Why publishers' Facebook traffic is surging
PLUS: Why can’t Apple News get its act together with selling advertising?
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Why publishers' Facebook traffic is surging
Digiday reports that several news publishers have seen a sudden surge in Facebook traffic referrals:
Facebook referral traffic quadrupled in March 2025 compared to March 2024, according to Josh Awtry, svp of audience development at Newsweek. He declined to share raw monthly visitor figures. (Newsweek’s referrals from all social platforms are up almost 10 times compared to the average day in March last year, Awtry noted.)
Political news site The Hill had 48 million visits in February, with month-over-month growth up 17%, making it the fastest growing English-language news site for visits, according to the Press Gazette. A big part of that is attributable to a surge in social referral traffic in February and March, said Sarakshi Rai, The Hill’s director of audience development. Facebook referrals in particular have tripled since last year for the publisher, she noted.
I think there are probably two factors contributing to this rise in Facebook referral traffic:
1. Facebook' decision to no longer algorithmically censor political news in the wake of Trump's election.
2. The current shitshow that is the Trump presidency, which is driving a huge increase of consumer interest in political news.
It's not a coincidence that many of the outlets namechecked in this article produce a lot of political content.
Is MrBeast too dependent on his personal brand?
Business Insider reported on a leaked pitch deck that broke down all of MrBeast’s revenue streams. One of the most interesting tidbits had to do with how he plans to continue diversifying his business going forward:
Donaldson has big ambitions for Beast Industries' future: by 2029, the company is forecasting revenue of $4.8 billion.
In media, Donaldson is exploring ways to be off-camera, according to the pitch deck, including with animation. An in-house writers' room — with backgrounds in novels, gaming, comics, TV, and film — is also developing "Beast Universe" IP for licensing across toys, gaming, comics, and merch.
It seems clear that MrBeast is a sort of heir to Walt Disney, in that he understands traditional media models alone can only take you so far; the real money is finding ways to spread your IP and reach across a lot of different non-media products.
In that vein, it surprises me that MrBeast is only now starting to develop media IP that isn't dependent upon his personal brand. He's proved so adept at weaving his chocolate products into his media content that he could easily do the same for other media properties. In fact, he has an entire constellation of employees who regularly guest star in his videos, and yet he hasn't really empowered them to build out their own channels under the Beast Industries umbrella — at least as far as I can tell.
When is serialized TV coming to the Creator Economy?
Taylor Lorenz has a fun profile of a TikTok creator who’s generated millions of views through a low-budget, serialized story about a female friend group chat:
The Group Chat follows the interpersonal dynamics of a group of young women planning a fun girls dinner. The central conflict surrounds Hailey and her attempt to bring her boyfriend Justin along …
The entire show is literally just Sydney acting out all the different girls in the chat, but I think what makes it resonate is how well she captures the subtle dynamics of communication between female friends. The show has spawned an endless stream of fan theories and commentary. The series is lo-fi and entirely rooted in the aesthetics of TikTok. “I don’t think I’ll ever watch real TV again,” one user posted.
The Creator Economy has already done a good job of replicating the dynamics of reality TV, but we haven't seen many attempts to create the kind of serialized fiction content that is now a staple of every major streaming platform.
A lot of this has to do with the sheer cost of producing these series, with most clocking in at $3 million per episode, minimum. The few serialized stories we're seeing on platforms like TikTok and YouTube are extremely low budget and can be churned out relatively quickly, but there's no reason that, once these shows gain traction, they can't gradually add to their production quality.
Eventually we will have a hit "TV show" debut on YouTube, but its first season will probably be cheaply produced, with each subsequent season costing more and more to film. My guess is the episodes will start out as relatively short and gradually lengthen over time.
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Quartz was born in the wrong media era
The business news site Quartz was sold off by G/O Media, and its new owner immediately laid off the entire staff. Founder Zach Seward, who left the outlet a few years ago, published a heartfelt sendoff to the publication:
We launched Quartz in 2012 with prestigious editorial hires, a slick new website, bold pronouncements about the future of media, and a splashy profile in The New York Times in which we likened ourselves to a "pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy." It sure felt that way. From a spare SoHo loft, and then increasingly fancier offices, we set out to be compelling, entertaining, serious, and excellent all at the same time. Everything was up for reinvention, from the structure of our stories to the design of our ads to the need for a traditional homepage. We believed that a news organization should stand for something, which in our case was globalism. Most of all, we put a strong emphasis on quality at a time when online journalism was still considered inferior to print publications that happened to have websites.
I think Quartz was a victim of timing. It was launched during the scale era of media — when Facebook was sending gobs of traffic and industry leaders still thought they could convert that traffic into meaningful ad revenue. Then when the traffic era ended, Quartz wasn't niche enough to operate as a B2B media outlet and didn't have the resources to compete with the WSJs and Bloombergs of the world. Its death knell was its acquisition by G/O Media, a company that never had the patience or the interest in finding a sustainable business model.
Some good longform journalism
How good will Google's AI be at answering questions once it's killed off many of the very websites it uses to supply those answers? While the company claims that the presence of its generative AI on top of search results hasn't triggered a loss in publisher traffic, independent data from companies like Similarweb shows a significant decrease in Google referrals. Meanwhile, sites that produce AI-generated slop are rushing to fill in the information gaps. [Bloomberg]
The Barclay brothers were virtually inseparable as they conquered the post-war UK real estate market and eventually cheered on the rise of Thatcherism. It was only after the passage of Brexit, for which they gave full-throated support, that their relationship deteriorated, devolving into outright corporate espionage as the octogenarians fought for control of their empire. It wasn't until the death of David Barclay in 2021 that it became widely known their businesses were sitting on a mountain of unsustainable debt — a revelation that eventually triggered the forced sale of The Telegraph. The irony, of course, is that Brexit likely hastened their downfall. [LRB]
With print magazines, stories take months to research, write, and edit, and, as a result of this dynamic, Graydon Carter wasn't fully steering the Vanity Fair ship until he was almost a year on the job. Luckily for him, his boss Si Newhouse had more patience than the average media mogul, with him treating Conde Nast more as a passion project than an actual business. "If he ever wobbled over his decision to hire me, he never showed it." [New York]
Americans spend about $70 billion a year on weddings, with much of that money flowing toward a constellation of vendors who make the majority of their revenue from those weddings. For years, wedding vendors have depended on The Knot, a wedding-focused publication that charges them thousands of dollars a year to be included on its directory. But after The Knot's acquisition by a private equity firm, vendors started getting flooded with thousands of fake leads in what they say was an effort to keep them buying more ads on the site. [New Yorker]
ICYMI: How Political Wire built its successful subscription offering
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Why can’t Apple News get its act together with selling advertising?
Former cable news stars are all trying to become media moguls
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