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ear-worthy · 10 months ago

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Hot Pod Goes Cold; Substack & Spotify Team Up; IAB’s Digital Advertising Report

Podnews reported lastweek that Hot Pod, one of the longest-running newsletters about podcasting, is to suspend publishing. Lead reporter Ariel Shapiro has announced that her last week with its owner, The Verge, will be next week. Deputy Editor Jake Kastrenakes added: “We won’t have a new writer in place by next week, so we’re planning to put Hot Pod on hiatus while we figure out next steps.” The publication’s writers, Ariel Shapiro, Ashley Carman, and Nick Quah, have been a vital part of the industry since 2014 and Podnews reported that "Hot Pod inspired them to produce this daily newsletter in 2017."

I'd like to start a campaign to convince The Verge to hire one of these three people to take over Hot Pod. All three are tremendously talented and know podcasting

The three are Arielle Nissenblatt, Wil Williams, and Samantha Hodder.

First, Arielle Nissenblatt is well-known and highly regarded in podcasting circles. In today's fragmented media world, there are TikTok celebrities, Instagram influencers, and YouTube stars who are unknown outside their media universe. If you've been involved in podcasting in any way over the last few years, you know Arielle Nissenblatt.

"I've been working in the podcast space since early 2017 when I started a podcast recommendation newsletter called EarBuds Podcast Collective,"Arielle notes. "Since then, I've managed podcast studios, worked as an in-app curator, gone to school for audio production, produced several podcasts, run successful marketing and PR campaigns for several dozen shows, have organized podcast communities on Twitter, Discord, and Slack, and much more."

Arielle confesses to "love working in and around audio because it's my favorite way to consume content. I want to help more people find their next favorite podcast."

Arielle is the founder of EarBuds Podcast Collective, a podcast recommendation newsletter. She is on the community team at Descript, an AI-powered video and audio editing software service. She hosts three podcasts, Trailer Park: The Podcast Trailer Podcast, Feedback with EarBuds and Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You with Arielle and Ned.

Then we have Wil Williams, who is currently a marketing specialist for Tink Media. Williams has written for Discover Pods, Polygon, Vulture, and The Takeout. She has appeared on KQED's Forum, WAMU's 1A, Slate's ICYMI; has cried listening to Wolf 359's "Memoria" at least five times.

Williams is also the CEO of Podcast Problems LLC (If you have a podcast, you have problems), and you should read her website if you are a podcaster. You can read her articles there, including Your Podcast Needs Better Show Notes, Your Podcast Needs Better Metadata and my favorite, How I Know So Much Shit.

Williams also writes and manages the Substack Podcast Marketing Magic. When it comes to podcast journalism, Wil Williams is one of the very best.

Then we have Samantha Hodder, who is a multihypenate -- someone who does several different jobs in the entertainment industry—and does them well. Her Substack newsletter Bingeworthy is the mother ship for narrative podcast opinion, review, trends, and analysis. Hodder began the newsletter in September 2022 and has already amassed an impressive following.

Samantha is an award-winning audio producer and writer. She has been making media across multiple formats for over two decades. She publishes regularly on Mediumand on Substack. Her narrative storytelling podcast This is Our Time launched in 2017. It is a memoir-based story about an all-women’s expedition to Antarctica for women. Season 2 was featured in the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in 2021. She works as a freelance podcast producer, editor and narration script advisor. This year, she began to teach and mentor students at TMU and OCADU in narrative podcasting.

She also works with other writers and creatives one-on-one to help them find a winning narrative structure for their projects. To see if this approach could be helpful to your work, find her free 5-day email course Find Your Fish, which draws on lessons from screenwriting, podcasting, journaling and mindful meditation.

Over the last two decades her writing has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and her interactive work has premiered at festivals internationally. She was the recipient of the Al Waxman Calling Card for her first documentary, The Mantelpiece, which was broadcast on TVOntario, and premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Festival in 2004. Her short film The Nothingness That Is Everything opened in Venice, Italy in 2018.

And if all this information doesn't persuade you, Samantha is from Canada.

So I ask The Verge to consider these three talented women for the role at Hot Pod. This esteemed publication deserves a person with a deep knowledge of podcasting and a lifelong passion for audio.

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Before I extol the virtues of this latest collaboration between Substack and Spotify, I must confess that I am a little wary. Spotify entered podcasting in earnest four years ago, and since then has created an industry-wide asset bubble that since has burst, purchased accomplished podcast studios like Parcast and Gimlet and dismantled them with no remorse, and produced and released a lot of crap.

So, we'll see how this goes. Podcasters on Substack are collectively earning more than $100 million in annual revenue, a number that has more than doubled in the past year. The number of active podcasters on the platform has also more than doubled in the same time span. And it’s not just that new opportunities are available to podcasters bringing their shows to Substack—it’s benefiting existing Substack publications too. Those writers and creators who have added audio and/or video to their Substacks grow their revenue more than 2.5 times as fast as those who haven’t.

Substack makes it dead simple for anyone to independently create, publish, distribute, grow, and monetize a show.

“We used to have two different feeds, one for our paying subscribers and one for everyone to listen to free shows,” says @Alex Kirshner, a host of @Split Zone Duo, the biggest sports podcast on Substack. “We were looking for a way to put everything under one roof and make the experience as easy as possible for the people who pay us for our work. Moving to Substack from Patreon has let us do that and been very, very good for our growth in not even half a year.”

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) empowers the media and marketing industries to thrive in the digital economy. Its membership comprises more than 700 leading media companies, brands, agencies, and the technology firms responsible for selling, delivering, and optimizing digital ad marketing campaigns. The trade group fields critical research on interactive advertising, while also educating brands, agencies, and the wider business community on the importance of digital marketing.

I know that's a mouthful, but the IAB holds an annual in-person and virtual meeting introducing new podcasts from some of the largest podcast networks.

The IAB's report on advertising revealed that digital advertising revenues reached a record-high of $225 billion, increasing by 7.3% year-over-year overall (YoY) between 2022 and 2023, according to the newly released “IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2023,” conducted by PwC. The report found that Q4 saw the highest growth rate of 12.3% from the year prior (4.4%), with revenues rising to $64.5 billion. “Despite inflation fears, interest rates at record highs, and continuing global unrest, the U.S. digital advertising industry continued its growth trajectory in 2023,” said David Cohen, CEO, IAB. “With significant industry transformation unfolding right before our eyes, we believe that those channels with a portfolio of privacy by design solutions will continue to outpace the market. For 2023, the winners were retail media, CTV, and audio, which saw the highest growth.” Audio advertising also saw a robust expansion, growing 18.9% to reach $7 billion. It is still the fastest-growing channel, albeit at a slower pace than last year.

I know that most podcast fans have little interest in advertising trends and finances, but ads pay the bills for many podcasts.

#podcast #podcasting #business #advertising

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kristenbrady · 1 year ago

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Lead Magnet Ideas for Event Planners

The following is a list of 6 lead magnet ideas for Event Planners:

Ways to Sell from Stage Checklist

Offer a checklist outlining the key components of a successful sales presentation, which includes tips on closing techniques, storytelling, and audience engagement.

Presentation Design Templates

Provide a set of pre-designed templates sales pros may use to develop amazing visual aids for presentations.

Lead Magnet Ideas for Editors

Seven lead magnet ideas for editors

kristenkaybrady.medium.com

Case Studies

Share some case studies of successful events you have planned, which includes information about ways you overcame challenges to develop a successful event, testimonials from clients, and before/after photos.

Event Planning Guide

Create a guide people might use to plan their events, which includes tips on creating memorable experiences for attendees, managing vendors, and tips on choosing a venue.

Venue Sourcing Guide

Develop a guide about how to source event venues. This guide might include ideas on finding the right location, ways to negotiate pricing, and what to search for in a venue.

Budget Template

Provide a complimentary budget template people might use to keep track of expenses and make sure they remain in their budget for their event or plan sufficiently to cover the event.

😃Kristen is a contributor on Medium. Sign up here to catch every story when she publishes.

Check out my FREE eBook: Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Podcast here

Kristen is a writer of over 14 years. She can write:

Articles

Blogs

Website copy

Podcast show notes

Substack newsletters

Medium posts

Linkedin Newsletters

eBooks

Contact her on Upwork for more details: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/kristenbrady

Originally posted on Medium

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chloeinletters · 2 years ago

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what advice do you have for a senior undergrad writer who has no direction for post-grad? 😩 i want to write my life!!! start a blog? try to freelance? you are my biggest writing inspiration ♥️✨

When I was a senior undergrad writer, I too felt like I had no direction. In my fall semester, as a result of Covid, my dream publication job closed down for good. I had one direction and it was gone!!!! I was devastated but it illuminated to me the idea I had about my life that I would leave school and someone would find my resume and say yes you! you are a writer now! So I thought, what if I decided I was a writer, what if I stopped waiting. I listened to myself!

That is my biggest advice.

Your desire to start writing should not be ignored. You do not have to wait until you graduate it is an arbitrary day. It is proof you have done something big but it also does not mean that when that day arrives you suddenly have a skillset and are allowed to do what it is you dream of doing. Your writing will improve as you move through life. You can figure stuff out while you go. (how you write best, when you write best, what kind of things excite you, where you wish to head off to) Though you feel you have no direction, moving onward is a way of going even if you are not sure which way it is. So that is the biggest advice, don't wait. Never wait. If you decide you are an artist you will always be a student. The want to write is honestly the only thing you really need. A degree is nothing in a certain sense, a respectable kind of nothing.

And any other advice I might offer is to listen. That's part of figuring it out. A big thing when I started was figuring out how I could make my writing life easier. I had to forget all the advice I had heard from successful writers who did not live the life I lived. Who did not have bills like I did, who did not work shitty retail jobs and then take a 20-minute delayed subway home at midnight. And when I decided I was a writer I had to forget that everyone was a weekly substack writer and listen to myself which knew I was really only capable of being a monthly substack writer. So to say, you know where to start and what to do. And when that knowing starts to be wrong you will know it. Allow yourself the ear to listen, and the grace to figure it out as you go. You will never have it all in place. Start a blog, a substack, an Instagram. Post everything. Your direction will reveal itself and you'll follow it.

In Anne Lamott's book bird by bird (a great place to start if you're feeling shaky about starting), she talks about writing and quotes someone who says when you drive in the dark you can only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make it the whole way home like that. You’re in the dark right now. Turn the headlights on and go.

#advice #ask

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strideofpride · 4 years ago

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Okay inspired by @bisexualdanhumphrey‘s answer to my ask, here’s where I think all the GG characters would be/should be in 2021 (this ignores a lot of canon tbh):

-Chuck got me-too’ed and is no longer the public face of Bass Industries. He is still on the board and obviously kept his billions because cancel culture is fake. He’s already on his third marriage to an Eastern European model and has five kids by three different women.

-Nate never ran the Spectator because he transferred to USC instead and got the California lifestyle he always dreamed of. He’s free from his family out there and has no social media presence whatsoever. He’s dating a yoga teacher and is still unsure what he truly wants to do for a living. He makes money by investing his trust fund in various start-ups though.

-Serena is a major Instagram influencer/travel blogger. Yes, she did keep traveling despite covid. People tried to cancel her for that but she’s white and rich and good-looking and has kept her following. She hooks up with Carter whenever they’re in the same city, but refuses to settle down with anyone. Her and Blair text occasionally and talk on the phone every month or so. Serena misses Blair deeply, but just can’t be tied down to one place.

-Vanessa is an Oscar-winning documentarian who splits time between LA & NY. She’s married to a film composer and is pregnant with her first child. She’s still close friends with both Dan AND Nate.

-Eric is a therapist who focuses on helping at-risk LGBTQ youth. He and his husband (a pastry chef he met at one of Lily’s events) are in the process of adopting. He lives the most drama-free life of them all, of course.

-Jenny’s the one who took over Waldorf Designs. She came out as a lesbian and serially dates her runway models (she subsequently has to keep finding new runway models). She also runs a very popular fashion vlog.

-Dan & Blair are together in NY with their daughter and their Conde Nast power couple life (he writes freelance for the New Yorker, she’s an editor at Vogue). Dan has written a few more novels, but none have had the success that Inside did. They’re both members of blue check Twitter and are very annoying on it. If that wasn’t enough, they’re thinking about starting a substack newsletter together.

#gossip girl #dair #anti chuck bass #nate archibald #serena van der woodsen #vanessa abrams #eric van der woodsen #jenny humphrey #dan humphrey #blair waldorf #serena x carter #otp: dan loves me for me #gg headcanons

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

…

Life in the “content” industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive. There are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble. There are permanent employees of highly prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance. Venues close all the time. Mourning another huge round of layoffs is a regular bonding experience for people in the industry. Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their potential bosses and peers. Many of them dream of selling that book to save themselves financially, not seeming to understand that book advances have fallen 40% in 10 years - median figure now $6,080 - and that the odds of actually making back even that meager advance are slim, meaning most authors are making less than minimum wage from their books when you do the math. They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision. They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again. They have to pretend to like ghouls like Ezra Klein and Jonah Peretti and make believe that there’s such a thing as “the Daily Beast reputation for excellence.”

I have always felt bad for them, despite our differences, because of these conditions. And they have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies. A newsletter company hosting Bari Weiss is why you can’t pay your student loans? You sure?

They’ll tell you about the terrible conditions in their industry themselves, when they’re feeling honest. So what are they really mad about? That I’m making a really-just-decent guaranteed wage for just one year? Or that this decent wage is the kind of money many of them dream of making despite the fact that, in their minds, they’ve done everything right and played by all the rules? Is their anger really about a half-dozen guys whose writing you have to actively seek out to see? (If you click the button and put in your email address, you’ll get these newsletters. If you don’t, you won’t. So if you’re a media type who hates my writing, consider just… not clicking that button.) Or do they need someplace to put the rage and resentment that grows inside them as they realize, no, it’s not getting better, this is all I get?

It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.

You think the writers complaining in that piece I linked to at the top wanted to be here, at this place in their career, after all those years of hustling? You think decades into their media career, the writers who decamped to Substack said to themselves “you know, I’d really like to be in my 40s and having to hope that enough people will pitch in $5 a month so I can pay my mortgage”? No. But the industry didn’t give them what they felt they deserved either. So they displace and project. They can hate Jesse Singal, but Jesse Singal isn’t where this burning anger is coming from. Neither am I. They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security. I feel for them as I feel for all people living economically precarious lives, but getting rid of Substack or any of its writers will not do anything to fix their industry or their jobs. They wanted more and they got less and it hurts. This isn’t what they dreamed. That’s what this is really about.

…

My own deal here is not mysterious. It’s just based on a fact that the blue checks on Twitter have never wanted to accept. I got offered money to write here for the same reason I got offered to write for The New York Times and Harper’s and The Washington Post and The LA Times, the same reason I’ve gotten a half-dozen invitations to pitch since I started here a few weeks ago, the same reason a literary agent sought me out and asked me to write a book, the same reason I sold that book for a decent advance: because I pull traffic. Though I am a social outcast from professional opinion writing, I have a better freelance publishing history than many, many of my critics who are paid-up, obedient members of the media social scene. Why? Because the editors who hired me thought I was a great guy? No. Because I pull traffic. I always have. That’s why you’re reading this on Substack right now.

…

A really important lesson to learn, in life, is this: your enemies are more honest about you than your friends ever will be. I’ve been telling the blue checks for over a decade that their industry was existentially fucked, that the all-advertising model was broken, that Google and Facebook would inevitably hoover up all the profit, that there are too many affluent kids fresh out of college just looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so driving down the wages of everyone else, that their mockery of early subscription programs like Times Select was creating a disastrous industry expectation that asking your readers directly for money was embarrassing. Trump is gone and the news business is cratering. Michael Tracey didn’t make that happen. None of this anger will heal what’s wrong. If you get all of the people you don’t like fired from Substack tomorrow, what will change? How will your life improve? Greenwald will spend more time with his hottie husband and his beloved kids and his 6,000 dogs in his beautiful home in Rio. Glenn will be fine. How do we do the real work of getting you job security and a decent wage?

…

But how do things get better in that way? Only through real self-criticism (which Twitter makes impossible) and by asking hard questions. Questions like one that has not been credibly confronted a single time in this entire media meltdown: why are so many people subscribing to Substacks? What is the traditional media not providing that they’re seeking elsewhere? Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions? You can try to make an adult determination about that question, to better understand what media is missing, or you can read this and write some shitty joke tweet while your industry burns to the ground around you. It’s your call.

Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you - college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going away.

Now steel yourselves, media people, take a shot of something strong, look yourself in the eye in the mirror, summon you most honest self, and tell me: am I wrong?

#freddie deboer #substack #journalism

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rafat · 4 years ago

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On Breaking Away: 18 Years Of Lessons On Journalist-As-An-Entrepreneur Life

Back in 2003, I wrote this rather bombastic “screed” about life as an individual journalist-entrepreneur, then a year into my journey on solo media entrepreneur life back then through paidContent.org (now defunct).

I was in my 20s then, barely two years into my career out of school and was a know-it-all, living in an East London tenement with a leaky roof, creating my own path on the backs of early blog publishing tools like Blogger, pMachine (anyone remembers that?!) and MovableType. This was 2003 and I had been blogging for four years then, had a Btech in Computer Engineering, MA in New Media journalism and loved the merging of reporting skills, DIY tech publishing tools and immediacy & freedom of blog journalism world. I was barely making subsistence money and still happy to just be doing my own thing.

Fast forward to 2020s, a year like no other for media, and the Substack generation is the new blogging-in-pajamas generation. Lots of hard knock lessons we learned back then still apply and figured I would jot them down, might be helpful to the new generation of journalists-as-entrepreneurs.

If you want control of your own destiny, then you’re in for the long-haul. This will take much much longer than you think or the initial reception will indicate.

If you can, give yourself two years as a good ballpark before you can become fully self-sustaining. After that time if you aren’t, you know the answer from there...

Own the stack and everything else along with it. While tools like Substack and others are enticing to get you started, there’s nothing like having your own site, where are you can do whatever you want to without the constraints of whatever choose any of these third-party providers will create. These days creating a Wordpress site and putting an email newsletter other, charge for it and dozens of other things in it are very easy these days and don’t require any technical knowledge, and even if they do, you can find cheap freelance talent to help you put it together and maintain it.

OWN your email newsletter list, don’t outsource that part to anyone or any entity.

While the newsletter format is great it get started, don’t ignore a standalone site which will allow you to better showcase previous work, archives, and pull in people better through search/SEO than just a newsletter format can. Also be ready to be multi format: podcasts, online webinars etc, whatever it takes to build the paying audience.

Subscriptions aren’t the only way, don’t let the herd guide you on this. Smart, long lasting businesses — even solo journalist entities — have multi pronged revenue streams built into them, including advertising, yes that dreaded A-word these days.

There’s nothing called the first mover advantage, that’s a myth in media. It works in platforms but popularity doesn’t necessarily mean revenues.

However crowded a sector you are in is, you can create your own whitespace by your own unique worldview. So better know what your unique worldview is before you get started.

Starting out as an ad-supported site/newsletter doesn’t mean you can’t convert to paid later, it’s just harder but it can be done. In fact a hybrid free+paid makes most sense for maximum impact.

Pace yourself, or else you will burn out quickly. Don’t “out-blog and out-news anyone to death” as I foolishly said 17 years ago when I started on my solo journey.

Frequency of output does matter, and consistency in frequency matters. You can be daily or weekly or mix of both, anything longer people won’t know how to value your work when deciding to pay for it, or not.

Bring original reporting and original thought into the world, that is what people will value in the short and long term. One step removed from original editorial is one step too many removed from success.

Build franchises people return to every year or every quarter. Yep, lists matters, and there are meaningful ways to do it.

Ignore and break the silos in whatever industry/sector you are writing about, the forward looking people in your sector will thank you for it.

Don’t write for praise of fellow journalists & media people, they have no bearing on your success, write for the audience that will care for what you write and build.

VERY IMPORTANT: Pay up for good financial advice, company structure and tax advice, your future self will thank you for it.

Stay solo or hire more people? You don’t need to know the answer right away, don’t worry about it, you’ll figure it out along the way. Just make sure your financial/company structure is set up right way for either, from the start.

Over a period of time, you’ll figure out what you are good at, and more importantly, what you aren't good at. Ask for help from experts and you’ll be surprised how many are willing to help you pro bono.

Will anyone miss you if you stop your newsletter/publication tomorrow? That is the ultimate mark of impact you can have, it will take time to get there.

“Fuck it, I’m going for it” will take you a long way in building your own destiny. Fuck the naysayers.

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mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog · 1 month ago

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What Makes This Advanced Book for Freelance Writers Exceptional?

Editorial Review of A Powerful Toolkit for Advanced Substack Newsletter Mastery Written by content strategist, leading author, and community builder Dr Mehmet Yildiz, A Powerful Toolkit for Advanced Substack Newsletter Mastery is not just another addition to the sea of freelance writing guides. It’s a symbol of clarity, care, and insights tailored for those ready to elevate their writing craft…

#Advanced Substack strategies #Build a community on Substack #Content creation strategies for writers #Dr. Mehmet Yildiz book review #Grow your Substack audience #Substack newsletter mastery #Substack Writing Tips #Successful freelance writing on Substack #Sustainable writing business #Writing tools for Substack creators

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carolinemillerbooks · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/is-there-gold-in-them-thar-blogs/

Is There Gold In Them Thar Blogs?

Would you pay to read these blogs? Don’t gulp. I know the answer. Recently, a friend interrupted when I started to quote myself. “You know I don’t read your blogs regularly, don’t you?” Her confession silenced me the way bird droppings landing on my head might do. Nonetheless, I’ve never assumed she or any of my acquaintances were regular readers. Frankly, I don’t read my blogs, either. I write them. Three days a week, my scribblings reach nearly 900 people. Three to four hundred of them drop by in an ordinary month. Of that number, three to five readers leave a comment. A desert waiting for a rain cloud gets more traffic. So no, my opening question wasn’t a serious one, though what passes for journalism today doesn’t fill me with awe. When I subject media articles to Grammarly, the print flashes so with many errors, it looks like Times Square on New Year’s eve. I don’t monetize my work because I want control. Money changes the game and I don’t want to play someone else’s. I’m too old to chase eyeballs. Nonetheless, I sympathize with writers who live via clicks per page. Most of them do their writing while standing in unemployment lines. For them, a new opportunity exists–though, by the time the information reaches the pages of Vanity Fair, as this one has, the big fish have already taken up most of the pond. I’m talking about Substack. (“The Next Media Gold Rush,” by Joe Pompeo, Vanity Fair, Dec. 2020, pgs. 40-41.) The company, says Wikipedia, is “an online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.” It allows writers to become entrepreneurs who can sell their newsletters and articles directly to the public rather than beg for the attention of a media editor. A-listers get upfront payments from Substack. Other contributors keep 90% of what their subscribers pay. Rates vary from $4 a month or $60 a year. The arrangement strikes me as similar to Amazon’s deal for self-published authors. I have no idea where this new venture is headed. According to writer Joe Pompeo, some contributors are making a killing. But I’m dubious. Amazon’s deal for book writers hasn’t worked miracles. What’s more, if the past is prologue, should Substack become successful, Amazon will buy them out. Still, while the game is afoot, freelancers, bloggers, and other journalists might try their wings on Substack. As for me, I choose to remain grounded, happy for backhanded compliments. After all, if my friend admits she doesn’t read my blog all of the time, it means she reads it some of the time.

#Amazon #freelance writers #Grammarly #Substack

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un-enfant-immature · 5 years ago

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Product lessons from building our subscription service Extra Crunch

Subscription has been all the rage in media circles as the industry searches for new, sustainable business models. We’ve seen companies from infrastructure plays like Substack and Pico to brand verticals like Holloway and The Athletic receive venture funding, all with the goal of changing the economics of news, information and entertainment.

Every day, I get the fortune of talking with founders about their startups and writing about them on TechCrunch, but I’ve also been something of an intrapreneur myself, building out product in the form of TechCrunch’s membership service Extra Crunch as EC’s executive editor over the past two years.

This month, I am transitioning to work on new projects at TechCrunch, and my co-editor Eric Eldon is now going to lead the charge on Extra Crunch as executive editor working in tandem with our new EC senior editor Walter Thompson.

So given the changing of the editorial guard, I wanted to write down some thoughts about editorial product strategy as well as some of the hard-won lessons learned about what worked and what didn’t in building a subscription product in today’s media environment.

The art of building an editorial product strategy within constraints

Before we get into some lessons though, I want to talk about product strategy a little bit. Every startup needs a product strategy, and Extra Crunch was no exception. The difference is that we are fundamentally an editorial product, which means that instead of transforming lines of codes into functional software, we take ideas, interviews, research, and analysis and transform them into articles and other media that users (hopefully!) want to pay for.

Product strategy involves devising a plan within constraints, and TechCrunch was no exception.

The first constraint was that we were not starting from scratch. Unlike a startup, TechCrunch has been here for years and has a strong brand name in the startup community, millions of passionate readers, a successful advertising and events business, and an editorial org that knows how to be productive. We couldn’t just throw out the playbook that has worked for years in the pursuit of a new business model that was untested. And so from the beginning, we had to have an attitude of evolution rather than one of revolution.

Second, we had limited resources in terms of capital and talent. TechCrunch is not a venture-backed company with millions of dollars in funding waiting to be burned in our bank account. Instead, we are a successful, sustainable and sometimes ridiculously efficient media business owned by a telecom that rewards proven financial performance. So when we launched, I was the only dedicated editorial position for Extra Crunch, along with a smattering of freelancers. As we have proven our success since launch this past February, we have since expanded to three dedicated editorial positions for EC. Throughout, we’ve had to have a strategy that was careful about spending our resources.

Third, we had to design a strategy that encompassed the talents of our existing staff. TechCrunch has consistently avoided the “hire a bunch of people and then fire a bunch of people” waves that hit New York media companies again and again and again by relying on smart reporters who can adapt with the changing tides of media. Extra Crunch was no exception — we wanted to build a product that every one of our writers could contribute to.

Those were the constraints. On top of that, I had a couple of personal rules for the product.

First, I hate metered paywalls (i.e. any model that charges you after reading a set number of articles) with a fiery passion. It has never made sense to me that articles could be free for some people, paid for others, or that the article that tries to force a conversion could be a news brief and not one of the best articles a site has published. To optimize for conversions, you want to trigger a conversation around moving from free to paid at just the right time, and not because the article clock has ticked down to zero.

Second, I didn’t want any of our writers to be placed entirely behind the paywall. Everything in subscription (media or not) should be focused on guiding users through the conversion funnel. If a writer is entirely behind the paywall, how can anyone sample their work or start to engage with that voice?

Third and finally, we had to charge for the right kinds of content. People don’t pay for news. They don’t, they won’t, and every time we as an industry ask users to do so, we fail (minus maybe the NYT and WSJ). At TechCrunch, our startup news coverage drives a huge loyal following and is a major credibility point of pride for many early-stage founders. It’s not good business to put that core offering behind a paywall.

With all those constraints and rules in mind, what we ended up centering Extra Crunch on was solving the problems facing founders in building their startups. That included how to raise venture capital, recruit talent, grow, pay themselves, work with PR agencies, and much, much more. I was previously a VC, and so I essentially channeled all the questions my founders would ask me into articles that solved those problems. Since launch in February, we’ve published about 600 articles on these topics.

Fundraising 101: How to trigger FOMO among VCs

This approach has allowed us to maximize our existing audience, which already encompasses a large number of founders, designers, builders, and product managers, but also has allowed our writers to write to their strengths, building on their relationships to research and answer new questions.

The great news is that one of our core metrics — engaged reading time — has been very strong, averaging upwards of 5 to 10 minutes per piece depending on its length. Subscribers don’t just read, they read closely and deeply that is not typical of a web surfer stopping by the site for a few seconds.

Now, on to some lessons from this whole product launch and early-growth phase.

Mistake: setting the wrong expectations around content length

I really despise the terms “longform” and its diminutive cousin “shortform.” Articles should be exactly the right length — no longer and no shorter than what is necessary to communicate their ideas. Longform articles are not fundamentally better because they are longer, and in fact, can actually be a lot worse if they convey little with many words.

One of the biggest concerns I heard from TechCrunch writers early on was that they would have to leave their beats for weeks at a time in order to produce “in-depth” subscription content — code for really, really longform pieces.

This fear was exacerbated by a mistake I made right at our launch: we published the Patreon EC-1 package as the very first set of articles on Extra Crunch. Eric Peckham, our media columnist, wrote nearly 24,000 words on the company after conducting many interviews with the startup’s leadership and others in the music and maker industries. A lot of folks on our staff looked at the gargantuan work involved in that package and basically thought “I just don’t have the time to do that” on top of all of their other duties.

The Patreon EC-1

Over time, we learned through data that article length has almost no correlation with the number of conversions or the readership of an article. People pay for short articles, long articles and everything in between so long as it meets their needs. That’s a major reason why we don’t have word counts or reading times listed on our content.

Frankly, it took months to emphasize that EC was a change in tone and focus in reporting, rather than just a refuge for extremely long pieces of content. A big part of that was trying to make a splash from day one, rather than just diving right into our day-to-day editorial. I would not take that approach a second time through.

Do: be very mindful of the number of premium articles

Beyond just content length, there was a huge debate early on around how many articles we should publish on EC each day. The obvious argument is essentially “the more the merrier,” since more articles get more readership and therefore more chances to convert users. Of course, there are real constraints, and writing more articles for EC meant drawing resources away from our news coverage on TechCrunch.

The approach that we’ve taken is to keep EC frequent but not overpowering. I have always believed that our core users are extremely busy and overwhelmed by the amount of media they feel a need to consume. So I have pushed hard, in line with my thesis around brainjunk, to try to force us to write a very small number of high-quality articles and simply ask that people pay for them. We ended up targeting about 2-3 articles per weekday, or roughly 5% of TechCrunch’s total volume each day.

Brainjunk and the killing of the internet mind

Do: Completely ignore users who compare you to Netflix

I have talked a lot about subscription hell, or the sheer number of subscriptions that consumers are being asked to sign up for these days (and that was back in 2018 — hello Disney+!). Hundreds of millions of consumers subscribe to Netflix, or Spotify, or Amazon Prime, or Apple Music, and so invariably, you start to see comparisons of different subscription offerings against each other.

Subscription hell

Here’s the thing: Extra Crunch (and really any niche media subscription publication) is not Netflix. We aren’t a general video entertainment service. Instead, we are a service that tries to help founders, builders, and other tech leaders do better in their jobs every single day. That’s just a completely different value proposition.

So when users start to do the comparisons with us (“you’re priced the same as Netflix!!!1”), I flat out ignore them (well, I try to educate, but you get my drift). If a user doesn’t find value in the product, then move on and find the users who do.

Mistake: ‘misunderestimating’ the timeline of product launches

Editorial is our product, but of course, we still have software that drives EC.

Unlike a startup that can just build a stack from scratch, we have software — sometimes really legacy software — that powers our platform. The approach we took on product had to take these constraints into account.

Our product team always gives reasonable timelines, but I have been guilty of just assuming that things will work faster than expected (and yes, I have a technical background and should know better). Unfortunately, I massively underestimated engineering timelines, and that has made communicating with our editorial staff and our readers challenging.

Pocket watch silver swinging on a chain black background to hypnotize

I’ll give two choice examples. First, identity is just tough for us. We have multiple internal identity providers thanks to a legacy of mergers and acquisitions, plus on top of that, we have identity in the context of our content management system as well as our paywall provider. It is a sheer programmatic chore to keep identity information synced across all of these databases, not to mention that each of these identity layers incorporates new changes that break the existing flows. If I had a magic wand, I would create the ultimate “one true identity source of truth.” But I don’t have a magic wand, and instead have code that needs to continue to function.

Second, launching internationally is extremely challenging for us as well. Extra Crunch is available in a handful of countries, but launching elsewhere can require dozens of people to work together to handle tax, accounting, legal, policy, and security reviews across multiple corporate entities and regions. We have thousands of users requesting access from dozens of other countries, but it just takes a lot of work to launch any specific country, making promising a timeline very hard.

The lesson for me here is to work with the timelines you are given, and realize that the world around subscription law is getting ever more complicated.

Do: give your writers huge room to experiment

We are blessed at TechCrunch to have a great editorial team, but as with any new editorial product, there is always a healthy fear of change.

One of the biggest challenges of launching a subscription media product within an existing brand is convincing writers to write for you. On a site where a top-trafficked article can get a million reads, it is hard to convince anyone to put their work behind a wall where only a few thousand people might read it (even if those readers are heavily engaged). Plus, some of our writers have been successfully producing content for a decade or more — some of our staff have literally written thousands of articles on TechCrunch. Any change to that formula is going to take time to be accepted.

On top of that, TechCrunch’s newsroom is very decentralized and bottoms-up. The reason we catch the next startup wave in a space is because our writers don’t have to go up and down the editor stack to get permission to chase a story or a trend. Instead, they can keep their ears to the ground and hunt for the best stories.

So we built structures to ensure that EC can be part of every staffer’s work when they are ready to engage with us. Every writer at TC has their own Slack channel that connects them to the EC editorial team and functions as a place to circulate ideas and get rapid feedback. As good ideas have worked, we’ve then circulated them to other writers as possible models for them to consider.

This approach has afforded us much more experimentation in the early phase of the product than if we had simply set out three buckets of content and demanded that everything fit perfectly inside of them.

Do: Integrate paid with the rest of the editorial product

Extra Crunch is a special, members-only place, but we also wanted to make sure that the product was integrated into everything else that we do. We took a couple of approaches here.

First, we integrated our content into other parts of TechCrunch. For example, Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm host our VC-focused podcast Equity, which discusses the venture rounds of the week and the startups behind them. When we have published our in-depth EC-1 business analyses, we have also tried to do a special episode of Equity called an Equity Dive where we discussed some of the takeaways of the EC-1 piece for the Equity audience (for instance, here is one on Patreon). Those episodes are packed with interesting tidbits, and also act as marketing for EC.

An Equity deep dive on Patreon

Danny Crichton, Mailchimp Co-founder & CEO Ben Chestnut and Kabbage Co-Founder & President Kathryn Petralia speak onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Second, we created a whole “Extra Crunch Stage” at our flagship conference Disrupt, again focused on solving the challenges that founders face every day. Among the panels we hosted were how to build a billion dollar subscription business, how to get into YC, how to build a startup culture, how to iterate a product, and how to exit your startup. What was great was the balance between our news-breaking Main Stage and the more skills-orinted EC stage. Plus, we also had a special members lounge for EC subscribers at the event, which proved even more popular that I would have predicted (yes, members want to feel exclusive!)

Discover the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF this October

Finally, we also offer EC members a discount on our events, which has driven more attention to our Sessions events and to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, where we will have another EC stage this coming December. We love it when members show up in person, and so we wanted to incentivize that as much as we could could. It’s a nice way to say thanks to our most enthusiastic customers.

Do: have a free newsletter for your paid content

This is one we accidentally stumbled upon but has worked really, really well. We have a free newsletter called the Extra Crunch Roundup (example issue) that summarizes the pieces we’ve published on EC.

Top VCs in Edtech, Dropbox, first mover advantage, India’s Netflix, scooters, and more

Here is something crazy: we have about a 4:1 ratio of free users to paid users subscribing to the newsletter. In other words, roughly 80% of the users reading the subscription-focused newsletter don’t subscribe to Extra Crunch.

I can’t stress enough how useful this is. In some cases, these users don’t have access to EC because we haven’t launched in their country, or they haven’t made a purchase decision about us yet. By allowing them to stay tapped into our community, we keep them engaged and hopefully in the long run, turn them into customers.

Mistake: failing to fully integrate real-time analytics into editorial decision-making

Extra Crunch faces a typical business intelligence problem: our core user and analytics data is scattered across a number of data silos, and we don’t have a data lake (a term that, if used in an email sent to me, automatically sends the email to spam by the way). Like many smaller media companies, we lack the data science team and data pipeline engineers required to build out a full BI function.

I code, and I have been able to cobble together some Python scripts to pipeline some of our data into an Airtable so that we have at least decent visibility on what our readers like and what they don’t (in some cases involving manually scraping our own sites since some of our tools don’t have API access). But it doesn’t allow us to make real-time decisions about our content, and that acts as friction to delivering the best possible experience.

While analytics is obviously important for our business leaders, it’s really editorial that needs the data the most. As I was building out the editorial strategy, I would have put even more time into thinking through our analytics strategy to ensure we had the right feedback mechanisms in place from day one to do quality data analysis.

Focused, steady progress against the media maelstrom

It’s been exhilarating watching a product start on a whiteboard and now being enjoyed by paying customers.

Media, and particularly New York media, loves the ambitious editor that wants to shake things up and shoot for the stars with massive budgets and a huge vision. But the reality is that the gyrations in the media industry in Manhattan are entirely avoidable by focusing on users, getting the basics right, using feedback properly, and being sure to walk before you run.

TechCrunch has watched as new publications have jumped into covering the tech industry, old publications have withered and faded away, and every format of media has come and gone. What has ultimately worked for us is to stay true to our founding mission: to fairly cover the startup world and all of its facets. That’s why we’ve always been here, and if the data we have is any proof, a heck of a lot of people are willing to pay to ensure that focus continues for us. So to our early Extra Crunch members — thank you. And of course, the best is yet to come.

#TechCrunch

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