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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Yet more evidence that Meta doesn’t understand the Creator Economy

The creator Hank Green published a fantastic breakdown of how much money he makes on his shortfom videos. Unsurprisingly, Meta-owned Instagram does the worst job of sharing revenue:

Speaking of video payouts, The Information broke the news today that Meta is winding down Facebook’s video revenue share and replacing it with a new payout system “similar to the bonus program it offered for short-form Reels that largely was based on number of views.”

While it remains to be seen how much Facebook ultimately pays creators through this new system — I’ve seen at least one person claim their revenue has already dropped — I’m largely in agreement Hank Green’s previous criticism of inscrutable “creator funds” that don’t pay out a fixed percentage of revenue generated from a platform’s content.

Meta continues to shit the bed when it comes to sharing revenue with creators. It will never be a culturally relevant video platform as a result. Browse Instagram today and most of the viral reels are either stolen clips from Hollywood-produced media or simply cross-posted from TikTok. In fact, it's a running joke on the platform that the videos going viral there are three-week-old TikTok videos.

What do you think?

A fascinating history of music copyright

Slow Boring published a fascinating history of music copyright that explains why the US government codified compulsory licenses for music compositions but didn't do so for music recordings:

In the early 1900s, controversy arose with the proliferation of player pianos. Player pianos were able to play songs without human aid by way of a perforated roll. The perforations in those rolls were instructions for which key to be pressed at which time. As the roll rotated mechanically, the piano was able to play the song …

… These issues were compounded by the fact that player piano companies didn’t pay royalties to the songwriters for using their songs. Their argument was that piano rolls were not copies of sheet music. They were just part of the machine that reproduced music.

Who knew that player pianos could have such an outsized impact!

ICYMI: How a kids-focused podcaster reached 1 million monthly downloads

Jim Jacob accidentally stumbled upon a huge market opportunity when he launched Kids Short Stories.

The rise of Coffeezilla’s YouTube investigations

Coffeezilla, a YouTuber who's done some incredible investigations of crypto scammers, talked about how Patreon stabilized his income and allowed him to double down on his investigative journalism.

Punchbowl wants to become the Bloomberg of legislative data

Punchbowl News, the independent media company that’s hyper focused on Capitol Hill, acquired a data company:

Punchbowl News said Thursday that it was acquiring Electo Analytics, a company that provides data to help decipher and analyze legislation … The company plans to increase its annual subscription by $50 in January and will also eventually offer a higher-cost subscription that includes data from Electo Analytics for more than $1,000, but the final price hasn’t been set.

I'm noticing more and more media companies keep launching or acquiring data products. Everyone wants to be the "Bloomberg of industry X."

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. )

Will news consumers actually use publisher chatbots?

Press Gazette reported on how individual publishers are launching chatbots that are trained specifically on their own archives:

Both Google and ChatGPT owner OpenAI have this year made technology available to allow people create their own generative AI tools using their proprietary content and data, mitigating the copyright issues – although hallucinations and other inaccuracies may still pose a risk …

… Money Saving Expert has created its own “MSE ChatGPT” module in its app for users to ask questions and receive answers based only on the outlet’s own archive of hundreds of thousands of articles.

Editor-in-chief Marcus Herbert told Press Gazette in September the bot was “giving some really, really interesting results” but the results were not yet “sufficiently accurate” especially when attributing and recommending relevant MSE articles. He was also concerned about the risk to trust from hallucinations, if they mislead people about MSE content.

I'm highly skeptical that people will use chatbots placed on individual news sites. I feel like if you want to ask a question to a chatbot, you're going to use some centralized source like ChatGPT or Google Bard. You're not going to go to the Forbes website and use its specific chatbot.

How Google’s generative AI will impact search traffic

Google is testing out generative AI text that pops up in response to search queries. This serves to push website links even further down in search results.

How much will this impact publisher search traffic? The WSJ reports:

Across the media world, Google generates nearly 40% of publishers’ traffic, accounting for the largest share of their “referrals,” according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from measurement firm SimilarWeb …

… While Google says the final shape of its AI product is far from set, publishers have seen enough to estimate that they will lose between 20% and 40% of their Google-generated traffic if anything resembling recent iterations rolls out widely. Google has said it is giving priority to sending traffic to publishers.

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