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Does a content windowing strategy actually work?

This is interesting: last year, HBO stopped publishing John Oliver segments to YouTube the morning after they aired — the idea being that, if it waited several days to upload these clips to the web, more people would be forced to check out the show on Max if they wanted their John Oliver fix.

But this season HBO reversed that policy and again began uploading the clips on YouTube the morning after. A source told the Hollywood Reporter that "the delay in posting the show to YouTube last season didn’t have any noticeable effect on viewing of the show on Max."

There are two ways of interpreting this revelation. The first is that windowing strategies don't work, and that audiences are more than willing to wait a few extra days to watch content if it means they don’t have to pay.

A second interpretation could be that windowing works, but it just has diminishing returns. The hardcore John Oliver fans, in other words, will want to watch the show immediately after it shows up on Max. Either way, I'm sure both Oliver and his fans are happy that the show's back to its regular next-day posting schedule.

I launched a new newsletter!

SOME BIG NEWS! I've launched a new newsletter! It's called The Long Story, and it curates the internet’s best longform journalism every Friday. If you’re looking to dig into some good weekend longreads, it’s the perfect resource.

You can check out the first issue and sign up over here.

Original reporting is the best defense against AI

Puck asked Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson and New Yorker editor David Remnick about how they’re preparing “for the coming AI transformation.” I liked their response:

Thompson’s response has been to invest in strengthening the relationship with the subscriber, which he cites as the motivation for TheAtlantic’s recent decision to add two print editions each year (from 10 to 12 issues, making it a true monthly). “I should try to develop the strongest direct relationships I can with people where there’s no tech platform and no A.I. platform that can get in the middle of that [relationship],” he said. “One of those things is print. We make the magazine, we put it in the U.S. Postal Service, it gets to your door. So, weirdly, print is kind of a counter-A.I. move.” It’s worth recalling that The Atlantic is underwritten, at least in part, by Steve Jobs’s estate.

Similarly, when I asked David Remnick, the legendary editor of The New Yorker for the last 27 years, how he thought about this challenge, he held up the latest edition of the print magazine: “That’s about as unmediated as you can get,” he said, almost defiantly. “And we produce not a few of these. We do this just about every week of the year, 48 a year.”

If AI eats into any traffic for publishers, it'll most certainly be search engine traffic — the kind of traffic that comes when someone is looking for a very specific answer to a question they have. I've always considered Google traffic to be overrated because it has an incredibly high bounce rate and doesn't contribute much to the KPIs that are actually important to a media business: email signups, homepage visitors, paid subscriptions, etc...

This is why I continue to think the publishers that invest the most in original reporting and analysis will be affected the least by the adoption of AI. Sure, that original reporting will eventually be sucked into an LLM, but being first to market with that information will always give a publisher an edge. I also think we'll see more and more publishers adopt hard paywalls that LLM bots can't penetrate. I've spoken to some publishers in extremely niche B2B industries that don't worry about AI at all because there's simply no way to access the high-value content they create without first paying up.

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Is Amazon losing its grip on the book industry?

It's been interesting to watch multiple companies make significant headway at cutting into Amazon's dominance in book publishing. Spotify's launch of its audiobook streaming has already captured a sizable portion of Audible's market share. Bookshop.org saw a surge in online orders as indie bookstores leveraged their collective might to divert book sales away from Amazon. And now we have a formidable challenger to Goodreads, the book-focused social network run by Amazon:

Six years ago, [software engineer Nadia Odunayo] sat down to ­create what she imagined might be a companion app to Goodreads.

After building a demo for a few friends, she quickly realised it was more likely to be a competitor, ­offering readers’ tracking tools and trends – using AI – that could help recommend their next book. And as of this week, The StoryGraph has 3.8 million active users, many of whom have ditched Goodreads.

So what's happening here? I think a combination of readers, authors, and publishers are highly incentivized to create more competition in the industry. Readers are anxious about the decline of local bookstores and their inability to browse titles at a physical location. Authors worry that their book sales will become too dependent on a single platform's recommendation algorithm. And book publishers know that Amazon's monopoly gives it too much leverage in negotiations.

The question is who will challenge Amazon's dominance of the ebook market? Apple made a half-hearted attempt and then gave up after the DOJ sued the company for anti-trust violations. The Barnes & Noble Nook supposedly has somewhere between 9% and 25% of ebook sales. And Bookshop recently launched its own ebook app, though it's hindered by Apple and Android's steep payment fees.

How AI can actually enhance filmmaking

We’ve seen several instances recently where Hollywood studios have experienced pretty intense backlash whenever they’ve admitted to using AI. The Brutalist, for instance, was criticized for using AI voice tech to refine Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent. There’s an extremely loud-but-influential group that believes any use of AI is unethical:

The virulence of the backlash against such minor and technical applications of AI — used, in both cases, with the full participation and approval of the artists involved — illustrates the widespread perception, inside the film industry and among the general public, that AI is a threat to jobs and to artistic integrity. An AI zero-tolerance policy has become fashionable for celebrities, with the likes of Robert Downey Jr., Glenn Close and Hank Azaria raising the alarm. Distributors have taken to slapping “no AI” labels on their films, the tech equivalent of a “no animals were harmed” guarantee of ethical behavior.

I'm a big skeptic of AI and think the tech is vastly overhyped, but I also find the wholesale rejection of all AI tools to be pretty silly. Companies have incorporated machine learning into their products for over a decade with nary a complaint, so why are we now deciding that any tool trained on a large data set is anathema?

There are some genuinely good applications that actually enhance a creative work and make it more accessible to a larger audience. I really don’t understand how jobs are being stolen because of voice dubbing software or ethical deepfake tech. In fact, I think some of these tools will lower the barriers to entry and allow even more aspiring filmmakers to enter the fold.

Some good longform articles

One day, a designer stumbled upon a font he'd never noticed or heard of before; at first, he didn't even know its name. But once he knew of it, he began to notice it everywhere, and his obsession compelled him to track it to an engraving machine that was popular in the early-to-mid 20th century. [Aresluna]

Rupert Murdoch is 92 and will almost certainly die in the near future. When he does, control of the Fox empire will be split among four progeny, three of whom are alarmed by the rightward tilt of the company. Their voting power is not only likely to alter the course of the company, but will also seismically impact conservative politics across the entire Western world. [The Atlantic]

Bloomberg is the world's largest information company, in large part because it's able to charge $23,000 for its main Terminal, which is considered a necessary resource for virtually anyone working in the financial sector. Now, an up-and-coming UK company called GlobalData is buying up media outlets and data firms in an effort to supplant its much larger rival. [The Times]

ICYMI: How a podcast for entrepreneurial parents generates $200,000 a year

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Behind the paywall

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

1. Hollywood streamers should syndicate YouTube content

2. How Spotify can upsell its users on pricier subscriptions

3. The death of the casual sports fan

Let’s jump into it…

Hollywood streamers should syndicate YouTube content...