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Another win for independent media

Five years ago, College Humor was on the verge of being shut down by its corporate parent, IAC. In what was a last ditch effort to save the company, IAC sold it to its chief creative officer Sam Reich, who then turned it into a streaming video platform funded entirely by subscriptions.

Flash forward five years, and it’s now a sustainable business. In the video below, Reich celebrates this milestone and announces a rebrand of the company:

Did Substack bring back the blogosphere?

Christina Loff, the partnerships lead at Substack, published a piece arguing that the platform spurred a resurgence in old-school blogging:

What we’re seeing now feels a lot like that early blogging boom. There was an intimacy we felt reading our favorite blogs, a personal connection to the writers and the communities that grew around them. We stacked our Google Reader with their RSS feeds and turned to them for restaurant recommendations, recipes, home decor trends, crafting inspiration, gossip, political analysis, and life advice. Writers on Substack are providing that same intimacy and connection with the communities they create. No media conglomerates edit their words and ideas. We have access to our favorite writers, just as we did in those fast blogging days. We see ourselves in the personal stories they share; we trust them.

I definitely agree there was a half-decade or so when a lot of independent, longform writing disappeared from the internet — the kind of writing we associated with the blogosphere — and that we're now seeing a resurgence of this type of writing.

A lot of of this transition had to do with distribution. With traditional blogs, it was incredibly difficult to build a steady audience. There were RSS readers, sure, but most people didn’t use them, which meant you mainly had to rely on your readers bookmarking your site and checking back regularly. And if you were only publishing, say, a few times a month, it was difficult to get readers to build you into their daily web browsing habits.

The rise of social media then made it possible to centralize your audience into one location, so most indie bloggers abandoned their websites and just posted to Twitter or Facebook. These tools were great for building a readership, but they didn’t do a good job of driving that audience off platform. Add in the death of Google Reader, and then suddenly you had a web that was inhospitable to longform writing. Platforms like Medium tried to solve the centralization issue, but largely failed.

So what changed? The adoption of newsletters. Email turned out to be a great tool for keeping your readers updated whenever you published a new piece of writing, which partially eliminated the need for centralized distribution. And while newsletter platforms have existed for decades, Substack was the first to marry newsletters with web publishing and monetization, and it did it all for free! This provided enough incentives to lure writers into launching their own blogs again, which is exciting!

I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast

One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.

In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:

• Niche news sites

• Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Affiliate/ecommerce

Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )

Accidental newsletter success

I love accidental media outlets — and by that I mean cases where a company begins creating content as a byproduct of its main operations and suddenly finds itself with a huge audience. Inbox Collective published a good case study of a fintech platform that accidentally grew a huge newsletter list and then decided to monetize it with ads:

With Moby, [Justin Kramer] didn’t set out to build a media company — his focus was on building a premium membership, which costs $199 a year or $29 per month, and gives members access to stock picks, research reports, and tools for tracking where hedge funds and politicians are investing their money. He wanted to build a product where investors could get smarter, or identify what stocks to buy at the right price point.

But along the way, Moby collected hundreds of thousands of email addresses for their daily newsletter. They hadn’t intended to build a successful daily newsletter product — but with the quality of the content they were producing on a daily basis, they did. And they realized that an audience that was large and engaged could be monetized not just through memberships but through advertising.

How TikTok drives foot traffic

BookTok doesn't just sell books; it also is driving foot traffic into physical bookstores:

Second Flight Books, a new-and-used bookstore in Lafayette, Ind., reports solid results from BookTok engagement. Laura Kendall, who has co-owned Second Flight with her husband Justin Kendall since 2016, noticed that her personal post about the store’s new location in 2020 “went a little viral,” so she created the store handle @2ndflightbooks. (The couple also owns and operates Main Street Books in Lafayette, which they took over in August 2022.)

At Second Flight, Kendall likes to “rotate through hashtags” to see what performs best. “The first time we got 30,000 or 40,000 views” store traffic increased, she said, “and we still get people regularly who say, ‘We were driving through Ohio, and since we saw you on TikTok we thought we’d stop in,’ or, ‘You were only an hour out of the way.’ Some people from out of state become repeat customers.”

Do you sell a product targeted toward marketers, media executives, or professional creators?

What a coincidence! That’s exactly who reads my newsletter. You can find out how to advertise to them over here.

The pivot back to free content

We’ve seen several cases recently where publishers have deliberately loosened up their paywalls to allow the consumption of more free content. For instance, Insider went all-in a few years ago with a very strict paywall, but EIC Nicholas Carlson recently announced that the site would begin making a lot more of its content freely available. Meanwhile, Time Magazine jettisoned its paywall completely.

Add The Daily Beast to the list of media outlets that are expanding their free content offerings. Adweek reported that it launched an entertainment vertical that’s completely monetized through advertising and has grown into a 7-figure business. While I have no insider knowledge of the company, I explained in an interview with Adweek why media outlets keep launching paywall-free verticals:

“A lot of publications are realizing that subscription models, while great, have a ceiling at which subscriber churn starts slowing growth,” Owens said. “That’s why we’re seeing publications start to loosen their paywalls so they can grow out their advertising inventory.”

How The New York Times reinvented itself over the last decade

There’s a buzzy new biography of The New York Times out, and New York magazine published a good piece looking at the book’s biggest revelations. What stood out to me most was that the NYT of, say, 20 years ago was a vastly different beast compared to the NYT of today:

What was once a daily newspaper of record is now a global continuous news source, endlessly churning out journalism at all hours and in all formats. There are 10 million subscribers and lots of moving parts, not all of which are particularly newspapery — games and recipes and product reviews and wellness content. It is an efficient, if more staid, bureaucracy these days.

The paper still has plenty of journalistic heft, but if you look at its business growth over the last few years — especially post-Trump — it’s been rooted in its non-news verticals like Wirecutter, recipes, games, and The Athletic. This goes beyond a mere transformation from print to digital; it’s a fundamental shift in what the Grey Lady offers the world. The print era may have been more profitable, but never in its history has the NYT had this level of influence.

ICYMI: How The Discourse scaled its business model to 34 local news sites

The media startup developed a membership model that involves asking the audience what news should be covered.

Let’s take this relationship to the next level

I only send this newsletter out twice a week, but I curate industry news on a daily basis. Follow me on one of these social platforms if you want your daily fix:

1. Substack Notes

2. Threads

3. My private Facebook group

4. LinkedIn