Why I'm bullish on Axios's ambitions in local news
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Let’s jump right into it…
WashPo: Axios is the latest media company to try to make money from local news. History is not on its side.
From the article:
The company makes no pretense of trying to match the journalism firepower of a local newspaper. Axios co-founder and chief executive Jim VandeHei said its local operations will have no more than two or three reporters on staff, at least at first; they will cover regional politics, business, education and major cultural events. Business operations will be stripped down, too, with no offices or production facilities in any of the cities. Axios will handle ad sales, promotion and tech support out of its headquarters in Arlington, Va., even while it expects the bulk of revenue to come from local advertisers.
I'm probably more bullish than the average person on Axios's local ambitions. It's keeping the operations lean by only hiring one or two writers per city while also centralizing most of its non-editorial infrastructure. That might not sound very robust, but two good journalists can cover a lot of ground.
Back in 2008, I worked as one of three reporters at a Virginia print newspaper called The Smithfield Times. We were each responsible for writing a minimum of seven articles per week, and between the three of us we were able to attend most of the school board, board of supervisors, and town council meetings in the counties we covered. We also wrote a mixture of sports, business, and lifestyle stories. We put out a pretty damn good newspaper each week despite having a small editorial staff.
Over the past year or so, I’ve written about several exciting local news companies — 6AM City, The Charlotte Ledger, WhereByUs — that offer fairly robust city coverage with only a handful of writers, and the model can work extremely well. Readers like getting their local news digested into a daily newsletter they can read every morning, and advertisers love the loyal audiences and the native ad format. I think there’s a good opportunity not only for Axios to build a robust business around local news, but to also actually fill in some of the informational gaps left by retrenching newspapers.
The Verge: Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces, says it’ll take a 20 percent cut of sales
From the article:
Twitter’s getting ready for the launch of its Ticketed Spaces feature, and today, it’s previewing what users can expect when they go to host their first one. US users will be able to apply to host paid live audio rooms starting in the next couple weeks. Anyone who wants to charge has to have 1,000 followers, have hosted three spaces in the past 30 days, and be at least 18 years old.
Twitter is already rolling out monetization for Spaces while Clubhouse is only just now launching an Android version of its app. I think those investors who valued Clubhouse at $4 billion might have overpaid.
Insider: Snapchat won't pay $1 million per day to creators anymore but says it will still dish out 'millions per week'
From the article:
The company said it paid over $130 million to more than 5,400 creators since the program launched in November.
I’m pretty ambivalent on Snapchat’s approach to creator payments. On the one hand, it’s great that it’s paying creators, but it’s doing it in such an arbitrary way that I don’t know how you build a sustainable business from it.
Let’s consider how YouTube pays its creators: When a YouTuber opts into the advertising program, they’re paid 55% of all ad revenue sold against their videos. The same goes for when they use YouTube’s paid subscription feature. They can also sell their own in-video sponsorships, promote their own merch, or push affiliate links. Because of this, growth of the channel highly correlates with revenue growth.
As far as I can tell, Snapchat’s Spotlight feature operates nothing like this. Whether people see your video is largely dependent on an opaque algorithm. Snapchat doesn’t pay you based on how much revenue your content generated. Instead, it sets an arbitrary daily amount ($1 million) and then splits that amount based on a creator’s proportional level of engagement that day.
Is it nice to receive a nice viral boost and a fat check to go along with it? I’m sure it is. But I can’t imagine that someone could build a sustainable business without predictable monthly revenue. This seems more like a lottery to me than a true monetization platform.
BuzzFeed: Some TikToks Are More Creative And Better Produced Than Feature Films
It turns out that when you only have 60 seconds to work with, you can get incredibly creative in how you create cinematic effects.
YouTube: Did Vertical Video Win?
This YouTuber makes a good argument that YouTube created an opening for TikTok by prioritizing longform content in the algorithm.
NYT: The economics of operating an OnlyFans account
From the article:
If you open an OnlyFans account but never advertise it, it doesn’t matter if OnlyFans grows from 100 million users to 100 billion. None of them will find you.
This is a great deep dive into the economics and logistics of running a successful OnlyFans account.
Podnews: Spotify vs Apple: who's bigger really?
Who has more podcast listeners? Apple or Spotify? It's really difficult to generate an apples to apples comparison. My opinion: if you're a podcast that isn't owned and operated by Spotify, you probably still have more listeners on Apple.
In other words, if you're just looking at podcast listening in general, Apple and Spotify are probably equal. But I also think a ton of podcast listens on Spotify are of Joe Rogan and other Spotify-owned podcasts.
Medialyte: The subprime attention crisis
This is an excellent explanation of the theory that the media industry is currently propped up by a massive digital advertising bubble that's about to pop.
From the piece:
Opacity is bad, but what makes it dangerous is its capacity to conceal greater ills.
“Opacity in a marketplace creates a smoke screen behind which an economic situation can deteriorate significantly without the broader market’s becoming aware of it,” Hwang writes.
The parallel to the 2008 financial crisis holds particularly well in this section. When criminal bankers packaged sub-prime mortgages into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, they committed two sins: they sold a garbage product, and they made its inferior quality almost impossible to detect.
In digital advertising, the opacity … masks the reality of attention: that no one is giving it to advertisements. Older generations pay more attention to advertisements than younger ones, studies show, meaning that their efficacy fades more with every passing day.