Is a decline of social media traffic bad for publishers?

PLUS: The podcasting industry has entered its sink-or-swim era.

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You can now download ebook versions of my case studies

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I regularly publish in-depth case studies about successful media outlets. I basically conduct interviews with media entrepreneurs and have them walk me through, step by step, how they built their businesses. My goal is always for the reader to come away with actionable insights they can use in their own content strategies.

Up until recently, these case studies were only available to paying subscribers, but I recognize that not everyone is necessarily ready for that level of commitment, so I created a Gumroad store where you can purchase them individually as ebooks. Here’s the initial batch of case studies:

1. How Oovvuu grew its video platform to over 400 million streams per day

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4. How Man of Many grew into the largest men's lifestyle media outlet in Australia

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Is a decline of social media traffic bad for publishers?

Social media referral traffic has been on a steep decline for years now, especially as large platforms like Facebook continued to de-emphasize news in the feed. Axios published a chart showing just how precipitous this fall has been:

It's hard to know though whether this has been good or bad for publishers without data showing whether overall traffic has declined. Media outlets have done a better job of building out their newsletter lists in recent years, and "dark social" traffic can be a pretty significant share of web visits, so my guess is that publishers aren't as reliant on social traffic as they once were. I think the impact on a publisher’s business is largely based on how dependent it is on programmatic advertising, since subscription-focused outlets began moving their audiences off Facebook years ago.

What’s the journalistic value of a scoop?

The Washington Post published a fun profile of two NBA reporters — ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and the Athletic’s Shams Charania — who have developed a fierce rivalry for being the first to break news of player trades:

They so own NBA news that one former league executive told The Post that they are the only NBA reporters who matter. A former Athletic executive said it might not even be worth having an NBA vertical without Shams. Shams has starred in an AT&T commercial, and Woj has been a T-Mobile pitchman. The suggestion is that they are always connected …

… Now, multiple NBA reporters and officials describe their relationship as something akin to Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, the tension between them spilling across their respective galaxies. One editor said the Athletic doesn’t want Woj tweets dropped into company Slack channels because Shams doesn’t like to see them; ESPN reporters, in turn, are discouraged from tweeting Athletic stories or inviting Athletic guests onto their podcasts. Neither reporter acknowledges the other publicly.

“It’s the only real rivalry left in the NBA,” NBA reporter Frank Isola said. “Everyone else likes each other.”

I've never completely understood the journalistic obsession with scooping competitors on a piece of news that was going to break anyway. It just seems so exhausting to be on this constant treadmill where your only reward is that you're a few minutes early to a scoop. You're basically devoting your life to chasing dopamine hits.

Should publishers block AI bots?

There’s been an ongoing question as to whether publishers could block crawlers designed to train Google’s Bard chatbot without also accidentally removing themselves from search results, but Google just released an update that makes it easy to do so:

The new tool, called Google-Extended, allows sites to continue to get scraped and indexed by crawlers like the Googlebot while avoiding having their data used to train AI models as they develop over time.

The company says Google-Extended will let publishers “manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs,” adding that web publishers can use the toggle to “control access to content on a site.”

I've never fully bought into the idea that AI poses a grave threat to high-quality publishers, but at the same time I see little downside to blocking Google's AI crawler given that its chatbot is specifically designed to send less traffic to websites.

The publishing industry continues to shoot itself in the foot

Earlier this year I published a piece arguing that the publishing industry’s widespread embrace of open programmatic advertising was the “original sin” that caused the entire sector to crater. Chief among my complaints was the role this technology played in the rise of ad fraud, which siphons money away from legitimate publishers and drives down the ROI of display advertising. Well, a new report from Juniper Research shows how massive that fraud is:

Ad fraud will cost marketers $84 billion this year – 22% of all online ad spend. This figure is expected to soar to $170 billion in five years’ time in 2028

Now imagine if that $84 billion actually went to legitimate publishers. How many jobs would that create?

Every publisher that opts into open programmatic advertising enables this. They're basically shooting themselves in the foot just to generate a few extra pennies.

Understanding YouTube’s role in podcast listening

It's often claimed that YouTube is one of the largest podcast platforms in the world. But that claim includes some pretty big asterisks, since most of that consumption involves watching video, and many of those videos consist of short clips that are excerpted from a longer episode.

Radio veteran Adam Bowie wrote a good breakdown of the different kinds of podcast formats that are uploaded to YouTube and why some perform better than others:

Consumers are not always available to view a video feed. When you’re driving, running, walking, cooking, washing, working out, cycling, working, sleeping even – you frequently don’t even have the ability to watch something at the same time.

Maybe in some far flung Elon Musk fever dream of a world where we’re chauffeured to work in our driverless cars, or leave the washing up and laundry to our household robots, we’ll have more time for video screens. But right now there are multiple parts of our days when audio is all that we can consume concurrently with the rest of our lives. And I’m not sure YouTube fully understands that. Or if they do, they’re not really chasing that part of the ecosystem. In which case, that’d be very disappointing.

That's not to say that YouTube isn't a powerful player in the podcast space, but the consumption is far different compared to what occurs with more standard podcast listening.

The podcasting industry has entered its sink-or-swim era

Bloomberg reported that Pushkin Industries, the narrative podcast studio co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell, has cut 30% of its staff:

The cuts represent a significant about-face for the company, which was still in growth mode not long ago. In June 2022, it announced a first-look deal with film and TV company A24 to adapt its audio series for the screen. The following month, it acquired Transmitter. But late last year, a distribution deal the company sought with Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Music fell through after the online retailer significantly lowered its offer …

… “What I think has changed and had such a big effect is the position of some of the biggest players,” [CEO Jacob Weisberg] said. “All these companies were investing a lot in podcasting and pulled back dramatically.”

Pushkin has produced a lot of good stuff, but it's clear that a lot of the growth in the podcast industry in recent years was based on the assumption that platforms like Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, and Amazon would continue signing huge upfront deals. Now that those deals have dried up, podcast companies need to sink or swim based entirely on the revenue they generate directly from their programming.