Commerce Content Is King (Maybe?)
Commerce Content Is King (Maybe?)
Good morning.
I’m back after a much-needed vacation. I hope all of you are doing well and staying safe as we head into the fall and the seventh month of living life in a pandemic.
Last week, I had to play a lot of catch up ball at work—and had to catch up on a lot of major national and world news stories—so I wasn’t able to get the newsletter together in time. Instead of trying to fill in the gaps of any stories I missed over the past two weeks, I’m going to jump right into what was happening on the media and audience development beats in the past week.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with another big development in the “journalists taking their fate into their own hands” narrative that has been playing out this year. Casey Newton, the Silicon Valley Editor at The Verge, announced he was leaving The Verge to start his own subscription-based newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Newton’s current newsletter The Interface, which is part of The Verge, is one of my favorite newsletters and possibly one of the most must-read newsletters on the tech industry. Newton articulated his decision further in an interview at the Medium publication OneZero, and his reasons for making this change in his career echo a lot of themes that have surfaced this year: Substack providing a compelling platform and way for journalists and writers to directly engage with readers outside of a major organization; writers and journalists wanting to have more control over their content and the money made from that content; and the uncertainty around the prevailing business models and long-term stability of jobs at all media organizations. Both Newton’s announcement and his interview at OneZero are worth reading in full.
Marc Tracy at the New York Times covered Newton’s announcement, contextualizing the move alongside other recent moves such as the one by BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen in August. Tracy’s piece also touches on the fact that Substack isn’t the only answer for journalists and writers taking their destinies into their own hands. The Discourse Blog, started by former staff members of the publication Splinter that was shut down by G/O Media last year, announced they were moving to the platform Lede because it offered a more “robust product” for them to truly build a full-fledged publication. As you can see there’s a lot to unpack in this story and I want to give it more space in an upcoming newsletter.
Over the past week, there were two stories around perhaps what will be two of the five or ten major media organizations or content kingdoms remaining by the end of the 2020s: the New York Times and Spotify.
The PressGazette ran a piece covering a speech Meredith Kopit Levien, the new CEO of the New York Times, gave at a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this month. Levien’s comments are all interesting, but the main data point coming out of her speech is that the New York Times expects there will be a total addressable market (TAM) of about 100 million paying news subscribers by the end of the 2020s. The Times believes they can corner about 25% of that market. As of the end of June, the Times has about 6 million paying subscribers. What the Times is hoping to do is to use their paying subscribers to move away from third-party advertising to using data from their own customers to better tailor advertising.
Meanwhile, The Verge covered a new deal between Spotify and Chernin Entertainment to turn Spotify podcasts into TV and movie pitches. A lot of publishers have developed deals of this nature to help create IP as another revenue stream for their businesses, but now Spotify is also moving into this lane as they continue to scale up their podcast and original content offering. It’s not hard to imagine a future by the end of this decade where Spotify is not only streaming music and podcasts, but also delivering news and creating film and TV properties.
Speaking of business expansion, there were two other notable examples of media organizations further expanding their reach via acquisition. These aren’t quite on the scale of influence (or content lordship) as the New York Times and Spotify, but are very notable in terms of keeping track of the media world’s consolidation:
Axios’s Sara Fischer had an exclusive story last week covering Dotdash’s acquisition of Simply Recipes and Serious Eats. Dotdash has quietly become one of the major success stories in the media industry over the past five years. The company rose out of About.com (remember that?!) and has turned into a successful business by overhauling a rich library of SEO-optimized content, turning it into better designed and organized verticals, and finding ways to expand via acquisition and apply their content strategy to new properties. As Fischer notes, “The company, which has long been profitable by a wide margin, makes most of its money from advertising against evergreen, utility content, or content that users seek out to help answer their questions or improve their lives.”
And last Wednesday, Variety reported that their parent company Penske Media was acquiring Billboard, Vibe, and The Hollywood Reporter as part of a new “joint venture” with MRC to be called PMRC. (Maybe I’m dumb, but that kind of just sounds like a merger?). Penske Media will handle content operations, but the joint venture will make use of MRC’s “content production assets” to create “new content and business opportunities drawn from stories and other intellectual property” (aka trying to create Hollywood or streaming service IP to create a new revenue stream). Penske Media also operates Rolling Stone, WWD, and ARTnews, among a suite of other brands and has slowly become a major player in the entertainment and lifestyle publishing arena. They’ve also built up their own robust offering of commerce content sites as well and incorporated commerce content into existing properties.
Yesterday, Sara Fischer also reported the launch of Bloomberg’s new vertical called Bloomberg Wealth. The latest expansion of Bloomberg’s content portfolio launched yesterday and will be providing, “more general business and lifestyle content to readers, instead of just straightforward markets and business news,” as Fischer reports.
The media industry’s year of reckoning continued at the Los Angeles Times. Meg James and Daniel Hernandez of The Los Angeles Times published an in-depth piece looking at all of the scandals and internal turmoil that their own company has experienced over the past several months. The story is sweeping, so I won’t attempt to summarize it here. But it is well worth your time.
In changing leadership news, Brian Morrissey, the president and editor in chief of Digiday, announced via Twitter that he would be stepping down from his positions at the end of September. Digiday has become a vital resource for professionals in the media and marketing businesses over the past five years (I mean, I cite it all the time in this newsletter!) and has become another true success story in terms of focusing on a smaller, highly-engaged audience, and leveraging a subscription model (those sweet, sweet, business-need subscriptions!). Where is Morrissey going next? He’s starting his own Substack newsletter of course!
Speaking of Digiday, they published three stories over the past week looking at approaches to coverage around three very different verticals:
First, they covered how the COVID-19 pandemic has led several media organizations to invest further in health and wellness content in order to further attract and play into advertiser demand.
Then, they covered how sports media organizations are developing deals with sports betting platforms and continuing to lean into sports betting as a new beat for their coverage.
And, building off Margaret Sullivan’s piece from a few weeks ago, they covered how different news organizations covering politics are preparing for “election night” coverage that could turn into “election months” coverage. One of the interesting audience development trends in there is the creation of “voting hubs” where readers can share information around voter education. A key example: “The Washington Post, for one, created an information hub with 51 unique URLs for its readers to share state-specific voting information with their friends and family, said Cameron Barr, a managing editor for The Washington Post.”
Finally, last Wednesday Vanity Fair ran a piece looking at a recent internal memo from Washington Post executive editor, Marty Baron. The memo outlines five “principles for covering potential hacked or leaked material ahead of the election.” I personally find the language around principle three to be the most interesting: “Our stories should prominently explain what we know about the full context of the information we are presenting, including its origins and the motivations of the source, including whether it appears to be an effort to distract from another development. Headlines need to be carefully vetted to make sure they do not echo propaganda.”
What I’m Engaged With
Based on the Casey Newton story, I could use this space this week to talk even more about the future of newsletters and what that means for the future of publishing overall. But there will be plenty of time to ruminate on that topic. This week, I want to focus on something everyone loves: What’s going on with commerce content!
In all seriousness, I’ve discussed affiliate and commerce content a few times in this newsletter and there were a few stories published over the past month or so that I wanted to revisit and break down for a check-in on that part of the media landscape.
Earlier this year, I covered the many issues that BuzzFeed was facing as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, specifically how their affiliate content took a major hit when Amazon pulled out of their revenue share partnership. At the beginning of July, Buzzfeed partnered with the ecommerce platform Bonsai to better integrate shopping capabilities into their content. I hadn’t heard of Bonsai before, but according to their website they are “helping publishers launch e-commerce as a new line of business” by allowing “users to transact natively while browsing content. We make the journey from seeing a product to buying it possible in two taps.”
I don’t have the BuzzFeed app and don’t have any kind of account with their platform, but the Bonsai addition appears to be an app or logged-in experience add-on that allows you to build a cart as you browse BuzzFeed—whether its their specific Shopping content or their news or entertainment coverage. Though new BuzzFeed shopping articles can only feature Bonsai partners, they do retain some amount of independence. Nilla Ali, senior vice president of commerce at BuzzFeed, told the Wall Street Journal that: “We think it’s extremely important that we’re not constraining our editorial team’s ability to link to the retailers or brands that we’re currently featuring. We definitely do not intend to be in a situation where we’re telling the writers they can only write about these brands because we have native checkout.”
In late August, Digiday ran a piece looking at how GQ was developing their own direct to consumer product line, rather than just recommending products from affiliates. To do that, they launched The Shop with a line of branded t-shirts. The Shop was launched to build on the success that GQ had seen with its own affiliate content as well as its GQ Best Box subscription. Items featured in The Shop are surfaced and marketed in GQ’s most-read content. As the Digiday piece notes, GQ is taking this approach slowly as creating your own merchandise comes with higher overhead and less immediate revenue upside.
At the beginning of this year (before I started this newsletter), Digiday also ran a piece on how CNN has slowly started to build up the staff for its commerce vertical, Underscored. To be honest, I didn’t know CNN had a commerce site until maybe the end of 2019. But according to the Digiday article, they may have as many as 10 staff members. The Digiday piece covers how Underscored uses a newsroom mentality to ensure their pieces rank highly in search on major shopping days. They pre-write pieces and then publish them with the latest deal prices or discounts and also jump on reporting deals and sales as news items.
And earlier this month Aya Kanai, the editor in chief of Marie Claire, jumped to Pinterest to become their first head of content and editorial partnerships. Kanai had been at Marie Claire for less than a year before making the move. Kanai’s major points of focus at Pinterest will be “working on the company’s editorial efforts, including shoppable curations and new content for the platform from publishers, creators and influencers,” as Yahoo News reports.
What does all of this tell us? That publishers are trying to act as ecommerce sites? That social platforms are trying to act as publishers and also as ecommerce sites? That all publishers and brands want to cash in on the rapidly increasing consumer shift to ecommerce? That media companies are looking to diversify revenue in any way possible?
All of the above are happening. But what remains to be seen is how patient every one of these organizations will be with the results and how many jobs will be created or retained depending on the results. I’m most interested (maybe because of my professional background) to see how a platform like Pinterest continues to build up and expand its content in the coming year.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: The TV series Dark (2017-2020)
POTENTIAL SPOILERS IF ANY OF THIS MAKES SENSE:
Do you like television shows set in small German towns that border misty, creepy damp forests and nuclear power plants? Do you like the idea of a TV show that feels kind of like the German version of Lost but with one very specific mind-boggling mystery instead of maybe ten (many of which don’t necessarily go anywhere or make sense)? And do you like the idea of a German TV show with a star-crossed, epic love story (with plenty of ugly crying) that also serves as a meditation on loss in the same way that each of those things acted as the backbone of all three seasons of The Leftovers? Well, if you like any of those things, you’ll love Dark.
I love Dark for many reasons. One of those reasons is that I started it exactly two weeks ago and finished the entire series on Saturday. Dark just finished its third, and final, season earlier this summer. That’s 28 episodes in 10 days. So, while so many other saps had to wait for months after a gripping season finale, I got to watch the entire series in just over a single week.
Another, is that it is German. It is a very German show. In fact, it makes me want to relive my life entirely again in Germany—but specifically in a town adjacent to the Black Forest (or maybe another impossibly dense forest that makes me think of the shared ties between European languages) where it rains all the time. This show is incredibly German. There are lines of dialogue such as, “Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle” and “Life is nothing but a spiral of pain” and “But in the end, every death is just a new beginning” and “Life is a labyrinth. Some wander around until their death in search of a way out of it” and “Every pain tends us to act, forms our will” and “But everything that once lived, lives on forever. In the eternity of time.” All of these lines are delivered with grave seriousness, and in wonderful German. Do not watch this TV show dubbed in English.
I’d love to spoil Dark for you. But, I love spoilers and I know that most people don’t so I won’t do that to you. However, that does lead me to another reason why I love this show: I can reasonably describe Dark as depicting or positing that true love, in some cases, may just be two intertwined particles of light or energy taking form as human beings in a reality that was caused into being by a disruption in another reality and worry about spoiling the entire show. So, if that did just spoil it, then I’m sorry. But honestly, another reason I love Dark is that if I did spoil it for you, you’d never be able to remember everything once you started watching the show itself.
A few other reasons why I love Dark. It is probably the second-best TV show with a nuclear power plant as a key setting (behind only The Simpsons). There are more uses of the phrase “a glitch in the matrix” than I have heard since probably 1999-2000. And because that phrase is said in German, it sounds truly wonderful (mah-trix vs. may-trix). The characters have great German last names like Tiedemann or Doppler or Kahnwald. There is a character whose first name is Helge. And every episode, the show manages to just be very everything at all times.
That last reason will make sense to you when you start watching it and begin to understand maybe half of what you’ve learned so far (so, by episode 2 or 3 maybe), but already want to learn even more.
The Action I’ve Taken
Since the beginning of June, I conclude each newsletter with a brief list of actions I’ve taken each week to help end police violence and to support an America that is free of racism. This isn’t meant to virtue signal or pat myself on the back—it’s merely meant to show my commitment to change. I won’t share any donation figures here but can provide them upon request.
Donated to this campaign raising awareness for the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act.