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When paywalls can be counterproductive

Substack profiled a writer who managed to grow her newsletter list to 190,000 and convert a whopping 10% of it into paid subscriptions despite never putting up a paywall:

Everyone thinks that some content has to be for only paid subscribers. And maybe it does for some people, but I didn’t find the need. At least not yet. If people believe in your cause and you bring them something useful to their lives, there will be a lot of support.

There’s an obvious caveat to be issued here: the writer in question is an epidemiologist who came to prevalence during the pandemic. Because they felt she was providing a public service, her subscribers were willing to pay her without receiving exclusive content in return.

I’ve written before about Judd Legum’s success in leveraging his (free) investigative journalism to drive subscriptions, and there are plenty of other success stories that fit this model. I can certainly see the appeal of only working on content that will reach the widest possible audience.

But I also think there are limits on how successful this framework can be, especially for media outlets that don’t operate in cause-based niches. There are tens of thousands of creators out there with their hands out asking for money, and most consumers are more than happy to take your free content without paying. Without offering some sort of exclusive benefit, most creators will struggle to drive paid conversions.

How JR Raphael built Android Intelligence, a thriving newsletter

Today, Android is the number one operating system for smartphones, but when Google launched the product in 2008, the iPhone already had a huge head start. Most consumers didn’t know Android existed, and even the tech press didn’t take it super seriously.

But JR Raphael was an early fan. A freelance tech journalist who wrote for publications like Fast Company and The Verge, JR pitched his editors at Computerworld on a regular column about Android, and though they were skeptical at first, they gave him the green light.

As Android grew into a major mobile operating system and eventually overtook the iPhone, JR became one of the leading authorities on the product. In 2018, he launched Android Intelligence, a supplementary newsletter that mostly linked to his column and other news items, but as it picked up steam, he began to introduce more and more monetization features. By 2023, Android Intelligence was generating the majority of his annual income.

In our interview, JR explained to me why he was such an early fan of Android, what motivated him to launch the newsletter, and how he turned it into a thriving business.

Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, go here.

Will human-produced content benefit from an AI backlash?

The Verge put together a good rundown of how AI-created content is accelerating the "enshittification" of the web, mostly by flooding the zone with low-quality content that's clogging search results and USG platforms:

Stack Overflow offers a similar but perhaps more extreme case. Like Reddit, its mods are also on strike, and like Wikipedia’s editors, they’re worried about the quality of machine-generated content. When ChatGPT launched last year, Stack Overflow was the first major platform to ban its output. As the mods wrote at the time: “The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce.” It takes too much time to sort the results, and so mods decided to ban it outright.

Which brings me to this tweet from media entrepreneur Rafat Ali: “Human-created quality editorial is the biggest moat you have in the age of AI-created-synthetic-content-at-scale. Dispute it.”

AI experts have already predicted that large language models that train AI will start scraping AI-generated content, which would lead to a quick degradation of quality. As unscrupulous publishers continue to clog the internet with this stuff, consumers will increasingly find themselves getting burned by bad information, and we could eventually see a major shift back toward media outlets that guarantee human-produced content.

Is Rafat being too optimistic? Maybe. But as that Verge article makes clear, we’re already seeing real-world examples of our information ecosystem being damaged by AI.

YouTube’s AI dubbing could have a huge impact on a channel’s viewership

YouTube is rolling out a new functionality that will take dialogue in a video and translate it into other languages:

The tool first transcribes your video, giving you a transcription that you can review and edit. Then, it translates and produces the dub …

… Down the line, YouTube is “working to make translated audio tracks sound like the creator’s voice, with more expression, and lip sync,” Hanif says. Those features are planned for 2024.

This could eventually have a huge impact on a channel's viewership. A lot of the biggest YouTubers have been shelling out money for a years now to hire professional actors to dub their videos in different languages, and Netflix has also seen lots of success with this strategy.

Take Mr. Beast as an example:

• His Spanish channel has 24 million subscribers and 2.6 billion views

• His Portuguese channel has 5.8 million subscribers and 688 million views

• His French channel has 1.7 million subscribers and 2.7 million views

• His Hindi channel has 2.9 million subscribers and 380 million views.

All of that is simply content that’s repurposed and dubbed from his main channel.

Quick hits

I've often wondered if the print versions of newspapers serve as a kind of albatross that prevent the outlets from truly adapting to the web. Sure, they can still be major revenue drivers and are valued by certain portions of the community, but they also mire publishers into a print-centric mentality. [The Guardian]

It's become almost a cliché to note that the internet removed most of the barriers to publishing, making it easy for anyone to become a publisher. But it's only within the last few years when sophisticated publishing and monetization tech became widely available for little to no cost. A lot of the basic features on, say, Substack were incredibly difficult to pull off unless you had access to a tech team and enterprise software. [Growth Croissant]

A cool profile of an anonymous Wall Street Banker who launched a popular meme account and grew it into a media brand. [Financial Times]

This feels gimmicky as hell. I doubt a team of journalists VCs are going to be any better at vetting early-stage startups than normal VCs. [Axios]

I find it extremely weird that an investment firm founded on the idea of funding black media entrepreneurs keeps trying to buy legacy publications owned by white people. [WSJ]

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