How Hollywood streamers should work with YouTubers
PLUS: Creators are learning how supply chains work.
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How Hollywood streamers should work with YouTubers
Now that MrBeast has proved that his huge popularity on YouTube can be replicated on Amazon Prime, Hollywood streamers are taking a lot more pitch meetings with creators:
Buyers' mandates change frequently, but in recent months, they've expressed interest in creator-led travel and sports projects and ways to use YouTube talent in live entertainment. Industry insiders said most of the calls are for unscripted projects.
"You're going to see more opportunity for creators to get bigger platforms and work with bigger media companies," said Jon Skogmo, the CEO of Lost iN, a creator-driven media company. "I know they're being pitched for shows by independent producers."
If I were a Hollywood streamer looking to work with creators, I wouldn't commission brand new originals from them; instead, I'd hammer out a licensing deal that allows me to stream their content during an exclusive window before it goes live on YouTube. Obviously, these creators already have a formula that works in terms of generating an engaged audience, and a windowing license is much less expensive than commissioning a wholly original show.
By saving money on production costs, streamers could cast a wider net and work with a far greater number of creators. They could also structure the deals to require the creators to promote the streamer on their own channels. Creators would love this type of deal because it wouldn't disrupt their YouTube channel production by all that much. In fact, many of the biggest education YouTubers have already established a deal like this with Nebula.
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Should creators post video content to LinkedIn?
LinkedIn really wants creators to post vertical videos, which means it’s giving those videos a huge algorithmic boost:
Earlier this month, creator Terry Rice ran an experiment in which he posted the same content as a video post and a text-based image post, finding that the video post far exceeded the text post in impressions — 786 to 181,000 — but the text post had a much higher engagement-to-impression rate of 12.7 percent versus the video’s engagement rate of 0.1 percent.
I remember when LinkedIn first launched the ability to publish full articles to its platform back in like 2014. I thought it was really cool, so I started cross posting my content there. It didn't take long before LinkedIn's editors decided that I wrote pretty good copy, so they started giving every article I published a big algorithmic boost. Not only did my content generate huge traffic, but my my LinkedIn account soon ballooned up to over 65,000 followers.
But then LinkedIn found a new shiny object — does anyone remember the "broetry" trend? — and suddenly my articles started getting hardly any views. I eventually got bored and stopped cross-posting there.
All this is to say, the reason that vertical videos are doing so well on LinkedIn right now is that they're the shiny new object being prioritized in the algorithm. As far as I can tell, LinkedIn isn't sharing its billions of dollars of revenue with these creators, and you can pretty much guarantee that there will be other shiny objects it'll focus on in the future.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't create vertical videos for LinkedIn. What I am saying is you should have a plan in place for moving any audience you build there onto a platform you actually own and can monetize.
Are brands prepared to advertise on rightwing media again?
The right-of-center magazine The Dispatch now has 45,000 paying subscriber and is generating between $5 to $10 million in revenue. Most of that revenue comes from subscriptions, but it recently hired someone whose focus is on building up its advertising business:
In January, it named media entrepreneur Michael Rothman as its first president. In addition to helping fine-tune its subscription funnel, Rothman will be tasked with finding ways to expand the surface area available to interested sponsors without disturbing its subscription model.
“If you look at Edelman trust data, you see that there is pressure from shareholders for companies to diversify and be more balanced,” Rothman said. “So The Dispatch, on one level, solves that for marketers by providing a brand-safe environment that reaches a center-right audience.”
Something I've noticed recently is that conservative publications are getting more confident that they can attract mainstream brand advertisers going forward. For the past 10 years, a lot of those advertisers have steered clear of partisan political content, especially on rightwing outlets, but now there's hope in politics media that Trump's win triggered a correction in the marketing industry’s perception of "brand safety."
I'm a little bit skeptical; as I've noted before, brands really operate in a buyer's market in terms of there being pretty much infinite supply of advertising inventory. When it's so easy to buy inexpensive ads on non-political content, why risk the blowback?
That being said, The Dispatch tracks closer to the center than your average rightwing publication, so it’ll have an easier time convincing advertisers it’s “brand safe” than more partisan outlets like Breitbart of the Daily Wire.
Can a Facebook group replace a local newspaper?
Anytime a local news outlet closes, it creates an information vacuum, and Facebook groups are often filling in that vacuum all across the US:
Patty Hevner is the founder and one of the moderators of the “Cheyenne Wells” group. She is also the deputy clerk for Cheyenne County. “I just wanted to learn more about the history of the area, so it started just as an history page more than information,” said Hevner. “And then when the local newspaper, the Range Ledger, shut down in 2022, I asked a local president of the historical society and thought, ‘Well, we don’t have a newspaper anymore, so it may be beneficial to residents to stay up to date.’”
The group originally started as just “Cheyenne Wells, Kit Carson, Arapahoe Memories.” She added “NEWS, ADVERTISEMENTS!” to include her expanded coverage.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it: it's a pretty bleak situation when an official news outlet is replaced with a Facebook group. These forums have no editorial filters to catch inaccuracies, and they don't have the newsgathering ability to hunt down hard-to-find information via interviews and other reporting methods.
That being said, as someone who spent the first two years of his career as a local news reporter, I think groups like these can provide a lot of the same value we delivered at our newspaper. They can spot new business openings, alert people to upcoming events, and direct attention to pressing problems within a community. As much as I hate that local newsgathering is being outsourced to Meta — a company that regularly decimates information ecosystems the moment they don't align with its current business strategy — I can't completely dismiss the value these online communities provide to information-starved towns and cities.
TikTok is driving foot traffic to bookstores
BookTok has already received lots of press attention for its ability to propel books onto the bestseller lists, but now it’s also being credited with saving Barnes & Noble:
Barnes & Noble has become something of a gathering place for book influencers. Indeed, many of them never stopped picking up books in person, but now they’re bringing their followers along to the store. “I’ve been shopping at Barnes & Noble for as long as I can remember,” says Simone Jung, a 39-year-old content creator who started her Instagram account in 2016 to connect with people who also love books … When she goes to Barnes & Noble now, Jung recognizes many of the covers lining the shelves from her online community and hears other shoppers doing the same. “I’ll see a little group of people hanging around a certain section of books, and being like ‘Oh my gosh, I read that one!’ or ‘I heard that one on BookTok,’” she says.
It's interesting that the specific claim here is that BookTok is generating more foot traffic for book stores; it seems intuitive that a viral video promoting a book would instead trigger immediate online sales on outlets like Amazon.
I think the key factor at play here is that many BookTok videos romanticize — and take place in — book stores. Personally, I haven't stepped foot in many over the past few years, but I certainly have very warm memories of time spent in Barnes and Noble growing up. I know we're supposed to favor independent bookstores, but there was something about the grandness of a Barnes and Noble that made it such an intoxicating place for a former bookworm like me (I still read books, but with nowhere near the frequency of my middle school and high school years).
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Behind the paywall
Here’s what’s on deck for paying subscribers:
Creators are learning how supply chains work
Creator funds are back in vogue
Is there an investment bubble forming in the music rights space?
Why the NFL’s new creator-friendly policy is a big deal
Why Netflix still isn’t that interested in NFL or NBA broadcasts
Creators are learning how supply chains work
There's a really interesting segment of this podcast conversation where the hosts talk about MrBeast's Feastables brand.