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Will Apple News finally produce meaningful revenue for publishers?

Axios reports that Apple News has entered into an exclusive ad partnership deal with Taboola:

As an authorized advertising reseller for Apple News and Apple Stocks, Taboola will power native advertising placements within those two apps in every market available.

Both apps are accessible in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia and are built in on every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Taboola can sell ads within the main feeds and articles for select publishers across both apps.

Apple News has a pretty massive user base — on account of its integration into over a billion iOS devices — but it’s always underperformed from a monetization perspective, especially on its advertising side. This is mostly due to Apple’s long-held distaste for advertising. A few years ago it outsourced its ad sales to NBC, but I doubt much came of that arrangement.

Taboola always gets a bad wrap — mostly because it’s allowed in low-quality advertisers that engage in clickbait ad arbitrage — but I’ve long thought it’s underrated as a native ad tool. Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I’ve advocated for the publishing industry to embrace self-service native advertising because it provides much better engagement than display ads, and Taboola is the most scalable platform that specializes in sponsored content. According to that Axios piece, the company is already generating $1.4 billion in annual revenue, and this association with Apple will likely supercharge its reach and sales.

So what does this mean for the publishers that have partnered with Apple News? Hopefully it results in a more meaningful revenue share. Historically, publishers have mostly viewed the free version of Apple News as a marketing tool to drive readers back to their owned and operated websites so they can be monetized more effectively. But if Taboola does succeed at increasing the platform’s ad revenue, then publishers might find themselves with a new meaningful revenue source.

And then there’s Apple News+ — the paid version that grants customers access to longform magazine content. Apple hasn’t broken out specific subscription numbers for the service, but anecdotal reporting indicates the product is continuing to grow and produce larger and larger payouts. It’s not inconceivable that Apple could emerge as the most important tech platform for the publishing industry.

Conde Nast’s innovative ecommerce strategy

Several Conde Nast titles developed their own annual product awards, which they monetize with affiliate links. The brands who win these awards will then tout them in their own marketing:

Some Condé Nast brands feature awards, which plays exceptionally well to the commerce strategy as well as lean into heavy brand engagement. Take a look at Allure Best of Beauty Awards and Allure Readers Choice. These are coveted awards for brands, beloved by readers, and now they produce an additional revenue stream by way of commerce revenue. 

In fact, the Allure Awards are so popular that a beauty chain store in the United States has an online section shopping only for products that have won an Allure award, which is part of a wider partnership … Amazon also has an Allure Best of Beauty storefront.

Obviously, the ecommerce space has become extremely saturated in recent years as thousands of publishers moved in to snatch up the low hanging fruit. Conde Nast’s innovative approach allows it to differentiate its content from all the low-quality product roundups that every website is now pumping out.

How AI is accelerating the production of content spam

The Verge published a good piece detailing how some of the largest media outlets in the world are licensing articles from a company that runs a massive AI spam operation:

A former AdVon employee told The Verge that the content that AdVon says is created by humans is nearly identical to the AI-generated content they created while working there. Freelancers who were initially hired as writers were reassigned to roles of editors and tasked with making AI-generated writing sound human. The tool AdVon used — called MEL internally — generated hundreds of words on products using bare-bones prompts like “best televisions,” spitting out links to product pages on Amazon.

“I looked at [MEL’s output] the first time and I just fell apart,” the former AdVon worker says. “Everything we were working towards — all that education, all of the writing experience … it was gone. There was none of the human journalistic writing. It was just, generate a bunch of words that we hope will look like a good article.”

I think what’s so maddening about this type of stuff is the brazen laziness of it. At the end of the day, what attracts people to AI-written content is it offers the possibility of scaling up an entire media operation without actually putting in the work. Never mind the threat it poses to human content creators; what frustrates me is that the internet is constantly clogged with shit because there will always be a subset of human beings who want to cut corners. The fact that these schemes almost always fail is beside the point, since there will always be a new wave of lazy shitheads to replace them. 

How Jared Newman built Cord Cutter Weekly, a TV streaming newsletter with 32,000 subscribers

When Jared Newman launched his Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter back in 2016, the streaming TV market was much smaller than it is today, with most TV networks either not having their own streaming app or requiring a cable subscription to access it. But as it turned out, he timed his launch perfectly, as it was only a matter of years before virtually every Hollywood studio pivoted to streaming. Today, his newsletter has over 32,000 subscribers, and a spinoff newsletter that gives tech advice has also grown to 1,200 paying members.

In a recent interview, he discussed his motivation for launching the newsletter, why his editor let him promote it at the end of his columns, and whether he ever wants to leave his freelance career entirely to just focus on growing his two newsletters:

It was on Twitter. Somebody was like, do you have a newsletter? I can't say that I really had thought about that much. I was maybe kind of aware of some people that were doing stuff, and this was 2016, so it was pre Subsstack and pre newsletter boom and all that. But the inspiration was like, Oh, maybe people would want to just get this directly. And I had at that point been a freelancer for six years, and so I didn't really have that relationship with readers. You're this hired gun, you write stories for a publication, and they get all the feedback and everything. I liked the idea of maybe kind of opening up this direct connection and decided to see how it went.

The nostalgic resilience of Metafilter

Metafilter just turned 25, and Wired reminisced over how it managed to reject the trappings of the modern web:

One popular feature from early on was “Ask Metafilter,” where members seek advice and tips from the Metafilter hive mind. “When you're pitching a question to 10,000 really smart nerds, chances are somebody has to be experienced in the thing you're asking,” says Haughey. It became an invaluable repository of knowledge, not just to the community but those who stumbled on the answers through Google. Quora later launched with a similar idea, but with ambitions for a mega-footprint. That wasn’t Metafilter’s thing.

Metafilter wasn't just an OG blog, its community features were later replicated on much larger platforms like Reddit and Quora. But Metafilter itself never had ambitions for massive scale, hence why it still serves as a sort of time capsule for the 2000s internet.

Writer-owned cooperatives provide an opportunity for laid-off journalists

Back in February, the public radio station WAMU abruptly shut down DCist, a local blog the station had acquired several years before. This week, several staffers who were laid off as a result of the closing launched their own media outlet:

The 51st’s staffers hope to raise $250,000 in the next 30 days to fund their site for six months as they continue to apply for grants and seek donations.

It will be operated as a worker-run newsroom, a model followed by other media start-ups as well, such as New York’s Hell Gate and Defector, which are funded by subscriptions.

The main difference between this new outlet and those other worker-owned cooperatives is that it’ll be operated as a non-profit — likely because the staff wants to avoid erecting paywalls to generate revenue. The nonprofit status will make it easier for them to solicit donations and also apply for larger grants.

I’m a big fan of writer cooperatives, especially when they’re launched by laid-off journalists. Building a sustainable media business by yourself requires a lot of runway, but a group of writers working together can scale up an audience much more quickly. This new outlet, for instance, has already managed to raise $84,000 in donations in less than 24 hours after launch. That’s the kind of momentum you get when working as a team.

A legendary sports journalist gets her due

The Long Lead published a fantastic profile of one of the first women to break into prestige sports journalism:

Despite more than 100 [Sports Illustrated] bylines and significant accolades and attention in her time, [Virginia] Kraft is absent from lists of pioneering women in journalism, and her articles are excluded from discussions of notable SI stories. Her work isn’t covered in journalism schools, and when asked, none of my peers was even familiar with her name. Virginia Kraft might be the most influential sports journalist nobody has ever heard of. Why?

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. )

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