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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What’s going on with Google traffic to publishers?

I keep seeing reports of wild fluctuations in search traffic. Some publishers claim it’s plummeted, yet I’ve spoken to plenty who say they haven’t seen any meaningful change in recent months. This Digiday piece indicates that search traffic overall is mostly flat, though some specific categories are getting hit:

“We have websites that were particularly exposed because they were in the product review space,” the media exec said. “It’s very hard to generate any audience in the e-commerce product review space today whereas it was not the case a year or 18 months ago.” 

Over the last few years, many publishers have moved aggressively into product recommendations that are monetized through affiliate links, but they mostly resorted to pulling in reviews and information about products from other websites — as opposed to acquiring and reviewing the products themselves. In response, Google has pushed through algorithm updates that punish websites that merely repackage content around products. This most recent dip might simply boil down to lazy publishers reaping what they sowed.

“Link tax” laws are just legislative rent seeking

The various "link tax" laws that would force tech platforms to pay publishers are nothing more than legislative rent seeking. It's basically the public policy equivalent of mobsters forcing local businesses to pay for "protection."

Ken Doctor does a good job of laying out the flaws with these laws in a Nieman Lab piece:

I’ll stress that the allocation of payment formulas laid out in both the Canadian law and the CJPA bill favors big publishers over smaller ones and broadcasters over print and digital media and fails to sufficiently differentiate kinds of “content”: National vs. local, human-created vs. AI, clickbait-spinning vs useful reporting, and so on …

…The bills’ writers tried to figure how to justify transferring money from Google and Meta and, taking a bad idea from Australia, came up with the unwieldy notion of a link tax, figuring that the number of news links displayed on those platforms could somehow serve as a proxy for deciding how much and to whom those platforms would pay news organizations. That approach is the original sin of the legislation, causing all kinds of confusion and opening new doors to the kinds of unintended consequences now before Canadian local news publishers.

ICYMI: How a podcast for entrepreneurial parents generates $200,000 a year

Sarah Peck explains why she didn't chase scale when building her Startup Parent podcast.

The marketing brilliance of Spotify Wrapped

Spotify Wrapped is probably one of the most successful marketing campaigns in business history. The Guardian published a good profile of the team responsible for the feature:

Since its initial rollout just under a decade ago, Wrapped has become a social media feast which has spawned countless memes, and a raft of imitators. “It’s very surreal,” says [Louisa Ferguson, Spotify’s global head of marketing experience], referring to the phenomena, with competitors like Apple Music and companies like JetBlue to Audible generating their own versions of Wrapped. Ferguson says the streaming giant has a secret to both success and relevancy. “We basically thrive off of feedback,” she says. “We’re constantly interacting and seeing what people are saying on how we can step up our game.”

As a result, the streaming giant ruminates for months about the unique ins and outs of the tradition which regularly includes quirky features. “It takes a long time. We’ve also developed a bit of a crew who has stayed on the program year-over-year. I always say we’re never not thinking about Wrapped. We stockpile ideas.”

When once-great news publishers become zombie websites

The Discourse Blog’s Jack Crosbie wrote about what it’s like to watch a media organization you used to write for die and then be resurrected again, usually in some diminished form:

If you browse around the sea of media properties long enough you will find many floating hulks of publications gone by, drifting listlessly as ghost ships or manned by a skeleton-crew of raiders who have repurposed them to trawl for the diminishing returns of SEO traffic or ecommerce kickbacks. Every now and then one of them makes a stab at a legitimate editorial overhaul, but it’s never the same. It always, without fail, feels like a possession more than a resurrection — the sense that something new and lesser is living in the body of something that was once whole.

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. )

Programmatic advertising will not save you

Digiday surveyed publishers about their programmatic ad revenue, and while the industry continues to increase its reliance on programmatic ads, its consistently fails to make any revenue gains from the tech:

According to Digiday’s data, publishers’ hopes for their programmatic ad revenue didn’t quite come to fruition this year. Nearly half of publisher pros (45%) said in Q1 2023 that building their programmatic business would be a large or very large focus in the next six months. But rather than seeing growth in the percentage of publishers who get a large portion of their revenues from programmatic by Q3 2023, we’re instead seeing a shift where fewer publishers are getting a large portion of their revenues from programmatic and more are getting a moderate portion from that source.

Translation: Programmatic continues to underperform expectations.

Publishers keep hoping that something will click and programmatic advertising will unleash a flood of revenue. It's never going to happen. It's a race to the bottom. The more revenue programmatic pulls in, the more low-quality publishers it attracts, and the more that revenue is diluted and funneled away from the high-quality publishers. It’s a vicious cycle where the premium publishers always lose.

Substack moves in on Patreon’s turf

Substack continues to move in on Patreon's turf, launching all sorts of new tools for paywalled videos and podcasts.

On a related note, this writer moved her subscription base from Patreon to Substack and was able to quadruple her subscriptions on the latter:

Each time a new post went out to my audience [on Patreon], I’d lose a few subscribers. It was almost like the mailshot was a reminder to them to unsubscribe — each time I’d press ‘post’ I’d shudder to think how many unsubs I’d get …

… The biggest issue for me with Patreon was the discovery block. Substack has multiple channels along which a profile, piece or quote can be shared. There’s the Notes feature, there’s the Recommendations feature (after you subscribe to one Substack, that writer’s own recommendations appear immediately for your perusal) and there’s the option for earning free subscription time via referrals.

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

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