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Why don't legacy publishers monetize their social media accounts?

Press Gazette published a good interview with Chris Anthony, chief revenue officer of Gallery Media Group, a women-focused media company that is not only profitable — generating upwards of $50 million a year — but also publishes most of its content natively to social media:

Chief revenue officer Chris Anthony told Press Gazette the business has found success in working with major brands to create direct monetisation opportunities rather than relying on the varying revenue share deals offered by the different platforms …

… GMG’s social accounts are primarily monetised through advertising brand partnerships: creating sponsored videos to go out on the accounts alongside editorial content or distributing major brands’ assets within the portfolio.

One thing that's always struck me as strange is how little most legacy media outlets seem interested in trying to monetize their social media accounts directly. Sure, some of them take the paltry revenue share from these platforms and sometimes even sign special deals that involve upfront payments — though most of those deals went away once Facebook lost interest in news — but for the most part, their social media accounts are solely focused on driving users back to their websites.

You rarely see legacy media outlets creating the kind of branded sponsorship content that's the bread and butter of the Creator Economy. To just give one example, the Washington Post has 7 million followers on Instagram, and there are probably lots of brands that would love to be featured in its images and video, especially since that audience skews younger. Yet I can find no evidence of any sponsored content there. I found the same thing when I checked out the Instagram accounts for CNN (20 million followers), LA Times (1.2 million followers), and Vanity Fair (9.2 million followers).

You'd think a struggling industry would grab more of the low-hanging fruit.

What do you think?

How The Dispatch is diversifying beyond its subscription model

The Dispatch launched in 2020 with a pretty straightforward thesis: that people would pay for quality, fact-based journalism. It certainly had a partisan lean — it was co-founded by conservative journalists Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, after all — but it steered clear of the wholesale rejection of reality that’s rampant in most pro-Trump media.

Flash forward to 2025, and that thesis has been vindicated. It recently crossed 45,000 paid subscribers without the help of huge VC investors. Now, it plans to diversify its revenue streams, and to accomplish that it brought on Mike Rothman, a longtime media veteran who helped build companies like Thrillist and Fatherly.

In a recent interview, Mike talked through his decision to join The Dispatch, what kind of advertising he wants to sell, and why brands are suddenly interested again in sponsoring politics media.

You can check out the interview over here.

YouTubers will eventually create Hollywood-quality films and series

This is cool: a group of prominent creators are banding together to launch their own film festival in Austin:

“In order to get creators to cross over into Hollywood, we need to show Hollywood the same signals they look for,” Creator Camp Head of Partnerships Danny Desatnik told us.

“If we’re just showing films with algorithmic media—which Hollywood can’t value cause it’s all an advertising model and they go off of ticket sales and IP—we want to build a system over the next couple of years where creators can get the necessary signals so that Hollywood looks at them and sees ‘oh you sold out a 1,200 person film festival,’” Desatnik said.

I'm on record as saying I think a YouTuber will one day self-finance and produce an Oscar-winning film that's mainly distributed on YouTube (though it might have a small theatrical release first). I think it's interesting that these up-and-coming filmmakers are already thinking about how they can prime Hollywood into taking them more seriously.

Now, you might be thinking that Hollywood already takes the Creator Economy seriously, on account of Beast Games breaking viewership records on Amazon Prime. But most creator investments have been in the reality TV space; very few film and serialized TV projects are being solicited from creators.

So how might this evolution actually happen? My guess is it'll start with an aspiring filmmaker posting weekly short films to their YouTube channel. Week by week, they'll gradually amass an audience and refine their storytelling/production skills, until one day they decide they've reached enough critical mass to shoot a feature-length movie. Then they'll launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, raise a few million dollars, and begin filming. From there, the channel will become a weekly vlog about making the movie, which will not only help them maintain their online audience but also build up anticipation for the film's launch.

In fact, we've already seen a version of this with the YouTuber Joel Haver. He built his channel to 2 million subscribers by posting weekly sketch videos, and then in 2024 he announced he was switching to a less-frequent posting schedule and only publishing full-length films. Those films amassed over 1.3 million views and were largely financed through his Patreon membership. None of them had Hollywood-level production quality, but he proved there's a viable business model for longform fictional storytelling.

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The podcast industry finally solved its discovery problem

Video podcasts aren’t exactly new — some YouTubers started building podcast studios at least a decade ago — but they’ve certainly generated a lot of excitement recently, especially with Spotify’s push into video. And because of this recent excitement, we’re suddenly seeing a lot of pushback from industry veterans who aren’t eager to flip on their webcams:

Video is “forcing people to change what the core competency of podcasting is,” said Eric Silver, head of development at Multitude Productions, which produces podcasts and sells ads on their behalf, in an interview. “I don’t think I should turn myself into a YouTuber just because Spotify is messaging that this is the future.”

Smaller podcasters may not have the budget to buy expensive camera equipment, set up a studio set and dedicate hours to editing video content.

Here's the thing: podcasters spent over a decade complaining that there was no frictionless social sharing with podcasts, which therefore made it really difficult for them to grow their shows. Podcast discovery largely depended on old-fashioned word-of-mouth, and it was extremely rare for an episode to go "viral" in the same way that videos, images, and text can go viral.

But then video podcasts came along and mostly solved this discovery problem. It's much easier to share a YouTube video than a podcast episode, and you can also chop a longform video into shorter clips that can then be seeded on shortform video apps like Tiktok and Instagram.

But now you have a lot of old-school traditionalists who complain they don't want to become proficient in video, or that it somehow destroys the sanctity of podcasting. Which is totally fine! There's no rule that you need to include video; many podcasts still don't. But if you do choose the audio-only path, I think you need to just be OK with the fact that you won't be able to use most of the social sharing tools that make it easier for consumers to discover content. You'll have to continue depending on the word-of-mouth, slow-growth dynamic that podcasters endured for the medium's first 15 years.

Some good longform content

For years, Hollywood's de-aging special effects weren't able to escape the uncanny valley, which left actors looking creepy and unrealistic. But a new AI company did away with the painstaking work of scanning an actor's face and editing in the younger features after filming; instead, the tool reimagines the actor's face pretty much in real-time, which makes the finished product much more realistic. [Vox]

In many ways, the success of White Lotus was a complete fluke; HBO was desperate for new programming during the pandemic, and creator Mike White happened to have an idea for a show set in Hawaii, a remote locale that made it easier for the staff to quarantine. He still doesn't quite know why the show amassed such a devoted following. "Somehow, I got on the last helicopter out of the dystopia that is Hollywood." [New Yorker]

FaZe Clan was the first esports company to be listed on the Nasdaq, and its members collectively amassed over 130 million YouTube subscribers. But what should have been a rags-to-riches success story was upended due to bad management and creator exploitation. It's now a cautionary tale for why young creators should be skeptical of fast-talking investors who promise to transform them into billionaires. [Golfcart]

ICYMI: How Starter Story grew to 1.4 million monthly visitors and $500,000 in annual revenue

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Behind the paywall

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. How comment sections improve subscriber retention

2. Why audio companies are abandoning platform exclusivity

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How comment sections improve subscriber retention...