The resurgence of the open web

PLUS: What the most successful local news startups have in common

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Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:

Let’s jump into it…

The open web is still kicking

Brian Morrissey published a piece arguing that the rise of AI-generated content, the diminishing return on programmatic advertising, and the increasing prominence of walled gardens have all caused a steady decline to the open web:

The open web was meant to do away with analog media’s gatekeepers and give birth to an abundance of high-quality information and entertainment that would be freely accessible. The open web led to an explosion of media businesses of all sizes and stripes, from big VC-funded digital publishing groups to niche brands, an SEO cottage industry, arbitrage plays, and a weird underbelly of made-for-advertising sites. 

Underpinning all of this were format (the webpage), distribution (search) and monetization (advertising). Now, all three are under threat.

People have been predicting the demise of the open web for over a decade (Wired published a big feature on the topic in 2010), but I think its death was always greatly exaggerated; in fact, I would even argue that the rise of editorial newsletters triggered an open web resurgence, allowing content creators to de-risk themselves from the walled gardens that they grew so dependent on.

Back in the 2010s, publishers were still bragging about how much traffic they received from Facebook. Today, Facebook almost never even comes up in conversation. When I speak to media entrepreneurs now, they’re quick to boast about their newsletter subscriber numbers and open rates. Some barely even mention their monthly web traffic.

I also think that content creators have developed a healthy antagonism to walled gardens. It’s not that they don’t still post to them, but there’s just this greater recognition that they’re building an audience on rented land, which means they’re much less likely to sink enormous resources into creating native content for a platform that can choke off their reach with just a few lines of code.

The one exception to this is video. While some of the largest publishers have native video players, the vast majority of video creators don’t bother with them. The silver lining to this reality is that the dominant video player is still YouTube, a platform that interacts well with the open web. Its videos are easy to link to, searchable, and can be embedded on web pages, which means that a channel’s viewership isn’t 100% dependent on a recommendation algorithm.

Do the largest tech platforms still have way too much sway over our online ecosystem? Sure, but I can’t help but feel optimistic that publishers and individual content creators have at least clawed back some of that influence over the past few years.

What do you think?

The products that Jacob Feldman, co-founder of The Sunday Long Read newsletter, can’t do without

Jacob Feldman has been working in sports journalism for over a decade and is currently a business reporter at Sportico. In 2014, he and ESPN writer Don Van Natta Jr. launched The Sunday Long Read, a newsletter that curates the web’s best stories every week. For each issue, the two co-founders narrow down a list from dozens of nominees and write short blurbs about why each piece stood out.

The Sunday Long Read is monetized through a mixture of sponsorships and paid memberships. “We’ve been thrilled to add more than 30,000 readers and writers to our community over the years,” Jacob told me. “We’re proud of an open rate currently north of 50% and excited to say we generate more than 15,000 clicks on fantastic pieces of storytelling each week.” He and Don now collaborate with more than 100 outside contributors who help in the production of the newsletter and accompanying podcast.

Jacob walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business. You can find his interview over here:

BTW, I’m still looking for creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Each interview is heavily featured in front of my 14,538 newsletter subscribers, and I share it out to my 70,472 social media subscribers. Go here if you’re interested.

The rise of the vanity media lists

Dan Toomey shot a funny video that tries to determine whether the Forbes 30 Under 30 list actually measures any discernible value produced by those named to the list. I think it’s a pretty fair critique that can apply to just about all the vanity lists put out each year by media outlets:

I remember working for a PR firm that was hired to help get a client onto the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. This person had accomplished absolutely nothing of note in her industry — honestly, I would argue that she was one of the least impressive people I’ve ever encountered in my career.

After she aged out without being named to the list, I sat on a phone call where she berated us and claimed that there were so many people on the list who were less deserving than her. She was truly one of the most delusional people I’ve ever met.

Anyway, I'm happy to no longer be working in PR!

Quick hits

Even when AI-written content isn't riddled with factual errors, it's often exceedingly bland. [The Desk]

There's no conceivable consumer benefit to forcing people to call a phone number in order to cancel their subscription. The arguments publishers put forth to keep these practices in place are absolutely laughable. [WSJ]

"[Graydon] Carter had courted [brand sponsors] by promising the allure of a glossy for half the price; an advertising takeover of an entire Air Mail issue goes for fifty-five thousand dollars." [CJR]

Now that Threads has launched, I thought it was a good time to look at the Substack Notes app and identify what still needs to be improved. [Simon Owens]

Here’s an argument that media consumption has become so fragmented that there will be no mainstream media narratives in future elections: [New York] From the article: "It seems not only possible but likely that this will be the first modern election in the United States without a minimum viable media: a placeless race, in which voters and candidates can and will, despite or maybe because of a glut of fragmented content, ignore the news."

What the most successful local news startups have in common

Out of all the media sectors to be hit over the last 20 or so years, none has seen the level of decimation visited upon local news. Hundreds of newspapers were shut down over that time period, and thousands of journalists lost their jobs. Not only have local advertising dollars been gobbled up by platforms like Craigslist, Google, and Facebook, but entire newspapers chains were also bled dry by private equity funds.

But that’s not to say there aren’t bright spots within the local news landscape. For the past few years, journalists Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg have been visiting and interviewing the entrepreneurs behind local news startups that managed to thrive in this new digital landscape. They’ve compiled their findings in a book titled “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate.” It’s due out in 2024.

Luckily for us, they agreed to share their findings in advance. They appeared on a Zoom call and answered questions from my audience about how the most successful media entrepreneurs are leveraging a mixture of grants, memberships, and sponsors to build sustainable local news outlets.

Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:

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