Using your severance pay as media startup capital

PLUS: It's time to stop judging a film's success by its box office returns.

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Creator Spotlight: Turning a layoff into a creator media business

After being laid off from ESPN, an employee found himself stuck in a two-year contract that prevented him from working elsewhere. He used that downtime to sharpen his video production skills. When the contract finally expired, he devoted himself to creating sports video essays on YouTube. Seven months later, his channel had grown to around 24,000 subscribers — not yet enough to support him full-time, but a solid and growing part of his overall income.

Variety: Inside David Ellison’s Dramatic First 100 Days at Paramount: Courting Tom Cruise Blockbusters, Forging Ties With Trump and Daring Anyone Else to Buy Warner Bros. Discovery

I just fundamentally don’t believe a media company can consolidate its way to success. There’s just not enough user lock-in, not when the Creator Economy is pumping out millions of hours of free content every day. The only truly differentiated media content is live sports, but the broadcasting rights for games have been bid up so high that it’s almost impossible for NFL and NBA games to drive a healthy profit margin. David Ellison has lots of his dad’s money to play around with now, but that’s mostly because Oracle’s stock price has been propped up by the AI bubble. Once that bubble pops, then he’ll be subjected to the same media economics as everyone else.

The piece also includes this gem of a passage (emphasis mine):

While David Ellison is the frontman in the family’s Hollywood forays, there is a sense that he is moving in lockstep with his father, who brings a mentality far different from what has reigned in Hollywood for more than a century — that the mogul with the most content wins. Instead, he follows a different guiding principle.

“Larry Ellison has a fundamental belief that the guy with the most data wins,” says Derek Reisfield, the first president of CBS New Media (now CBS Interactive) and co-founder of MarketWatch. “That’s been his mantra at Oracle. That’s what is going on with the Warner Bros. Discovery bid.

lol. The entire business case for why AT&T acquired Warner Media in the first place was that it would be able to leverage the combined data of its telecom customers and media customers to drive all sorts of synergies. That was also the logic for why Verizon bought both AOL and Yahoo. Can someone remind me how those acquisitions worked out?

ICYM: How Android Intelligence built a thriving paid membership

Like & Subscribe: ‘IMDb for Creators’: How Famous Birthdays Took Over Gen Z — and Became Agents’ Scouting Tool

I’ve always thought Famous Birthdays was super smart in how it identified an information vacuum and then did an excellent job filling it. Basically, there are tons of social media influencers who are fairly famous — in that they have millions of followers — but don’t meet the notability requirements to land their own Wikipedia articles, mostly because the legacy media outlets that Wikipedia favors have been extremely bad about covering creators.

So Famous Birthdays stepped in and started compiling basic biographical details about influencers who were collectively receiving tens of millions of Google searches per month. And then once the site gained a foothold, its team had a much easier time soliciting biographical information from the influencers who now considered it a badge of honor to be included in its index. The company also became adept at monitoring its analytics to identify rising influencers who are starting to generate lots of search queries.

Axios: Vox Media board has discussed spinning out podcast network

Media executives have seemed oddly obsessed recently with spinning out media outlets into separate companies —both WBD and NBCU are spinning out their cable channels, for instance — and I just don’t get it. Wouldn’t the distribution of Vox Media’s publishing arm help Vox Media’s podcasts grow their audiences? Wouldn’t the company’s sales team want a wide diversity of formats to sell across? Just seems short-sighted to me.

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Digiday: The rise of micro dramas that are attracting big ad dollars

Microdramas are already an $11 billion industry, and while much of that revenue comes from China, they’ll generate over $800 million in other countries this year. The companies behind microdramas are now spending big on social media advertising, running clips and trailers on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.

Puck: Taylor Sheridan Burning Questions and Smoking Guns

Taylor Sheridan doesn’t just produce some of Paramount+’s most popular shows, he’s one of the platform’s main customer acquisition drivers, with data showing his shows collectively generate millions of paid subscription signups. He’s locked into his contract until January 1, 2029, and David Ellison has until then to find non-Sheridan IP that will keep customers from churning out. Perhaps that’s why he’s so hellbent on adding HBO to his arsenal.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

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Variety: Ashley Flowers’ ‘Crime Junkie’ Podcast Company Inks $150 Million Multiyear Pact With Fox Corp.’s Tubi Media Group in Exit From SiriusXM

It seems notable that one of the most popular podcasts has switched its ad representation from a company primarily associated with audio to one that’s primarily associated with video. Pretty soon we’re going to start thinking of podcasts as TV shows that also just happen to offer audio-only versions.

Bloomberg: Box-Office Duds Are Becoming Streaming Hits

Traditionally, how much a streamer pays to license a movie is determined by its box office performance, but some of the best-performing movies on streaming in recent years were box office duds. Some studios like Sony are contemplating changing up the way they negotiate streaming rights, with a new emphasis on actual streaming performance.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Forbes: Why VideoAmp Thinks It Can Bust Nielsen’s TV Ratings Monopoly

Nielsen has had a 70-year monopoly on measuring TV ratings, but networks have long complained of its inconsistent data, especially when it comes to measuring niche audiences. Now, a bunch of competitors are trying to convince advertisers to switch over to their own proprietary platforms, the largest of which uses AI to sift through billions of data points to determine audience demographics for a specific show.

What’s coming down the pipeline…

I’m 5,843 words into writing a long profile of Dynamo, the media startup launched earlier this year by former Business Insider editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson. Yes, I’ve once again vastly underestimated the final word count for an article. I’m fairly confident this will be coming out next week, and then I have a bunch of podcast episodes that are pretty much ready to publish.

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