MrBeast is trying to build a marketplace platform that matches creators with brands — the end goal being that companies will one day be able to scale up their creator sponsorships through large programmatic ad buys. digiday.com/media/mrbeas...

Weighty nonfiction tomes — the kind that I and a lot of other men like to read — are on the decline. www.wsj.com/business/med...

I actually think this is a pretty risky move on Amazon’s part. Sure, you could argue that it has enough retail dominance to where it no longer needs publishers, but it’s now incentivizing every influencer on the internet to link to its competitors for their product recommendations.

Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch sat down for an interview with Business Insider and was asked whether creator platforms like Substack are a threat to his business. He said that he's growing increasingly comfortable publishing work from independent media entrepreneurs and wants to do more of it.

Donald Trump is about to take $1.7 billion of OUR tax dollars and redistribute it to the terrorists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Remember that the next time you fill your tank with $4.50-per-gallon gas or struggle to pay your insurance premium.

The Verge sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and one of the most interesting moments came when he discussed Facebook’s decision to stop paying media companies for content.

The New York Times reports on how political campaigns and advocacy organizations are engaging in paid partnerships with politics influencers who aren’t bothering to disclose their conflicts of interests when they publish content. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/b...

One thing that’s always perplexed me is why legacy publishers with strong subscription businesses largely avoided paywalled podcasts, even as independent podcasters were generating hundreds of millions of dollars through platforms like Patreon and others.

I’ve never understood why people do this

TO RECAP: Trump sued the IRS, which he controls, for $10 billion, and the IRS will “settle” the lawsuit by redirecting $1.7 billion of OUR tax dollars to the terrorists that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. abcnews.com/US/trump-poi...

For a long time, the digital publisher NowThis was known primarily for distributing viral news clips, but in recent years it’s actually seen tremendous success launching series with repeatable formats — oftentimes, you don’t even realize the show is produced by NowThis. Every media brand that’

This is really fascinating: According to Adweek, Penguin Random House launched a food media brand — initially to promote its cookbooks, but it’s now on track to generate seven figures of revenue on its own.

Sometimes I wonder what Gawker Media would look like today if Nick Denton still owned it.

Puck detailed how much media company CEO pay has risen despite years of stagnant stock prices and revenue. This is the sort of dynamic that gives the Creator Economy its edge — more money flows toward the people who are actually making the content. One of the biggest problems in legacy media is tha

The Hollywood Reporter published an interview with media mogul Byron Allen, and he revealed his plan to incorporate Buzzfeed’s video content into his FAST channel Local Now. For the uninitiated, Local Now is available on all the TV streaming platforms and licenses local news broadcasts from hundred

Between 2021 and 2024, USAID is estimated to have saved 91 million lives. Before it shut down, the agency accounted for less than 1% of federal spending. The collapse may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths and could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, study says.

It used to be that landing a first-time book contract was a long, grueling process. Writers first had to secure an established literary agent — a major hurdle in itself — and then spend months revising their manuscript to the agent’s specifications before it was even submitted to publishers. If the

The YouTuber Christophe published a great deep dive into how Meta’s smart glasses have made it incredibly easy for viral influencers to film unwitting bystanders without their knowledge. This is something I’ve noticed myself in my own Reels feed — people getting pranked without even realizing they’

The biggest news out of the media world this week is that Buzzfeed’s been acquired by media mogul Byron Allen. And while it’s still mostly unclear what this means for the company’s future, Allen indicated in a New York Times interview that he wants Buzzfeed to double down on its YouTube efforts.

The Hollywood Reporter took a look at how cable news networks are warming up to “hybrid” deals that allow their TV talent to launch their own independent media channels:. I’ve seen several critiques of these “hybrid” deals arguing that TV networks are no longer building their own IP, but instead ar

The Wall Street Journal profiled Kareem Rahma, the host behind the Instagram hit Subway Takes who’s now launching a longform show on YouTube. Rahma’s journey mirrors that of almost every shortform video star: eventually, they all try to transition into longform content.

How Straight Arrow News is trying to build a national news brand around trust instead of outrage youtu.be/0KaX4Q7pr9w?...

Yep, and it didn't have to be this way. Bluesky's executive team has consistently mismanaged this app and set it up for failure. Honestly, Threads has done a better job of corralling the mainstream Left. There's actually a vibrant left-of-center user base there and their posts actually go viral

Your regular reminder that Bluesky as a product sucks and many liberals made a mistake of sequestering themselves on a website that's specifically designed to hinder user growth.

During the 2020 pandemic, many publishers rushed into the product review space because they viewed affiliate revenue as low-hanging fruit. The problem was that most approached it as little more than an SEO game, assuming they’d be rewarded with free Google traffic whenever consumers researched produ

OK, I have a few thoughts on this. First, doubling the digital subscription footprint of a legacy newspaper in just three years is genuinely impressive, especially considering that only a handful of regional daily newspapers in the U.S. have surpassed 100,000 digital-only subscribers.

So over the past several months, nearly every major streamer has announced plans to roll out a TikTok-style vertical video feed inside its mobile app. But most of them seemed content to simply repurpose clips from their longform shows. From the beginning, I’ve been skeptical of that strategy. If the

It’s great to hear that the price of GLP-1 drugs is continuing the plummet to the point where more and more people can afford them out of pocket. I really think we’re heading toward a future where just about everyone is on one of these drugs. www.city-journal.org/article/glp-...

It’s pretty notable that some of the most successful independent news creators today were originally cast off from their legacy media motherships — people like Mehdi Hasan, Joy Reid, Chris Cillizza, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Jim Acosta, and Don Lemon.

The Hollywood Reporter profiled Sara Moonves, who turned the fashion magazine W around by leaning into print and “pairing A-listers with world-class photographers and letting them get their creative freak on." Hammers home the point I’ve made several times before that print can still serve a purp

Vulture took a look at why NBCU’s Bravo shows have done so well on Peacock. Most of the other streamers failed at building a significant reality TV viewership. Remember, the entire thesis behind the Warner Media/Discovery merger was that David Zaslav would leverage Discovery’s low-brow reality con

I’m someone who thinks many media conglomerates don’t do enough to drive synergies between their various properties, but even I have to agree with this take. Most people are accessing Disney+ through their TVs, and that’s just not the ideal location for them to book a trip that will cost upwards of

It seems to me like we’re entering a new era of big splashy podcast deals. If you’ll remember, a podcast bubble popped a few years ago after several hugely-expensive celebrity shows failed to gain much traction. My read at the time was that companies like Spotify had thrown a lot of dumb money at A-

Dazed reports some celebrities are wiping their Instagram grid whenever they want to signal some sort of rebrand or new artistic “era.” www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture...

The Hollywood Reporter says "paid subscriptions to U.K.-based publishers and creators have officially surpassed half a million on Substack." So as a media analyst, I find that UK subscription number kind of meaningless since the platform’s never broken out its country-specific numbers before. If

I think taking seriously that the president is an honest-to-God deranged gangster, and every lawful institution meant to stop that from happening has failed and has no real prospect of functioning, is so unsettling that a lot of folks have just decided to retreat into fantasy as a coping mechanism.

Trump threatened to nuke Iran during the same press event where he called a woman reporter "baby" and a "bitch" and we'll all just supposed to continue on tomorrow as though any of this insanity is normal or acceptable

Communications Day founder Grahame Lynch explained why he doesn't worry about social media traffic or the threat of AI. youtu.be/RzJTlc80WDg?...

This is sort of true. I'm not saying they should have stayed on Twitter, but it sucks that so many progressive chose a platform that's run by people who aren't interested in growth. To be clear, I want Bluesky to succeed. But there are key design flaws hobbling its growth.

Trump might accidentally go down as the greatest green energy president of our lifetime. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/c...

That seems, uh, not good.

The YouTuber golfcart, who’s quickly becoming one of my favorite video essayists, put out a great documentary about an incredibly successful Twitch streamer who has such bad OCD he can’t go out in public. youtu.be/LER7b_09NyM?...

This is pretty cool: Dropout TV, the indie streaming company that spun out from IAC, launched an at-home version of its popular game show, and it’s already raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter. This is a great example of how creators can develop products around their own IP and then sell it directly t

LitHub published a fascinating history of the book auction, which is when an agent shops a book simultaneously to several publishers at once: "The auction morphed into various forms, replete with its own strategies and schools of thought around best bids and round robins. The book auction, and the

Bluesky sucks so much ass as a product. Install me as the CEO and I'm pretty confident I could 10X its user base in six months by making a couple key changes to how it works.

Online communities are the holy grail for content businesses because they create a self-reinforcing flywheel: members begin generating value for one another without requiring constant involvement from the company itself. In many ways, it’s the same kind of network effect that powers large tech pla

Vanity Fair profiled NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, specifically through the lens of how he built the league into the world’s most valuable media franchise. There’s nothing much new here for people who follow sports media closely, but it does a good job of detailing how Goodell carved up the broad

I think one thing that’s notable about the NYT’s subscription growth is how reliable it’s been. While nearly every other subscription publisher out there either plateaued or backslid, it manages to keep its momentum, regardless of the larger macroeconomic conditions. It developed a true flywheel ope

It doesn’t bode well for democracy that the world’s largest autocracy is absolutely running laps around us when it comes to green energy. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/b...

Oil prices down after a report that Lucy does plan to hold the football properly this time.