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Morning Brew’s brilliant YouTube strategy

When you think of Morning Brew, probably the first thing that comes to mind is their newsletter, but I actually think they've been much more creative and innovative in the video space. Their YouTube channel has struck this perfect balance between high-quality information and comedy, and that's largely due to the creative genius of a guy named Dan Toomey.

I actually interviewed Toomey last year about how he built up Morning Brew’s TikTok channel, but he recently teamed up with a video producer named Henry Stockwell to transform the company’s YouTube channel into a documentary series that reminds me of the narrative correspondent segments from the Daily Show. Toomey and Stockwell recently sat down for a long interview to talk about their creative process and how they landed on the series’ distinctive format.

Watch the interview in the video below:

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The rise of the Fox News “diaspora”

Fox News has a habit of building up hosts into conservative stars and then engendering a lot of bad blood upon their exit. This has resulted in a Fox "diaspora" that's now competing with the network on outlets ranging from independent podcasts to right wing cable networks:

The business model of the Fox diaspora benefits from lower overhead, since its outlets don’t require the pretense of an expensive newsgathering apparatus. Instead, the former Fox stars can just rant angrily about whatever is reported elsewhere. And one of the things they rant about is Fox: They have a vested interest in tearing down the network, decrying it as insufficiently anti-woke or pro-Trump in an effort to steal away its viewers, which in turn can lead the network to course-correct in their direction.

What do you think?

ICYMI: How investment newsletter The Daily Upside reached 300,000 subscribers

Founder Patrick Trousdale explained his growth and monetization strategies.

The podcast “middle class” is suffering too

There were a bunch of pieces last week arguing that the podcast industry's recent turmoil has been mainly concentrated within large tech companies like Spotify, and that the massive layoffs are mostly a result of bad investments made by these companies. But there's plenty of evidence that mid tier podcast networks are also experiencing revenue headwinds.

Case in point: TWiT, one of the OG tech podcast networks, has recently laid off staff and cancelled several of its shows:

Unfortunately, our medium, podcasting, has suffered economically since the beginning of Covid. As the number of podcasts grew exponentially, the number of advertisers dwindled, and with it, our revenue. At one time, we had as many as 30 people on the TWiT staff, not including show hosts, producing more than 30 unique shows. Today, the staff is half that size, and we produce half the number of shows.

The Mail Online’s bizarre expansion into subscriptions

The Mail Online, which is a web traffic behemoth that’s known for publishing hundreds of articles per day, in considering launching some sort of paywall:

Most of the up to 1,500 stories published daily on the Mail Online website would remain free to access but a “freemium” paywall model could ask people to pay to read around ten to 15 stories per day, Press Gazette understands.

The new model would only apply to Mail Online users in the UK and would likely begin to be implemented in January.

You can either run a clickbait traffic farm or a premium subscription publisher. I'm highly skeptical that you can do both simultaneously under the same brand.

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Print magazines are the new vinyl?

GQ argues that glossy print magazines are experiencing a comeback, mostly because they serve as a sort of status symbol for the elite:

As we head into 2024, the print tide is coming back in. Magazines are merch now: Signifiers of good taste, to be displayed on the coffee table or desk to let visitors know that you don’t just mindlessly scroll at your phone. The same wave that pushed vinyl back into the mainstream long after it was pronounced dead is now powering magazines. It’s a new, affordable way to support your favorite creative people. Swifties who don’t own turntables are scooping up $50 12” LPs from Urban Outfitters. Magazines are (usually) cheaper, and you don’t need a player to actually enjoy them.

YouTube is fueling a chess resurgence

The New York Times published a fun profile of a YouTuber who's become one of the biggest celebrities in the chess world:

[Levy Rozman] started his YouTube channel a couple of months into the pandemic. By the summer of 2021, he had a million subscribers; earlier this year, he reached four million. His total page views are approaching two billion. On the GothamChess YouTube channel, Rozman has taken advantage of all the big chess moments in recent years: the surge in popularity during Covid; the success of “The Queen’s Gambit”; the crossover appeal of Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian grandmaster and all-time great; the salacious cheating scandal that involved Carlsen’s accusations against Hans Niemann, a 20-year-old American grandmaster. That scandal ended up in court and drove GothamChess viewership for months.

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