The media learned the wrong lessons from the “pivot to video”

PLUS: Every sports franchise and star athlete is becoming a media company.

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Many people learned the wrong lessons from the original “pivot to video”

From the Rebooting:

In crafting video strategies, publishers will keep in mind the original pivot to video, which was in reality a pivot to platforms. Publishers were addicted to platform traffic, so as Facebook emphasized on-platform video, publishers needed to follow suit.

This is in response to a podcast interview with New York Times editor in chief Joe Kahn in which he explained that the newspaper is rapidly expanding its video operation so that nearly every part of its journalism now includes some kind of video component.

That announcement prompted a wave of snarky comments about the media embracing another “pivot to video”—a reference to the mid-2010s, when many VC-backed digital publishers imploded after spending tens of millions of dollars on video production that generated little revenue.

What frustrates me about these comparisons is that they misunderstand what actually happened back then. As Brian Morrissey points out in the Rebooting quote above, publishers didn’t really pivot to video—they specifically pivoted to Facebook video.

At the time, Facebook was sending enormous amounts of free traffic to publisher websites. For some outlets, it accounted for more than half of all referrals. Publishers were already deeply invested in the platform just as Mark Zuckerberg decided he wanted Facebook to compete more directly with YouTube.

Facebook did two things to make that happen.

First, it gave video a massive algorithmic boost, making it much more likely to appear in users’ feeds. Second, it started writing multi-million-dollar checks to publishers so they could ramp up Facebook video production.

Publishers happily obliged, collectively hiring thousands of video producers. I’d argue that much of the content wasn’t especially good, but that hardly mattered when the algorithm was generating billions of views. We later learned that Facebook had also been “accidentally” overstating many of those viewership metrics, making the audience appear even larger than it really was.

The “pivot to video” strategy unraveled because Facebook made two major decisions in quick succession.

First, it lost interest in competing with YouTube and stopped writing those multi-million-dollar checks. Suddenly, publishers were left supporting massive video teams that produced little direct revenue.

Then Facebook made an even more consequential move: it dramatically reduced traffic to publisher websites. Before that change, publishers could at least argue that strong video engagement on Facebook indirectly drove visitors back to their own sites, where they monetized traffic through programmatic advertising. Once Facebook turned off the traffic spigot, that business model collapsed.

Many of these companies were already heavily dependent on venture capital. Overnight, they lost a major source of revenue while still carrying enormous operating costs. Investors saw the writing on the wall, funding dried up, and the combination of high burn rates and collapsing traffic devastated much of the digital media industry.

I have no idea whether the New York Times will succeed with its current video expansion, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare its strategy to what brought down those publishers.

For one thing, the Times has a highly profitable subscription business that insulates it from sudden platform shifts. Rather than relying on Facebook subsidies, it’s using subscription profits to invest in video.

More importantly, today’s video ecosystem is fundamentally different from the one that existed a decade ago. Individual YouTubers now generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Consumers increasingly watch YouTube on their TVs, and brands spend tens of billions of dollars annually advertising across digital video platforms.

The platforms themselves have also matured. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are far better at recommending compelling content than Facebook ever was. Any publisher hoping to succeed on those platforms has to compete on merit against millions of independent creators. It’s a totally different dynamic that will hopefully prevent the next generation of media startups from pumping out high volumes of video content that nobody actually wants to watch.

ICYMI: Daily Detroit is proving there’s a market for local podcasts

Jer Staes monetizes his podcast through a mixture of local business advertising and paid memberships.

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.

A quick note on gift links to articles

If you’re a longtime reader of this newsletter, you’ve probably noticed that I always try to use a gift link that allows you to bypass paywalls. In cases where no gift link is available, I at least try to summarize the core insights from the article so you still get some value even if you can’t read it.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to reward me for giving you so much access to content that’s otherwise locked behind a paywall, you could always take out a paid subscription to this newsletter or at least buy one of my ebooks. Just saying!

Quick hits

Several of the deals Netflix is signing with YouTubers allow them to publish new videos to YouTube the same day they show up on Netflix. I continue to be skeptical that paywalled content can perform well when it’s also freely available on another platform. [Publish Press]

YouTube’s apparently figured out a way to identify and take down AI slop farms. Rather than targeting channels individually, it looks for patterns within clusters of channels that are run by the same spammer and then removes the cluster with one fell swoop. This approach makes it easier for the platform to battle AI spam at scale. [Inside the Creator Economy]

The Kansas City Chiefs aren’t just creating their own media content—they’re also selling sponsorships around it. Some of their video series don’t even feature Chiefs players, instead bringing in established creators to host the shows. This is part of a larger trend in which every sports franchise and star athlete is increasingly evolving into a media company. [Business Insider]

Creators who buy products with their own money, test them, and review them for TikTok Shop worry they’re being undermined by AI avatars created with TikTok’s own tools. Even some brands are uneasy about having their products promoted through synthetic content, arguing that it erodes consumer trust. [WSJ] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

This is kind of neat: the WWE, which already creates semi-scripted programming through its fake wrestling matches, is experimenting in microdramas. The organization is pairing its wrestlers with actors who are already famous in the microdrama space to create a new series. [Hollywood Reporter]

The company State Affairs employs 75 journalists to aggressively cover the governments in 14 state capitals and then feeds their work into an LLM for a Bloomberg Terminal-style information product. The idea is that a subscriber not only gets to read the journalism output, but can also ask questions related to their specific interests. [WashPo] (I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.) Back in 2024 I interviewed a publisher who sold his outlet to State Affairs.

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The playbook behind Spotify’s audiobook expansion

For years, the audiobook industry was defined by a single dominant player and a purchasing model that asked listeners to commit to an entire book before they knew whether they would enjoy it. Spotify is betting that there’s a better way. By folding audiobooks into its subscription service and using the same discovery engine that powers its music and podcast recommendations, the company is trying to transform audiobooks from a niche product for avid readers into a mainstream entertainment format. Duncan Bruce, Spotify’s director of audiobooks partnerships and licensing, has been at the center of that effort, working with publishers to build the company’s licensing strategy and expand its catalog from 150,000 titles at launch to more than 700,000 today.

In this interview, Bruce explained how Spotify convinced publishers to embrace a radically different distribution model, why casual sampling is unlocking new audiences for authors, and how the company is using AI and product innovation to make audiobooks more accessible without replacing human creativity.

You can watch the interview on YouTube.

If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]