Is Google about to reopen the traffic floodgates?

PLUS: The strange allure of the New York Post

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Is Google about to reopen the traffic floodgates?

Search Engine Roundtable reports Google is starting to roll out its Discover tool on desktop browsers, which means news headlines are appearing whenever users fire up the Google homepage:

Since the weekend, Google has started to roll out Google Discover on desktop in many countries and regions. I personally can trigger it in Google New Zealand and some other locations but I am not yet able to trigger it on Google.com in the United States … We've seen Google test Discover on desktop since 2023. But now we seem to be on the verge of a full rollout of Google Discover on desktop.

I think this could unleash an absolute firehose of traffic for traditional news publishers. Google Discover is already a substantial traffic driver on mobile, and desktop users likely open new Chrome tabs even more often than phone users.

Of course, only large media companies are eligible to have their headlines displayed on Discover, for the most part. If you're an independent creator who publishes on a platform like Substack or BeeHiiv, then you probably won't see any benefit from this tool, even if the content you publish is just as good as anything uploaded to mainstream websites.

And of course once Google opens this traffic floodgate, every traditional media company will start pumping out more and more content that caters to the Discover algorithm, even if that content does nothing to really service the publication's core audience. It'll be a new shiny object in a long line of shiny objects that distracts legacy media outlets from addressing the systemic problems facing their industry.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google executives are hoping this move will get publishers to ease off on their criticism that the company’s generative AI summaries are leading to fewer website clicks in the main search results.

Kara Swisher’s big bet on herself

Kara Swisher eschewed a large upfront payment to license her podcast and instead signed a deal with Vox Media that was based entirely on a revenue share. According to projections from her business partner Scott Galloway, the two could pocket as much as $70 million over the next four years:

Ms. Swisher's reach in the media world goes far beyond Vox Media. She is completing a deal for a documentary series about cheating death, produced with EverWonder Studio, probably for CNN, where, she said, she already earns around $250,000 annually as a contributor. She is working on a book about mortality and future tech. There is a potential TV show based on her memoir and another possible series about tech moguls. She also serves as a consultant on a Washington version of the series “The L Word.”

The Onion’s big bet on quality

The new CEO of The Onion spent his first month on the job getting rid of the website's god awful ad tech. He then launched a paid membership, reintroduced the print product, and expanded the staff from 14 to 27. His focus on delivering a better user experience seems to be working. Maybe other legacy media organizations should try it!

“We took this thing that was dying a slow internet heat death and turned it into a real newspaper and much bigger business,” he exclusively tells Vanity Fair. “There was a boner-pill ad shawl that covered all of our content, and you just couldn’t read it. We got rid of all of it. We reset revenue to zero for a month or two while we figured out how to make and ship a paper to tens of thousands of people.”

Spotify shouldn’t have caved on podcast play counts

Spotify first announced it would start showing play counts for podcast episodes and then rolled the policy back when podcasters complained:

Now, play counts will only appear on shows with at least 50,000 plays each. Instead of showing an exact play count, the designation will only update at specific milestones, like 100,000 or 1 million plays.

I'm kind of sad that Spotify caved on this. I think it's great that platforms like YouTube publicly display their video counts; this transparency allows us to gauge the impact of any particular video. Whether something received 50 plays or 5 million plays is relevant, and Spotify just seems to be shielding podcasters' egos while making it easier for them to lie about audience size.

I guess the counterpoint to this argument would be that the podcast market is pretty fragmented, and some podcasters simply don't perform as well on Spotify as they do on other platforms, which means any play count there would vastly underestimate their audience. My podcast, for instance, has always underperformed on Spotify; it currently accounts for only 10% of my downloads/streams.

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Meta launches yet another gimmick instead of sharing revenue with creators

Business Insider reports Instagram is offering up to $20,000 to creators who can get new users to sign up for its platform:

The program, called "Referrals," is an invite-only, limited test that pays US-based creators when people visit Instagram or sign up for a new Instagram account from links shared by the creator.

There are two ways creators can earn money, capped at $20,000, from Instagram's referrals:

Some creators will be able to earn $100 for every eligible new user who signs up for an Instagram account.

Other creators can earn $100 for every 1,000 "eligible visits" to the Instagram app.

Meta will try every gimmick in the book rather than just establish a clearly-defined revenue sharing program for creators.

There's a reason that YouTube has become a cultural epicenter while Instagram is mainly a repository for repurposed or stolen content that was originally posted elsewhere. Seriously, every time I open the app I'm struck by how much of my feed consists of just "meme" pages that post clips from famous TV shows and movies. Even when the content isn't stolen, it's usually just recycled from a users' TikTok account.

The strange allure of the New York Post

New York is unquestionably a liberal city, but one that likes to flirt with conservatism, hence why the New York Post continues to have so much clout with its citizens. Even those who disagree with its politics have a grudging respect of the tabloid and its willingness to take big swings against its chosen enemies. It harkens back to a time when local newspapers could operate as their own power centers in every city and town:

The paper holds real clout in notionally liberal New York. It editorializes on perennially important local issues—mass transit, real estate, the ever-fluctuating fortunes of the Knicks—and leads substantive political investigations. No other outlet in the city has as thoroughly covered the struggle between Governor Kathy Hochul and Donald Trump over the construction of the new Penn Station, or their ongoing political fight about New York’s congestion-pricing law, which took effect in January, or the recently—and quite dubiously—dropped federal corruption case against Mayor Adams, the Post’s former golden child.

The Post’s dedication to this kind of fisking, oppositional metro reporting is rarer than ever, if hopelessly slanted.

My advice for working with Shane Smith

Semafor reports that Vice co-founder Shane Smith is trying to convince influencers to join a podcast network called the Vice News Collective.

My advice for anyone working with Shane Smith: make him pay you as much upfront as humanly possible. The guy got rich by paying young 20-somethings dogshit wages and then left them holding the bag when his company imploded. Consider yourself warned!

ICYMI: How Gary Arndt built Everything Everywhere, a podcast with 1.5 million monthly downloads

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