Should the media be afraid of Google Zero? youtu.be/4cpuznafIKM?...

I think part of the reason the major sports leagues are so keen to work with creators is because it’s so low risk for them. In most cases, they aren’t actually paying these creators, just offering them VIP access, and none of the content these creators produce will cannibalize the value of the live

What makes Cartwright a fascinating creator to watch is that he brought a tabloid sensibility to his media reporting. For example, when the Sulzberger’s hosted their annual barbecue, he hired a freelance photographer and physically stood outside their property so he could log all the invitees. Not

I know it’s almost cliche at this point to note that the party that ran on free speech now operates the most anti-free speech government in modern US history, but I can’t think of many things that are more anti-free speech than threatening to investigate a company for being too mean to the current

It’s tempting to compare MrBeast’s latest acquisition to other celebrity-owned products, but that overlooks the massive marketing machine he’s built across his channels. When he launched his chocolate brand, Feastables, he didn’t just promote it in his YouTube videos — he wove the product directly i

In my middle school and high school years I used to devour mass market paperback novels, so it's a little bitter sweet for me that the format has largely been replaced by ebooks. At the same time I think it's cool that ebooks offer a lower entry point for just about any aspiring author.

While fiction sales have been relatively stable and even increased in some genres, nonfiction books have been on a steady decline. Some industry insiders believe the rise of podcasts are to blame -- especially since podcasters often conduct longform interviews with authors who are trying to promote

If I had to identify Will Lewis’s biggest failure during his disastrous tenure at the Washington Post, it was alienating the newsroom early on and doing nothing to repair that relationship. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your strategy is — and there’s little evidence he had one — if you can’t inspi

Lots of people have compared video podcasts to talk shows, and the cancellation of several daytime and nighttime shows is an indication that podcasts are eating into this format. Why spend tens of millions of dollars to host a nightly show in front of a live studio audience when celebrities are incr

If true, that’s fairly impressive. Pre-Elon, Twitter was generating around $4 billion a year in advertising revenue, so he replaced about a fourth of that with subscriptions. Now imagine what he could have accomplished if he hadn’t transformed the platform into a right-wing cesspool.

I think it’s a smart move for major progressive donors to invest in local news. Studies have shown that counties that lose their local news outlets tend to shift significantly to the right. Some researchers theorize that when coverage of local communities disappears, voters become more fixated on na

We're going to see Hollywood continue to treat the Creator Economy as more and more of a talent incubator -- a place where aspiring entertainers can hone their skills and also build an audience that can then be leveraged in promoting a new TV show or film. It's so much easier to justify spending mil

I’m starting to realize that I might be wasting my time on my podcast. It doesn’t directly contribute to my business — I don’t put episodes behind a paywall, and I don’t sell ads against it.

Definitely a clear sign that a startup is worth $1.25 trillion dollars.

YouTube shut down its Originals division in 2022 because it didn’t align with the platform’s creator-first strategy. But now that YouTube has become the undisputed leader in TV viewership, the case for reviving Originals is much stronger. The platform is in direct competition with major streamers fo

All eyes are on Netflix's moves into video podcasting, but Fox also continues to make interesting investments in the space. Last year it acquired Red Seat Ventures, a podcast advertising company that had signed deals with multiple cable news outcasts, including multiple Fox News hosts. Now it's buyi

It's incredible that a B-tier creator I've never heard of can get 327,000 people to sign up for a monthly paid subscription while the vast majority of legacy newspapers and magazines haven't hit that milestone. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

That PR firm you’re paying the $20,000 a month retainer to is most likely having their lowest level employee use AI-generated pitches to spam thousands of journalists after plugging vague category keywords into a database. They’re doing absolutely nothing you couldn’t do yourself.

The top 10 most popular creators on YouTube and TikTok hardly changed in the past year, which means it's getting harder and harder to break through as a generalist creator and amass millions of followers. In the coming years, the newer creators who succeed will be the ones who niche down and develop

Dear PR people, for the love of god please stop doing this. It is so fucking obvious that you’re just having an AI program ingest my latest podcast episode and then spit out a paragraph summary. Nobody is being fooled by this shit.

It seems indisputably true that Bob Iger ultimately damaged his legacy by coming back to run Disney a second time. When he passed the reins, the company was at the height of its power. Now he'll be remembered as undermining his handpicked successor and then managing Disney's waning influence as comp

It’s no longer enough for aspiring pro athletes to simply excel at their sport; they also have to be skilled at building and maintaining their own fanbases. We’re likely to see more young athletes coached from an early age on how to create social media content and grow an audience.

I’ve always hated the rent-a-scooters and bikes because they’re constantly blocking the sidewalks, but over the past week I’ve reached a new level of hatred as they’re even harder to maneuver around. Today I found myself fantasizing about walking around with a hammer and breaking them, one by one.

Kit Chilvers started posting memes on Instagram when he was 14, treating the platform like a video game and obsessing over what made posts take off. A decade later, that experimentation has turned into Pubity Group, a bootstrapped social media company with roughly 170 million followers and hundreds

Something to keep in mind the next time the city tries to repurpose parking and drivers complain that every last car is necessary at all times. The storm was two weeks ago.

I love this booming economy

Why would anyone visit the US when there's the near constant threat of being thrown into a jail for five months?

I realized I don't put enough content behind the paywall. youtu.be/ICCZtKbcBYA?...

HEADLINE: President Trump Stokes Racial Tensions When He Says Black People Who Talk Back Should Be Strung up on a Tree SUBHEADER: It's unclear whether the president knew he was echoing racist talking points when he made the statement. -- The New York Times

Pretty hard to deny at this point that Trump is a full blown white supremacist.

Finally cancelled my WashPo subscription. Not even for ideological reasons — but because I was barely reading it. That’s what happens when you shrink your newsroom.

An annual subscription to my newsletter costs $150. If you use my newsletter sponsorship index to land just one sponsor, you've more than paid for the price of the subscription.

👀 Apparently, Ross Douthat invited Seth Harp to debate him on Douthat's "Interesting Times" NYT podcast. Harp says that the episode was recorded, Douthat got crushed, and RD/NYT decided not to publish it. What? x.com/sethharpesq/...

Do Google's AI overviews siphon off traffic? Yes. Does Google still send a ton of clicks to publisher websites? Also yes. simonowens.substack.com/p/the-threat...

I’ve always thought predictions of “Google Zero” were overblown because they misunderstand how many people actually use search engines. Yes, some queries are straightforward and easily answered, and in those cases an AI summary is often enough. But a large share of Google searches are more explorato

For the past several years, SiriusXM has been amassing a stable of star talent that can rival the influence of Howard Stern, who may announce his retirement any year now. In some ways, the company succeeded, in that it licenses chart-topping podcasts like Smartless, Call Your Daddy, and Conan O'Brie

Is Bitcoin's crash a recession indicator? Lots of people suddenly strapped for cash and needing to liquidate their holdings?

Several years ago, the company that owned the magazine Outside embarked on a bold strategy of acquiring a bunch of niche outdoors media outlets and rolling them until into a big subscription bundle. That strategy finally paid off, with the company reaching profitability last year. At the beginning o

One of my favorite things about TBPN is its constant tongue-in-cheek nod to the legacy media that came before it. Its name -- short for Technology Business Programming Network -- is basically a dumb joke referring to old school TV networks. Its hosts dress up in suits and the show features a crawlin

The knock on YouTube over the past 20 years was that even though it had enormous reach, it was still a bad business. Not anymore. It's managed to not only build an enormous ad business, but also a respectable subscription business as well. What's more, it did the latter without locking any content

A 16-year-old YouTuber launched a skincare product and drew roughly 50,000 people to its unveiling at a mall. At the time, she and her father had been pitching an animated series to all the major streamers. But after seeing the scale of that launch, Netflix quickly signed her to a broader, open-ende

I’m a paid subscriber to Business Insider and it’s gotten to the point that whenever I want to read one of its articles, I save it to a web app that strips out all its advertising. That’s a testament to how abusive its adtech is.

I’ve been leaning more into old-school blogging in recent weeks — shorter posts consisting of curation and analysis — and I kind of love it. As much as I’d like to spend more time on longform reporting, the economics just don’t work if you’re a solo creator.

This is pretty incredible when you consider that People, Inc is a media company that's almost entirely focused on creating "intent-based content," which is basically the kind of product recommendation content that we've been told is most vulnerable to AI chatbots. The fact that it's still growing it

Over the past decade, police body cameras have become widespread, a shift many activists believe has brought greater transparency to law enforcement. But jurisdictions vary widely in how they release bodycam footage, with some states providing it to virtually anyone who requests it. That permissiven

Kind of incredible that Washington, DC is one of the most influential cities in the world, and yet its only newspaper thinks it's worth dedicating just 12 reporters to the local beat.

I really hope that lots of laid-off WashPo journalists band together and launch a worker-owned cooperative. They would definitely see a huge rush of subscriptions.

A newsletter writer hired a PR person who emails me every single time her client send out a new newsletter — as if I weren’t capable of signing up for said newsletter. This is why I send 90% of PR pitches to my spam folder.

I think one of the incredible things about IShowSpeed's travel tours is that they pull down massive viewership numbers without any editing or post-production. Most mainstream travel shows cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode and don't reach a fraction of his audience. What's more, a hug

For years, Democrats have worried that they lack their own version of Fox News—a nakedly partisan video outlet with massive reach. MSNBC partially fills that role, but with only a fraction of Fox’s audience. The rise of YouTube channels like MeidasTouch and The Bulwark, however, may finally be level