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Politics Joe puts video podcast behind paywall
From Press Gazette:
“The economics of publishing on Youtube really aren’t there. People ask, ‘Why don’t you do a Youtube membership?’ – they have their subscription package, but they take 30%…” …
[Oli Dugmore, editor of Joe.co.uk,] said the podcast’s audio content currently generates twice the revenue of its Youtube videos, despite attracting roughly half the audience.
It's interesting that podcasters regularly say that the audio versions of their podcasts generate much higher advertising CPMs than the video versions, even though the video versions are theoretically a much richer form of media. My guess is that this has to do with audio listening being a much more deliberate experience whereas a lot of video watching happens passively as people are scrolling through algorithmically-controlled feeds.
Of course, this dynamic could also be due to video advertising being spread out across a much wider net of creators, whereas audio advertising is still limited to a relatively smaller portion of podcasters who've achieved enough scale to be accepted into a podcast network. YouTubers, on the other hand, can gain access to the platform's Partnership program as soon as they hit 1,000 subscribers — a much lower bar to entry.
SCOOP: Leaked Spotify Deck Reveals Big Video Push — and Raid on YouTube
From the Like & Subscribe newsletter:
Yesterday … chef and cooking creator Nick DiGiovanni had the No. 1 arts podcast in the U.S. on Spotify. Great — except that DiGiovanni doesn’t have a podcast.
What DiGiovanni does have is a library of popular YouTube videos that since January he’s been uploading to Spotify, where they’re clearly resonating with audiences. He tells me over email that he’s a Spotify superfan with more than 40 of his own playlists, and that sharing his videos on the platform “has been really exciting.” Other creators without podcasts who’ve found success on Spotify include JackSepticEye, Ryan Trahan and Game Theorists — all of whom have charted in recent weeks.
If I were a podcaster or musician who derives a significant amount of revenue from Spotify audio streams, I'd be getting pretty nervous that the platform has latched onto video creators as the newest shiny object it needs to chase. It wouldn't be the first time non-video content was flushed down the algorithmic shitter to make room for more video. Just ask all the news publishers who were completely fucked over by Facebook's pivot to video a decade ago.
How three Morning Brew alums struck out to build their own niche media network
Of all the media outlets to have launched in the last decade, Morning Brew has had one of the most impressive growth trajectories. Now three of its former employees are helping some of the most promising up-and-coming YouTubers to scale their businesses. [The Business of Content]
Spotify’s video podcast program draws praise from creators — and skepticism from networks
From Digiday:
Six months in, video podcasters largely fall into two camps: independent individual creators embracing the format for its direct payouts and podcasters who are part of larger networks — which are holding back, wary that subscriber-only video could cannibalize their dynamic ad revenue.
The split primarily comes down to how much dynamic ad revenue podcasts generate from audio via tools like Simplecast or Spotify’s Megaphone service. Although this is a significant revenue stream for many podcasters, the Spotify Partner Program (SPP) doesn’t allow for dynamic ads to be served to premium Spotify subscribers when they consume a video podcast. Creators who are part of podcast networks that don’t want to lose access to this revenue stream are choosing to continue sharing their podcasts as Spotify audio, rather than video.
I think the biggest challenge for Spotify as it tries to compete with YouTube is that it has to deal with a much higher proportion of middlemen than YouTube. Most of the largest music artists are represented by record labels and most of the largest podcasters are represented by podcast networks.
YouTube has to deal with these same parties, but it also has a vast creator ecosystem that uploads its content directly to YouTube without interference from middlemen. That means YouTube has to spend far less time and effort appeasing the middlemen and can design tools that appeal more directly to content creators.
The Washington Post Will Ask Some Sources to Annotate Its Stories
From the NYT:
On Wednesday, The Post’s top editor said in a memo that the publication would begin piloting another attempt to keep readers engaged: inviting some of the people quoted in its stories to annotate articles they appeared in.
The program will allow only people identified by name in an article to comment on it, and the articles included for now are only those published by The Post’s climate team, … The Post will vet their remarks for accuracy and fairness, and the publication said it also might withhold comments that violated rules against defamatory or obscene submissions.
This is certainly an interesting experiment. It's not uncommon for a source to spend upwards of an hour on the phone with a journalist only to see one or two sentences of the interview make it into a story, and the fact that they're being interviewed for the piece is indicative that they have at least some sort of authoritative knowledge of the article’s subject.
I definitely have some doubts about the viability of this approach. How many readers will actually hover over the source's name and read the annotation? And how well would this system scale across the thousands of news stories WashPo publishes each month?
I wonder if the better approach would be to allow every source to submit an op-ed responding to the piece, and then you link to those op-eds prominently at the bottom of the article. That would at least make a more streamlined reading experience and increase the likelihood that someone would actually read the responses.
Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls
From the Pew Research Center:
The vast majority of Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Another 17% say they have directly paid or given money to a news source by subscribing, donating or becoming a member during that time.
It continues to be an unfortunate truth that the vast majority of online users have no interest in paying for news, and honestly I don't see that dynamic changing much in the near future. A lot of people simply don't consume a lot of news and are happy to rely on free resources for what little news they do consume.
This would be slightly less depressing if the news industry also didn't absolutely suck at developing ad products that deliver actual value to advertisers. Instead, they decided to plaster their websites with programmatic display ads that do nothing more than annoy their users.
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The Mainstream News Battle Hits YouTube: How Fox News, CNN, MSNBC Stack Up
From the Wrap:
Fox News, just as it does versus traditional linear broadcasters, leads the way when it comes to YouTube. As the midway point of 2025 approaches, the network’s YouTube channel so far this year has racked up 2.3 billion views on the Google-owned platform, more than doubling the number of views it had at the same time last year …
“We continue to invest in YouTube with original content, and we’re seeing a community that’s building — allowing us to grow our audience and meet them on the platforms native to them,” Brad Gold, MSNBC’s executive producer of content strategy and development, told TheWrap.
This is further evidence that TV networks are starting to see YouTube as a genuine distribution platform, as opposed to it being a competitor or just a place to post promotional clips.
My sense is those networks are still severely under monetizing their YouTube channels though. As far as I can tell, none of the major networks are experimenting with paid memberships or selling direct sponsorships for these videos. That means their RPMs are much lower than your average independent YouTuber.
YouTube Zeros in on Subscriptions
From the Information:
Current and former YouTube executives who I have spoken to in recent months, as well as other media and streaming industry executives, have said they expect YouTube will be able to grow revenue faster through subscriptions than advertising …
As of September, YouTube’s subscription products, which also include the cable TV-like YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket, had become at least a $15 billion annual business—approaching half the size of its advertising sales last year.
It’s pretty incredible that both YouTube and Spotify have built massive subscription businesses while keeping most of their content free to consume. They've proved there's a huge consumer base that will pay to escape annoying advertisements.
That's why I'm a little surprised that more publishers haven't experimented with going ad-free with their subscription offerings. There were a bunch several years that experimented with "ad lite" models, but they mostly abandoned that approach, and I doubt many readers were jazzed about the concept of simply seeing fewer ads. Meanwhile, I know of a lot of podcasts that offer ad-free versions of their shows through subscription platforms like Patreon.
At the very least, I certainly think an ad-free experience would significantly lower subscription churn. I'm consistently annoyed by how bad the reading experience is on Business Insider even though I'm a logged-in paid subscriber, and I've definitely contemplated cancelling my subscription more than a few times specifically because of that bad user experience.
YouTube’s Neal Mohan Fires Back at Netflix CEO’s “Killing Time” Dig
From Adweek:
In March, [Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos] described YouTube is a platform for “killing time” while Netflix is a platform for “spending time” with premium storytelling …
“Who am I to say what’s spending time, engaging time, quality time, killing time?” [YouTube CEO Neal Mohan] asked. “It’s all of us as consumers—the 2 billion people that come to YouTube every single day—we get to decide how to spend our time.”
It's funny that Netflix is using the same kind of language to dismiss YouTube that other media company executives used to deploy against Netflix. Remember a decade ago when companies like Warner Media and Paramount would claim that Netflix was the creative dumping ground for TV shows and movies that nobody else wanted? You don't hear that line of criticism as often anymore now that Netflix is the runaway leader in global paid subscriptions.
As for whether people "kill time" on YouTube, sure that happens, but that's been a major factor for TV networks going back decades; how many times have you put on reruns of Seinfeld or The Office just to kill time? Meanwhile, I think it's pretty indisputable at this point that YouTube channels build fairly loyal audiences who tune in for appointment viewing. I can certainly name several YouTubers who get a watch from me every time they post a new video.
Netflix should embrace short-form video and take on YouTube, a Wall Street analyst says
From Business Insider:
[Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall] wrote that adding shorter videos would perfectly complement Netflix's vast library. It would make the streamer a top destination for viewers, even if they only have a few minutes to spare. That could help form fresh habits with young audiences hooked on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.
I don't disagree with this analysis that Netflix could probably offer the biggest YouTubers far better monetization while still paying a lot less than it does for standard Hollywood TV shows and movies, but it doesn't solve for the problem that YouTube can basically be infinitely nichefied to a far greater degree than Netflix could ever hope to. YouTube has millions of channels that have between 1,000 and 500,000 subscribers, and they collectively cover just an extremely broad range of subject matter. In some ways, I think these smaller channels are much more important to YouTube's core business than the platform's biggest stars, and Netflix could never access that level of scale unless it opened itself up to user generated content.
Andrew Schulz, ‘Podcast Bro,’ Might Be America’s Foremost Political Journalist
Andrew Schulz was frustrated that his standup comedy career was growing so slowly, so he released a 20-minute comedy routine on YouTube, and by the very next week he was selling out comedy clubs. [NYT]
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