When will the sports media bubble pop?
PLUS: Why Vox outperforms every other media outlet on YouTube
Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.
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Let’s jump into it…
When will the sports media bubble pop?
This is a good explainer of why the sports broadcasting landscape has become so fragmented — and why, in turn, it's so expensive now for the average fan to stream games from their favorite leagues.
It used to be that sports broadcasts were largely subsidized by non-sports watchers. If you were subscribed to the cable bundle, you had to pay upwards of $15 a month for sports channels regardless of whether you watched them. This allowed major sports leagues to charge more and more for the rights to broadcast their games.
But now that the cable bundle is disintegrating, non-sports watchers are able to largely avoid those fees, which means the costs have to be more fully absorbed by actual sports watchers. Basically, the cable bundle helped form a huge sports media bubble that's increasingly unsustainable.
At some point, that bubble will probably pop, and sports leagues like the NFL and NBA will have to drop their prices to match their actual market value. My guess is, at that point, it will no longer be worth it to them to license their broadcast rights, and they will simply claw back all those rights and stream games from their own subscription apps.
As for now, I'm really happy that I don't watch sports and therefore don't have to subscribe to six different services just to feed my hobby.
Want to pick my brain on your content strategy?
At this point I’ve probably interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.
I also spent over a decade consulting with organizations ranging from small nonprofits to Fortune 100 companies on their content strategies.
For this reason I get a fair number of people who reach out to me to see if I offer consulting calls so they can ask me questions related to their own content strategies.
Currently, there are three options for booking consulting calls with me:
Become a paid subscriber to my newsletter: When you subscribe, you automatically receive an email with a Calendly link that allows you to book a half-hour introductory call with me. Many of my subscribers use these calls to ask me questions related to their own businesses. Use this link and get 20% off for your first year:
Book an hour-long consulting call: Substack has a cool tool that allows you to directly book a call with me. Paid subscribers automatically get a $50 discount for these calls: [Book a call here]
Book a series of calls: Sometimes people want to book multiple calls with me. I can offer a significant discount for three or more calls. I also sometimes take on more bespoke consulting engagements. Reach out to me for details.
The media keeps getting more nichified
A newsletter that's solely focused on examining Bob Dylan's live music performances has over 1,000 paid subscribers. A media company this niche probably couldn't have generated a full-time salary as recently as 10 years ago:
I think of myself as a Dylan fan, and I’m a Dylan writer … I never write about the lyrics. I don’t analyze them. I don’t mention them. I don’t even think about them. I’m just not someone who pays much attention to lyrics. It’s funny to do all this work on Dylan and the thing that most other people focus on I pretty much entirely ignore.
Will LA continue on as an entertainment epicenter?
The Hollywood trade publication The Ankler is launching a spin-off newsletter about the Creator Economy:
The new product, authored by veteran tech and entertainment journalist Natalie Jarvey, will launch as a standalone Substack newsletter, separately from The Ankler, and will be priced at $129 a year to start.
Like & Subscribe will launch as a weekly newsletter, and will eventually be accompanied by a podcast, events, and subscriber engagement features.
Subscribers can purchase Like & Subscribe separately as a standalone publication. It will not be bundled with The Ankler, which still uses Substack as its main email tech provider.
This is a smart move considering how much traditional Hollywood and the Creator Economy are bleeding into each other.
Which begs the question: how much longer will Los Angeles remain a regional epicenter for entertainment as the Creator Economy continues to grow?
On the one hand, it's never been easier and less expensive for someone living in, say, Indiana to launch a YouTube channel that can achieve the same audience scale as most TV shows and films; that's the dynamic that allowed MrBeast to build out his huge studio ecosystem in his North Carolina hometown instead of moving his entire operations to a city like NYC or LA.
But at the same, there are definitely benefits that come with proximity to other creators, which could mean that many still gravitate to LA so they can collaborate more easily. It's not a coincidence that many of the world's biggest independent creators live there already.
When should a media outlet take on VC investment?
Tim Huelskamp, CEO and co-founder of 1440, explained in an interview why his company decided to stay bootstrapped:
One of the biggest benefits of not having taken VC funding is that you do not have to answer to shareholders. It really cannot be overstated how much of a bonus that is – not just for the owners, but for the employees that choose to work for the media business.
Like other digital start-ups such as Defector, 1440 is employee-owned. Tim explains: “We have the very rare privilege that if we want to launch a product, and it makes sense, and we all believe in it, we can go launch that product. If you’re backed with investors, your board can just tell you ‘No, go back to doing that thing, or do this thing we want to do. So it’s a wonderful luxury we have.”
One of the biggest problems for media companies that take on VC money is it pushes them into getting too far ahead of their skis. They start producing content without any clear understanding of whether it's monetizable, and then they find themselves with unsustainable burn rates that crater the company the very second the VC money dries up.
That's not to say there isn't a responsible way to bring on investment. My rule of thumb would be for the company to start with a bootstrapped MVP and only begin raising money once that initial operation is profitable. The investment should only be used to help the media outlet launch a new vertical or revenue stream.
In most cases, launching a new vertical or revenue stream doesn't require hiring more than a few additional employees, which means that a media outlet should rarely raise anything north of the low seven figures that it would cost to hire those team members. Anything above that, and the money just becomes a liability that's just as likely to sink an outlet as help it grow.
Why promoting your evergreen content is so important
Chris Hayes makes a good point here for why building a media business is so tough right now: you're not only competing with the near-infinite amount of content that's being pumped out every day, but also the near-infinite amount of content that's ever been produced in human history:
I love this thing that happened a few years ago where “Suits,” which was a network show, had become the most-watched show on Netflix. It never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that I might be fighting for eyeballs with someone watching “Suits.”
But at every single moment that you are trying to get someone’s attention now, the totality of human content is the library of your competition. And that was not true in 2000.
That's why I think every media business should not only invest in the creation of evergreen content, but also focus on consistently driving its audience back into its archives. That's the only way to accrue enough audience attention that you can properly monetize your content. If you focus ONLY on ephemeral content, then its shelf life is too short to properly monetize it.
To give you example of how I've incorporated these insights into my own business, I recently compiled a spreadsheet of all my evergreen interviews with media entrepreneurs, and now it's part of my MO to link back to these interviews in every newsletter I send out. Often, those links have the highest click-rate of the entire newsletter, which is a clear indicator that I'm driving a lot of additional engagement and attention that I wouldn't otherwise have if I only focused on alerting subscribers to my new content.
Why human curators still matter
This is a good profile of Sulinna Ong, who runs Spotify's music curation team. We think of music listening on Spotify as being largely algorithm-driven, but Spotify employees comb through up to 100,000 new songs a day and insert the best ones into playlists. Just as music labels used to lobby radio DJs, now they clamor to get their songs in front of this team:
Ong’s team was early to bless and boost the careers of artists like emerging British star Raye (another nominee for best new artist), singer-songwriter Steve Lacey and guitarist Michael Gordon, who performs under the name Mk.gee. When a South African editor brought up amapiano, an electronic-dance subgenre gaining momentum in clubs there, others on the team tested the music on playlists in the U.S. and U.K., and it took off.
ICYMI: How Man of Many grew into the largest men's lifestyle media outlet in Australia
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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Behind the paywall
Here’s what I have on deck for paying subscribers:
Why Vox outperforms every other media outlet on YouTube
Meta distracts creators with “empty calorie” metrics
Let’s jump into it…
Why Vox outperforms every other media outlet on YouTube
The most interesting chart in this analysis of the most popular news channels on YouTube is the one ranking publishers by average video view count. Vox not only sits at the top of that list, but it has double the average view count per video compared to the #2 publisher on the list.