How Twitter spaces can be repurposed by podcasters
Plus: TikTok is still terrible at paying creators.
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How Twitter spaces can be leveraged by podcasters
The Telegraph hosts a live Twitter Spaces event every day, and then its audio team takes the recording, adds in additional production, and publishes it as an on-demand podcast episode that's released in the evenings. Press Gazette reported on the show’s success:
To date, Ukraine: The Latest has topped 16 million listens, with 2.9 million listens (including downloads and Youtube listens) in November – up from 1.6 million in October. More than 70,000 people typically listen each day and it quickly became The Telegraph’s most successful podcast to date.
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Live audio was overhyped from the beginning
The market for live audio isn't non-existent, it's just much smaller than the audiences for most other digital mediums.
To remain relevant, Clubhouse and others needed to provide compelling programming 24/7, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to compete with the likes of TV, let alone TikTok, Netflix and social media. But what we’re now seeing is that even the platforms that threw money at the problem, like Spotify and Amazon, aren’t getting much traction. Maybe live audio wasn’t going to ever work as a standalone product and really is just a feature after all.
What do you think?
TikTok is still doing a bad job of paying creators
Tiktok finally rolled out a more meaningful revenue sharing program and...it's pathetic. It bases its share on a tiny portion of a creator's overall views. The revenue sharing formula devised for YouTube Shorts is much more generous.
"I was pretty shocked when this whole thing came out," said Betts Waller, a gaming creator who has around 380,000 followers on his TikTok account Forrest Dump. "I was super excited to join it, but I'm six cents richer today."
Waller only had eight video views qualify for Pulse earnings over the first pay period between September 30 and October 30, despite posting videos that garnered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of views during the period.
Punchbowl News reaches $10 million in revenue
Press Gazette interviewed Anna Palmer, co-founder of the Capitol Hill-focused newsletter Punchbowl News:
Punchbowl News offers its audience a free morning newsletter and a ten-minute podcast, recorded by Palmer and Sherman at 5am each weekday. They also sell premium membership, which includes access to paid-for newsletters, exclusive polling and events hosted by Punchbowl.
Asked about Punchbowl’s finances, Palmer said it had generated revenues of $10million in 2021, including more than $1million from subscriptions. “This past year, I would say we have doubled down on all of that,” she said. “So, we have not shared a number publicly on what our revenue is this year. I will say I’m very focused on our subscription business.”
It seems like The Athletic's advertising business is off to a good start
It’s been a few months since The New York Times introduced ads into The Athletic, and Digiday checked in with the outlet’s chief commercial officer Sebastian Tomich about how the effort is going so far:
I segment it in three ways. We look for brands that already have pre-existing sports relationships. So team and league [sponsors and] official sponsors of the World Cup, like Visa Hyundai, McDonald’s, Coke — we will 100% go after all of them.
Then you have brands that are interested in reaching affluent audiences, predominantly males. That leads you to all the golf tournaments, all the men’s lifestyle publishers, all the brands that show up there like big watches, cars and apparel. They might not sponsor a team, but they want to be around it.
And then third is advertisers who just want to be around sports. Their number-one target might not necessarily be affluent males, but they love the sports environment. A good example of that is Paramount+, right? They’re not an official team sponsor. They target everybody, but they love being around sports.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.