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.

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Did The Verge figure out a great way to increase homepage traffic?

It's been a year since The Verge redesigned its home page so it featured short, Twitter-like link posts. The site claims the redesign significantly increased user engagement:

From January to September, The Verge saw its readership increase 15%, according to Patel. In the same timeframe, its loyal user base, which it defines as a reader who visits the site at least five times per month, increased 62%. (Twitter, now X, has lost 13% of its daily active users since Elon Musk bought the platform in October 2022, per Apptopia).

“Our total user base is growing, but specifically, the user base is shifting to loyal readers,” said Helen Havlak, the publisher of The Verge. “So, the site is doing a great job of converting fly-by readers into loyal readers.”

Did SEO specialists ruin the internet?

Speaking of The Verge, it published a pretty spicy history of the SEO industry, asking whether it’s the culprit responsible for flooding search results with so much low-quality content:

Perhaps this is why nearly everyone hates SEO and the people who do it for a living: the practice seems to have successfully destroyed the illusion that the internet was ever about anything other than selling stuff.

I think a pretty big reason the SEO industry has such a negative reputation is it served for years as one of the greatest sources of spam. I remember a time in the mid-2000s when running a comments section on my blog became unmanageable because it was inundated with so much automated spam content from SEO link farmers. My inbox has also been bombarded with offers of “guest posts” from SEO consultants who are trying to place links back to their clients.

A lot of that activity has since died down — I haven’t had many spammy comments on my Substack and I can’t remember the last time I was offered a guest post — but a lot of that stench still lingers for anyone old enough to remember it.

ICYMI: How ScoopWhoop became one of India’s most viral publishers

The BuzzFeed-like site has built two popular channels on YouTube, one of which serves as a counterbalance to partisan TV news.

How TikTok is transforming the music industry

Wired profiled a talent manager who specializes in finding artists on TikTok right before they blow up:

Like other self-styled social media gurus, [Ursus] Magana hustles to sign clients by touting his ability to game the platforms that shape our tastes. (“Influence the algorithm, not the audience” is 25/7 Media’s slogan.) But part of his pitch, and his gift, is that he’s an authentic product of the subcultures in which he operates. An ardent metalhead and community college dropout who was shaped by a turbulent immigrant experience, the 29-year-old Magana has built his company around supporting artists who are often isolated by their creativity, and by their oddness. “We understand how they feel at home when they’re doing something kind of weird, something that isn’t easily explainable,” he says. “That’s our competitive advantage.” And that is no small edge. Doing something weird at home has never offered such a wormhole to fame.

The worker bees of the Creator Economy

Many of the top creators now employ entire staffs that work behind the scenes on both the creative and business sides of their operations. Business Insider interviewed several of these workers to get an idea of what it's like to be employed by a famous influencer:

[Kai] Cenat responded to her message, writing that she could have the job if she could get one task done.

The task: Cenat was turning his house into a petting zoo and needed a zebra.

"I wasn't expecting that at all," said [Brianna] Lewis, now 28. "We were talking on a Friday, and I asked, 'When do you need this by?' He said Monday. I was like, 'Oh, shit!' But you know, we got it done."

Lewis said she called zoo after zoo in Georgia, to no avail, until she found a "mobile petting zoo" that happened to have a baby zebra available for hire.

"They weren't even available for the date I needed, but I begged them to do it, and they eventually agreed," she said. "If they had said no, I probably wouldn't be here today."

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More content = more traffic

The Daily Mail has developed a reputation as a web traffic behemoth. A lot of that success simply boils down to the fact that it produces a crap ton of content:

Mail Online published the most content of any of the newsrooms we looked at. Between 13 and 19 September, Mail Online published an average of 1,490 stories each day – or 1,640 stories per weekday and 14 stories per hour between Monday and Friday …

… The high content strategy appears to be working. There were 392 million visits globally to dailymail.co.uk in September according to Similarweb, making it the fifth most popular English language news website in the world and the most popular UK-based commercial news publisher globally.

The rise of influencer journalists

There's a rising generation of "influencer journalists" who are creating native news content on social platforms. While this has lead to new perspectives from people with more diverse backgrounds, many of these influencers aren't actually conducting any original journalism:

Johnny Harris, a journalist whose YouTube channel has more than 4 million followers, covers global news and geopolitical conflicts and conducts deep investigations into targets such as the Mormon Church and the flat earther movement. He rejects talk of a decline in American journalism.

“It’s always uncomfortable for me being in these rooms where there’s so much doom and gloom about journalism and the business of journalism,” Harris said. While journalism is experiencing “a major disruption,” he said, “this is a transformation to fit the technology and the preferences of audiences.”

Getting off the subscription hamster wheel

Inbox Collective published a case study from a newsletter writer who developed a series of evergreen ebooks around her niche:

Combined, the three ebooks still continue to be a nice form of passive income, where I get a direct deposit every other week that covers a chunk of my grocery bills without any additional marketing effort on my part …

… Now, when someone emails me for advice, I can offer them two options: the free newsletter archives or one of three $10 ebooks. If they get one tip that leads them to a new or better client, then that more than pays for the cost of the ebook.

Sometimes, it's better to create evergreen information products that you can sell into perpetuity than it is to launch a paid subscription newsletter where you're required to churn out new paid content every week.

What’s the journalistic value of a scoop?

This is a great profile of Punchbowl's Jake Sherman. It does a good job of asking whether his "micro-scoops" really amount to any meaningful information that's actually serving the public:

Sherman, a 5-foot-6, cherub-faced 37-year-old, has made it his business to become that guy on the Hill, where the currency is micro-scoops — news about extremely incremental developments that could be stale within hours. What this has brought him is a reputation as a primary narrator of major events and minor subplots driving the news in Congress, from Republican infighting over who should get to be Speaker of the House to the question of whether a member of Congress pulled the fire alarm before a crucial vote. In addition to his outlet’s newsletter dispatches, Sherman’s play-by-play of various Hill dramas go out to more than 420,000 followers on X, formerly known as Twitter — and into the bloodstream of Official Washington. These posts often have overtones of urgency.

We haven’t hit peak subscription just yet

A large portion of the population doesn't pay for news subscriptions, but if a person subscribes to one publication, there's an 81% chance that they subscribe to multiple publications:

In a study of 1,007 U.S. consumers who have subscribed to digital publications, 29% of current subscribers said the total number of subscriptions they hold has increased over the past 12 months, while just 7% said it has decreased. Sixty-four percent said the number of subscriptions they hold has remained consistent.

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