Good morning.
As someone who wrote a post laying out some media trends in 2023, I feel it is my solemn duty to follow up on those trends as we close out the year.
It’s been about four months since I wrote that post and while some things have changed, a lot has stayed the same. As I wrote in October, the ecosystem of the internet is changing. What “social media” was, whatever it was or however you defined it, is collapsing and morphing into something new. The scale era is over. BuzzFeed, of all places, declared it over. (Disclosure: I am engaged to someone who works at BuzzFeed.)
Advertising as a revenue stream for publishers is continuing to disappear. It’s happening slowly and is causing a lot of pain. Mark Sternberg summed this up well in his recent newsletter. This has been a brutal year and an especially brutal month in media. Everyone is getting laid off. And everyone who isn’t getting laid off is looking around and asking: “Why do I do this?”
There are trends and there are things people think are the Answer. But now more than ever there seems to really be no Answer. Nobody knows anything right now. Truly. Except maybe the people at Defector, who shared their yearly report (blog version here) and had David Roth talk a bit about it with Luke O’Neill. A choice excerpt:
Deadspin was an ad supported business, we are a subscription business. And so for Deadspin, the traffic was higher, but traffic was how you made your money. At this point our traffic is good, but it's not the most important thing anymore. The way that it used to be at Gawker, there was like a leader board, like in that episode of Succession or whatever, showing what posts were doing the best and shit. At this point we've tried to train ourselves not to think like that anymore, which is kind of a challenge. But the idea is, basically, the same. We're a cash business, a small business, the idea is you give your customers what they want, and then they will continue to purchase that from you. So in some ways it's been really clarifying and less stressful in a way that I have a hard time putting into words.
That sounds like paradise. And it shows that there are sustainable models out there. But they are hard to come by and they are certainly not sexy to anyone sitting in a boardroom—they’re only sexy for people who had to chase traffic for years, put love and care into their work whenever they could, and worked long hours only to be rewarded with unending rounds of layoffs.
On that note, let’s check in on some trends.
Artificial Intelligence
Whether you like it or not, this has been the dominant story across most industries this year. I was surprised that Taylor Swift was person of the year and not Sam Altman—or even ChatGPT as “person” of the year (wink, wink). Has much changed here? Yes, and no. I still see a lot of LinkedIn posts from people telling me how to use AI to be more efficient, telling me not to be afraid of AI, and sharing their hacks. Sam Altman is still at OpenAI. Websites are still bumbling along trying to lie about how they are definitely not using AI content but also are using AI content.
What’s different? Well, I guess mainly that the New York Times hired an Editorial Director of AI. That’s something and probably a role smarter organizations may hire for in the next year. It looks like OpenAI’s playbook may include skipping ahead and paying publishers for their content in one hand while they steal the money back by stealing their audience with the other hand. And it now appears Google is doing more than just dangling the sword of Damocles above every publisher’s head.
Meanwhile, I’m solemnly dreading having to start using AI next year to help me craft memos and meeting agendas and other summary documents just because I probably should be doing that already. Luckily I can find some great SEO content about the best chatbots out there.
Creators
In the summer, I wrote the following:
Advertisers are starting to move to social video as ad capabilities are developed and sales teams are noticing—right now. The iron is hot. The issue is people may just pivot to video all over again and try to be creator agencies or something or try to throw money at creators to get advertising dollars while they are available over the next (licks finger and holds it in the air, discerning wind) oh, six months or so. But that ain’t it. Long term, sustainable, and equitable relationships with actual individuals who are talented at multimedia storytelling, who have a track record and catalog of work that can be mutually beneficial for a brand and the individual, that’s closer to it.
And that’s still the case as far as I’m concerned. Now that I’m plugged into more people covering the creator space, like Jim Louderback, I get a lot more content sent my way about different ways creators are monetizing this or that and how brands are using creators and how much money is being exchanged. None of it makes sense to me and my question remains: Where does all this money go and what does it get you? Influencer agencies (firms that match creators and brands for sponsored deals) are being sold. Is this all a shell game? Maybe I’m just not on Twitch and YouTube enough.
Meanwhile, TikTok has discontinued its Creator Fund but spun up their shop to help Creators sell products themselves. That’s something I’m interested in following. And Spotify is cutting back on creator-driven podcasts as they backtrack from those big deals they signed during the pandemic as they further cut down their staff.
I’m not sure what the exact long game here is for media brands other than to find people who tell stories are create entertaining videos or podcasts and to work collaboratively with them so they benefit from reaching your audience and any other infrastructure being in a major media company provides (ahem…) and you can keep your brand relevant with by getting awareness with your audiences and hopefully bringing them in to be subscribers or engaged members of your audience who interact with your brand in meaningful ways. And it has to be incremental—not all in.
FAST
Now remember everyone, that’s Free Ad-Supported Television. Or as we used to call it: television.
What’s happening with FAST? Well, not so much FAST in particular but really the fact that all streaming services now have an ad-supported tier. At the moment, Disney and Netflix are the primary players in the race to acquire more subscribers who are happy to sit through ads. Netflix is in the lead and it is amazing how they have turned around their company perception over 18 months primarily through adding an ad-supported tier and cracking down on password sharing.
What’s going to happen next? Live sports. Now that these streaming services have ad supported tiers, they are layering on live sports. Because what goes better together than live sports and ads? Max is adding a sports package that they’ve been trialing with existing subscribers over the last few months (before we have to pay to watch basketball and baseball next year) and Netflix is even starting to dip their toe into live sports with an exhibition tennis tournament in 2024. And, of course, Amazon has already staked out ground with the NFL.
People already spend most of their time in front of smart TVs and on streaming platforms. Half of YouTube’s video viewership in the U.S. now comes from smart TVs. Advertisers are going to continue to move there. What’s going to be the point of a website if you have a streaming platform or a social media platform where people are only watching videos? Even this website knows where the wind is blowing. (“Substack Reads presents Substack is for Video”)
Scalable Events Series
I’ll be honest, I still don’t know enough about this business. But it seems that smaller publications with either a subscription model at their core or who aren’t chasing scale for advertising dollars seem to think that events are worth doing. Puck has launched an event series. Semafor is betting on them. Bloomberg is leaning further into them. And, Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting, continues to do them and tout their virtues. I generally admire the strategies being taken by each of those places and so I’m going to keep trying to pay attention and learn.
Community
Last but not least, there is Community. Along with AI, I think this is going to be the buzziest trend next year. As the current social media ecosystem collapses or becomes something new, people are looking for spaces that represent some kind of forum for discussion—basically what Twitter used to be.
Community can take different shapes. Since I’m in food media now, I’ve been paying attention to how different communities take shape among home cooks. There’s communities within cooking apps. And then there are things happening on good ol’ Substack here that are basically a mixture of a Twitter live blog and a Reddit AMA but all contained within the app, desktop, or mobile web experience of Substack.
Social media platforms are no longer a means for publishers to get traffic to their sites. They are now really just for advertising the products and the talent and personality that are associated with a media brand. So publishers may reinvest in the comment sections on their sites or on their social media accounts or they may try to build their own social networks on their own apps or websites. Look for community management and customer experience and CRM roles to become more prominent or more valued.
After giving away their audiences to social platforms, publishers are going to want to keep them going forward. But for many, it may be too late. What kind of loyalty can there to ad-filled sites that are losing more and more writers and editors and other talented people year after year?