Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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Let’s jump into it…

YouTubers have mastered revenue diversification

This YouTuber gives an incredibly detailed breakdown of how he made $4.6 million this year. He has 12 different revenue streams, and I guarantee you he's better than 99% of publishers at monetizing his audience.

He’s not an anomaly. In the wake of the “adpocalypse,” in which YouTube drastically overhauled its programmatic advertising algorithms, YouTubers had to get smart about finding other ways to monetize their massive audiences, and it’s common that I come across creators with six or seven revenue streams — programmatic, native sponsorships, Patreon, affiliate, merch, and online courses. Every single publisher should study their strategies, because most are leaving money on the table.

Interested in reaching my audience?

I keep an updated Google Doc that lists all my available advertising inventory, and as you can see, ad slots for the next few months are quickly getting filled. I monitor my competitors’ pricing, and I can tell you that I charge much lower CPMs than most of them. Check out my advertising page to learn about my audience size, demographics, and pricing.

Yet more evidence that there should be a video component to your podcast

From Morning Consult:

Morning Consult found that nearly a third (32%) of Americans said they prefer listening to podcasts with video, compared with 26% who prefer them with just audio, according to the late October survey.

Active podcast listeners (those who have listened to one in the last month) preferred video too, 46% to 42%. Among the top reasons consumers preferred a podcast with videos were to see facial expressions and reactions from the hosts and guests (51%) and because video helps them to better focus on the podcast (50%).

This is a drum I’ve been banging on for a while, but every podcaster should be developing a video strategy. I’ve seen some pushback against this notion, and most of it boils down to “if I wanted to be a video creator, I wouldn’t have launched a podcast.” Some people express anxiety that their podcasting skills don’t translate to video editing and production.

But if you actually watch most video versions of podcasts, you’ll see that they’re not a heavy production lift at all — it’s just a matter of creating a video feed of you and the guest. Tools like Zencastr, Squadcast, and Riverside have made it incredibly easy to create ready-made videos from podcast recordings, and it really is just a matter of uploading these files to YouTube. Grab the low-hanging fruit!

Apple is letting its podcast dominance slip through its fingers

Bloomberg reports on how the Apple podcast app is playing less and less of a role in driving audience growth:

“It’s harder than ever to get that prime real estate,” said Jeff Umbro, chief executive officer of Podglomerate, a podcast marketing and production company. He says obtaining a front-and-center placement can still net up to 10,000 downloads a day while being in the last slot of a carousel ends up being “pretty minimal” at a few hundred or so per day.

“There was a time where it was magical,” said Jonas Woost, co-founder at Bumper, a podcast growth agency. Now, he says, Apple’s placements are more effective in other English-speaking countries, such as Canada and Australia, where localized programming might have a better chance of getting a listener’s attention. He still recommends clients pitch their show to the team because “being featured by Apple continues to be a great and free way to be exposed to real listeners.”

This isn't surprising given that Apple has held the entire podcast industry at arm's length, even as competitors major moves at stealing its market share.

Over the past few years, companies like Spotify, SiriusXM, and YouTube have made serious investments in IP ownership, advertising tech, and creator monetization. While Apple did recently launch paid subscription functionality, it still won’t hold a candle to YouTube or Spotify’s ability to insert programmatic ads into podcasts.

Wordpress should pay its creators

Wordpress announced a native advertising tool that spans across all Wordpress.com sites and Tumblr. From what I can understand, you can also install a plugin for any sites that utilize the Wordpress CMS.

Wordpress powers a huge portion of internet websites, so this is potentially a big deal. And Tumblr certainly has some wind in its sails, especially after Elon Musk began alienating users from Twitter.

But there's no mention here about sharing that revenue with its creators, which is bullshit. Time and again, we’ve seen that the biggest motivating force for creators is monetization, and yet most of the major platforms outside of Twitch and YouTube have failed to launch meaningful revenue shares.

If Wordpress really wants to take away market share from platforms like Tumblr and Substack, then it should prioritize revenue sharing.

The rise of the Spotify music spammers

Chairman/CEO of Universal Music Group Lucian Grainge penned a letter to his staff, about the state of the music industry, and while his analysis should be taken with a huge grain of salt — he does represent the traditional music labels, after all — it contains interesting criticisms of music streaming economics.

The juiciest part is when he rails against what are essentially content spammers who exist solely to game the Spotify algorithm:

Consumers are often guided by algorithms to generic music that lacks a meaningful artistic context, is less expensive for the platform to license or, in some cases, has been commissioned directly by the platform,” he writes. “For example, just witness the thousands and thousands of 31-second track uploads of sound files whose sole purpose is to game the system and divert royalties. The result? A less fulfilling experience for the consumer, diminished compensation flowing to artists that are driving the business models of the platforms, and fewer cultural moments that fans can collectively share, all of which undermines the creativity and development of artists and their music that the platforms were, in part, designed to foster… consumers are increasingly being guided by algorithms to lower-quality functional content that in some cases can barely pass for ‘music.’

This is something you see on any platform of sufficiently large size: creative entrepreneurs who reverse engineer the algorithm to produce enormously-successful content that requires very little effort or originality. The Garbage Day newsletter recently wrote about the TikTok equivalent of this:

On short-form video apps like TikTok and Instagram, a lot of channels try and game the algorithm by combining random video clips and sounds to catch users’ attention…

…The seemingly earnest popularity of these videos, especially among younger users, is part of an untethering of video content from coherent meaning that seems to be happening on short-form video apps. It feels like the longer people make videos for an algorithm the more the videos start to degrade into just random visual stimuli, which is unnerving, but also kind of interesting.

Which begs the question: should major platforms like Spotify try to snuff out content like this? On the one hand, it’s not super original, but on the other — it wouldn’t be successful if users weren’t consuming it. We chose to live in an online world governed by algorithms, so who are we to judge those creators who try to conform to that world?

Like this new format?

I’ve been playing around with a shorter, punchier format to the newsletter, with the hope that it frees up time for me to work on longer features and podcasts. What do you think? Sound off in the comments:

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