The rise of the bookazine
PLUS: How the Creator Economy is upending media talent relations
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Why Netflix is suddenly so interested in live sports
Why are all the major streaming companies suddenly bidding on sports rights? Well, two reasons. The first is that the streaming market has reached the kind of mass adoption that will allow the major sports leagues to reach huge audiences. And the second is that most of the streamers have rolled out cheaper ad tiers and are hungry for live content:
Roughly 40 percent of Netflix’s new subscribers in all available territories are choosing the ad-supported tier, according to the company, and the ad tier has 40 million users (this is different from subscribers). That puts Netflix in sixth place domestically among all other streamers when looking at its ad-supported gross share in Q1. But with its Christmas football games, for example, the NFL is allowing Netflix to bring ads to its ad-free tier—something the streamer is also doing with events like Mike Tyson and Jake Paul’s fight, which is sponsored by Celsius. If Netflix can acculturate more users to watching ads, both domestically and internationally (where ad-supported plans appeal to more cost conscious consumers), it can theoretically swing more existing and new customers to the ad tier, which actually has higher ARPU for the company.
The rise of the “bookazine”
Those "special edition" magazines you see on newsstands at airports actually do make money. That's why we're seeing a shift within the industry where digital-only media companies are starting to put out print editions once or twice a year:
This year, Time has been trying to capitalize on the success of the collectible model by publishing more special interest publications (which the publisher calls “bookazines”), including with a “bookazine” celebrating Pokémon’s 25th anniversary, published in collaboration with Dotdash Meredith. Four covers variations of the initial run of the Pokemon magazine, priced at $14.99 each, released in February. The publisher is planning to rerelease it later this year with four new covers to further capitalize on the sales. She declined to share how many copies were sold during the first run or how many will be printed in the second run.
Monopolizing the subway commute
The Evening Standard is attributing many of its revenue troubles to London introducing WIFI on its subway. It's a great illustration of how the internet eliminated the regional monopolies offered by print newspapers.
Ad-supported streaming is still far superior to cable
The New York Times writes about the rise of ad-supported streaming tiers and whether this undermines the claim that streaming apps offer a better user experience than cable:
Ads are getting increasingly hard to avoid on streaming services. One by one, Netflix, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and Max have added 30- and 60-second commercials in exchange for a slightly lower subscription price. Amazon has turned ads on by default. And the live sports on those services include built-in commercial breaks no matter what price you pay.
Personally, I like the fact that I can at least pay a premium to TV streamers to get an ad-free experience. It's much better than the expensive cable bundle where the ads are not only mandatory, but incredibly interruptive. In the rare cases I find myself watching cable — usually in a hotel room — I'm astonished by how bad the experience is.
How the Wonder Tools newsletter grew to 39,000 subscribers
There’s this saying that “those who can’t do, teach,” but Jeremy Caplan actually practices what he preaches. By day, he instructs on entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and on his nights and weekends he writes Wonder Tools, a newsletter about the internet’s most useful websites and apps.
Jeremy launched Wonder Tools in 2020 and has since grown it to 39,000 subscribers, which is pretty remarkable considering he’s still running it as just a side hustle. In a recent interview, he walked through all the strategies he uses to grow his audience, including:
How he partnered with Poynter to grow his initial subscriber base
How he collaborates and swaps recommendations with other newsletter writers
How he buys ads on other newsletters
How speaking gigs at online and in-person events drive signups
Check out the interview over here.
Local newspapers are doing away with editorials
There's been a sharp decline in editorials published in local newspapers.
Gannett has justified its retrenchment by pointing to reader surveys indicating that local editorials have been among its newspapers’ least-read articles. It also has said many readers had trouble distinguishing between routine news reporting and editorial commentary, especially when an editorial was published online, unmoored from a traditional opinion section. Rather than offering staff-written editorials, Gannett now sees its role as “convening conversations” among community members, said Michael McCarter, Gannett’s opinion editor, in a statement.
It’s never too late for a media career
Vanity Fair published a great profile of a burnt-out lawyer who switched careers in her 40s and became MSNBC's top legal analyst.
Rubin is a case study of how successful careers are not always built on a straight line. She graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and master’s in organizational behavior, and moved to Washington two weeks later to be a congressional aide, first for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, then for former Representative Nita Lowey. Her next stop was Yale Law School, partly with an eye toward representing victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Rubin married her Stanford college sweetheart Jon Oram, graduated from Yale in 2004, clerked for a federal judge, and then entered the heady world of private practice in New York City.
AI companies are attempting to weed out partisan bias
So far, the large AI LLMs have shown zero interest in signing licensing deals with highly-partisan media outlets. But does that mean that these LLMs aren't still harvesting content from those outlets? Who knows?
“It does concern me, but not surprise me, that these left wing tech companies are ignoring news outlets trusted by half of America and focusing exclusively on training AI models using left leaning news sources,” said Neil Patel, Daily Caller co-founder and publisher of the Daily Caller News Foundation, in an email. “The result will of course be shockingly biased AI systems having influence and even control over many aspects of life. The insanity that Google released is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s flat out scary.”
How Netflix completely transformed Hollywood
Ted Sarandos reflects in a long NYT interview on how much Hollywood has changed since Netflix launched its first original series:
In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.
How the Creator Economy is upending media talent relations
ESPN's struggles to manage Pat McAfee are a clear indicator of how much the media ecosystem has shifted toward the personal brand. It's hard not to draw parallels to when ESPN regularly disciplined Bill Simmons around a decade ago for relatively minor infractions:
Just four months after joining the network, [McAfee] accused ESPN executives of “actively trying to sabotage” his show, and he called out one of them by name, the powerful event and studio production chief Norby Williamson. Williamson, McAfee said live on air, was “a rat.”
It was a stunning moment—the kind of public airing of grievances that ESPN is renowned for not tolerating. Many past ESPN talents, such as Jemele Hill (now a writer for The Atlantic) and Bill Simmons, have been pushed out for far less. And yet McAfee suffered no consequences. No suspension, no public reprimand. Then, three months later, Williamson was fired. If any doubt remained about who had the power now at ESPN—the suits or the dumb punter—it vanished along with Williamson.
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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Lots of states are trying to legalize sports betting. I got to imagine streaming platforms are perfectly suited to overlay betting information on live events.