Good morning.
I’ll be honest, it was hard to pick one article from last week that I found to be a very clear illustration of a relevant storyline developing in the media business.
That’s because there were so many and, again to be completely honest, I didn’t fully understand the implications or the overall mechanics of several of them. It could have been because I was traveling and trying to keep up with work during a holiday week or it could be simply that I’m just not that smart. It’s probably the latter.
As you’ll see in the links further down, the ground continues to shift and give way on so many fronts. I kind of feel like I’m in the Temple of the Sun (aka the Grail Temple) in Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail facing the three challenges. You have to be humble and penitent to avoid the the buzz saws that will decapitate you; you have to remember your Latin in order to not fall through the floor into a gaping void; and you need to trust that the bridge across the abyss is there even though you currently can’t see it.
If that labored comparison doesn’t work for you, then maybe this Axios article from the past week summarizing the current moment in media will.
In it, co-founder and CEO of Axios, Jim VandeHei goes over five key facts about the current moment in media that we all have to accept: social media as we knew it is dying, traffic is shrinking, AI will continue to alter our experiences, subscriptions aren’t going to save you, and finding new audiences are hard in a fragmented media landscape.
He closes with a blunt, honest, bit of advice. “We in the media need to do more with less; demand excellence at all levels at all times, like other free-market industries; confidently and quickly throw out ideas that no longer work; jump on new ideas and technologies to do things better, faster and more efficiently; and listen closer to what readers like you want or need—then deliver it without dithering.”
At a lot of places, heeding some of that advice is going to be very challenging.
One more good blunt and honest quote
“I have asked several publishers this week what their businesses look like in five years. None have attempted to give a coherent answer. This isn’t a business for everyone. You have a much better shot if you’re resilient and adaptable.”
This one is from Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting newsletter last week. Anyone who says they have a clear vision of what their media business will look like in the next few years is absolutely lying. Having a strategy, a sense of direction, and a clear POV is a good start but being able to modify and adjust those things—without overreacting one way or another—about every six months (or maybe every quarter, honestly) is going to be crucial for any media organization over the next five to ten years.
Another list of links to try and make sense of things:
The Wall Street Journal asked whether or not you can replace Google with Reddit. The answer? Kinda but neither one is perfect. I don’t fully agree with this author’s conclusion as I still generally find Reddit way more helpful than Google now and if Reddit can improve their search functionality (especially on the app) they are going to be even more powerful.
Puck’s Lauren Sherman and Jon Kelly (who was once Graydon Carter’s assistant) went deep on my employer’s recent history on Sherman’s podcast. Their conversation includes how the company arrived at their current crossroads (including maybe some missteps along the way) and also where my employer goes from here.
Yahoo Finance looked at how Amazon’s ad-supported tier is disrupting the streaming advertising market.
Because of said disruption, according to Variety, Disney may be trying to disrupt further by lowering the CPM rates for advertising across their surfaces.
While that’s going on, it appears that YouTube TV lost 150,000 subscribers earlier this year and live TV providers continued to see subscribers drop.
Wired dove into how Perplexity has been scraping their site and what, exactly, the AI company is supposed to be.
Here on Substack Notes, there was a rare moment of people not talking about their subscriber numbers or how to grow subscribers and instead a discussion on a relevant topic like how any platform (like, say, Substack) can hope to prevent AI companies from scraping their content.
Speaking of Substack, Modern Retail ran a piece about how advertisers are slowly trying to understand and work with people writing and building their own media ecosystems here.
The Verge covered Instagram’s latest announcement: rolling out live broadcast functionality for close friends. This continues Meta’s progress in convincing individuals and brands to develop tighter communities that are based on the Instagram platform itself vs. other surfaces. I want to come back to this story because how media companies view Instagram and the tools they are offering needs to drastically change.