What a creator wants
And more media lessons for the history books
Good morning,
I hope everyone is doing OK out there.
The last few posts have been on the longer side, so I’m keeping it tight this week.
What caught my eye the most the past week was a Substack Note by the media business writer Simon Owens.
It was focused on a video Dave Portnoy posted on TikTok talking about how much a creator named Grace O’Malley made when she was working with Barstool Sports.
I don’t know much about Barstool Sports so I can’t speak to any specifics about who Grace O’Malley is or what she does. Portnoy goes into a bunch of it in the video if you care about that stuff at all.
What’s interesting about this to me is the details Owens transcribed from the video about how Barstool compensated a creator.
“Barstool paid her a base salary of $175,000 and then also shared 70% of revenue with her whenever the company upsold a sponsorship on one of her personal social media accounts (eg, if it sold a $10,000 sponsorship on her Instagram account she'd get $7,000). Furthermore, Barstool tried to negotiate a contract for launching a new podcast with her, and in that scenario she'd continue earning her $175,000 base salary, and then Barstool would split the proceeds with her 50/50 once it had recouped the $175,000.”
Owens concludes his Note saying that media companies should look to be partners with creators vs. treating them like employees.
I’ve been saying something like this for a while now. It’s not anything revelatory. As platforms rise (Substack) and fall (TikTok) income can be volatile for creators. Media companies, while just have precarious, often have more infrastructure to offer a creator and the creator will have audience and relevance to offer a media brand.
There's a partnership there. It just has to be smartly and fairly done.
One long quote about history
“At the beginning of the 19th century, the arrival of the steam press made it possible to print off pamphlets and scandal sheets in numbers that could say anything about anybody. The titan of the penny press was the New York Sun, which rapidly became the biggest-selling newspaper on the planet. One of its most famous investigative series claimed to have discovered, with the help of a large but strangely very-hard-to-locate telescope, that the moon was populated by a wonderful menagerie of creatures, including half-humans/half-bats who built temples.
But gradually things began to sort themselves out. New Yorkers preferred to pay for news that was useful, that told them about the real world; and the new consumer goods companies preferred to advertise their wares alongside stories that were actually true. New titles appeared. The Economist was founded in 1843, the New York Times and Reuters both appeared in 1851, the Financial Times in 1888, the Wall Street Journal in 1889. A flight to quality happened.
As long as we focus on original reporting, on writing stories that people in power don’t want us to publish or that tell us something new about the world, and we do that without fear, favor or bias, we will do well”
This one is from John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, in his piece “How Journalism Will Adapt in the Age of AI.” There’s more to this history of modern news and media than this, but I like looking back at the precedents and shifts of the past to think about what might happen in the future. History is always grounding.
More links that will go down in history
The Reuters Institute and University of Oxford partnered on a 2025 media trends report. One of the things that stood out to me was this: “With subscription growth slowing, new product development is set to be a more important priority in the year ahead.” Most media products aren’t good, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
At Feed Me, Emily Sundberg talked to Chris Best about Substack welcoming TikTok creators.
At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick wrote about the end of content moderation in the wake of Meta’s announcement that they were shutting down their fact-checking program.
Brian Morrissey talked with Mike Mallazzo of the Zero Clicks newsletter about the current state of affiliate revenue referrals. This one is super informative and I recommend listening to it.
On the Grill Room podcast, Dylan Byers and Jon Kelly talked about the current state of CNN and the Washington Post.
Speaking of the Washington Post, if you haven’t been keeping up with every bit of drama coming out of that newsroom, the Wall Street Journal’s Alexandra Bruell has a good explainer of what’s happening.
Remember that sports streaming service, Venu, that Fox, Disney, and Warner Brothers Discovery were going to team up on? Yeah, well that’s not happening and CNBC.com explains why.