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Quick hits

A media entrepreneur in NYC has taken many of the styles and formats of reality TV and transferred them to TikTok. He's responsible for many of the "man on the street" series that have come to dominate the For You page. [Gothamist]

Ted Williams, who launched a Charlotte local news site and sold it to Axios for millions of dollars, posted an open letter saying he wants to buy the Charlotte Observer for $5 million. What's most fascinating is he provides a playbook for how he can drastically increase digital subscriptions while transitioning the print product to a once-a-week Sunday edition. [Tiny Money]

Forbes dominates Google search results for highly-lucrative search terms. This piece questions whether it actually has the expertise to deserve such rankings: "Does anybody think Forbes is the best authority on pet insurance, CBD gummies, and cockroach infestations? I sure as fuck don’t." [Lars Lofgren]

"Hot Ones has grown into one of the most popular talk shows in the world and turned [Sean] Evans into the David Letterman of Generation YouTube. Publicists compete, lie and cajole for a chance to book their clients on the show, which has helped First We Feast generate about $30 million in revenue and $10 million in profit." [Bloomberg]

Adrian Wojnarowski's influence within sports was enormous, hence why his retirement announcement sent shockwaves through the industry: "In many ways, Woj set the gold standard for breaking news in the Twitter era, the kind of reporter for whom people set push notifications." [Puck]

For the first time since he became an election forecaster, Nate Silver put his presidential forecast behind a paywall, and he says he's surprised by how well it converted people into paid subscribers. [Silver Bulletin] FROM THE ARTICLE: "I never expected the sort of traffic or subscriptions that we’ve wound up getting at Silver Bulletin. We’re the #3 Substack in our category and probably pretty close to that in the overall Substack ecosystem since I’m reliably informed that our category ('U.S. Politics') is by far the biggest category. Without getting into specifics, I’ve never been so widely read, and the conversion from drive-by readers to paid subscriptions has gone well, too."

A huge number of YouTubers host their communities on Discord, so it makes sense that the platform launched a Discord competitor. [The Verge]

How Project Brazen builds huge audiences for its narrative podcasts

You may have noticed recently that most of the podcasts generating multi-million dollar paydays are chat shows centered around star hosts. Meanwhile, many of the major platforms and media outlets have pulled back their investments in narrative podcasts, mostly because they’re expensive to produce and more difficult to monetize.

But at least one company remains committed to narrative shows: Project Brazen. Founded by two former Wall Street Journal reporters, the startup operates almost like a movie studio in how it produces shows, and it’s launched several narrative series that went on to top the podcast download charts.

In a recent interview, co-founder Bradley Hope walked through every aspect of its marketing strategy, including Project Brazen’s pre-launch checklist, its approach to public relations, and how it leverages its own growing network to boost a new show:

When we first started, we really didn't have much experience in podcasts. And we just learned everything from scratch. Unlike most people who produce podcasts, we distribute it on our own network, which is called Brazen. We distribute on Apple and Spotify and everything like that.

But under the brand of Brazen, we only ever sold one podcast. Every other one is our own podcast. And in taking on that risk and taking on that challenge, you learn a lot more about podcasts because there's nobody else taking it from here. It's all up to you.

And so we've learned a lot and we created something that we call the big machine. And we have a big machine for every project. And it's essentially a very detailed checklist that's created at the beginning. It goes hand in hand with a calendar of everything you have to do from the beginning to the end. And it's dozens and dozens of steps. And as you kind of get towards the end of the series, that would include creating a trailer. We always create a visual trailer, an audio trailer, sometimes multiple versions of ads depending on the audience.

More quick hits

Many sites that made big bets on driving commerce revenue via product recommendations are now struggling to grow and even seeing a decline in sales. This could be the result of too many publishers rushing into the space at once, or it's an early sign that generative AI is having a negative impact on product recommendation content. [Adweek]

TALK ABOUT SYNERGY: Amazon Prime is launching a show where Amazon retail sellers compete in front of a panel of celebrity judges to have their products featured in its store. [WSJ]

For years, Netflix was tight-lipped about how many people were actually watching its shows. But now that it's the undisputed king of streaming — at least, if you don't count YouTube — it's proudly touting its dominance. It probably also wants to send a signal to potential advertisers about its reach. [Hollywood Reporter]

Some of the best journalists on YouTube are former Vox employees. One example is Cleo Abram. She worked on the business side of Vox and cajoled her way into working on a documentary series the company produced with Netflix. Two years ago she launched her own science channel and has since grown it to 3.8 million subscribers. [Colin & Samir]

There's a growing ecosystem of local news publications hosted on Substack. Most aren't generating huge revenue, but they're still filling in some of the gaps left by retrenched legacy newspapers. [inews]

Patreon launched a tool that tries to predict which free members are on the verge of converting into paid and offers them a discount: "Autopilot improved the rate of free-to-paid membership upgrades by an average of 19% in testing." [TechCrunch]

"Substack shared that over the past year, publications and subscriptions in the Fashion & Beauty category have more than doubled. Collectively, these writers earn more than $10 million annually in subscriptions, a figure that does not account for affiliate revenue." [WashPo]

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