Stop calling the New York Times a “games company”
PLUS: YouTube animation is approaching Hollywood-level quality.
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Stop calling the New York Times a “games company”
Ben Thompson interviewed NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, and the most fascinating part was when they discussed the outlet’s diversification strategy:
Ben Thompson: This is a point you made before, is you wanted the New York Times to not just be — sometimes the news is slow, or sometimes stuff’s happening you don’t care about, and you wanted to have other stuff for people along the way.
Meredith Kopit Levien: Listen, I want to be really clear. We are first and foremost a high quality independent news journalism company, that is our mission, it is the most value-creating thing we do for society and economically, and that is by miles. And to your original question, it’s just amazing to have all these other points of introduction to people and point all these other ways to bring people into the Times ecosystem and to get them to form a habit with us. Once we do that, once we can engage them in something, our bet is that we can engage them in more and more, and there’s lots of examples of that.
A common quip is that the New York Times is a games company that subsidizes a news outlet, but that framing has always struck me as overly simplistic. Its success—far exceeding that of most media companies—comes from recognizing that news is inherently cyclical. To sustain growth, it has built products and content that extend beyond the daily news cycle.
During the first Trump administration, a lot of legacy news outlets saw a huge surge in traffic and subscribers, and so they doubled down on their Washington coverage. Then a boring Biden administration took the reins, and their churn skyrocketed.
The NYT, on the other hand, rode that same Trump bump but then also heavily diversified across product reviews (Wirecutter), recipes, games, and sports (The Athletic). This allowed it to keep posting massive subscriber wins even when nothing was happening in DC.
I think the bundle is what really matters. If the New York Times were to strip everything down to just its games section, it likely wouldn’t be nearly as successful. News may not be a strong direct moneymaker, but it’s incredibly effective at driving organic reach — and that reach becomes a marketing funnel for the Times’ other products.
Each vertical maps to a different moment in a user’s day. Recipes are something you look up when you’re planning or preparing a meal, while the crossword fills a different kind of downtime. Sports coverage ebbs and flows with the seasons, spiking during moments of peak interest. Wirecutter is more episodic, surfacing when someone is ready to make a purchase decision. And then there are podcasts, which people often consume while multitasking or when they don’t have access to a screen.
This sort of diversification means that the NYT can build habits in your life in a way that CNN never could.
Why being a “family” influencer can be so lucrative
Rolling Stone published a deep dive intothe world of family influencers, and I found this paragraph interesting:
“There’s crazy, crazy amounts of money,” Tyler Chou, an attorney for YouTube creators, says of affiliate links. “Being a family influencer is the best because as the mom, you can do everything, right? You can do fashion, you can do home goods, you can do all the kids’ foods. All foods, all foods basically you can touch. You can do kitchen appliances, you can do furniture. Of all the creators, I think being a family channel is probably the most profitable.”
In Hollywood, you hear about “four quadrant” movies that are perfectly crafted to appeal to just about every demographic ranging from a youngish child to their parents. Family influencers have achieved a similar sweetspot, except for brand partnerships. While their primary viewership is likely on the younger side, there are probably plenty of parents who watch these channels alongside their kids.
ICYMI: Why a former New York Times editor launched her own women-focused magazine
Francesca Donner grew frustrated by the lack of female voices at the mainstream media outlets she worked for.
That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.
Disney’s journalistic hypocrisy
Puck reports that Disney hired a defamation lawyer who’s represented Trump and other various assholes to go after a journalist writing a book about Bob Iger:
In recent weeks, Harder has sent multiple threatening letters to publisher Harper Collins, seeking information about the book’s contents and slamming Whelan, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, as a supposedly biased journalist committing a hit job on Iger and the company. In the letters, Disney points to previous negative coverage by Whelan, fishes for clues as to what is being included, and demands sufficient time to “fact check” the book, which has been positioned in the publishing world as a thorough and unvarnished portrait of one of the most famous C.E.O.s of the past 50 years, including his abrupt Disney exit as the pandemic began in 2020 and his return to power less than two years later. Since even before its announcement, the Whelan book has been a hot topic at Disney, which has refused to participate at all.
It’s pretty hypocritical for a company that owns multiple journalistic outlets to go after a journalist who’s merely doing his job. My guess is this bullying will only trigger a Streisand Effect whereby the book garners even more attention than it normally would have.
(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)
The Daily Beast’s impressive milestone
Wow. According to Press Gazette, the Daily Beast surpassed 100,000 paid subscribers, which is an incredibly tough milestone to crack, especially for a publication with such a small staff — I doubt it has more than a few dozen people on its editorial team.
It’s also been experimenting with subscription offshoots, offering multiple paid newsletters on Substack and placing videos behind a YouTube membership paywall. All told, these platforms now have several thousand paid subscribers between them.
It’s also impressive that the outlet built its YouTube channel up to over 600,000 subscribers entirely on the back of longform video podcasts. An hour-long interview with a journalist posted just yesterday, for instance, has already amassed over 200,000 views — and it’s shot entirely within a Daily Beast office. It’s stuff like this that should terrify anyone who works in cable news.
There was a lot of staff backlash when Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood came in and immediately started making cuts, but they’ve proven to be savvy media operators. I’ve always thought that the Daily Beast punched far above its weight when it came to journalistic output, so it’s good to see that it found a product-market fit without succumbing to ad arbitrage enshittification.
Behind the paywall
Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:
How the food influencer scene is evolving to embrace more authentic content
YouTube animation is approaching Hollywood-level quality
AI comes for the shortform video clipping economy
Let’s jump into it…