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Why I never make it to the end of MrBeast videos

I've always been fascinated with MrBeast as a media entrepreneur, but this comedy sketch really captures why I'm hardly ever able to make it to the end of any of his videos:

MrBeast focuses solely on producing enormous spectacle and isn't very creative in coming up with interesting challenges for his contestants.

What's more, he's just a bad storyteller. His videos rarely contain much character development, and his editing style is so frenetic that it feels like you're watching a trailer for a reality TV show rather than the show itself.

The only MrBeast video I've actually been able to watch from start to finish was one where he locked two people — a man and a woman — inside a room together for 100 days. The narrow scope of only focusing on two people allowed the viewer to get to know them, and so it was much easier to become emotionally invested in the outcome.

What do you think?

How JJ Hornblass built Royal Media, the most successful B2B media company you've never heard of

When JJ Hornblass got his first journalism job in the 1990s, his dad made a deal with him: he could spend a few years as a reporter, but he had to eventually make his way over to the revenue side of the media business. It didn’t take very long for JJ to deliver on that deal.

While working as an editor at American Banker, he pitched his bosses on launching a print newsletter covering the mortgage securities market. When those bosses took too long to make a decision, he left his job to launch the newsletter on his own. Flash forward 30 years, and that newsletter has grown into Royal Media, a B2B media company that covers four niche industries.

In a recent interview, JJ explained where he found his initial subscribers for that first newsletter, how he expanded into new verticals, and why he’s so focused now on building and selling access to data platforms.

You can check out our interview over here.

Romance fiction is propping up the publishing industry

Romance novels used to be relegated to a small section of the book store, but now bookstores entirely devoted to romance fiction are opening in most major cities. The genre is being credited as the main driver of the book industry's continued growth:

The return of the romance-focused bookstore began with the Ripped Bodice in Culver City, Los Angeles in 2016 … The name “Ripped Bodice” defiantly claims the “bodice-ripper” epithet, frequently lobbed at romance novels for their sexual content. It presents itself as an out-and-proud spot devoted to the genre. Its light-filled space and book displays show off the covers of its novels. Its romance-focused events, merchandising and sales techniques like “blind date with a book” (a gift-wrapped novel with a cute blurb) have now become the standard for other romance bookstores worldwide.

Video podcasts are a major threat to cable news

YouTube just announced that 1 billion people consume podcasts on its platform every month:

The company has embraced its image as the dominant podcast platform, ahead even of audio-first competitors like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. YouTube announced that viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices — that is, televisions, rather than phones — last year. And while it declined to say what the number was last year, [Tim Katz, YouTube’s VP for news partnerships,] said the number was moving “quickly up and to the right.”

What's the significance of this 1 billion viewers stat? I think it's pretty huge. Basically, one out of every eight people on the planet are watching podcasts on YouTube — and remember, China doesn't have YouTube, which means the podcast penetration in the rest of the world is even more significant.

A lot of the framing around podcasts over the past 15 years was that it posed a threat to traditional broadcast radio, but I think the bigger vulnerability is within cable news. The average cable news segment, after all, is little more than a talking heads podcast. In fact, it's not a coincidence that so many cable news stars — Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Mehdi Hasan, Chris Cillizza, Jim Acosta — have decamped to launch their own independent media companies.

Please don’t take my newsletter for granted

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Let me put this another way: if you’d be disappointed if I suddenly announced that I’m shutting down my newsletter — a very real possibility — then you should probably subscribe.

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Why Substack doesn’t launch subscription bundles

Speaking of Chris Cillizza, he asked recently why Substack doesn’t launch subscription bundles for multiple newsletters:

I hear it every single day from subscribers: Substack needs a bundling option.

I see two obvious ways to do it:

1. Politics bundle: Pick any five political (or mainly political) Substacks for 10 or 12 bucks a months

2. Potpourri bundle: Pick any five Substacks — entertainment, sports, politics, whatever — for 10-12 bucks a months

Other bundle ideas? And how to we get Substack to start experimenting with bundles?

I just think this would be extremely difficult for Substack to execute on its end. What happens if you get all these people to sign up for the bundle and then one of the Substack writers stops writing? Will their portion of the money still flow to them? If you try to push them out, would they have grounds to sue? Seems like a huge logistical headache that Substack isn’t eager to deal with.

If Substack writers really want to team up and launch a bundle, there are ways to do it. They could essentially launch a brand new Substack newsletter that only publishes their paywalled posts, and then point to that separate newsletter from all their individual newsletters. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it could definitely work. In fact, some early Substack writers already did this; it was called the Everything Bundle and was so successful that they eventually moved it off of Substack and changed the name of the company to Every.

The international ripple effects of the US TikTok ban

It’s not just US creators who will be impacted by the TikTok ban. Most English-language TikTok creators get a sizable portion of their viewership from the US market, so they’re likely to see a dip in viewership and sponsorship revenue if the ban ever goes through:

Jonny Davies, a senior talent manager at management firm Sixteenth, told me it’s taking longer to hash out deals for his creator clients that start after the April 5 deadline President Trump set to figure out a solution. He’s seeing delays “until we have a bit more understanding of what’s going to happen.” In addition, contracts are now more frequently including clauses to renegotiate terms if TikTok does disappear in the U.S., such as posting the content to other social apps instead.

Publishers keep chasing the AI squirrel

As a journalist who covers the media industry, I can’t tell you how boring and annoying it is that every interview with a media executive needs to spend a significant amount of time on the subject of AI. They almost never have anything interesting to say on the matter — usually they all issue the same pablum about how they’re “experimenting” with the tech — but these questions are always rooted in the assumption that media companies need an AI strategy if they want to survive. This isn’t really true! We’re at least two years into the AI era and every single publisher that made significant investments in the tech has ended up with egg on its face.

The same was true during the “Web3” era — every single executive was asked what they were doing with Web3, and it just created this narrative that somehow the media was missing out if it didn’t make significant investments in the tech. So that resulted in publishers pumping out worthless NFTs that all eventually went to zero. Now they’re caving under the same pressure and publishing AI-generated content that’s of low quality and riddled with errors.

There are so many basic problems that legacy publishers need to solve. For example: how they’re going to create effective ad tools that brands actually value. The current adtech ecosystem is so thoroughly broken and useless for delivering marketing results, and yet I almost never hear any media executives acknowledge it.

That’s not to say there aren’t cool applications of AI. But that doesn’t mean that every interview needs to be framed around AI, and we certainly don’t need to fuel this narrative that every publisher that doesn’t have a robust AI strategy is going to die.

Some good longform content

William Shawn is often thought of as a legendary editor — and he was — but under his leadership The New Yorker's writing became a stodgy, boring trudge that was more admired than actually read. In the 1990s, owner Si Newhouse pressured Tina Brown into taking over the magazine, and while some of the veteran staff revolted, she played a major role in revitalizing the magazine and setting it on a path to the relevance and profitability it enjoys today. That's not to say David Remnick isn't a great steward of the brand, but Tina Brown walked so he could run. [Fresh Hell]

A prominent cookbook author launched on YouTube in an effort to promote an upcoming book launch. Over the next few years, she grew the channel to over 200,000 subscribers, which is no easy feat. But while the channel looks like a huge success to outside viewers, it was hemorrhaging money, generating far less than what it cost to produce it. [Food Processing]

Ernest Hemingway and the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross were good friends when he agreed to let her profile him in 1950. The profile made him look like a complete idiot and severely damaged his public reputation, yet he maintained his friendship with her afterward and insisted that she didn’t do anything wrong. [New Yorker]

ICYMI: How an interest in whiskey birthed a thriving media company

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