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The oversaturation of “Morning Brew for X” newsletters

Brian Morrissey wrote about the glut of newsletters that produce very little original content and exist mainly to summarize daily news within their niches:

Thousands of email newsletter businesses have sprung up, in the hopes of being the next Morning Brew or Milk Road or Industry Dive. Many of these Morning Brew of X will go the same way as the Uber of X businesses. Different always wins, and you can’t reverse engineer originality.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed that many of the flaws of scaled digital publishing creeping into email newsletters: the heavy reliance on optimization and growth hacking, drift into arbitrage, the worship of easily gamed vanity metrics, and the short-term approach to building resilient business models.

I’ve come across what seems like hundreds of these “Morning Brew for X” newsletters over the last few years, and just as most of the aggregation-heavy news sites of the early 2010s eventually lost their momentum, I think many of these arbitrage-focused newsletters that produce little additive value will also face a reckoning.

I wrote a piece a few months back about whether the Morning Brew model is crumbling, and I noted that aggregation-dependent media outlets almost always encounter diminishing returns once they scale past a certain point. After all, just about anyone can choose the most important news stories of the day and summarize them in a pithy style, and no amount of “growth hacking” will transform that aggregation into a truly differentiated product.

How Bloomberg Media reached 500,000 paying subscribers

Bloomberg is one of only 16 English-language publishers to reach over 500,000 digital subscribers. Chief digital officer Julia Beizer spoke to Press Gazette about how the company reached that milestone:

Bloomberg uses a dynamic paywall with different pricing offers for different users, but the general rule is there is registration to begin with that earns users one free article per month, then they must pay to read more …

… Asked what types of content works best when it comes to driving subscriptions, she says markets coverage and technology are among the most popular categories. Personal finance is another growing category, particularly in the UK-facing website. Bloomberg employs some 500 journalists and analysts in London and made a significant investment in its Bloomberg UK media website last year.

ICYMI: How Starter Story grew to 1.4 million monthly visitors and $500,000 in annual revenue

Founder Pat Walls discussed how he automated his process so that the site now operates as a sort of flywheel.

Why influencers are pivoting to food content

Many influencers are expanding into food content — even in cases where they have no expertise in the topic— apparently because it's extremely advertiser friendly:

Food is an easy pivot from other types of content, because cooking videos are a low-barrier entry point for creators looking to diversify their content and, ultimately, remain relevant within the social media algorithms.

“Food is seen as a quick and easy way to diversify that content outside of your niche,” said Christopher Douglas, senior manager of strategy at Billion Dollar Boy. “Think of it like an investment portfolio. If you have more content that appeals to more people, that’s obviously going to be beneficial to you.”

Why the podcast industry remains tiny outside of the US

The podcast industry remains tiny outside of the US. Why?

If the UK podcasting ad market matched the US’s revenue-given-reach figure, it would have generated $279mn in ad revenue last year. Instead, it generated only $60mn. Put another way, the UK podcasting ad market is just over a fifth (22%) of the size it should be. Australia (37%), Canada (32%) and New Zealand (7%) likewise lag behind.

It’s time for publishers to outsource their subscriptions to Facebook

I’m just kidding. I don’t think I even knew this functionality exists, but apparently you can paywall content on your Facebook page:

Facebook first introduced subscriptions, formerly known as fan subscriptions, in 2018. But they have never taken off among news publishers and may now represent an opportunity to claw something back from the platform.

To be eligible, a Facebook page must meet certain criteria including having either 10,000 followers or at least 250 return views. It must also have reached either 50,000 post engagements or 180,000 watch minutes in the previous 60 days, and be in compliance with Facebook’s monetisation policies.

Given the company’s history with news outlets, I'm not sure Meta is going to convince many publishers to build their subscription businesses on Facebook.

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