The next generation of media companies won’t behave like media companies

PLUS: CNN needs to pivot away from punditry.

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The next generation of media companies won’t behave like media companies

Craig Fuller is best known as the founder of FreightWaves, a media company that sells a high-priced data product. But as a side hustle he also buys hobbyist magazines and then sells products and services to the hobbyists who read those magazines:

For instance, he bought Flying Magazine, an outlet geared toward people who own private planes and jets. Then he bought a large plot of land in Tennessee, built a small airport at the center of it, and began selling parcels of land to flying enthusiasts who want to build homes around this airport.

This is how the next generation of media companies will operate; they won’t necessarily eschew traditional media models like advertising and subscriptions, but their main value will be to drive down customer acquisition costs for some kind of adjacent product or service. Fuller essentially owns a real estate company that markets itself with a magazine.

How to incorporate LinkedIn Newsletters into your larger newsletter strategy

LinkedIn rolled out a new feature that will allow company pages to buy ads promoting their LinkedIn newsletters:

Currently, only newsletter articles authored by companies and posted organically on Company Pages can be sponsored. Member-authored newsletters are not eligible for sponsorship at this time, though LinkedIn plans to add this capability in the future …

… This new feature marks a significant evolution in LinkedIn's content strategy, bridging organic content with paid promotion. It offers companies a powerful tool to expand their reach, enhance thought leadership, and grow their subscriber base on the platform.

Before you go spending a bunch of money on LinkedIn buying subscribers for your LinkedIn newsletter, remember that you'll never be able to export your email list and LinkedIn can begin choking off your newsletter distribution at any point. Currently, the stats dashboard doesn’t even tell you if your newsletters are being distributed to the entire subscriber base that signed up for it; you just see a vague “article views” number that combines the people who opened the newsletter in their inbox and those who saw it on LinkedIn.

That being said, it’s clear LinkedIn is heavily promoting its own newsletter tool within its network, so there is an opportunity to tap into its massive user base. Since launching my own newsletter on LinkedIn, it’s grown to over 7,000 subscribers; that’s about half the subscribers I have on Substack, though it seems clear that the open rate for my LinkedIn newsletter is much lower.

So how do you balance growing a LinkedIn newsletter without undermining your main newsletter strategy?

My approach is to try to leverage the LinkedIn newsletter to drive signups for my main newsletter. To start with, I always publish the LinkedIn version on a 12-hour time delay, so as to avoid cannibalizing my main list as much as possible.  

I also put a call to action at the top of the LinkedIn newsletter to try to drive signups to my main newsletter:

And then finally, I always include links within my LinkedIn newsletter that drive people back into the archives of my Substack newsletter.

How many signups is this actually driving to my main newsletter? It’s difficult to say. But I’m getting an additional 1,500 views on every LinkedIn newsletter, so my hope is that it’s producing at least some additive value.

The Washington Post needs to diversify its coverage

Dick Tofel published a piece dissecting WashPo’s struggles under Jeff Bezos’s ownership:

I don’t think it’s too late for the Post to take yet another run at the Times, as it has done occasionally over the last half century, and possibly to prevail, or to reach an acceptable and profitable parity. But that approach, I believe, would require major new investment—likely acquisitions, such as the Times has undertaken with Wirecutter, The Athletic and Wordle; faster and more effective deployment of AI in ways not yet seen in news; a reversal of talent losses and a concerted effort to amass new talent; a much more nimble and systematic adaptation to the creator economy.

A big reason for why WashPo's growth stalled out is because it over-indexed on political news. Not only is that content category super saturated, but interest in politics significantly declines in non-election years.

Compare its strategy to the one employed by the New York Times, which has diversified its offerings to recipes, games, product recommendations, and sports — not to mention a wider breadth of news coverage across various topic categories.

That’s not to say that WashPo needs to go and build out its own games and recipes verticals — though that approach probably wouldn’t hurt — but any significant expansion will require an aggressive investment in non-politics verticals. Bezos has the buying power to snipe away the best content creators across virtually any niche, but someone in the company’s executive ranks needs to take the initiative to recruit that talent. 

How TAPinto sells local ads across 90 news sites

Talk to just about anyone who works in local newspapers, and they’ll tell you it’s getting more and more difficult to convince local businesses to buy ads. Not only are these businesses able to build their own audiences on social media and email, but they also have access to super targeted ad products offered by platforms like Google and Facebook.

But Mike Shapiro hasn’t been daunted by the challenge of selling local ads. He’s the founder of TAPinto, a network of over 90 news websites spread out mostly in New Jersey. Over the past decade, he’s developed a range of ad products and all sorts of unique incentives that allow his network operators to collaborate on selling sponsorships.

In a recent interview, Mike walked through every aspect of his advertising ecosystem including:

• All the different ad products he offers

• Why they’re superior to Google and Facebook

• How his operators collaborate on selling sponsorships

• Why every ad unit has a flat rate regardless of the site’s audience size

You can find the interview over here.

Streaming royalties come for the audiobook market

Audible is testing out a new subscription offering that allows customers to stream an unlimited number of audiobooks:

Historically, the Amazon subsidiary focused on attracting subscribers using a system based largely on “credits,” which over time became the industry standard. But under the newly proposed model, Audible would start paying publishers and authors in a new way — specifically, by handing over royalty fees for a particular pool of audiobooks on the service that subscribers can listen to credit-free.

This is similar to how payouts are allocated on most music streaming services, and it seems to be Audible’s response to Spotify’s rollout of a similar audiobook streaming bundle.

So will this be good for authors? We can probably assume that some will loudly protest this new system, especially given that the book industry has always been resistant to change. 

My guess is that this all-you-can-eat offering will lure more customers into the audiobook market, thereby increasing the overall spend on the sector. But as with the introduction of music streaming, there will be winners and losers. Prolific authors that specialize in serialized storytelling will probably see an increase in their take-home pay, whereas authors who publish shorter standalone books might struggle under this royalty system. 

CNN needs to pivot away from punditry

You know that advice I gave above about WashPo diversifying beyond politics? I think I’d give the same advice to CNN, which will soon roll out its own digital subscription offering:

First, we will create best-in-class, subscription-ready products that will provide need-to-know news, analysis and context in compelling new formats and experiences, starting with CNN.com’s first subscription product launching before the end of 2024. We want to build on CNN.com’s reach with a new focus on engagement and frequency — how long our users spend with us and how often they return — by improving the quality of the product experience and giving users powerful reasons to come back to us more often.

Many doubt CNN's ability to generate real digital subscription revenue, but it's worth noting that people expressed the same doubts when the NYT launched its own paywall. CNN has a huge brand and its website is one of the most-visited in the world. That gives it a huge leg up in marketing any type of subscription offering.

But any success will require its executives to recognize that its value to TV cable subscribers won’t translate to the web. On TV, CNN serves as a sort of ambient programming — a channel people turn to when they’re waiting for a favorite show to come on. That’s allowed CNN to devote most of its programming to cheap-to-produce punditry that involves a bunch of talking heads chewing over that day’s political news.

That kind of punditry is incredibly abundant on the web, and I sincerely doubt there’s much consumer appetite to pay for it. Without serious investment in non-politics beat reporting, I don’t see CNN reaching its goal of $1 billion in digital revenue. 

What do you think?

A radical approach to fighting splogs

Ernie Smith bought the expired domain of a news website he used to work for to ensure it didn't fall into the hands of the spam harvesters that will capitalize on a domain's authority to trick Google into promoting their AI-generated slop:

If companies we used to work at are going to let go of old domains, it only makes sense that former employees scoop them up before spammers get the chance to ruin it. If you worked somewhere you care about and their domain is offline, do yourself a favor and take a close look at domainr.com, and see if they’re doing a good job at protecting their domains. If they aren’t, it might be an opportunity to protect former coworkers from spammers ruining their search results or beloved old products from being exploited.

Of course, you only have this option if the publisher lets the domain expire. Many either sell the domains to a willing buyer or just wipe the archives completely, eliminating thousands of articles in the process. In those cases, the journalists have little recourse other than to salvage the articles from the Internet Archive and reprint them on their own websites.

I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast

One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.

In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:

• Niche news sites

• Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Affiliate/ecommerce

Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )

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