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The AI backlash is here

Garbage Day writes about a designer who used various AI programs to write and illustrate a book. The internet was not happy with him:

Ammaar Reshi, a design manager from San Fransisco, is going viral right now (in the bad way) after he used a couple A.I. tools to create a children’s book in a weekend. Reshi used ChatGPT to build prompts for a picture book about how artificial intelligence works. Then he fed those prompts into Midjourney, settled on some characters and a somewhat-consistent aesthetic, and put it all together in a book. Then Reshi published it on Amazon Kindle Publishing and ChatGPT helped him fill out some of the details and metadata for the listing.

And, well, the reviews for the book are very bad. “The writing is stiff and has no voice whatsoever,” one user wrote. “And the art — wow — so bad it hurts. Tangents all over the place, strange fingers on every page, and inconsistencies to the point where it feels like these images are barely a step above random.”

[simondavidowens]

Investors were way too bullish on esports

Are esports a growing market with a huge amount of future potential? Yes. Did investors get too far out ahead of their skis with assuming that esports would quickly overtake traditional pro sports in market value? Definitely yes.

Sports-business billionaires and gaming executives had hopes that esports could one day could scale into an organization like the National Basketball Association. But after a boom five years ago, several prominent esports teams and organizations, particularly in the US, are contracting, the result of a broad economic downturn, a venture capital industry that’s no longer willing to accept growth without profits and a crypto meltdown that has undercut a significant source of backing.

[simondavidowens]

It turns out media companies don’t make for very good tech companies

The Rebooting writes about the death of the “platisher”

Of course, developing proprietary tech is the normal course of many businesses. When you come up with problems somewhat unique to your business and without any easy off-the-shelf solution, you build it yourself. The problem comes when this goes from being a tool use to further the core business and leadership gets SaaS margin dreams. Software businesses are valued far higher than content businesses, especially those reliant on the ups and downs of advertising.

That led plenty of publishers down the primrose path of spinning up SaaS arms for their homegrown CMS. New York magazine attempted to license its CMS, called Clay. Vox Media has licensed its CMS, Chorus. Minute Media used its CMS licensing business as a key part of its $40 million funding round in 2020. It’s unsurprising that following Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of The Washington Post in 2011 that he sought to inject a tech mindset into the company. One results: Arc, a homegrown CMS product the Post would license to other publishers, like the Boston Globe and Slate. As recently as 2019, in a headline I very well might have written, Digiday detailed a “CMS war between Vox Media and The Washington Post.”

[simondavidowens]

Will a recession bring direct-to-consumer brands back to podcasts?

Bloomberg predicts a pullback in brand advertising could do just that:

At some level, podcast shops might actually be in a stronger position than other media organizations to weather this storm. Though the networks have sought big brand dollars, they haven’t yet completely shaken free of the advertisers that helped build the space: direct response brands, such as mattress companies, meal kits and health supplements like Athletic Greens.

In recent years, as more and more popular programs locked themselves up in exclusive distribution deals and their new parent companies demanded higher prices from advertisers, many of these early adopter podcast sponsors were almost priced out of their most effective shows.

[simondavidowens]

How BookTok is fueling a resurgence in fiction reading

An author writes about what happened when her novel blew up on TikTok:

My novel got the kind of reviews that debut novelists dream about. But getting great reviews from legacy media doesn’t ensure that your debut novel is going to sell — BookTok does.

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Netflix keeps breaking new viewership records while at the same time its subscriber growth is stalling out

Puck writes about the diminishing returns of streaming hits:

In fact, 50 percent of all of Netflix’s Top 10 English-speaking debuts premiered in 2022, including Ozark’s fourth season and Bridgerton’s second season. It’s an impressive feat, and yet it’s entirely discordant with the fact that Netflix also had arguably its worst year on record. The company lost subscribers in its second and third quarters, and gained only 100,000 subs in the U.S. and Canada in its most recent quarter. And, despite a recent rebound, its stock is still down some 50 percent from a year ago. Netflix is projecting subscriber growth of 4.5 million in Q4, about half the number that joined in Q4 2021. Revenue has slowed alongside subscriber growth, and churn rates are still higher than normal at the company.

[simondavidowens]

Growing a tech company within a media company can be hard

The Wall Street Journal reports on why Jeff Bezos is considering spinning off Arc, the content management platform developed at the Washington Post, into its own company:

Incubating a tech startup inside a larger company—and drawing in the investment and talent needed to build it into a larger enterprise—can be challenging. Executives at the Post debated whether it was better to spin off Arc, which had drawn some interest from potential acquirers, or continue to build it in house, people familiar with deliberations at the news outlet said ...

...  Mr. Prakash at times pushed for greater investment in Arc and argued that as a stand-alone company it could do a better job recruiting top engineers, by offering them equity and giving them more freedom to work remotely than was possible at the Post, the people said.

[simondavidowens]

Matt Yglesias says he failed at what he set out to do at Vox

Kind of wish this wasn’t behind a paywall, because Yglesias has some really good insights here about his time at Vox and why the site didn’t live up to his ambitions:

They don’t really do explainers anymore. You’d be hard-pressed to describe what differentiates a Vox article from an Atlantic article or a Slate article or an article on any other quality website. As I wrote in “The Regrettable Death of the Slatepitch,” there has been an incredible flattening of the content landscape, and Vox has become part of that flattening rather than an alternative to it.

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How should creators vet the brands they work with?

Passionfruit wrote about the processes that some influencers undertake to vet brands before agreeing to work with them: 

Sarah Hickam, head of talent at influencer relations and talent management company Shine Talent Group ... has worked with creator specialists like doctors, dermatologists, and nutritionists, but also has a large roster of lifestyle, fashion, and food creators. Many of the influencers she works with ask questions to brands before they sign, such as: What responsibility do you take with the waste from your products? What is in these ingredients?“You would probably be surprised at how many creators say no to partnerships,” Hickam said. 

[simondavidowens]

SiriusXM overtakes Spotify as the most popular podcast producer

This seems pretty significant:

Edison Research announces the Top Podcast Networks in the U.S. for total network reach in Q3 2022, as SXM Media, Spotify, and iHeartRadio take the top three spots, respectively. After falling behind Spotify by a narrow margin in the Q2 report, SXM edges back ahead this time. Each are well out ahead of third place iHeartRadio, which in turn is comfortably head of the fourth spot on the chart, Audioboom. The list ranks the most listened-to podcast networks based on total audience reach from Edison Podcast Metrics.  

[simondavidowens]

Ken Doctor’s local news venture inches closer to sustainability

For years, Ken Doctor was a go-to resource on the economics of news, and he was well-known for his deep dives into the balance sheets of major media companies. Then in 2020, he decided to put his money where his mouth is and launch a local news venture in Santa Cruz. He’s now resurfaced to give an update on how that venture is going:

We’re on track to meet our goal of sustainable recurring revenue by next summer. We’re not declaring success yet, but we’re tangibly close, even as we ready ourselves for expansion into other communities. The work is tough and painstaking. We’ve made mistakes; fixing them costs us time and money — the two pressure points for all new ventures. We’ll undoubtedly make more.

[simondavidowens]

YouTube should copy Spotify Wrapped

This is actually a pretty good idea. YouTube should just rip off Spotify Wrapped and produce an annual overview of all the content individual users watched. I'd be curious about my own viewership habits.

[simondavidowens]

Literary magazines are almost never profitable

The New York Times reports on the sudden closure of a once-promising literary magazine:

In the United States, none of the five large publishing houses currently fund these outlets. The infrastructure supporting national literary magazines is crumbling, too: There are fewer newsstands, fewer bookstores that stock niche magazines, fewer advertisers willing to spend on print, and — in a world where information is increasingly siloed online — fewer people willing to subscribe.

Many literary magazines, like The Paris Review and The Drift, operate as nonprofits. With backing from a foundation and a private donor, The Dial announced itself as a new, nonprofit literary magazine last week. And, as their names suggest, publications like The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, and The Kenyon Review are backed by universities or tied to university presses.

[simondavidowens]

The Financial Times has an “incubation” team to develop and test out new products

INMA interviewed Caitlin Clarke, business development director at The Financial Times:

To mitigate the risk, and to bring people on board internally, we’ve built a clear framework around which we assess whether or not we pursue a new venture — which we really try and stick to. This takes into account brand alignment, target audience, route to market, and unit economics — and forces us to think hard about why we want to do something and what we’ll learn. Then, I think we try and phase our work with clear KPIs and deliverables at every step.

[simondavidowens]

Is Twitter’s impact on newsletter signups overrated?

The newsletter Garbage Day published a year-in-review, and this nugget stood out to me:

Even worse, Twitter users don’t really sign up and definitely don’t pay. Less than 1,000 users who came from Twitter signed up for free emails and less than 80 paid me.

[simondavidowens]

The record labels are competing directly with YouTube now

This is interesting: At least one major record label, Warner Music, is competing directly with YouTube by launching free, ad-supported music videos on streaming platforms:

The new channels from the music company — WMX Pop, WMX Rock and WMX Hip-Hop — are now available to stream for free on the Roku Channel through the service’s Live TV Guide. WMG is giving Roku a three-month exclusive window on the FAST channels for the U.S. before widening distribution to other platforms ...

... Each of the three music and entertainment linear channels will feature music videos and concerts from WMG’s global catalog of artists as well as original programming from WMG’s media brands including Uproxx, HipHopDX, Songkick, Cover Nation, The Pit and Lasso Nation.