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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Let’s jump into it…

Quick hits

When it comes to product reviews, Google claims to prioritize websites that have actually tested the products, but one indie publisher claims that's not the case. [Nieman Lab]

This is a fascinating discussion between several indie content creators about what it takes to build a sustainable media business. [Nieman Lab]

I think there's an argument to be made that MrBeast's content drives more global consumption time than Taylor Swift's entire music catalog. [Time]

"Showmax — which was spun out of Africa’s largest entertainment company, MultiChoice, in 2015 — had 2.1 million subscribers on the continent at the end of November 2023, as compared to 1.8 million for Netflix" [Rest of World]

This is why I think TikTok will cave before UMG: there are now too many other short form video apps ready to step in and steal its cultural dominance. [Business Insider]

Walmart already has a $3.4 billion advertising business. The entire media industry had nearly a century head start on selling ads, yet how many media companies generate over $3.4 billion in advertising? Maybe Disney, Paramount, and WBD? [Axios]

In just a few short years, Alex Cooper built such a devoted fan base for her podcast that Spotify shelled out $60 million to distribute it. Now, she’s attempting to leverage that fame to launch a media empire. [NYT]

A free streaming service owned by Fox leaned into campy, low-budget films and saw a huge uptick in viewership once clips went viral on TikTok. [NYT]

It used to be that pro athletes were extremely limited in their career choices after they retired from their sport, but now they're increasingly leveraging their star power to launch their own media companies, which they can then use to promote all kinds of ancillary products. [WSJ]

This is a good profile of a news wire service that most people haven't heard of. [Inquirer]

Most people are aware that local news has been in decline over the past 15 years, but many don't realize that a lot of the job cuts were at newspapers that were healthily profitable, and that those cuts only came about because private equity owners were trying to squeeze them for more profits. [Politico]

Did AG Sulzberger get the publisher job at the NYT because of nepotism? Sure. But he also clearly put in the work of learning the ins and outs of journalism, and I think a lot of the company's current success can be attributed to him. [Reuters]

Why the decline of the neighborhood barbershop led to the rise of conspiracy theories. [Momentary Experts]

Advertisers won’t be guilted into funding news

Back in November 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, there was suddenly a lot of anxiety over the proliferation of “fake news” — this was before Trump himself co-opted that phrase — and the advertising ecosystem that supported it. Basically, the ubiquity of programmatic ad tech had made it incredibly easy for fringe, rightwing publishers to run ads for Fortune 100 brands next to their unhinged content. Within weeks of Trump’s election, everyone started reading articles about “Macedonian teens” who had become overnight millionaires by producing pro-Trump articles and promoting them on Facebook.

Understandably, lots of people were extremely angry about this situation and eager to fix it. It was in the midst of all this anger that Sleeping Giants was born.

Its approach was fairly simple: it encouraged followers to visit right wing websites like Breitbart, screenshot the brands showing up in programmatic ads, and then tweet those screenshots at the brands themselves, usually with some sort of message like, “Did you know your company is funding right-wing hate?” The Sleeping Giants account would then retweet these messages, which would cause a flood of users to come in and threaten to stop using the brand’s products. More often than not, the brand would issue some sort of announcement that they’d reached out to their advertising agency and asked that Breitbart be blocked from their ad buys.

Breitbart tried to fight back against this trend — does anyone remember the #DumpKelloggs campaign? — but it largely failed. Sleeping Giants had succeeded in diverting millions of dollars away from fringe media.

But here’s the problem: it wasn’t just fringe media that was hurt by this activism. The whole point of the Sleeping Giants campaign was to make brands more judicious in how they targeted their ads, with the assumption being that they would be more likely to handpick high quality news publishers that deserved their support. Instead, those brands’ advertising agencies began to employ keyword blocklists to filter out sites that covered any news that could be considered even remotely controversial. In essence, the very ad tech that facilitated the rise of fringe websites was now being used to defund legitimate news outlets.

Flash forward to today, and it’s now virtually impossible to monetize hard news through advertising alone. As a result, there’s a growing movement to pressure brands into loosening their keyword restrictions so that they can fund expensive newsgathering. For instance, the organization Check My Ads published a recent piece titled, “Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: Please stop hurting journalism.” Here’s what he had to say on the matter:

He had some advice for advertisers who are currently just “pushing out” ads “anywhere except where these negative words are.”

“Find trusted sites and support those sites,” Jackson said.

“I think that has a bigger impact than the shotgun approach that is happening right now, with ads going so many different places — and the common denominator is that they they don't have the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the story.”

(I’ll pause to note the irony that Check My Ads was co-founded by Nandini Jammi, one of the original researchers for Sleeping Giants. I don’t say that to disparage her work, which is important.)

So do I think there’s a viable path forward for getting brands, en masse, to include news publishers in their programmatic ad buys? Or to put it another way, do I think those brands can be “guilted” back into the fold?

No, not really...