India’s biggest streamer
India's largest streaming platform almost has as many subscribers as Netflix — though they're paying far less for a subscription — and that success is almost entirely due to it owning the broadcasting rights to Cricket matches:
The surge in subscriptions, with monthly packages starting as low as $0.60, caps a difficult period for broadcasters, which have struggled to profit from a cricket league that has been hugely profitable for the Indian cricket board and the individual teams but not for the media companies that paid for the rights.
Broadcasters paid $6.2bn for the cricket rights for the five years till 2027, making it one of the most lucrative in the sports world. The high figure also reflected the fierce competition between Reliance, Disney and Sony.
How a classic comic strip is being distorted by modern politics
If someone calls you "Richie Rich" today, it's usually a pejorative, one that's often applied to out-of-touch billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But in the 60s and 70s, when the Richie Rich comics were at the height of their popularity, the character was a working class hero, someone who leveraged his parents' ostentatious wealth to help his much poorer friends. Some of the comics' biggest fans are dismayed that Richie Rich has been retconned into a greedy villain:
“Richie is so misunderstood,” laments 30-year-old news producer Jonny Harvey, whose late grandfather, Leon, along with brothers Alfred and Robert, churned out hundreds of issues of Richie Rich on their family-friendly Harvey Comics imprint from 1960 through 1982—with an encore from 1986 to 1989, when the company was sold—in addition to titles like Little Audrey and Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“I think people believe he’s this spoiled rich kid,” says Harvey, who is working on a documentary about the late family business. “Because of the blond hair, because he was the son of a multimillionaire, people make that [Donald Trump] comparison. And there couldn’t be anything further from that.”
ICYMI: How Colossus built one of the largest investing-focused podcast networks
My other newsletter: The best longform journalism we consumed this week
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