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The rise of unsexy B2B media

Earlier this week, WTWH Media, which owns several B2B publications, announced it was acquiring Aging Media, a company founded in 2011 by brothers John and George Yedinak. I had John on my podcast a few years ago, and I was blown away by how effectively they had built news products around an industry that generated over $7.5 trillion in annual economic activity. Here are just a few of their titles:

• Home Healthcare News

• Skilled Nursing News

• Hospice News

Now take a look at some of the publications run by Industry Dive, another B2B media company that built a massive business around narrow niches:

• Packaging Dive

• Waste Dive

• Utility Dive

If there’s something that many of these publications have in common, it’s that they cover industries that are both massive and unsexy.

Every day you hear about entrepreneurial journalists launching B2B publications around niches like tech, climate, fashion, energy, and finance. That’s because these are topics that are fun to cover and imbue an aura of prestige on the journalists who write about them.

But who grows up dreaming of writing about waste disposal or hospice home care? Absolutely nobody. And you kind of have to wonder if that very unsexiness is what gave companies like Aging Media and Industry Dive a competitive edge. When they launched, they weren’t competing with thousands of other information sources, so they were able to break into their respective industries rather quickly. They eschewed prestige in favor of utility, and in return they outperformed the vast majority of digital media outlets in existence.

The products that Scott Purcell, co-founder of Man of Many, can’t do without

Scott started out his career as a financial analyst, but in 2012 he and his friend Frank Arthur launched Man of Many, a men’s lifestyle publication. “Frank and I used to email each other cool things we’d find on sites like Uncrate.com,” he told me. “Instead of keeping these discoveries to ourselves, we decided to set up our own website, as there weren’t any publications in Australia covering the sorts of things we were interested in at the time. We ran the site part-time —during many late nights and weekends together — up until June 2016 when we decided to quit to pursue the business full-time.”

Many of Many primarily publishes content focused on technology and consumer product news, as well as men’s cultural, lifestyle, and public interest matters. The majority of its revenue comes from native content campaigns from large advertising agencies. The remainder is made up of banner advertising, affiliate revenue, original video and photography production for brands, and, more recently, events.

Today, Many of Many has three million visitors each month to its website, over 700,000 social followers, and over 150,000 email subscribers.

Scott walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business. You can find our interview over here:

Click here to read the interview

BTW, I’m still looking for creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Each interview is heavily featured in front of my 14,538 newsletter subscribers, and I share it out to my 70,472 social media subscribers. Go here if you’re interested.

Canada’s new “journalism” law will not save journalism

The Canadian government passed a law that would require large platforms like Facebook and Google to come to the bargaining table and negotiate a revenue sharing agreement with publishers. It’s modeled on a 2021 law passed in Australia that had similar provisions.

In Nieman Lab, a communications professor named Diana Bossio shared the results of her research on the Australia law — specifically on the revenue-sharing deals that were signed as a direct result. She found there were relatively few deals signed, and a large disparity in bargaining power between small outlets and those owned by larger media conglomerates:

There was … a significant difference between Google and Meta when it came to the deals made. Meta only made deals with 13 media organizations, whereas Google secured about 23 deals …

…Lack of transparency around the type and amount of funding effectively meant smaller, independent organizations competing for market share in a highly concentrated Australian media ecosystem were losing talent and investment. They were going to the larger media groups that were likely to have been given more funding under the code …

…As Nick Shelton, publisher of lifestyle-focused Broadsheet Media, argued: “The platforms are the ones who are in a position to determine who they deal with…So all of a sudden you have Google and Meta, huge multinational businesses, deciding the winners and losers of the Australian media industry.”

Platforms could refuse to negotiate with organizations they deemed ineligible as public-interest journalism, or choose to remunerate organizations they had a business interest in supporting. Our interview participants suggested both scenarios had occurred.

In other words, the Australian law resulted in a huge handout to large media outlets — several of which were owned by Rupert Murdoch — whereas independent outlets benefited little from the law.

Which brings us back to the Canadian law. It won't "save" journalism. It's one set of corporations leveraging their government influence to force another set of corporations to hand over money. It erodes the legal concepts of fair use and undermines the foundational internet principles that give one website the right to link to another website. Also, the vast majority of content creators won't benefit from the law.

Meanwhile, similar laws are making their way through both the US Congress and the California legislature. If they pass, the biggest beneficiaries will likely be the newspaper chains that are owned by private equity firms — the same firms that spent the last 15 years laying off journalists in order to increase their profit margins. What are the chances they’ll use the proceeds from such legislation to hire more journalists?

What do you think?

Quick hits

One of the great things about Twitter — and part of the reason that its influence extended far outside the realm of its daily logged in users — was that it was a platform that mainly existed on the open web, which meant that you could access the vast majority of tweets without being logged in. And once again Elon has killed an aspect of the platform that made it so great. [The Verge]

Telegram has become a powerful content distribution tool, particularly for those who are worried about being monitored by their governments. [The Atlantic]

Wow, game shows are still incredibly popular. It's probably not a coincidence that MrBeast, arguably the most popular creator in the world, structures a lot of his videos to include gameshow-like qualities. [NYT]

This woman generated over 400,000 TikTok followers by reading her embarrassing diary entries from when she was a teenager. [NYT]

It was only a matter of time before shitty programmatic ads started running on shitty AI-generated content. At this point, if you're a media buyer who's purchasing programmatic ad inventory, you're actively committing malpractice on behalf of your clients. [Digiday]

How to grow your podcast audience

Let’s face it: podcast discovery is hard. There aren’t many network effects built into the medium, and listeners have to fire up a designated podcast app just to consume your content. The industry largely depends on old-fashioned word-of-mouth to grow an audience.

So how do you achieve that word of mouth? I convened a panel of podcast experts to discuss the best ways to find new listeners and convert them into subscribers. It included:

• Brian McCullough, founder of the Techmeme Ride Home podcast

• Jeremiah Staes, founder of the Daily Detroit podcast

• Kathy Doyle, former VP at Macmillan’s podcast network

• Mignon Fogarty, founder of the Grammar Girl podcast

• Brian Colburn, founder of StitchRadio

Check out our discussion in the video embedded below:...