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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Are LinkedIn newsletters worth the investment?

Nieman Lab took a look at how 13 news publishers are leveraging LinkedIn’s newsletter tool and what ROI they’re seeing from it. Here, for example, is what the Wall Street Journal’s newsletter editor had to say:

Compared with other email service providers, the available data is minimal: We can’t track open rates or click-through rates, or compare metrics over time. We also had to create our own system for tracking article traffic from the [LinkedIn]. Unlike our on-platform newsletters, we don’t have access to subscribers’ emails — effectively, LinkedIn owns and controls our list. We also can’t serve ads to those subscribers as we do throughout our portfolio.

Our LinkedIn newsletter drives much less traffic back to the site than we expected, especially given the audience size. Our on-platform newsletter drives many more clicks, despite a smaller list.

I get asked by a lot of industry folks whether they should invest in LinkedIn newsletters, and here’s what I typically say: it seems clear that LinkedIn is prioritizing newsletter content in its algorithm, so it’s probably worth incorporating them into your newsletter strategy, but by no means should they serve as your main newsletter product, especially since you can’t export your email list from LinkedIn.

The vindication of Jessica Lessin

The Information just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. It continues to show that a media company can succeed if it stays singularly focused on quality and doesn't try to scale too quickly:

“There were a number of media start-ups around that moment, and [Information founder Jessica Lessin] was very unconventional—that she was doing paid subscriptions and was not that interested in social,” says Ben Smith, a former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, who last year founded Semafor, one of the start-ups in which Lessin has invested. “It kind of pains me to say it, but obviously, she’s been totally vindicated, and most of her competitors are no longer around.” Those former competitors include BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize–winning online news site that shut down in April. There was also Recode, a brand Vox retired in March; Quartz, which is still around but has changed hands multiple times over the years, most recently to G/O Media; and Vice, which, the Times, while reporting that the company had filed for bankruptcy in May, referred to as a “decayed digital colossus.” Lessin was ahead of her time with the business model she adopted and the story she wanted to own.

ICYMI: How a college student launched one of the most influential B2B sports media companies

Adam White explains how Front Office Sports grew from a college project into a media powerhouse.

How Ash Read built Living Cozy, a product review site monetized with ecommerce

Ash Read didn’t launch a review website about household products because of some lifelong interest in home decor; instead, his interest came about simply because he was moving into a new house and needed to furnish it.

While it was easy to search for products listed on retailers like Amazon and Walmart, he realized that there wasn’t a good directory for the direct-to-consumer goods that are sold directly through a company’s website. So he created a database of direct-to-consumer companies and published it to the web. The audience feedback was so strong that he decided to build out an entire website dedicated to covering and reviewing D2C home products.

Ash launched Living Cozy in 2020, and over the next few years he scaled the site to over 350,000 monthly pageviews. What started out as simple product curation soon led to an in-depth review process and him hiring a network of freelance writers to review items like sofas and beds. 

How did Ash manage to break into such a saturated market category that was already dominated by much larger websites? In an interview, we talked about his introduction to direct-to-consumer products, his clever use of search keywords, and how he coordinated the shipment of large pieces of furniture to reviewers all over the world.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, go here.

Why is the book industry obsessed with prior sales?

This is an interesting story of an author with a huge audience who nonetheless became a pariah within the publishing world simply because of her first book's poor sales — so much so that dozens of editors passed on her second book despite loving it:

A few publishers responded with 1-sentence “not for us” rejections, and a few more never responded, but the others seemed to take the proposal quite seriously, and many described what they liked in some detail. One said it was the best proposal he had seen in a long time, but he just couldn’t take a chance because of the sales of DePaulo’s last book. There was even a Zoom meeting with one editor who was very enthusiastic and who already had buy-in from several colleagues. But her boss said absolutely not, because of of the sales track record …

… After more revisions to the proposal, it was sent to another 29 editors. DePaulo got two Zoom meetings out of that group, including one with an editor who was herself single at heart. She loved the proposal and had all sorts of ideas for the book, including an idea for a follow-up. But she got shot down by others at the imprint, again because of the sales track record.

After finally landing a publisher at a small imprint, the book is shaping up to be a huge success.

Reddit’s increasing importance as a traffic driver

Ever since Twitter’s implosion, publishers have been scrambling to replace it as a traffic source. WashPo reports that some have turned to Reddit, which can sometimes drive huge audiences to articles but also has had an uneasy relationship with traditional media:

One thing Reddit is extremely effective at is driving traffic to websites. Unlike YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other mainstream social media, Reddit, like X, is mostly text based, the right link in the right subreddit has the power to generate an enormous number of clicks. It’s no surprise, then, that more media companies are investing significant resources into growing their Reddit footprint.

But because of Reddit’s community-centered model, news organizations can’t just post to a central homepage. They must seek out specific subreddits and cultivate relationships within those groups to be allowed to promote stories there.

How Kick has taken on much larger rivals in the video livestreaming space

The live streaming platform Kick has an interesting business model: it only takes a 5% cut of creator revenue, but it serves as a loss leader for the online gambling platform Stake, which is owned by the same company. Apparently, a large number of creators on Kick will live stream their gambling on Stake, therefore promoting the gambling site.

The New York Times published a good piece on the platform’s rise:

Welcome to life on Kick, the Wild West of livestreaming — where seemingly any kind of content goes. Since it went live late last year, the upstart platform has made waves in the world of livestreaming, long dominated by Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. Today, Kick has 21 million accounts, nearly twice as many as just four months ago, and has carved out a niche for itself as the latest home for the fringes of young male viewers who spend a significant amount of time online.

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