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Understanding Business Insider’s pivots

During the height of the pandemic — when so many publishers were hitting the panic button and laying off journalists — Insider was one of the few outlets that not only retained its workforce, but went into expansion mode.

A big impetus behind that expansion was its paid subscription product, which it launched in the wake of its Axel Springer acquisition. I was skeptical at first, but eventually it won me over and I became a paid subscriber, mostly because I kept landing on paywalled articles I actually wanted to read.

Recently though, there’s been some upheaval and restructuring at the company, particularly as it relates to paywalled articles. The Daily Beast has a good deep dive into the disintegration of Insider’s Washington Bureau, which experienced whiplash as the outlet began to de-emphasize subscriptions in favor of clickbait aggregation:

In March 2022, Insider merged both politics teams into one unit chasing traffic over subscriptions—a deeply polarizing move, staffers told The Daily Beast. Some recalled how instead of pursuing original stories, they were more often asked to follow up on clicky articles written overnight by the London and Singapore teams. The stories were frequently wrong or mischaracterized, reporters claimed.

“That was the way it was run for a while,” one reporter said. “I found that to be really, really frustrating and kind of a boneheaded way of doing journalism.”

Frustrations grew as management intensified its traffic focus. That May, executive editor Rebecca Harrington sent a newsroom-wide email with guidance ranging from the innocuous (“Find the Insider angle”) to the explicit (“Play the Chartbeat ‘game’”). The memo, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast, irked many Washington staffers, especially because it encouraged them to avoid topics that didn’t guarantee traffic and to simply “publish more.”

I’ve seen snarky takes on Twitter that this is further evidence that Insider’s subscription strategy is failing, but I don’t see it that way.

One thing not mentioned in the article is Axel Springer’s 2021 acquisition of Politico. Given that publication’s domination of DC coverage, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that the parent company is not interested in competing with itself for talent and scoops. 

I also think Insider is just getting smarter about its paywall strategy. In its early days, it over-indexed on paywalled content — putting a lot of articles behind the paywall even when they contained very little original reporting. This likely meant that it wasted tremendous resources on producing content that generated very few paid conversions.

Over the last few years, more publishers have gotten smarter about their subscription strategies. Whereas paywalls used to be rather rigid — treating all content as the same — there’s growing recognition that a more effective strategy is to hit a reader with a paywall when they’re most likely to convert. This is not only improving conversions, but also opening up more inventory that can be monetized through advertising.

My bet is that Insider looked at its analytics and found that political news had a particularly low conversion rate — not surprising since it’s geared toward a more general interest audience. Washington, DC is already saturated with coverage, so it’s hard to mourn the loss of a single bureau. Why reinvent the wheel when someone already built a better version?

“this dude is very funny. unhinged, but funny.” — Judd Apatow

[Sponsored]

Hi. I’m Alex, and if you’re reading this, Simon has surprisingly approved my weird little ad, so let’s dive in! 

I write Both Are True — Absurd, honest comedy delivered twice a weekish through the vulnerable personal essays of Alex Dobrenko: friend to all, father to one, and tv actor+writer to anyone hiring.

Simon said that you guys would dig this piece — How I grew this newsletter from 56 to 2,177 subscribers in less than a year  and yes the number 2,177 is very important. 

Usually, I write slice of life essays that descend into existential chaos, e.g. i think my son hates me.

Also, I was just listed as a Substack recommended publication! 

I love writing Both Are True and the community I’m building over there. It’s strange and nice and sorta beautiful. I’m excited for you to check it out. Thanks for reading, I hope to see you over in Both Are True land.

How James Cridland built the most influential newsletter within the podcast industry

While podcasting has been around since the mid-aughts, it’s only within the last half decade that the industry started generating significant revenue, finally crossing $1 billion in 2021. And until recently, there were very few journalists who were solely dedicated to writing about podcasts. That’s a big part of the reason that in 2017 James Cridland decided to launch Podnews, a B2B newsletter that covers the industry.

A longtime radio veteran who once worked for the BBC, James realized that there was a major need for a daily news digest of all the various startups and media outlets that were operating in the space. And as his readership grew, he found that there were plenty of companies willing to pay to reach his hyper-niche audience.

In my interview with James, we talked about his approach to compiling his newsletter, his monetization strategy, and why he insists on coding most of his tools from scratch.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your email provider, you can find it over here. 

Did the world need Gawker 2.0?

Bustle Digital Group announced this week that it was cutting 8% of its workforce and shutting down Gawker completely.

If you’ll remember, BDG purchased the Gawker domain in a fire sale a few years back and revived the brand in 2021. Shortly after its launch, I tweeted “I think one thing we'll be asking ourselves over the coming months is whether we need a Gawker anymore. One could argue that its influence has already seeped into huge swaths of the internet.”

I still followed Gawker on all my social media channels, so after its relaunch I was consistently exposed to its content. While it did publish great stuff from time to time, my suspicions were confirmed that the snarky commentary it had pioneered in the aughts was now already a part of mainstream internet culture. “So many Gawker posts are just lukewarm snark that could have just been a tweet,” I tweeted in late 2021. Freddie deBoer published a harsher take later that same month:

Honestly the output of new Gawker is so narcotized, so listless and existentially half-assed, that I imagine if they were in an office right now you could visit and they’d all be in a coma, sprawled out on quirky office furniture, drooling all over their open floorplan. I can’t imagine that I’d hurt anyone’s feelings over this given that no one employed there seems to have invested a nickel’s worth of emotion in the endeavor. Gawker existed to offend; new Gawker could not achieve offense if you promised to trade its staff Juul pods in exchange for fighting words. But who would even notice if they tried their hand at it? I’m fairly certain everyone involved, including the investors, sees the site as a short-term cash out, a summer job, a pop up shop that sells disaffection and “ironically” shitty graphic design. Only, from what I hear, almost no one is buying.

For the record, if you ever feel affronted by someone at new Gawker, you only need five words: you work for Bryan Goldberg.

Ultimately, the new Gawker always felt like a ghost of its former self. It was as if someone read an article about the old Gawker and then tried to recreate it based entirely on that one article. I also think that its shoot-from-the-hips brand of commentary is just the norm for internet discourse now — which means that even if it had achieved the old Gawker’s voice, it wouldn’t have felt like the guilty pleasure it was during the publication’s height in the late aughts. I’ll always remember the publication fondly — its 2008 article “The Story Of The Pooping Intern” will remain an internet classic — but I’m not surprised it wasn’t able to differentiate its product in the modern media environment.

Let's talk about building an events arm of your media business

As the media industry focuses on revenue diversification, more and more publishers are venturing into live events — both virtual and in-person. Not only can they be monetized in multiple ways, but a well-planned event can provide a great venue to forge a deeper connection with your most engaged audience.

But events are tricky to pull off and can be intimidating for those who haven’t hosted one before. On Thursday, I’m hosting a live Zoom call where we’re going to tackle every aspect of the events business — from the planning to the marketing to the content itself.

We have several featured guests lined up for this session, including:

• Chris Ferrell, CEO of Endeavor Business Media, one of the largest B2B publishers in the world

• Bo Brustkern, co-founder of Fintech Nexus, which hosts major fintech conferences

• John Allsopp, who runs one of the most influential conferences for web designers, developers, and digital creatives

• Ross Douglas, founder of Autonomy Paris, the first global event on Urban Mobility for innovators, corporations, policymakers, media, and urbanites

• Sarah Peck, a podcaster who launched the Wise Women’s Council, a six-month “leadership incubator”

You can find the login details for the event over here.

Brands are finally waking up to the fact that programmatic ads are virtually worthless

About a decade ago I had lunch with an advertising agency executive, and the subject of publisher monetization came up. I expressed skepticism that high quality journalism could be funded by digital advertising alone, but she pushed back on my argument. 

In her view, it was only a matter of time before programmatic advertising solved the content monetization problem. In just a few years, brands would no longer need to contribute any guesswork into their ad-buying process; instead, they’d locate and target individual consumers and then serve up ads on whatever website they landed on. As a result of this dynamic, publishers that attracted the most high quality audiences would see their CPMs shoot up to astronomical levels.

Her view wasn’t an anomaly within the ad industry. But here we are 10 years later, and that utopian future never came to pass. Not only is the open programmatic ad market subjected to widespread fraud, but even many of the “legitimate” publishers are churning out low-quality content to maximize ad arbitrage. 

Even worse, it’s become increasingly clear that the largest ad tech players — including Google — have been leveraging their marketing dominance and the opaqueness of their products to capture much of the revenue that would otherwise go to publishers. Needless to say, programmatic advertising never saved the publishing industry.

Both brands and publishers are waking up to this reality. Not only are outlets like Bloomberg doing away completely with open programmatic, but brands are also pulling away from these platforms:

Three mid-size to large-size national publishers told Digiday that their RPMs (revenue earned per 1,000 page views) are down between 20-55%, while two other publishers agreed that they’re seeing declines as well in this business, but refused to disclose the exact percentage …

… [Salon CRO Justin Wohl] declined to share exact price points for the average RPM his company is earning off of the open programmatic marketplace, however he said that from Jan. 2022 to Jan. 2023, the average RPM was down 55% year over year. Compared to pre-pandemic Jan. 2020, the average RPM in Jan. 2023 is down about 21%, making January 2023 “the worst January [when it comes to] ad [RPMs] since 2020,” he said. Meanwhile, average RPMs in the three consecutive January’s from 2020 to 2021 and from 2021 to 2022 increased about 24% and 43%, respectively.

“We’re definitely feeling, on the programmatic side, the lack of competition, the lack of advertiser presence [and] the lack of pricing pressure,” said Wohl.

Good riddance! Not only has the rise of programmatic advertising been bad for traditional publishers, it also fueled the rise of fake news sites and far-right media networks. I’m not sad to see it go. 

Are you ready to take this relationship to the next level?

We live in an era where every company needs to operate as a media company. With traditional marketing channels losing their effectiveness, it’s never been more important to own your audience, and the best way to do that is through the creation of blog posts, podcasts, videos, newsletters, and other kinds of high-quality digital content.

I now work with a team of media veterans who can develop a content strategy for your brand, ensure that this content reaches the target demographics within your industry, and help you deepen client relationships and remain top of mind. Here’s a summary of our services:

Content strategy: Many of our clients come to us with the intent to invest in digital content but without knowing how they should allocate that investment. Should they create articles, white papers, videos, or podcasts? How can they differentiate their content offerings within their business niche? Who should they hire to create this content? How do they develop an audience across social media, newsletters, and search engines?

Podcasts: A podcast can be an effective vehicle for developing a relationship with your potential customers. It’s considered to be one of the most intimate mediums, and a good podcast interview can be repurposed into multiple formats, including blog posts and videos. Our team can handle multiple aspects of podcast production.

Video: Many companies want to do more with video but they’re intimidated by the level of production skill required. We can service every level of the video creation process.

Writing: The written word still forms the bedrock of any great content strategy. There’s simply no better way to establish a relationship with your audience and begin driving customers through your sales funnel. 

For a full rundown of our capabilities, go here.

Quick hits

More and more publishers are investing in their TikTok content, but almost none of them are actually generating any direct revenue from these efforts. [Press Gazette]

A good Twitter thread pulling together some pretty eye opening statistics from the book industry [Jason Colavito]

"The bleak future of media is human-owned websites profiting from automated banner ads placed on bot-written content, crawled by search-engine bots, and occasionally served to bot visitors." [The Atlantic]

An amazing quote: “You can have the most sophisticated funnel, the best retention tools on the planet, spend a fortune on your tech stack, but if your content is bad, if you’ve gutted your newsroom, if you’re publishing two or three local stories a day, I say save your money on all your retention efforts because you’re still going to fail.” [WAN-IFRA]