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The thorny ethics around child influencers

The WSJ reports that Utah is on the verge of passing a law that installs new protections for children who appear on their parents’ social media accounts:

The state is poised to enact dramatic protections for the kids in those videos by giving them the right to remove embarrassing clips when they are older and to share in the revenue. The governor is expected to sign a bill that would make Utah the first red state among a handful of others that have passed laws extending the rights of child TV stars to child internet stars.

The push for the legislation comes from the family of Ruby Franke, a popular Utah influencer with six children who went to prison last year for child abuse. Their 8 Passengers YouTube channel amassed over a billion views, but now her estranged husband, Kevin, and children want to stop others from using kids for clicks, likes and brand partnerships.

As the Creator Economy matures, I do think we're going to have to grapple more as a society with what rights kids have when they're involved in any content business. The way I see it, there are basically three types of parent creators:

1. Those that don't allow their kids to appear in their videos at all. A good example of this is Casey Neistat, who made a conscious early decision not to show his daughters' faces on his channel.

2. Those whose kids make short cameos in videos. Nick Bare, for instance, is a fitness influencer who vlogs about family life and sometimes shows his kids, but not in a way where they're expected to perform for the camera.

3. Those whose kids play some kind of central role in videos. A lot of "family" vloggers fit this mold, and the kids on these channels are definitely akin to child actors, in that they're putting on some form of performance for the audience.

Of course, there are also plenty of channels run by kids without their parents' involvement. MrBeast was a good example of this — his mom famously went years without realizing her son was posting videos.

Anyway, now that it's common for family vlogs to draw huge audiences and develop into big businesses, the stakes are pretty real. There's a reason that child labor laws exist — both inside and outside the entertainment world. Policymakers will need to adapt them to this emerging industry.

Why the Daily Mail’s subscriber milestone is actually impressive

The Daily Mail just hit 250,000 paid subscribers across its website and apps:

More than 163,000 people have signed up to Mail+ since its launch initially in the UK in January 2024, then Australia in October, and now the US and Canada in February … The Mail also has more than 92,000 paying subscribers to Mail+ Editions, its newspaper replica app for phones and tablets.

250,000 paid subscribers might not sound that impressive given the size of the Daily Mail's staff, but the thing to keep in mind is that it achieved this while locking only 5% of its content behind a paywall. Most of the publishers that have reached that milestone needed a much more aggressive paywall to drive conversions.

Brand deals come for LinkedIn influencers

The WSJ reports that LinkedIn influencers are increasingly signing the kinds of brand deals that were traditionally reserved for platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube:

Teal, a résumé builder tool, has partnered with 50 to 60 content creators, paying them anywhere from $500 to $3,000 a post. Founder Dave Fano says their influencer marketing goes further on LinkedIn than elsewhere on the web.

Danielle Ito, head of influencer marketing at digital workspace Notion, says posts on the site tend to have a longer shelf life because of the way commented-on or liked posts reappear in people’s feeds. In January, the company worked with more than 60 influencers to launch Notion Faces, an avatar generator. The campaign reached more than 2.5 million LinkedIn users, according to Ito.

I still think the main value for LinkedIn is its ability to drive deal flow for B2B companies. If I were running the marketing for such a business, I'd much rather invest in hiring a ghost writer to help the CEO publish thought leadership pieces to LinkedIn instead of devoting budget to an influencer campaign.

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Nick Denton finally does his exit interview

Nick Denton is selling his apartment and moving to Budapest, which for some reason means he’s doing a round of media interviews. In this Vanity Fair one, he talked about why he (bizarrely) doesn’t hold a grudge against Peter Thiel for bankrupting Gawker Media:

I owned Gawker, but I had stock in this company that wasn’t on the public markets. I couldn’t sell my stock. I had an apartment. I made some money out of a couple of previous transactions. Look, Peter Thiel did me a huge favor, to be honest. I don’t think he saw that at the time, but it forced the sale of Gawker Media. It provided a pretext to close Gawker down, which I needed to do anyway. And I sold the business for $135 million. There were lawyers fees to pay, and then Peter Thiel. What did Hogan get? $20 or $30 [million], or something like that? I think $30 [million]. [Editor’s note: $31 million.] So yeah, it would’ve been nicer not to have had to go through that ugly process, but the fact is that was probably the peak of valuation for the digital media companies around then. So just in terms of timing, in retrospect, I’d rather be me than [BuzzFeed cofounder] Jonah Peretti.

I think there's an argument to be made that Denton was one of the most interesting and innovative media moguls of the 21st century. One of the biggest downsides of Gawker Media being basically sued out of existence is that we didn't get to see how he would have adapted his company during the post-social era. Would he have invested more in video? Pivoted to subscriptions? Doubled down on longform? Even worse, the outlets that used to belong to Gawker Media have pretty much been decimated. Someday soon, someone should write a biography of Gawker Media. I’d buy it!

Is Apple TV just lighting money on fire?

The Information recently reported that Apple TV+ is losing $1 billion a year, and this has led to a lot of speculation as to why. MG Siegler wrote a good piece analyzing all the weird decisions that got Apple into this hole:

Apple thought that creating great Apple TV+ shows would lead people to buy Apple TV set top boxes. That didn't happen. Instead, they just kept their Rokus and stayed happy with Netflix and Prime Video and Disney+ and didn't think much about Apple TV+.

That was especially true since the other mistake Apple made here was not having a big enough back-catalog at launch.3 I mean, they essentially didn't have any back-catalog. They were starting from scratch. You know who wasn't? Disney+, with 100+ years worth of back-catalog across many studios. Same with Prime Video thanks to licensing deals struck – a model which, yes, Netflix pioneered. Apple thought they could go it alone for some reason. If they weren't going to buy Netflix, they should have bought HBO.

I think people are underestimating the branding value of forcing people to open an Apple app every time they want to watch one of their favorite TV shows, eg Severance. It's certainly much better than the branding the company would get if it ran commercials during a popular TV show on another company’s streaming app.

It's also worth noting that most Apple TV content is evergreen, and the value of its library grows as it adds more shows and movies. New audiences will continue discovering Severance for decades, which means its contribution to the business isn't really being reflected in annual loss figures. It could just be that Apple is playing the long game, figuring that five to 10 years from now, the ad-free library of premium TV and film content will be too good to pass up.

Some good longform journalism

Back in the 1980s, a comic book enthusiast liquidated his construction company so he could work full time writing and drawing comics in the Donald Duck universe, and his work developed a small fanbase. But then Disney tried to exert more control over his work, and so he quit, even though he had no other career path to fall back on. Luckily for him, it turned out Europeans were much bigger Donald Duck fans than Americans, and he was hired by a Danish company to continue his comic book series. Today, he's a pop culture hero on the continent. [matttt]

In the mid 20th century, a mystery novelist named Rex Stout was so successful that he had more books in circulation than any other living writer. Today, many of his books are out of print, and it's actually his sister, Ruth Stout, who is much more famous. The author of three major gardening books, the late Stout is now a staple of TikTok, where many influencers post videos of their vegetables grown with the "Ruth Stout Method." But who was she? A newly unearthed autobiography reveals she was a radical socialist who had a love/hate relationship with her famous brother. [New Yorker]

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My other newsletter: The best longform journalism we consumed this week

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Behind the paywall

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

1. Why Threads is suddenly sending traffic to publishers

2. Should the New York Times post its documentaries to YouTube?

3. Why is Max abandoning its children’s programming?

4. Why YouTube’s new dynamic ad insertion tool could be a big deal

5. The print resurrection continues

Let’s jump into it…

Why Threads is suddenly sending traffic to publishers...