Is a decline of social media traffic bad for publishers?
Is a decline of social media traffic bad for publishers?PLUS: The podcasting industry has entered its sink-or-swim era.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. If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button: If you’re already signed up and want to support the work I do here, the subscription link below will give you 10% off for your first year: Let’s jump into it… You can now download ebook versions of my case studiesLongtime readers of this newsletter know that I regularly publish in-depth case studies about successful media outlets. I basically conduct interviews with media entrepreneurs and have them walk me through, step by step, how they built their businesses. My goal is always for the reader to come away with actionable insights they can use in their own content strategies. Up until recently, these case studies were only available to paying subscribers, but I recognize that not everyone is necessarily ready for that level of commitment, so I created a Gumroad store where you can purchase them individually as ebooks. Here’s the initial batch of case studies:
This not only allows you to sample my content, but it’s a great way to financially support all the work I do here. And of course, if you’re already a subscriber, then you can access my full archive of case studies for no additional charge. Is a decline of social media traffic bad for publishers?Social media referral traffic has been on a steep decline for years now, especially as large platforms like Facebook continued to de-emphasize news in the feed. Axios published a chart showing just how precipitous this fall has been: It's hard to know though whether this has been good or bad for publishers without data showing whether overall traffic has declined. Media outlets have done a better job of building out their newsletter lists in recent years, and "dark social" traffic can be a pretty significant share of web visits, so my guess is that publishers aren't as reliant on social traffic as they once were. I think the impact on a publisher’s business is largely based on how dependent it is on programmatic advertising, since subscription-focused outlets began moving their audiences off Facebook years ago. What’s the journalistic value of a scoop?The Washington Post published a fun profile of two NBA reporters — ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and the Athletic’s Shams Charania — who have developed a fierce rivalry for being the first to break news of player trades:
I've never completely understood the journalistic obsession with scooping competitors on a piece of news that was going to break anyway. It just seems so exhausting to be on this constant treadmill where your only reward is that you're a few minutes early to a scoop. You're basically devoting your life to chasing dopamine hits. Should publishers block AI bots?There’s been an ongoing question as to whether publishers could block crawlers designed to train Google’s Bard chatbot without also accidentally removing themselves from search results, but Google just released an update that makes it easy to do so:
I've never fully bought into the idea that AI poses a grave threat to high-quality publishers, but at the same time I see little downside to blocking Google's AI crawler given that its chatbot is specifically designed to send less traffic to websites. The publishing industry continues to shoot itself in the footEarlier this year I published a piece arguing that the publishing industry’s widespread embrace of open programmatic advertising was the “original sin” that caused the entire sector to crater. Chief among my complaints was the role this technology played in the rise of ad fraud, which siphons money away from legitimate publishers and drives down the ROI of display advertising. Well, a new report from Juniper Research shows how massive that fraud is:
Now imagine if that $84 billion actually went to legitimate publishers. How many jobs would that create? Every publisher that opts into open programmatic advertising enables this. They're basically shooting themselves in the foot just to generate a few extra pennies. Understanding YouTube’s role in podcast listeningIt's often claimed that YouTube is one of the largest podcast platforms in the world. But that claim includes some pretty big asterisks, since most of that consumption involves watching video, and many of those videos consist of short clips that are excerpted from a longer episode. Radio veteran Adam Bowie wrote a good breakdown of the different kinds of podcast formats that are uploaded to YouTube and why some perform better than others:
That's not to say that YouTube isn't a powerful player in the podcast space, but the consumption is far different compared to what occurs with more standard podcast listening. The podcasting industry has entered its sink-or-swim eraBloomberg reported that Pushkin Industries, the narrative podcast studio co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell, has cut 30% of its staff:
Pushkin has produced a lot of good stuff, but it's clear that a lot of the growth in the podcast industry in recent years was based on the assumption that platforms like Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart, and Amazon would continue signing huge upfront deals. Now that those deals have dried up, podcast companies need to sink or swim based entirely on the revenue they generate directly from their programming. You're currently a free subscriber to Simon Owens's Media Newsletter. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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