The creator program complex
Plus some contents I'm enjoying
Good morning.
I hope everyone’s week is going all right.
I’m keeping myself busy these days enjoying a variety of contents. Here are some of my favorite contents right now.
Basking in your team winning the Super Bowl content. From podcasts, to articles, to Social videos, to endless Reddit threads about the Super Bowl itself or about how dominant the Eagles were or about what they are going to do in free agency, to podcast versions of TV shows you used to watch, there is nothing better than the content that comes after your team wins a major championship. There’s really nothing like it. I mean look at this stuff.
SNL50 content. I had a blast watching the SNL50 special on Sunday, which then sent me watching old SNL sketches. (Chris Farley’s inimitable series of roars, howls, and yawps in his various sketches are tickling my funny bone a lot right now. SNL sketches need breathing room and the Chris Farley Show sketch with Paul McCartney is a classic that still holds up after not watching it for many, many years.) And reading people analyze the anniversary show on /r/livefromnewyork has also been highly entertaining. My take away from everything: If you think too much about a Saturday Night Live anniversary show you are missing the point and missing so much of the fun.
A new Paul McCartney tome. Speaking of Paul McCartney, I was filled with joy when I saw that The McCartney Legacy, Volume II: 1974-1980 was at my local book store. The first installment was 700 pages of bliss that covered four years in Paul’s life. This second volume covers six years (so a more reasonable ~100 pages/year vs. closer to almost ~200 pages/ year) and I am already loving the detail put into covering the album Paul produced for his brother, Mike McCartney, as well as the Wings tryouts that led to Paul hiring the drummer Geoff Britton. Can’t wait to read about Laurence Juber joining the band!! Plus there’s already four hours worth of interviews with the books writers for sickos like me to listen to!
All right, enough of that. Let’s get to the newsletter.
There are two stories that I think are worth a little more time discussing today.
The first was from Bloomberg. It was a news story from last week about Yahoo signing deals with influencers or creators in an effort to drive traffic to its website.
Yahoo has been making a lot of investments in its editorial offering over the last year or so, particularly when it comes to sports coverage and their product offering.
But I didn’t realize that they’d started a creator program or platform that now has an entry point on their homepage called “Stories From Creators.”
Most people don’t think about Yahoo as a player anymore but they still generate a lot of traffic in today’s day and age. And as their senior vice president and general manager, Kat Downs Mulder, said in the Bloomberg piece, “Yahoo is an aggregator at its heart, and really our goal is to curate the vast amount of the content on the internet…Creators are generating a tremendous amount of interesting content that’s relevant to our readers.”
Another key quote from the Bloomberg piece:
“Under the program, Yahoo is offering contributors half of the advertising sales their material generates. The company doesn’t disclose how much it’s making from advertising or how many page views are being driven by creators. Page views can vary widely, but a high-performing article can get upward of 300,000 views, several creators said. They earn income from advertising revenue and affiliate links, which send readers to websites where they can purchase products.”
The piece cites one creator couple saying they get $3,000 a month for their work. As I covered before, creator deals can vary widely but getting 50% of advertising revenue generated by their content sounds like a good place to start.
The second story worth discussing is this piece by Liz Kelly Nelson from earlier this week called, “From 'Trad News' to AI: The evolving journalism landscape,”
The timing on Nelson’s piece felt perfect after I read the Bloomberg story because in it she breaks down the blur word/term “news influencer” and how that breaks down into two major categories. In her words those categories are:
“‘News influencers’ are more narrowly defined: they primarily share takes and analysis (aka their protein powder) rather than producing original reporting. Think of them as the Opinion section of the internet, where everyone from Joe Rogan on YouTube to your aunt in Florida on Facebook has a platform…Content Creator-Model Journalist may be a mouthful, but it better captures what’s happening in the most rigorous, personality-driven corners of independent journalism. It’s where many journalists who are leaving traditional newsrooms set up camp.”
In Nelson’s piece, she also charted what the news ecosystem looks like in 2025.
It’s worth a closer look and I’m going to spend some time thinking through this framework too as I try to be better and more specific when I talk about what “the media” actually means or refers to in 2025.
One good Instagram quote
“Data from influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy’s proprietary tool, Companion, showed that Instagram saw creator content growing 16% in the week after the [TikTok] ban, which it measured based on number of posts creators published on a platform after the ban. YouTube also saw content creation increasing 14% during the same period, while TikTok saw a 3% drop in content posts and a 9% decrease in average views per video, per the study, which analyzed more than 10,000 creators’ activity, 78,000 posts and 19 billion impressions in the U.S. and U.K.”
That one is from this Digiday piece on why Instagram might stand the most to gain from a TikTok ban in the United States. There's a lot of good data and insights in the piece and this battle over creators, their content, and their audiences is one to watch as TikTok’s fate in the United States continues to hang in the balance. My money is still on YouTube in the long run. As audiences continue to shift habits and they improve the visibility of Shorts, I can see it being much more lucrative to make YouTube your home base for everything.
Some non-Instagram links:
As you all know, conservative media is dominant. So Semafor covered how Democrats are looking for a new media strategy.
Semafor also had a good story looking at the ways the New York Times will be using AI in its newsroom.
Brian Morrissey talked to Jonah Peretti about the new BuzzFeed social media platform he’s launching. Still not sure what BuzzFeed Island is going to be, but this is worth a listen for Peretti’s ability to distill down the last 20 years of the internet. No wonder he started out as a teacher.
Speaking of: Digiday wrote a brief history of media companies trying to get into the social media business.
NiemanLab ran a piece looking at a new study about the most effective paywall tactics. This is super nitty gritty stuff but it’s often what needs the most discussion when you’re trying to build an effective subscription business. Nick Thompson said as much to Dylan Byers last week.
Have you developed your lore? I still haven’t figured out if being a failed novelist turned whatever I’m doing now is good enough lore. Probably not.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote about how 2025 will be the end of linear television.
I thought this was an interesting read about younger audiences not truly knowing what a journalist does.