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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Quick hits

The Year Creators Took Over

I pretty much agree with this thesis that 2024 is the year the Creator Economy surpassed the traditional media in terms of reach and influence. That's not to say that the legacy media doesn't maintain some level of influence, but it's also clear it has nowhere near the power it once had to control or define the cultural narrative. [New Yorker]

How the Teen Moms of TikTok Are Making Big Money While Breaking Stereotypes

For the past two decades, there's been an entire genre of reality television devoted to following the lives of teen moms. Now, teen moms are directly monetizing that public fascination via their social media accounts. "The social media stardom gives them a chance to provide for their children, sometimes resulting in 6-figure incomes." [Teen Vogue]

The IShowSpeed Interview: Streamer of the Year

This live streamer is so popular that legions of people will figure out where he's streaming from and show up to catch a glimpse of him. He can never announce where he's streaming in advance because too many fans would flood in and create a dangerous situation for both him and the surrounding population. [Created]

In Massachusetts towns haunted by ghost newspapers, startups are fighting to meet audience needs

Legacy media chains like Gannett are operating more and more "ghost papers" — newspapers that still technically exist but have almost no actual local news, which means their contribution to their communities is negligible. Basically, the media companies that own them are trying to squeeze every last remaining penny out of their brands and websites. [Poynter]

Mrs. Burns Goes to Washington

Wow, this is bleak: "MSNBC ... has lost half of its audience since November 5, and is now watched by an average of fewer than half a million people, and just 43,000 people below the age of 55."

I know this isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but there are YouTubers who simply flip on their laptop’s webcam and get higher viewership than that. [Puck]

Do you live in Washington, DC?

I genuinely love working from home and the flexibility it allows, but it really does suck sometimes to go days without much in-person interaction other than with my spouse.

I actually own a house in DC now and am contemplating the idea of setting up coworking hangouts where someone else can come over and work at my kitchen table. Does this sound like something that would appeal to people? If so, you can drop me a line.

How Bluesky hopes to win over publishers (and users)

Bluesky is smart to focus on getting publishers and journalists on its platform; as I've argued before, news was the lifeblood of Twitter, ensuring that there was always something new and topical in your feed every time you opened it. And given how anxious journalists are about other platforms deprioritizing links, they're especially eager to find a home base that allows them to freely share their work. [Digiday]

Business Insider tech chief: AI lets us ‘punch above our weight class’

I continue to be skeptical that individual publisher chatbots will have much consumer adoption. Just as most search queries go through Google, most people will choose a general chatbot to answer their questions.

The one exception maybe is super niche publishers that lock a bunch of exclusive content behind a hard paywall that LLMs can't access. I was talking to a publisher the other day who runs an extremely niche industry research company that requires a log-in to access its in-depth research reports. He was super excited about his company's internal chatbot and I could see that having some differentiated value. [Press Gazette]

How the GameDiscoverCo newsletter launched a data product for game developers

There’s absolutely no way to predict with 100% accuracy how a piece of commercial art will perform once it’s released to the public. If that were possible, then book publishers would only put out bestsellers and movie studios would exclusively release blockbusters. There are just too many variables at play — including critical reviews, marketing campaigns, word-of-mouth buzz, and even macroeconomic trends — to determine ahead of time whether a piece of content will be a smash hit or total flop.

That’s not to say that the companies that fund this content don’t try to gauge the potential sales numbers of a project before greenlighting it. That’s why every book proposal is required to have a “comp titles” section where the author lists other similar books in the marketplace along with their sales numbers, and it’s why there’s a whole cottage industry of data analysts who try to predict the box office openings for films. It’s also why Hollywood is obsessed with making movies and TV shows that fit within already-existing IP; it gives executives at least some peace of mind that there’s an audience that’s expressed an interest in the property.

But what happens if you’re a video game producer who wants to set realistic sales expectations for an upcoming title? While some games are based on already-existing IP, there are hundreds launched every year for smartphones, desktop computers, and consoles that are wholly original, and the companies that publish them collectively spend billions of dollars to market those titles to potential customers. In order to ensure a good return on their marketing spend, they need accurate data on how similar games were promoted and discovered.

To get this data, many within the industry turn to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. Launched in 2019 by a longtime gaming journalist named Simon Carless, GameDiscoverCo analyzes both public and private data around game releases and then distills it into marketing and sales insights. Carless monetizes the newsletter through a mixture of paid subscriptions and consulting, and he’s used his profits to build a platform that visualizes this data for paying customers. Think of it as sort of a Bloomberg Terminal for game developers.

In a recent interview, Carless discussed why he decided to quit his job to run the newsletter, how he grew his audience, and what it took to build out and run his own data platform.

You can find the interview over here.

More quick hits

CNBC Plans Q1 Launch for Targeted Streaming Service

It's a smart move for CNBC to launch a paid streaming service given its affluent, differentiated audience. What I don't get is why it doesn't wrap MSNBC into the streaming service. I don't know why so many media companies don't fully exploit their IP when building subscription products. It happens all the time.

For instance, my in-laws were visiting during the election week and they love MSNBC, so I subscribed to Peacock thinking it for sure would have lots of MSNBC content, especially so close to the election. But the MSNBC widget was buried deep within the app and the programming they made available was pretty limited. These companies just still suck at very basic subscription economics. [Variety]

How can the mainstream media compete with Sam Sulek?

Sam Sulek is such a fascinating creator. The dude has 3.8 million subscribers on YouTube. He uploads every single day. His videos are long and mostly unedited. Every video has the same format: several minutes of him talking directly to the camera while driving to the gym followed by footage of him lifting weights at said gym. As far as I can tell, none of his videos have a sponsor. Each video gets several hundred thousand views.

How does the mainstream media expect to compete with something so popular yet so cheap to produce? [Sam Sulek]

ActBlue Isn’t Selling Your Data

INTERESTING: Like a lot of Democratic donors, I was inundated with nonstop, unwanted text messages from candidates asking me to donate to them this election cycle. I always assumed that ActBlue was selling my contact information to them, but it turns out that it's the campaigns I've donated to that were selling it to other campaigns. It's a pretty shitty practice that needs to stop. [Matt Hodges]

Money Ball: How College Athletes Are Raking in Big Bucks Without Going Pro

You no longer have to land a coveted spot in a pro sports league in order to become a professional athlete. You just have to amass a large audience online and effectively monetize it. [Hollywood Reporter]

The Free Press hires a publisher amid expansion

The Free Press started as a solo operation from Bari Weiss but has since grown into a full-fledged magazine generating over $10 million a year. Whatever your feelings are on Weiss's politics, you have to admit she's a savvy marketer. [Axios]

YouTube is a hit on TVs — and is starting to act like it

Video versions of podcasts are great for lean-back TV consumption: “[YouTube] viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts on their TVs every month."

If you have a chat podcast and you're not producing a video version, then you're potentially missing out on some highly-engaged consumption. [The Verge]

HarperCollins CEO touts Spotify’s audiobooks entry, AI’s impact on publishing

The Harper Collins CEO says audiobooks outsell ebooks and that ebook sales are declining even as overall revenue increases. It's probably worth noting, however, that the major publishers keep their ebook prices relatively high, which might suppress sales, and that there's a huge market for self-published ebooks. Still though, it's pretty incredible that the printed book has remained resilient in the face of so much digital competition. [TechCrunch]

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