#advertising industry independent because its subscription based at 5$ a month.

[electrosquash]

By the way, since i saw many people confused

AI Overviews – offered previously as a Search Labs experiment – is rolling out to US search users today, with more countries to follow. In the future, "Google will do the Googling for you" – or so suggests Liz Reid, VP of search. The presentation of AI Overview results, however, made it look like Google's search page will keep much of the viewer's attention, rather than sending searchers to linked websites.

[arcticdementor]

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?

[perfectirishgifts]

Amazon’s Possible Acquisition Of Wondery Would Put Podcasting On A Path To A Crossroads

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/amazons-possible-acquisition-of-wondery-would-put-podcasting-on-a-path-to-a-crossroads/

Amazon’s Possible Acquisition Of Wondery Would Put Podcasting On A Path To A Crossroads

A person listens to a podcast on a smartphone in an arranged photograph taken in the Brooklyn … [] borough of New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

Another important podcast publisher may soon be owned by a major content platform. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Amazon AMZN is in exclusive talks to acquire Wondery, home of over 150 podcasts, at a valuation of over $300 million. This move is a natural next step for Amazon in following Spotify’s strategy to go big into podcasting as the medium becomes more commercially viable. Amazon and Spotify are about to become frenemies in podcasting as they implement a strategy that competes with the other pair of podcasting frenemies, iHeartRadio and NPR.

Spotify, looking to differentiate itself from its competitors in the music market, has invested around a billion dollars in podcasting: it has bought large podcast publishers such as Gimlet (home of Reply All, StartUp, and Crimetown), Parcast (Supernatural, Unexplained Mysteries), The Ringer (The Bill Simmons Podcast), and—last month—the podcast publishing and advertising platform Megaphone. Recently it has been gradually making more and more of its podcasts exclusive to Spotify subscribers—including the highly popular Joe Rogan Experience, for which it reportedly paid over $100 million.

Amazon recently followed a similar path by offering podcasts within its Amazon Music app and embarking on a series of celebrity exclusives, starting with Will Smith and DJ Khaled. Amazon’s Audible division has had original audio content for years, but that content—from sources such as the Wall Street Journal and Scientific American—has existed outside of the emerging mainstream of podcast listenership, and Audible hasn’t marketed it very heavily. So the logical next step for Amazon is to acquire one of the remaining large independent podcast publishers.

Wondery is a venture-backed company that was founded in 2016 by former Fox television executive Hernan Lopez. Fox studios took a stake in the company; the stake is now owned by Disney DIS since Disney’s acquisition of the Fox studios last year. The company has known to be seeking a buyer for the past few months.

Wondery is the largest independent podcast publisher by audience, according to Podtrac’s publisher rankings: it’s No. 4 overall behind iHeartRadio, NPR, and the New York Times NYT (home of The Daily, the No. 1 most-listened-to show in Podtrac’s podcast rankings). And it’s the last large independent podcast publisher left standing after acquisition sprees by Spotify and others.

In addition to its own podcasts, including favorites such as Business Wars and Dr. Death, Wondery publishes shows in partnership with NBC, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Bloomberg, and others. This past summer it launched a paid subscription service that offers ad-free versions of its podcasts for $5/month. Last year it launched a partnership with Cumulus Media, the No. 2 U.S. broadcast radio network, that should help Cumulus compete against the iHeartRadio radio/podcasting juggernaut. Wondery also has an agreement with Universal Music Group that—uniquely among podcast publishers—enables it to use music from UMG’s catalog, the biggest in the music industry, in any of its podcasts.

If Amazon completes the deal, it’s inevitable that Amazon will follow a path with Wondery that’s similar to the path that Spotify is on with its podcast acquisitions and licensing deals: gradually make them exclusive to Amazon Music (and possibly Audible), to increase the attractiveness of those audio content platforms. Amazon is also likely to promote Wondery’s podcasts through its Alexa-based smart speaker ecosystem. According to the Infinite Dial research study from Edison Research and Triton Digital, Amazon Music is the fastest-growing on-demand music service; it’s currently No. 2 behind Spotify (the study doesn’t measure YouTube for music) and ahead of Apple AAPL Music.

With Amazon and Spotify pursuing walled-garden strategies for podcasting, we’re likely to be headed for a bifurcated podcasting world, where one axis of companies pushes for exclusivity and walled gardens while the other pushes for ubiquity and ad revenue.

The two biggest podcast publishers today, by a wide margin, are iHeartRadio and NPR. Although the latter is a nonprofit and the former is not, they both have the same fundamental strategy: to distribute their shows as widely as possible and maximize revenue from ads and sponsorships. As we’re especially hearing on many of iHeartRadio’s shows, pre-recorded third-party ads placed on these podcasts make them sound more and more like commercial radio. Recent research from Veritone shows that such ads are not as effective or appealing to listeners than the less-scalable host-read ads that podcasts have become known for.

This could put the iHeart/NPR axis on a collision course with the Spotify/Amazon axis. iHeart and NPR are increasingly dependent on Spotify for distribution, because Spotify is now, according to Statista, the most popular podcast app in the U.S. market, having recently leapt ahead of Apple Podcasts. (Google Podcasts, standard on Android devices, is now No. 3.) Amazon Music is likely to climb that list in the coming year or two.

In other words, Spotify and Amazon have increasing amounts of leverage against other podcast publishers. One or both of them could de-emphasize iHeart’s or NPR’s podcasts in their search results, make them more difficult to subscribe to, or require them to pay fees to be available on their apps. Conversely, shows published by iHeart, NPR, or other publishers may be so popular that they are “must-haves,” in which case the money could flow in the opposite direction, as it does in cable TV. To the extent antitrust law allows it, podcast publishers could require Spotify or Amazon to offer less popular shows as a condition of offering the big hits. There are lots of possibilities.

If any of this happens, we’ll have a podcasting world that looks more like television, with its tiers of free broadcast, basic cable, and premium cable channels, instead of the world of digital music where all of the services offer more or less the same enormous catalog of content. Amazon’s potential acquisition of Wondery puts podcasting on a path towards a crossroads; the next couple of years are going to be very interesting.

From Media in Perfectirishgifts

[opticien2-0]

2020 VISIONS Twenty Mobile trends for 2020

What does 2020 have in store for mobile and retail?

As the new year – nay, a new decade – hoves into view, we continue our look at what the future holds for mobile with these 20 predictions from Thomas Husson, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester

  I have just published a post sharing some of our marketing predictions for 2020. It made me realise that Forrester no longer publishes dedicated “mobile” predictions. Why? Because mobile has simply become a key driver and enabler of business transformation.

  Mobile is embedded everywhere. However, many brands wrongly think they have ticked the mobile box and move on to new and more disrupting technologies. In a nutshell, they want to move from mobile-first to AI-first.

  A couple of months ago, I published a report claiming that the concept of “mobile-first” was failing CMOs, that most brands were still not mature when it comes to mobile, and that they needed to reimagine mobile to activate the total brand experience.

  As a board member of the Mobile Marketing Association France (MMA) and an independent analyst, I was honored to give a keynote this week at the MMA Forum in Paris and share my perspective on what will happen in 2020 in the mobile space. In fact, I decided to share several mobile mega trends, some mobile media and advertising trends that I expect to happen or to accelerate, and some trends that will not happen!

  Mobile will be the catalyst for business transformation.The mobile revolution primarily consisted of changing customer expectations to be served in their moments of need and in their context. The age of the customer (the shift of power from institutions to customers) was accelerated because of mobile. To answer these growing expectations and make their own mobile mind shift, organizations had (and still have) to evolve their culture, organizations, and processes (think agile, DevOps, cross-functional pizza teams, etc.). This transition toward more adaptive enterprises is still a work in progress. This is not new but will accelerate next year.

  Mobile becomes the glue that connects new technologies at scale.Let’s not forget voice-based assistants (such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant) are primarily used on smartphones, not on smart home speakers. Augmented reality (AR) will start really taking off next year (think Google Maps’ AR experience or Snapchat’s augmented experiences) because it has become a platform play at scale: Developers can tap into more than 1 billion compatible smartphones to build new integrated experiences.

  Mobile will act as the personalization experience hub.It is not a channel but a way to deliver an integrated offline/online experience in real time. Some brands (think Starbucks, McDonald’s, Nike, Argos, John Lewis, and Schibsted, to name a few) get it and execute pretty well the integration of mobile into their marketing strategy. But most struggle and still need to fix their mobile foundation.

  Mobile becomes a key enabler of societal engagement for values-based customers.Think apps for good (e.g., Yuka), mobile accessibility (e.g., vocal commands for blind people), and green IT (including dark mode), even though the key issue here is when Gen Z will realize the largely negative impact of smartphone and digital on climate change.

  Leading CMOs will leverage mobile to optimize the marketing mix.MMA has proven through numerous cross marketing effectiveness research that many brands underinvest in mobile. We expect leaders to define the role of mobile in achieving growth objectives and to start measuring offline media impact in (almost) real time. For example, for retailers, to put it shortly, this is less about mCommerce and more about how mobile drives traffic to the store and generates total incremental revenue. Mobile contextual data and transactional point-of-service data are thus central to improving media attribution across every channel, not just mobile!

  Moment automation will require you to assemble your own (mobile) martech stack.Once you have defined key mobile moments across your customer journey, you must identify the right trigger points and automate content and messaging. Think push notifications and in-app messages on steroids. To do this right, it often means you need to assemble your own martech stack with leading mobile point solutions and integrate them with many other marketing systems. At the minimum, you need ASO (app store optimization), mobile CRM (customer relationship management), analytics, and attribution.

  Mobile data privacy becomes a strategic differentiator to establish trust.A lot of the hidden harvesting of consumer data happens through mobile. To establish trust and enable personalization (or lack thereof, if consumers precisely do not want to share data), it is key to integrate mobile into your privacy-by-design approach.

  App platforms will continue to get traction.The rise of super apps is not just happening with the likes of Tencent, Alibaba, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. This trend is accelerating in other regions, too, such as in South America. See this TechCrunch article here.

  Expect more rationalization of mobile interfaces.Many brands I have spoken to recently told me they suffer a lot from hybrid development that’s supposed to work across different platforms (think Flutter, React, or Kotlin) and that they prefer to focus on native apps and/or mobile web-first experiences. Forrester has claimed for years that PWA (progressive web apps) are a key way to deliver applike experiences. According to Forrester’s Q2 2019 Global Emerging Technology Executive Online Survey, 18% of digital executives plan to pilot PWA in the next 12 months.

  Leaders will integrate meaningful mobile metrics into their dashboards.Marketers measure too many vanity KPIs when it comes to mobile. Let’s measure less pure digital KPIs and more meaningful metrics: customer experience, incremental revenue,DAU/MAU (daily/monthly active users), CLV (customer lifetime value), etc.

  Mobile will drive more than 80% of digital ad growth next year.Looking at the top five EU countries, we expect PC advertising spending to remain flat, while mobile advertising will grow from €22.9 billion at the end of 2019 to €26.1 billion by the end of 2020 (representing 64% of total digital advertising spend).

  Retail media is set to explode.Mobile is only a component of the retail media opportunity but will play a key role, when it comes to “drive-to-store” offerings, for example. More specifically, Amazon generated $10 billion of ad revenue last year, and next year it is likely that it will represent more than 5% of its total revenue, increasingly challenging Google/Facebook’s duopoly. For more information, see my colleague Collin Colburn’s report here.

  Streaming fatigue will lead to new offerings.Again, far from being just a mobile play, but the war between Disney+, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, and low-cost Apple TV+ to compete with Netflix and Prime Video will exhaust consumers and lead to new content subscription models.

  Audio advertising will continue to grow fast, driven by podcasts as the next $1 billion ad format.Podcasts are massively listened to via mobile, and they will drive audio advertising more than voice-based assistants will.

  Visual search will take off for fashion and home decoration brands.Despite Pinterest’s initiatives, it is still early days for visual search. For selected brands, however, visual recommendations, and to a lesser extent, visual search will become key ways to engage consumers.

  And here are five trends of what will not happen…

5G will not matter to CMOs.Unless you’re a CMO at a telecom equipment company or a telco, you should not spend time thinking about 5G in the consumer space. Yes, it will matter for industrial players, but to consumers, 5G in 2020 will feel like 3G in 2004 or 4G in 2010; even urban areas in early-5G-rollout countries such as Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland will get an undifferentiated experience. And Apple’s launch of its 5G smartphone in Q3 of 2020 won’t change the game.

  Virtual reality (VR) marketing will remain niche.Despite more affordable VR headsets (Oculus Quest) and the success of the Beat Saber game, VR will mostly matter for B2B and industrial players or play a role in employee training. Marketing opportunities in the consumer space will grow but remain limited.

  More than 80% of AI conversations will not pass the Turing test.The vast majority of chatbot experiences will not leverage true NLG (natural language generation). Don’t get me wrong: Some chatbots will deliver value, but let’s not call them AI conversations.

  TikTok will not sell, and its IPO will be delayed until 2021.Explosion of mobile social videos will continue. TikTok would be an ideal target for the likes of Meredith, Snap, or Facebook but is not for sale and too costly anyway.

  RCS will not become a standard.Google and some telcos will roll out more rich communication service (think of it as the next generation of SMS), but they won’t truly scale in 2020. For more information about RCS, see Julie Ask’s report here.

from InternetRetailing https://ift.tt/2YF4mAp via IFTTT

[marviinmelton]

Kamarq, the “Netflix for furniture,” pulls designs amid plagiarism scandal

We’re living in the age of on-demand, subscription-based convenience, from Netflix to Car2Go. The new Japanese startup Kamarq is applying the same concept to the home, convinced that it may even be passé to assume that consumers, or at least young millennials, care to own the furniture they pay for these days.

However, the company may have overlooked the value of authenticity in its ambitious plans to disrupt the furniture industry. Hours after Kamarq launched its subscription furniture plan today in New York, the company told Co.Design via a statement that it would be pulling the majority of the collection after Instagram users identified the pieces as knockoffs of an earlier 2015 collection by independent designer Ana Kras.

Now, with the exception of two designs, Kamarq’s collection will never see the light of day. It’s a story that illustrates the pitfalls of this new, rapidly evolving model of design–and how, in the age of social media, there are always #receipts.

[Photo: Travis Chantar/courtesy Kamarq]

But let’s back up: What is Kamarq? The company–whose name is a play on the word for “my room” in Indonesian–offers a subscription-based model with six and 10-month plans for its furniture items, like a single unit of a modular shelf. Order a piece online—as of now, debut prices range from $5 to $18 per month per item—and at the end of your plan, you can choose to either keep it or have it sent back to exchange for another product, presumably from the next, newer collection.

The pay-as-you-go model doesn’t just enable instant gratification, it doubles down on it: Customers only receive new, unused items, shipped worldwide in ten days from Indonesia, where they’re manufactured at a high-volume facility with quick turnaround. All returned items, advertised as made from 100% recycled materials, are sent to be pulped and reused for future collections.

Kamarq is taking a “fast fashion” approach to disrupting the market, says fashion designer and erstwhile Lady Gaga collaborator Nicola Formichetti, who, along with friend and creative consultant PJ Mattan was tapped to design and direct Kamarq’s debut collection. Their designs include modular shelves, seating, and tables in an array of bright, pop monochromes, made to mix and match in an accessible, lighthearted way. Arranged into elaborate color vignettes paired with miniature prototypes, lush flower arrangements, objets, toys, and other items from Formichetti and Mattan’s personal collections, the preview installation that debuted this week at NYCxDesign was an energetic display that touted a sugary lack of self-seriousness.

“We do other jobs, in fashion and elsewhere, so we just wanted to have this be a fun thing that’s also recyclable and ecological, and also reasonable in price, which is different from what’s happening in furniture. It’s like a styling approach to furniture, which is what the young generation needs,” Formichetti told me at the preview. Added Mattan: “We kept it intentionally very simple, because we’re not product designers or industrial designers, and we didn’t want to pretend we were.”

The duo’s debut collection for Kamarq is instantly alluring, accessible, priced to be affordable, and promises to be more ecological than most–a feat to achieve all in combination, to be sure. But like many fast fashion retailers that have been caught up in plagiarism accusations, it was almost immediately tied back to an independent designer’s work.

[Photo: Travis Chantar/courtesy Kamarq]

Formichetti and Mattan were forthright in naming some specific influences, all august Italian architect-designers: The Memphis Group, the contrarian and visually aggressive 1980s design collective founded by Ettore Sottsass, which has come back into teeming popularity among millennials, its riot of patterns and punchy graphic appeal well-suited to the visual currency of Instagram; Gaetano Pesce, the elder enfant terrible with a maximalist approach to material, color, and experimental sculpture; and the minimalist luxury designs of Mario Bellini, most apparently his Il Colonnato table for Cassina–variations of chunky cylindrical legs and simple geometric tops, all made of solid marble and stone, which often fetch thousands in the secondary market. Bellini’s iconic 1977 design is a clear reference for the Kamarq collection, all circles and lines and monochromes.

But it’s almost a dead ringer for Slon, a 2015 collection by the independent New York-based designer Ana Kras, who, also showing inspiration from Il Colonnato and Memphis, updated and edited the classic with several subtle twists. Bellini’s version, meant to evoke the columns of Stonehenge or the Parthenon, places each table leg slightly apart. Kras’s reimagining sets the design to an earthy palette, clusters the legs together, and rounds the collection out with seating and lidded stools that double as containers—as does Kamarq’s debut collection, on all three points. Where Kamarq and Kras deviate is the price point: Slon pieces start at $1,600, carried by the well-known New York gallery-boutique Matter. Fittingly, Slon, which translates to “elephant” in Kras’ native Serbian, might just be the elephant in the room.

This wouldn’t be the first time Kras, who is also a photographer and model, has seen brands run with her independent designs: In 2016, the fashion brand Marni released a collection of string-covered pendant lights that shared likenesses to her Bonbon collection.

Slon tables 2015 / designed for @mattermade @matterstore ???? OG

A post shared by Аna Kraš (@teget) on May 15, 2018 at 7:11pm PDT

Asked if the collection also referenced Kras’ design at yesterday’s morning preview, Formichetti and Mattan didn’t respond but instead eagerly showed me images of Bellini’s work on an iPad, flipping through variations of Il Colonnato. I wasn’t the only one to notice a likeness to Kras’ work, though: Later that afternoon, various designers began commenting on Formichetti and Mattan’s Instagram posts taken that morning, calling it out as a direct copy. For her part, Kras posted images from Slon on her Instagram account and website, bolstered by friends and followers proclaiming her design the original.

By the next day, the popular and feared Instagram account @dietprada—which tracks and pokes fun at offenders within fashion’s copycat culture—joined the scuffle and began posting receipts on Stories. One showed an old post from Mattan documenting his visit to see Slon at Matter when it launched in 2015. Shade moves fast in the social media world.

This morning, in an exclusive statement shared with Co.Design, Jamie Gray, the proprietor of Matter who developed Slon with Kras, was clear on his stance:

I think if Ana had never designed Slon and I had never produced it with her, I would totally agree with the Mario Bellini reference. If Ana had said that she was inspired by Bellini I’d say, yeah! But that’s not really what happened is it? In truth this is totally fucked up. PJ came to Ana’s show at Matter in 2015. And three years later he’s releasing a collection that references that collection, Slon. Or more to the point, copies Slon. Right down to the name. It’s bad enough that Instagram has become the de facto intern for many designers who without any filter copy what they see in their feed. But to walk in to Matter, see a collection, even post it to your own Instagram account and then release near replicas three years later under your own name. That’s just terrible. We’re all fighting to protect our IP and it’s obviously not easy. But I didn’t expect to see this from someone who’s been a supposed fan of Matter for years. And judging from the response to the collection on IG I’m not the only one that’s disappointed and angered to see respected people  in the design industry getting behind this. It’s just careless. And it’s disheartening to work so hard to develop and build something with integrity to then see it dumbed down, chewed up and spit back out as an original. I call bullshit.

Shortly after, Formichetti and Mattan shared the following statement via Kamarq’s publicists, announcing plans to recall portions of the collection, just one day into its launch:

This week we debuted our inaugural collection with Japanese brand, Kamarq. Part of the collection was heavily inspired by the elegant long legs of Mario Bellini’s set of Il Colonnato tables from the 1970’s. We acknowledge that certain pieces could be attributed to the work of designer Ana Kras, and out of respect for Ana, we will be removing these pieces from the collection. Kamarq is an ever-evolving brand that will strive to work with many different designers, and we remain respectful of and committed to supporting the creative community at large.

Reached for comment, Kras herself shared the following statement with Co.Design:

When I was sent the screengrab of a post about the Elephant collection by Kamarq few months ago – I laughed. Not only because the pieces looked very similar to my ‘Slon’ collection, but what stunned me the most is the fact they translated the name as well – since ‘Slon’ means ‘Elephant’ in Serbian, my mother tongue. Yesterday I was overwhelmed by the support of the community – so many people i don’t know messaged me pointing out the Kamarq launch of that same ‘Elephant’ collection in NYC – stating it’s a collaboration between PJ Mattan and Nicola Formichetti. On PJ Mattan’s instagram we can see a photo of my ‘Slon’ tables that he posted upon his visit to the launch at Matter store in 2015. We are all inspired by many things that we see and like, but to be “inspired” by the design so literally as to copy the design and name it the same way via translation to another language, to me seems very disrespectful.

While it’s safe to assume a “fast fashion” approach to anything would involve some form of pastiche, it would be cynical to excuse plagiarism. One thing is certain: In our hypervisual age of collage and constant #content creation, it can be decidedly hard to tell the snake’s head from its tail. The tide has turned for Kamarq, and in record time—faster than you can say “fast fashion.”

Kamarq, the “Netflix for furniture,” pulls designs amid plagiarism scandal published first on https://petrotekb.tumblr.com/

[jccamus]

News Podcasts and the Opportunities for Publishers

News Podcasts and the Opportunities for Publishers https://ift.tt/2DDuJgy

1. Introduction

More than 15 years after the term was first coined, podcasting has become one of the hottest topics in media. Our Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that podcasting is now a worldwide phenomenon, with 36% of those surveyed accessing a podcast each month and around 15% using a news podcast. Edison Research estimates that around 90m people listen to podcasts each month in the United States – a number that has doubled since 2015.1 In the United Kingdom podcast usage is up 40% in the last year,2 driven by a younger – plugged in – generation looking for information, entertainment, and distraction. At the same time advertisers are shifting significant budgets into podcasting, while private and public financiers are supporting a range of start-ups in Europe and North America (e.g. Luminary, Himalaya, Podimo, Sybel). Apple has been synonymous with podcasting for many years, but now other big tech companies are investing in the medium. Spotify is commissioning and paying for original podcasts while Google has made them visible in search results at the same time as developing its own podcast service for Android phones.

Publisher interest has grown following the success of The Daily from the New York Times, which has built an audience of 2m daily listens along with substantial annual revenues. Dozens of daily news podcasts have launched over the last 18 months.

There has been much written about podcasts in general and the drivers around growth, but there has been less focus on news podcasts and the creative and commercial opportunities for publishers. Nor has there been much attempt to understand differences between domestic markets, especially outside the English-speaking world. This research sets out to redress that balance by answering the following questions.

What types of news podcasts are being produced, who is producing them, and how does that differ across countries?

How big is the daily news podcast category in particular? Why are publishers investing?

What are wider publisher content and monetisation strategies?

What role are platforms and other intermediaries playing in discovery and monetisation?

What are the future prospects for publishers in this space?

We have categorised the top news podcasts in five countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, France, and Sweden) and linked this with wider industry data on consumption and demographics. We also interviewed around 30 leading publishers (including the Washington Post, Slate, BBC, the Guardian, ABC, The Australian, Les Echos, Radio France, Swedish Radio, Dagens Nyheter), platforms such as Spotify, Google, and Acast, independent producers such as Stitcher, advertising executives, and podcast experts too.

Key Findings

News podcasts make up a small proportion (6%) of the 770,000 existing podcasts, as categorised by Apple, but the general appeal and stickiness of news content means that the category punches well above its weight in terms of consumption. News makes up around a fifth (21%) of the most popular episodes in the United States Apple charts. It is a similar picture in other countries, with a third (34%) of the top podcast episodes in France categorised as news, and just under a fifth in Sweden (18%), Australia (18%), and the United Kingdom (16%).

The category itself is also growing rapidly. The number of new news podcasts globally rose by almost 12,000 between January and October 2019 – an increase of around a third (32%) according to data provided by Chartable. Talk and interview shows are the most popular sub-genre within news, along with one-off narrative series, but daily news has become an increasingly important focus. We have identified almost 60 native daily news podcasts across our five countries (see full list in Appendix B) with the majority of these shows having launched in the last 18 months. Some of the most popular daily news podcasts in the United States – such as The Daily from the New York Times – are attracting audiences of millions, while others are struggling in an increasingly competitive market. Elsewhere audiences are more modest but are showing consistent growth. We have identified three sub-categories of daily news podcasts:

Micro-bulletins, with a length of between 1 and 5 minutes.

News round-ups, with a length of between 6 and 15 minutes.

Deep-dives, with a length of 20 minutes or more.

Our research shows that many publishers from print or digital-born backgrounds have focused on single-subject deep-dives that play to their strengths in analysis and explanation. Print journalists have enthusiastically embraced these new forms of storytelling, finding them a natural add-on to existing workflows. By contrast, many broadcasters have focused on producing micro-bulletins and redistributing existing radio programmes as podcasts. Where they have commissioned digital-born or native podcasts, these have often been aimed at younger and more diverse audiences that they are finding hard to reach through linear channels.

Some commercial publishers are already deriving significant revenue from podcasts, especially in the United States. More than half of Slate’s total revenue now comes from podcasts. NPR is expecting to earn $55m from podcasting next year, overtaking radio in terms of sponsorship income. But outside the English-speaking world and in smaller markets, monetisation is far more challenging, with lower consumption and much lower interest from advertisers. But short-term revenue is often not the only motivation. Publishers see podcasts as a good way to build brand awareness and loyalty, which some hope may eventually transfer into subscriptions or donations.

New platforms are shaking up the podcast market, bringing new ideas and extra investment. Apple still accounts for the majority of podcast use but Spotify has doubled its market share in the last year.3 A number of paid content providers are commissioning original content, using Netflix-type models, and offering significant sums for the production of exclusive content. This is opening up new opportunities for publishers around comedy, sport, lifestyle, and high-quality narrative series.

But the growing influence of tech companies and other intermediaries is also bringing familiar challenges. Many publishers fear they could be helping platforms build profitable businesses on the back of their content. Others worry that they could lose their direct relationship with audiences, including first-party data, as platforms take the credit for content. Public broadcasters, in particular, are trying to develop their own destinations for audio content and a number have started to publish first in their own platforms or are withholding content altogether from third parties.

Most publishers and experts feel there is still significant room for growth, with new voice-driven interfaces making it easier to access on-demand audio in the home and on the move. But the scale of the opportunity remains unclear, with revenue still relatively modest and increasing competition from platforms and independent producers. Podcasting is attracting younger audiences but these are predominantly from the better educated ‘latte-drinking’ classes. Reaching mainstream audiences will require a broader range of content and audio formats, better interfaces, and improved distribution. These changes are likely to take some time.

2. Methodology and Definitions

The aim of the analysis was to map the news podcast sector across different countries. In order to do so, we collected data from the Apple Podcasts charts in five countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Sweden). Our methodology only explored content that was tagged as News & Politics by publishers themselves in July 20194 and focused on the top (trending) 200 podcasts in each country. This allowed us to capture a wide range of well-used content from daily news to documentary in a consistent way. However, it will have missed out some specialist content, such as sport, comedy, and lifestyle areas, as well as less popular content.

We further categorised each podcast to identify sub-genres (daily news, narrative serialised podcast, chat/interview, etc.) along with producers (broadcasters, print and digital-born publishers, independent podcast companies, etc.). We used the Apple charts because these metadata have become the industry standard and the majority of listening still happens via the Apple podcasts app. These charts, which are not fully transparent, and are loosely based on the number of subscriptions to a particular podcast feed, helped us to identify podcasts that are worth categorising in each country. Apple is only one source of podcasts, and other services (e.g. Spotify) may show different results.

Understanding podcast consumption is more challenging so we have used a variety of sources. We have used survey data (Edison Infinite Dial and Digital News Report) to help put podcasts into a wider context as well as provide robust data on demographics. The Apple Podcasts Episode charts, based on recent usage around specific shows, help provide a picture of relative consumption – even if actual numbers are not publicly available. To help fill in these gaps, we have in some cases used consumption data provided directly by individual publishers, or we have referenced aggregated publisher data from Podtrac in the United States and Poddindex in Sweden.

We chose the United States, the UK, and Australia because they have been quick to embrace podcasting, with fast developing monetisation and professional podcast services. By contrast, France has been slower to adopt podcasts but has a vibrant and emerging independent sector and is an example of a large non-English-speaking country. Sweden is the home of Spotify and another country with a high level of podcast consumption. We interviewed leading publishers in all five countries, along with platforms, other intermediaries, and industry experts. We also included three interviews from Denmark, a small European market which is showing innovation in business models and through a recently launched paid podcast platform, Podimo. A full list of interviewees is included in Appendix A of this report.

What is a Podcast Anyway?

In the Digital News Report, we define a podcast as an episodic series of digital audio files, which you can download, subscribe to, or listen to. Technically the programme or show itself sits inside a feed, which can be accessed via an app (sometimes known as a podcatcher) such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podcast Addicts – or via a publisher app or website, such as BBC Sounds or SR Play from Swedish Radio, or the New York Times, which has recently incorporated a podcast feature in its app. But in the ­last few years podcasts have also become available via music services such as Spotify and Pandora, via voice platforms such as Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant, and via Google search itself. As audio becomes more integrated into mainstream consumer experiences across the internet, these early technical definitions are becoming less meaningful. Individual shows are increasingly being surfaced across the web often without the need to subscribe to a feed or use a specialist app. Given this, it is perhaps more useful to consider the other characteristics of a podcast, in terms of content or form, that make it different from a traditional radio programme.

A number of previous studies have noted that podcast listening is a more active process, with listeners typically listening intently from the start, whereas radio is often consumed distractedly as a flow of information.5 This allows shows to be constructed in a more demanding way, often using immersive and narrative storytelling techniques borrowed from movies and television drama. ‘It is often more filmic,’ says Kellie Riordan, manager at ABC Audio Studios. ‘Radio tends to be topic driven whereas podcasts – even if they’re news podcasts – build in storytelling, and plot points, and casting, and character, and scene building.’ Marguerite Howell, co-editor of The Intelligence at The Economist says it is not just about the way shows are constructed, it is also about tone: ‘It’s much more intimate, where sometimes with the radio it’s as if you’re being assaulted.’

But it is not just the production techniques. The context is also different, with 90% of podcast listening happening alone, largely using headphones attached to a smartphone, whereas radio listening is often a shared experience.6 This tends to push creators towards a more intimate experience where the relationship with the host is critical. ‘People are choosing to listen to that particular host either daily or weekly and make that part of their habit,’ according to Susie Warhurst, SVP of Content at Acast. ‘You are incredibly engaged with the content.’

Others point to the democratic nature of podcasts – the way that low barriers to entry encourage diverse viewpoints. Podcasts open up the possibility of super-serving an almost infinite number of passions and niches. In that sense they are different from radio programmes which, in terms of the spoken word, have tended to serve a more general audience within a particular broadcast distribution area.

Attempts to neatly define and categorise podcasts are often problematic, as this study shows. A significant proportion of popular podcasts originated as radio programmes but can now be enjoyed in a new context. We also find broadcasters adapting and reversioning content as well as commissioning podcast-first content that finds itself back on the radio. In this report we will use the terms native podcast and catch-up radio, because it helps us understand the production and supply of content. However, these differences are not clear cut and audiences themselves rarely make these distinctions.

Term

Definition

Examples

Podcast

A podcast is an episodic series of digital audio files, which you can download, subscribe to, or listen to via a range of technologies (RSS feed, podcasting apps)

771,000 examples catalogued by Apple

Native Podcast

An audio programme produced and designed as an on-demand programme/show, without being bound to the radio or TV broadcasting schedule.

The Daily (New York Times), The Teachers Pet (The Australian), P3 Dystopia (Swedish Radio)

Catch-up Radio

A time-shifted, on-demand programme formerly broadcast on radio (or even TV)

Morning Edition (NPR), AM (ABC), In Our Time (BBC), Le Téléphone Sonne (France Inter)

3. Comparing the Production of News Podcasts across Five Countries

This chapter looks at the different types of content that are being produced. It looks first at the news in the wider context of podcasting before looking at typologies of news content. Finally, it examines the different producers of news content and links these to the typologies.

The Importance of News in the Wider Podcast Ecosystem

Taking native and catch-up radio podcasts together, we find 771,000 podcasts in the Apple directory as of November 2019, but the news category makes up a relatively small proportion of these – 6% or about 50,000 podcasts. And yet we find that news makes up more than a fifth (21%) of the top 250 places in the Apple episode charts: ‘These episode charts are reflective of consumption, not just recent subscriptions. So clearly news pods punch above their weight,’ says Dave Zohrob, CEO of Chartable, which tracks changes in the podcast ecosystem.

Across all genres, the number of new podcasts is growing at a rate of more than 200,000 a year, though this rate has started to slow a little (see the next chart). Many of these are produced by hobbyists and individuals, but this growth is also increasingly driven by higher-quality professional content with significant investment from broadcasters and digital-born publishers, as well as those with a background in print. There have been almost 12,000 new news podcasts so far this year, representing an increase of around a third (32%) in the last year.

News podcasts 2005–2019

Source: Chartable

While some publishers have been creating and distributing podcasts for 10 or 15 years, it was the blockbuster success of Serial (2014), an investigative journalism podcast developed as a ‘spin off’ from the American public radio show This American Life, that kicked off this current wave of excitement. The show’s first two series notched up 340m downloads,7 sparking a new genre of true crime investigations including break-out hits S-Town and more recently The Teacher’s Pet in Australia. Noting renewed interest in podcasts, the New York Times started to develop a daily news show to showcase its journalism in an audio format. Borrowing techniques from American public radio, the show launched in early 2017, becoming a surprise hit, in part because of the podcast’s ‘conversational and intimate’ tone.8 In turn this has led to the development of a new genre of narrative news podcasts that take a deep-dive into one or more stories.

In the United States listening patterns have already started to change dramatically: ‘Strategically we know that we would be completely foolish if we weren’t committing ourselves to pushing aggressively into the on-demand space,’ says Chris Turpin, Vice President for Editorial Innovation and Special Projects at National Public Radio (NPR), who notes that the podcast audience is much younger than the broadcast audience (see next chart).

Source: Digital News Report 2019: Q11 A podcast is an episodic series of digital audio files, which you can download, subscribe or listen to. Which of the following types of podcast have you listened to in the last month? Base: All markets – UK= 2023, US=2012

But for other publishers, audio represents another significant disruption to traditional models. ‘You can see consumer habits changing to include audio more in daily routines,’ says Chris Duncan, Managing Director of The Times and Sunday Times. ‘It feels like a positive opportunity but also it’s a threat for attention – so it’s a place that we have to be.’

Native vs Catch-Up Radio

The next chart shows the proportion of trending news podcasts that are native (digital-born), as opposed to catch-up radio content, across our five countries.

Percentage of top 200 news podcasts that are native vs catch-up in five markets

Source: Apple Podcasts charts top 200 News & Politics, 16 July 2019 (Domestic only, n = 200 in each market)

It is striking that in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden ‘native’ podcasts are more prevalent than podcasts originating as radio programmes. In these countries more than two-thirds of the top 200 podcasts are made first for this medium, showing both how media companies have invested in this area and also how this has been matched by consumer interest.

In France the situation is different, with the majority of trending podcasts (68%) being catch-up radio programmes from mainstream radio stations such as the Radio France group (France Culture, France Inter, and France Info), RTL, and Europe 1. This shows the different levels of maturity of podcasting in France, where catch-up radio still dominates and where there has been a relative lack of investment from other publishers.

Further analysis shows that the most popular shows in France tend to be on-demand versions of debate and current affairs programmes (e.g. Le 7–9 from France Inter and RTL Soir from RTL) as well as short segments from broadcast, such as the three-minute Géopolitique morning section from Pierre Haski (France Inter). In the United States we find just 16% of the trending podcasts are catch-up, but these include audio versions of popular cable television programmes, such as The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC), and highlights from The Daily Show (Comedy Central). In the UK, commercial broadcasters like LBC (James O’Brien, Nigel Farage) and Talk Radio compete with the BBC with offcuts and recuts of popular shows.

Catch-up radio is often a good starting point for news podcasts, but over time we see high-quality native podcasts competing strongly with broadcast content – often resonating more with consumers.

Domestic vs Foreign Podcasts: US and UK Podcasts have International Reach

Our chart explores the extent to which people are accessing podcasts from outside their home country. Once again, we see significant differences across our markets.

Percentage of top 200 news podcasts that are domestic vs foreign in five markets

Source: Apple Podcasts charts top 200 News & Politics, 16 July 2019 (n= 200 for each country)

The dominance of the US podcasting industry, especially the production of high-quality narrative podcasts, is reflected in the significant pink wedges that we see in the pie charts from the UK, Australia, and Sweden. More than half (58%) of the podcasts in the Australian charts are produced internationally, with US shows such as White Lies (NPR), and Cold (KSL and Wondery) leading the charge – along with those from the UK. This research suggests that podcasts can – to some extent at least – break down national boundaries around audio content. Seven programmes are represented in the top 200 places in all of the countries studied. These include The Daily, Can He Do That?, and The Argument from the US, the Global News podcast from the BBC, The Intelligence by The Economist, and the true crime podcast Uncover from the Canadian public broadcaster CBC.

Over time, one might expect the proportion of US podcasts in the top 200 to reduce as domestic podcast scenes become stronger, with higher quality content. On the other hand, smaller countries with high levels of fluency in English, like Sweden, are likely to continue to look outwards for relevant content.

By contrast, in the United States and France, the podcast scene is dominated by local producers, albeit for very different reasons. In the United States only 13 of the top 200 shows (7%) are non-domestic, with half of those being British. Strong domestic competition makes it extremely hard to break into this American market. In France almost nine in ten (87%) of our trending podcasts were locally produced, with language clearly a factor.

Different Types of Popular News Podcasts across Countries

We have identified five types of news podcasts, which were categorised using the following criteria.

Type

Description

Examples

Daily News/current affairs

This is either a) a NATIVE and DAILY podcast focusing on NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS or b) a daily radio (or TV) show repackaged as podcast.

Post Reports (Washington Post), La Story (Les Echos), Ekot (Sveriges Radio)

Talk/Interview

unscripted

A TALK / DEBATE / CONVERSATION show. Can be native or catch-up. Mostly these are weekly and non-scripted.

Political Gabfest (Slate), The Nigel Farage Show (LBC), The Professor and The Hack (10 Speaks)

Narrative series – single topic

NATIVE podcast with a SEASONAL / IRREGULAR frequency. A podcast in series focused on one story / investigation / true crime narrative.

Serial, The Assassination (BBC), The Teacher’s Pet (the Australian), Injustices (Louie Média)

Other documentary – many topics

DOCUMENTARY strand released at a REGULAR frequency (weekly, monthly, etc.). It reports on a wide range of topics. Can be native or catch-up.

P3 Dystopia (SR), Code Switch (NPR), Slow Burn (Slate), Une lettre d’Amérique (RTL)

Audio long read

NATIVE podcast. A read of newspaper/magazine feature. Can be regular or seasonal / irregular.

Guardian Long Read (Guardian)

Les éditos de la rédaction (Les Echos)

Percentage of different types of popular news podcasts AGGREGATED TOTALS FROM THE UK, THE US, AUSTRALIA, SWEDEN, AND FRANCE

Source: Apple Podcasts charts top 200 News & Politics, 16 July 2019 (n= 1000; 200 from each country)

Our research shows that talk and interview formats were most common across all five countries, accounting for more than four in ten (44%) news podcasts across all five countries. These are shows like the Political Gabfest from Slate, which was one of the pioneers of this format. Talk radio hosts such as James O’Brien in the UK have also found success by reversioning their broadcast shows as podcasts.

The one-off narrative series is another popular format (24%), with true crime hits coming from the US, as well as Australia and the UK. The Teacher’s Pet was a true crime podcast from the Australian that was downloaded more than 30 million times. The Assassination from the BBC was an award-winning investigation into the death of Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.

Daily news podcasts made up 17% of the total, and this category includes catch-up morning radio shows, as well as native podcasts including short-form bulletins like NPR News Now, and deep-dives like Today in Focus from the Guardian and Aftonbladet Daily. We explore this category in much more detail in Chapter 4.

Who are the Main Producers of News Podcasts across Countries?

Next we identified the main producers of both catch-up radio and native podcasts.

Type

Description

Examples

Broadcaster

From a TV or radio background. High level of radio shows reversioned as podcasts. Some are commissioning native podcasts

NPR, BBC, ABC, SR, Radio France

Print / Digital Media

From either a) a newspaper/magazine background or a digital-born publication

Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Parisien, Slate, Vox

Podcasting company

A studio producing original programmes designed to be podcast

Gimlet Media, District Productive, Louie Média, 10 Speaks, Audioboom

Independent

An individual or a group of individuals producing one single podcast show. Often self-funded or via donation platforms like Patreon.

The Bellingcat Podcast, Reasons to be Cheerful with Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd

Other

A range of diverse actors, from universities to institutes to political parties. Mostly non-commercial

Reuters Institute

It is noteworthy that broadcasters are consistently the biggest producers of domestic podcasts in each country – mainly because of the amount of radio catch-up material they are able to provide. This is particularly the case in France, where 138 out of the top 200 are taken directly from the broadcast schedule. Around 80% of the top domestic podcasts are produced by French radio stations Radio France, RTL, and Europe 1, but only around 5% of these are native. French publishers from a print or digital background are now starting to invest, with legacy media such as Le Monde, Le Parisien, and Les Echos launching a new range of podcasts over the past few months. Independent podcasting companies tend to focus on non-news areas such as video games and gender issues.

By contrast the US podcast scene is more evenly split, with publishers from a print or digital-born background (28%) producing almost as many popular podcasts as broadcasters (35%).

Top producers of domestic news podcasts by country Percentage of each type

Source: Apple Podcasts charts top 200 News & Politics, 16 July 2019 (US=186. UK=114, Australia=84, Sweden=119, France=174)

Another striking feature of the podcasting scene in the United States is the strength of podcast production companies such as Gimlet, Stitcher, and Wondery. These studios produce 26 of the top trending domestic news shows in the United States (19%) and their shows are widely consumed around the world. Wondery recently held the top chart position in seven countries around the world with its blockbuster true crime series Dr Death, the story of a two-year-killing spree committed by spinal surgeon Christopher Duntsch. The show has been translated into a number of languages and is destined for a TV spin-off.

In many cases podcast studios are creating content in partnership with media brands. Stitcher produces Today Explained with Vox Media and Wondery collaborated with the Boston Globe on Gladiator, an investigative series about the secret life of the American footballer Aaron Hernandez.

Elsewhere the independent sector is far more nascent. In France, Louie Média has produced a number of successful narrative podcasts, including Injustices, a series about sexual harassment within French journalism. In Australia there are a handful of independent producers working closely with media companies while the television company Ten has recently set up a native podcast studio called 10 Speaks. It has created a talk show called The Professor and the Hack and a true crime hit Where’s William Tyrrell? By comparison, in the UK there was no domestic podcast production in the top 200, though a number of independent production companies do create hit shows on behalf of the BBC so this figure may be slightly misleading.

Overall, independent podcasting companies account for less than one tenth of all the popular domestic news podcasts listed in the five countries studied. This could be because it is hard to compete with traditional media companies in news – so the focus is often on documentary, lifestyle, sport, or creating content for brands. It will be interesting to see if countries outside the US can support more independent studios as the market grows – or if big US companies will move in.

Print and Digital-Born Companies See Opportunities for Disruption

Although broadcasters are the largest podcast producers in all five countries studied, print and digital media companies produce more of the trending native podcasts overall, according to our analysis. Print and digital publishers have focused more on talk and interview formats that are relatively cheap to produce as well as deep-dive daily news podcasts. Both of these formats allow them to reuse existing journalistic talent, showcasing the expertise of their newsrooms.

Percentage of native and domestic news podcasts in each category Print/Digital-born vs Broadcaster

Source: Apple Podcasts charts top 200 News & Politics, 16 July 2019 Base: Native and domestic podcasts aggregated total across countries, n=247

In total, half of the trending native podcasts (50%) produced by print and digital media companies are classic talk/debate shows. A number of the most successful are personality-led shows such as the Ezra Klein show (Vox), Giles Coren Has No Idea (The Times), or Intercepted With Jeremy Scahill (The Intercept). Others are branded with the name of the outlet, such as FT Politics, The Spectator Podcast, The Economist Asks, and Politics And More.

By contrast radio broadcasters have looked to leverage their skills in documentaries and audio production in creating more one-off series. All the main broadcasters of the countries studied have invested in serialised podcasts. These include Death In Ice Valley – a true crime podcast produced by the BBC and Norway’s NRK – and Russia If You’re Listening, a landmark series from ABC (Australia) about the Mueller report.

Overall, one-off series represent just over half (53%) of the total of native broadcaster podcasts listed in the trending charts. Broadcaster-produced native talk and debate shows tend to be either closely focused on one specific topic (e.g. Brexitcast by the BBC), or try to bring the listener ‘behind the headlines’, e.g. Sky News Australia 2600 Talks podcast, or Political Thinking With Nick Robinson (BBC). Not surprisingly, the long-read format is only created by print publications.

4. Deep-Dive into Daily News Podcasts

In this chapter we will take a deeper look at the native daily news podcast segment. We have identified almost 60 of these in the five countries studied. The vast majority have launched in the last 18 months.

The evolution of news podcasts THE US, THE UK, AUSTRALIA, FRANCE, SWEDEN ONLY

Source: RISJ research (The full list of daily news podcasts is included in Appendix B to this report.)

The 59 native daily news podcasts identified divide into three broad sections:

Micro-bulletins – short news bulletins of just a few minutes that aim to provide a quick summary of the day’s news. These are often aimed at voice devices such as the Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Examples include BBC Minute and NPR News Now.

News round-ups – these are longer podcasts that have the aim of briefing people at particular points in the day with a short update. Examples include the FT News Briefing.

Deep-dive analysis – these typically take one story for deeper analysis. Examples include The Daily from the New York Times.

In the following chart we have mapped the length of these podcasts against these different types in order to highlight three length clusters. Micro-bulletins have an average length of around three minutes, news round-ups are around 10 minutes, and the deep-dives tend to be around 20 minutes or longer.

Daily news podcasts: length by category

Average length calculated from the last 15 episodes from September 2019 Source: RISJ analysis

Deep Dive Podcasts

In terms of popularity, it tends to be the longer deep dives that are the biggest hit with consumers – at least in the UK and the US. The Podtrac ranking for September 2019 shows The Daily as the most popular podcast in the United States, with NPR’s Up First, which is a news round-up, at number four. By contrast, news round-ups do best in Sweden, with Ekot and Omni Pod achieving top listening figures according to Poddindex.

Popular native daily news podcasts in five countries

United States

United Kingdom

France

Australia

Sweden

The Daily – New York Times

Up First – NPR

Today Explained – Vox

*News Now – NPR

Post Reports – Washington Post

Start Here – ABC News

Skimm This – The Skimm

What Next – Slate

The Journal – Wall Street Journal

Today in Focus –Guardian

Beyond Today – BBC

The Intelligence – Economist

FT News Briefing

The Leader – Evening Standard

La Story – Les Echos

Code Source – Le Parisen

Programme B – Binge Audio

The Signal – ABC News

7am – Schwartz Media

The Quicky – Mamamia

Squiz today – Squiz

*Ekot – Swedish RadioOmni Pod – Schibsted

Aftonbladet Daily – Schibsted

Di Morgonkoll – Dagens Industri

* These are not strictly native as they are radio bulletins updated many times a day. They are included because they have been adapted and branded for on demand and made available as podcasts

Daily news podcasts are not just delivering reach, they are also bringing deeper engagement. Private data from publishers show that listeners come back several times a week and listen to the majority of each show – completion rates tend to be between 60% and 90%. This suggests engagement times of more than an hour per podcast user per week, which compares extremely favourably to a few minutes a week for the average website visitor.9 ‘We are thrilled to have 25 minutes a day with people that we didn’t have before,’ says Erik Borenstein, Director of Audio at the New York Times. ‘We really think of The Daily as the new Front Page.’

Many of our interviewees referenced The Daily as an inspiration for starting their news podcast, and it is not surprising that formats and length of deep-dive podcasts that we uncovered in this research are relatively uniform (see examples below). The group in France which owns the business paper Les Echos and popular daily Le Parisien looked at The Daily when looking to create first-mover advantage in France. Both publications worked with recently acquired start-up Binge Audio to develop their daily news podcasts and quickly settled on the format of one big story, as presenter of La Story Pierrick Fay recalls: ‘It’s the format that works in the United States. For two months, I listened to what was being done, as we designed our new show.’ Le Parisien cancelled its audio briefing for Amazon Alexa devices to make room for a deep-dive podcast: ‘The number one goal was to tell a few stories differently, with a podcast daily news that lasts about twenty minutes,’ says Editorial Deputy Director Pierre Chausse.

Others have defined themselves almost as an alternative to The Daily. ‘We saw the afternoon space as an opportunity because a lot of shows were consolidated around the morning,’ says Jessica Stahl, Head of Audio at the Washington Post, which launched more than a year after the Times with a proposition that was aimed at evening commuters. The Post has also tried to differentiate itself with a format of three stories each day, showing off the variety of its journalism as well as its depth.

The Economist also settled on a three-story format for The Intelligence, with the aim of showcasing the global spread of its correspondents and building awareness for its brand in the United States. It hits the market at 6am Eastern Time but, because the show is produced in London, the time-difference allows the team to add more newsy elements at the top of the podcast. The Wall Street Journal operates two deep-dive podcasts: one 15-minute single-item investigation called The Journal produced with Gimlet, and Business Wars, a serialised battle between two companies told in daily bites, which is a co-production with Wondery.

News Round-Ups and Micro-Bulletins

In the United States, the most successful news round-up show is Up First from National Public Radio. This 12-minute show is actually a hybrid, with the original interviews airing on NPR soon after 5am. These are then recut with the same host and given more of a podcast feel. NPR’s Chris Turpin says this is an effective way to reach a new audience without breaking the bank: ‘The same material is reaching an audience that is on average at least 20 years younger than our broadcasting audience with the same hosts.’ NPR says that the audience for Up First is still much smaller than the morning radio audience but runs into millions and is up 50% in the last year.

The Financial Times has also gone for a news round-up approach aimed at the business community in the US. The FT News Briefing typically runs to 9 or 10 minutes and covers three or four news stories and then one analytical item in greater depth. It is the FT’s fastest-growing podcast, surpassing a million monthly listens in August 2019: ‘It’s not a behind the scenes, deeper dive,’ says Renée Kaplan, Head of Audience and New Content Strategies at the FT, who says the aim is not to compete head to head with the other big players. ‘It is a business and markets focused news update that is really meant to equip you to start your day.’

We also find a number of micro-bulletins, such as NPR’s News Now, which is the recut radio bulletin updated every hour. The Washington Post has been operating the Daily 202 Big Idea podcast alongside its morning newsletter for some time, while the BBC Minute packs five stories and two presenters into a frantic 60-second native podcast updated several times each day. These micro-bulletins are all available as podcasts but are also aimed at voice platforms.

How Many People Does it Take to Make a Daily News Podcast?

Creating a deep-dive daily news podcast is a significant investment – certainly when compared with low-cost weekly chat/interview shows that many publishers had previously favoured. The New York Times employs around 15 dedicated people on The Daily – amongst a wider audio team of around 30 – though it has access to a total journalistic team of hundreds. The Guardian employs ten for Today in Focus, and The Economist eight. At the other end of the scale, Schwartz Media in Australia, Le Parisien, and Les Echos in France all produce their daily podcasts with four or five – a more typical number for smaller publications starting out. The skillset tends to include one or two hosts, an executive producer, one or two producers, and a sound engineer/sound designer.

Today in Focus executive producer Nicole Jackson says that robust staffing levels at the Guardian have helped to avoid burn out and ensure that the show has a constant stream of high-quality stories. ‘Every producer is at a different stage on their story. Someone’s finishing, someone’s making calls, someone’s in the middle of an edit, and it allows you to really hone those stories. If we had a smaller team, you would only be able to work on that day’s and maybe the following day’s and it just wouldn’t be as good’.

One underestimated element of a news podcast is the sound design. The Guardian’s Axel Kacoutié is a critical member of the team, whose work inspires such devotion that a group of listeners have named a quiz team after him. ‘When we plan out the interviews, we think about them in terms of chapters and that pacing is really important when we hand over the piece [with notes] to Axel.’ Nicole Jackson says that using music to create the right mood is a critical part of the production process: ‘What’s so brilliant about Axel is he will take those notes and always give you something that feels surprising, original and fresh.’

A key factor for many teams producing daily news podcasts has been the wider cooperation of the newsroom. While other digital developments have often been resisted, the podcast has been universally welcomed: ‘A lot of our journalists just like it,’ explains Christian Bennett, Head of Global Audio and Video at the Guardian. ‘People like talking about their stories and finding new ways of doing that. It’s a place of storytellers.’

The Podcast Host Helps Create an Intimate Atmosphere

Another key element of a successful podcast is the personality of the host. The Daily’s Michael Barbaro is a former political reporter whose slow, deliberate style provided a natural fit for The Daily, where he coached other reporters in narrative audio techniques such as setting a scene and sustaining a dramatic arc. ‘I had to learn to ask questions differently. The questions are what propel the whole interview,’ he recently told an interviewer.10

The difference between radio and podcasting hosting was a regular theme in our interviews. ‘Not all great TV and radio broadcasters make great podcasters,’ says John Shields, editor of the BBC’s daily narrative podcast Beyond Today, which targets younger consumers. With fewer pressures of time and a more demanding audience, he says that part of his job has been getting hosts in a different frame of mind: ‘We talk about “making the tea” – getting them to slow down, relax, and linger on the details.’

Schwartz Media brought in the experience of Elizabeth Kulas, who had been working with native podcaster Gimlet Studios in the United States and had previously won a Peabody award with NPR’s Planet Money. ‘We saw her as a perfect host for our show and also coming from the school of podcasting that we were inspired by,’ says CEO Rebecca Costello. Le Parisien also looked to bring in an experienced host from outside, Jules Lavie from Radio France, while Les Echos was able to call on the talents of Pierrick Fay, a former broadcaster who already worked in the newsroom. The Economist’s Jason Palmer was a science correspondent with the paper, a US national, and had previous broadcast experience with the BBC: ‘He is the perfect avatar for this mostly American audience who are saying, “help me to understand what’s going on”,’ says deputy editor Tom Standage.

Consumption Levels for Daily News Podcasts are on the Rise

Understanding consumption is hard because listening is fragmented across platforms and it is difficult to measure usage of podcasts that are downloaded and listened to later offline. The latest IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) standard 2.0 counts a listen as ‘a download or a podcast that has been streamed for at least 60 seconds’, but some publishers and platforms do not yet adhere to this standard. Our research shows wide variation in numbers.

The New York Times says that The Daily reaches 2m listeners per day up from 1.1m in June 2018.11 The Economist told us that The Intelligence, which is less than a year old, reaches 1.5m people each month, with around 6–7m individual downloads monthly. It says that the average listener downloads or listens to three to four episodes each week. These are substantial audiences, even if they are not yet on a par with the most popular radio news shows in the US.

In the UK, numbers are generally smaller but still substantial. In less than a year the Guardian has built a bigger audience for its Today in Focus podcast than buys the newspaper. ‘It’s hundreds of thousands every day,’ says the Guardian’s Head of Audio, Christian Bennett, who points out that the podcast attracts younger people who are listening to the vast majority of each 25–30 minute episode, with a 80% completion rate: ‘It’s younger than people that buy the paper and it’s younger than people that come to our website as well. It’s opening up a new audience as opposed to cannibalising.’

In France, daily news podcasts are a relatively recent development, but La Story from Les Echos has still managed to attract 100,000 weekly listens in October 2019 – more than double the figure at launch in May. Despite this, the shelf life for news podcasts in general tends to be much shorter than for other types of content such as lifestyle. Additional data provided by Les Echos shows that the vast majority of listening happens within two days of initial publication (see right-hand chart) and these patterns are consistent with other publishers we spoke to.

Source: Les Echos

Daily Round-Ups Do Best in Sweden

In Sweden the main publishers have got together to create a publicly available Poddindex, using common measurement standards. Analysis of these data show that weekly listens to some of the top podcasts have doubled (Omni Pod) since the beginning of this year. Swedish Radio’s Ekot increased from 200,000 weekly listens two years ago but growth has been largely flat this year.

Both Ekot and Omni Pod have a news bulletin format and multiple editions each day, which may partly explain why their figures are higher than Aftonbladet Daily, which is a deep-dive podcast. The Omni Pod bulletin, which started as an experiment, aims to provide a concise briefing with a wide range of stories: ‘It’s highly educated people, mainly in big cities in Sweden and this is for them the perfect format for their morning behaviour,’ says Editor in Chief Markus Gustafsson.

Weekly listening figures for five popular Swedish daily news podcasts

Source: Poddindex Sweden (some missing or incomplete data)

Advertising is the Dominant Business Model

For most daily news podcasts that we studied, the main revenue driver is advertising or sponsorship – even for publishers like the New York Times that elsewhere deploy a subscription model. Digital advertising is broadly sold on a CPM model (cost per thousand listens in this case) and podcast CPMs are generally higher than websites and for many forms of video.12 This is partly because professional podcast content is mostly deemed to be ‘brand safe’, it is hard to skip ads, and ad density is still relatively low: ‘The user experience for audio is a good deal for everyone. You get a nice amount of audio to listen to,’ says the Guardian’s Christian Bennett. ‘The way ads work at the moment are very similar to what people are used to in traditional forms of media,’ he adds. Today in Focus is already making a positive contribution to the bottom line.

The engaged podcast audience appeals to advertisers as does the younger demographic, which they increasingly find hard to reach elsewhere online. Partly as a result, even an intensively staffed news podcast like The Intelligence from The Economist was also making money within six months.13 ‘There has been so much demand for sponsorship that it more than pays for itself,’ says Tom Standage who helped make the case for their daily news podcast, The Intelligence. ‘The big change is commercially, which is that we had advertisers who started to come to us last year and said we are only going to buy two kinds of ad next year. Print and podcast, what have you got?’

Even so there have been some challenges around news, with the most popular format, ‘host reads’, not considered to be appropriate because of concerns about trust. Sponsorship is a popular alternative, where a brand takes all advertising in the podcast for a defined period. Generic spot advertisements are becoming more widespread, however, with some publishers worried that this could undermine the premium, intimate, and carefully constructed nature of news podcasting. One approach used by many is to use neutral voices to read the ads. ‘We have two voices, male and female, we record the ads here and there is no music behind them,’ says Schwartz CEO Rebecca Costello.

New Paid Models Emerging

Some publishers are experimenting with keeping their news podcast behind the paywall as a way of delivering extra value to subscribers.

Politiken, which was one of the first major news organisations in Denmark to try a daily podcast, has been experimenting with a hybrid model where the podcast is free for two days each week, with mid-week versions kept back just for subscribers. Politiken’s approach has partly been driven by necessity given the lack of advertiser interest: ‘We are doing probably the best Danish podcast out there,’ says Digital Director Troels Behrendt Jørgensen, ‘but none of the traditional advertisers have really been interested.’

Others doubt that podcast advertising will ever work in small markets like Denmark and are also focusing on subscriber-based audio. Zetland is a small slow news operation with around 13,000 members that has refocused much of its operation around audio: ‘We are turning ourselves into a media company where people pay to listen to journalists,’ says CEO and co-founder Jacob Moll. ‘We made it very easy to find in our audio app,’ he adds. All news stories are also available in audio form and there is a daily news podcast, Helicopter, released at 4pm each day. For many subscribers it has become an invaluable part of the wider package, with four in ten (39%) accessing the podcast each month and a quarter (24%) listening every week. The average listener is extremely engaged, listening to 2.83 episodes each week. Zetland has invested in a number of other podcasts as well as live shows linked to the journalism. All articles are now read by journalists and these options are prominently displayed in the app. Zetland’s research shows that audio stories and podcasts are easier to consume for people with busy lives. This has helped reduce churn amongst members – especially time-poor young professional parents.

It may be that smaller markets or smaller publishers will follow a different trajectory when it comes to the business models for podcasting.

For many publishers the main driver is not making short-term money but rather finding new audiences for their core subscription businesses. ‘It’s more about opening the top of our funnel and bringing Times journalism to a new audience who we think will eventually become our next generation of subscribers,’ says Erik Borenstein at the New York Times. The Times sees The Daily as a showcase for the depth of its journalism but has recently made that more explicit by including interviews with producers about the value of subscribing. At The Economist, Tom Standage agrees: ‘It’s a form of editorial that happens to be very effective marketing and also pays for itself.’

As audiences build, some publications are starting to look at these shows almost like Hollywood franchises, with merchandise and live recordings for which tickets are sold. The feed itself is also becoming extremely valuable as a way of promoting other podcasts. The New York Times recently pushed its narrative series 1619 to its 2m-strong subscribers as an effective way to build an audience quickly: ‘We’ve put every episode of that series into the daily feed on the weekend and get positive response from listeners,’ says Erik Borenstein. ‘We do it very respectfully, only occasionally, but we think it really works.’ NPR is using similar tactics with the Up First feed to supercharge some of its other podcasts.

Daily news podcasts have clearly struck a chord with listeners looking to get away from screens and get a deeper and more immersive take on the news. They are amongst the most popular of all podcasts, with listeners often accessing several episodes a week. The five-days-a-week schedule has created much more advertising inventory and a strong new revenue line for publishers, with blue chip companies now showing considerable interest in the US, the UK and Australia. Outside the English-speaking world, there seems currently to be much less competition, with just a handful of publishers in each country getting involved, but there is also much less revenue as many advertisers have yet to be convinced.

5. Wider Publisher Strategies: Case Studies

Daily news podcasts are just part of the wider opportunities that publishers see in the on-demand audio space. Different starting points and business models mean a range of approaches are in play. In this chapter we explore a number of case studies based on our interviews in the UK, the US, Australia, France, and Sweden. We have chosen a mix of broadcasters, digital-born, and former print publishers.

Publishers from a Newspaper Background

The New York Times

The New York Times has pursued a ‘fewer, bigger, better’ strategy, with a portfolio of just five podcasts – The Daily, Still Processing, The Argument, The Book Review podcast, and Popcast – along with the Modern Love podcast, which is a partnership with public radio station WBUR in Boston. ‘We don’t want to rush things. We feel very happy with how they’re going,’ says Director of Audio Erik Borenstein. He still feels there is plenty of room for growth: ‘We want to be very deliberate about what we’re creating and where we’re distributing it.’

A key focus for the Times now is to recruit more talented audio producers who can make a variety of programming types – interviews shows, weekly round-ups, and narrative series. As the Times expands audio output, keeping the quality high will be critical.

The Times is watching new developments carefully, particularly as a range of audio on-demand becomes easier to access at home and through in-car devices. ‘I do think you’ll start to see a lot of great innovation on the form – from short form to long form, audio books, spoken word articles, and live audio,’ says Borenstein. ‘All of the fun innovation that media going over the top unlocks will start to happen in audio and I think that’s very exciting.’

The Washington Post

The Washington Post has been podcasting for more than a decade, but audio has stepped up a notch with its own department and new strategies around audience building and monetisation. ‘We have some of the best reporters in the world here and we want to make sure that their reporting and their storytelling is in front of as many people as possible,’ says Head of Audio Jessica Stahl. Much of the team’s effort goes into supporting the flagship Post Reports, but the Daily 202 offers a shorter daily fix around news. Politics is covered by Can He Do That? which deploys a more conventional interview format to explore different aspects of the Trump presidency. Retropod is a popular highly designed daily history show, while the Post is also experimenting with narrative podcasts like Moonrise, and Letters from War, a documentary tracing the story of one family in the Second World War. ‘Some of our biggest, most interesting work can be in the documentary format where you can make a really big splash with one thing,’ says Stahl. But she also acknowledges that it can be hard to find and build an audience for one-off shows compared with the ongoing formats. ‘It’s an existential effort to find new listeners.’

The Times and Sunday Times 

The Times has not yet launched a daily news podcast but has established a reputation for innovative hits. Walking the Dog was an interview show based on the playful idea that celebrities might open up in a different way when they were with their favourite pet. Giles Coren Has No Idea, which at one stage was the top-ranked ‘news’ podcast in the UK, explores the writer’s struggles with working out the subject matter for his print column each week. The irreverent Red Box podcast with Matt Chorley brings a lighter approach to politics: ‘That’s interesting for us because one of the things that gives us is tone,’ says Times Managing Director Chris Duncan: ‘It may not immediately occur to you that we do have quite a lot of humour. It isn’t an entirely serious and dry view of the world.’ Chorley has used the podcast as a springboard to take politics on the road in a series of live shows. Sport has also been a successful genre, with both football and rugby podcasts attracting loyal audiences. It is also an area where sponsorship and monetisation tends to be easier than hard news.

The Times has benefited from the group’s recent purchase of Wireless Group (owners of talkSPORT and Virgin Radio). This has provided access to professional studios but also new skills and insights: ‘Publishers are really good at working out how you format newspapers,’ says Duncan. ‘But in terms of thinking about a series of podcasts, about programming, and what’s the optimum length of a podcast – all of those things the audio guys really brought a lot of expertise in.’

Monetisation efforts are focused on advertising, sponsorship, and some early moves into branded content (e.g. with a show for KPMG). With significant numbers for the most popular Times podcasts and growing advertiser interest, Chris Duncan is positive about the future: ‘It feels like it will be a significant revenue line because it’s going to become a significant habit.’

Financial Times (FT)

The FT podcast strategy is focused on reaching new audiences in the United States, where the publication is less well known. The idea is to make younger and more female audiences more aware of the FT’s breadth and range, in the hope that they will eventually subscribe. The FT has culled some shows, revamped others, and is looking to professionalise the whole portfolio to stand out in the hugely competitive US market. ‘We are hiring, we’re bringing in talent, we’re bringing in producers. But the bigger picture objective is not about doing more. It’s about doing less of the right stuff better,’ says Renée Kaplan, Head of Audience and New Content Strategies.

More resources are going to the FT Daily News briefing, while News in Focus becomes biweekly, with a dedicated non-British female host. They are also working up ideas around working life and careers, areas where the FT already has considerable authority and expertise. Another possible idea is to branch out into investigations and narrative series. ‘What is the FT version of true crime?’ asks Kaplan. Beyond this the FT is also experimenting this autumn with its first podcast exclusively for existing FT subscribers: a global affairs podcast called the Rachman Review. New technology from podcast distributer Acast allows paid subscribers to be authenticated so that podcasts can be listened to on any third-party platform. Existing solutions remain clunky for users but hold out the promise that exclusive audio could become an important part of the overall bundle – a useful weapon in building loyalty and reducing churn.

Dagens Nyheter (DN)

This quality newspaper in Sweden has been experimenting with different types of audio including podcasting, but the economics remain somewhat challenging. The main interest has been to create more loyalty and more habit with existing users, to prevent churn within the subscription model: ‘Podcasts or audio book content is a great asset because you can send out push notifications when there is new content available, to remind people that they get something for their subscriptions’, says Martin Jönsson, Head of Editorial Development. DN operates four podcasts including The Weekly (a news magazine), one for popular culture, one for children, and one documentary feature. Johnson has not ruled out starting a daily news podcast – or turning The Weekly into a daily version – but recognises that the investment is significant and the rewards uncertain. ‘Sweden is a smaller market. So you need bigger numbers to make the advertising or sponsorship work.’

Digital-Born Publishers

Slate

Slate has been making podcasts for almost 15 years. It was a format that grew naturally within a web magazine culture that differentiated itself by being conversational, opinionated, and argumentative. Talk podcasts, like the Political GabFest, were pretty much invented at Slate and are now just part of a portfolio of 25 different shows. With the talk space relatively crowded, Slate has been pushing into narrative series. Slow Burn is a critically acclaimed true crime series which covered Watergate and then the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Slate also recently teamed up with The Economist for the Secret History of the Future, though as Editorial Director Gabriel Roth points out these series can be more risky: ‘The classic Slate podcast is a model where you’re taking like a few hours out of three reporters’ days once a week. A project like Secret History involves taking months and months of a reporter’s time, over much of a year to make – and so it’s just a different prospect.’

Podcasting will make around half of Slate’s entire revenue by the end of this year, up from 28% in 2018.14 The bulk of this revenue is advertising, but podcasting also contributes heavily to its Slate Plus membership programme, which boasts 60,000 members. ‘The strongest connections that we have to our audience are very often through the podcast and the strongest set of benefits through Slate Plus are associated with the podcast,’ says Gabriel Roth. Members get ad-free products and bonus episodes too, using home-grown technology, Supporting Cast, which is now being sold to other publishers.

Vox Media

Vox Media, which incorporates SB Nation, Recode, Polygon SB Nation, The Verge, and Eater, as well as Vox itself, has one of the largest, fastest-growing, and most diverse collections of quality podcasts. Podcasting was a ‘natural fit from a content perspective,’ explained Vox’s Marty Moe in a recent interview.15 ‘The question was, from a business perspective, is this something we can justify putting a lot more into?’ Having grown up as a side project for many columnists and editorial leaders, podcasts are now seen as a strategic driver of growth. The Vox Media Podcast Network has doubled the number of shows over the last year to more than 200 active shows, contributing to an eight-figure audio business overall. Popular shows include The Ezra Klein Show (Vox), Recode Media with Peter Kafka, Recode Decode, and the recently launched Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway in the tech and business space. Today Explained, the daily news show, is a joint production with Stitcher, a relationship that also helps with distribution as it can be promoted via a second network with millions of listeners.

The number of Vox podcasts gives the company critical mass with advertisers but also allows it to use its network to create and promote new shows for companies and brands – another growth opportunity. Vox has recently brought together all of its online video, television, and audio into a single studios business, partly to reduce its exposure to a softening market for traditional internet advertising. A studios business also makes sense because Vox sees podcasts as a way of uncovering stories or formats that could then be licensed for television. The idea of digging deeper into a single topic has been adapted for a Netflix series, Explained, which has been commissioned for a second series.

Broadcasters

National Public Radio (NPR)

NPR was one of the pioneers in podcasting and a number of its best-known shows continue to dominate the Podtrac and Apple charts (Up First, Planet Money, Hidden Brain, How I Built This, etc.). As well as creating native news podcasts, NPR is working on making more of its broadcast schedule available on demand. It has just, for example, released its morning and evening drive shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as podcasts. Chris Turpin, Vice President for Editorial Innovation and Special Projects, believes that ‘many of the distinctions that initially people saw between podcasting and broadcast audio are essentially vanishing’.

NPR’s podcast-first strategy involves four pillars: (1) short news podcasts that build habit, often aimed at new devices; (2) weekly podcasts that are relatively cheap to make and tend to make money; (3) ‘news that you can use’ podcasts that lend themselves to the increasing searchable nature of audio; and (4) blue ribbon podcasts that fit the public service remit and often have multiple funding streams, such as a recent civil rights era podcast which showcased NPR’s journalism and role in American life. One recent trend has been to create more frequency in its podcasting. The Indicator is a successful NPR daily economics daily podcast, while NPR Politics will become daily during the upcoming election. NPR is also looking to reuse more of its podcast-first content back on linear radio.

NPR is projecting that podcast sponsorship revenues will surpass revenues from broadcast underwriting next year at around $55m. ‘Something like 25% of our underwriters are now blue-chip companies,’ says Turpin. ‘That’s a big sea change. And it gives you a sense of the way that podcasting is here to stay as a commercial entity.’

BBC

The BBC started its podcast service 15 years ago, but today mixes original on-demand broadcast shows with a new focus on native podcasts. It has developed its own platform, BBC Sounds, a name that symbolises the move away from radio towards a range of audio formats. The Apple podcasts directory shows 85 podcasts in the news category alone, including some in a number of different languages.

The BBC sees podcasts as a way of attracting younger and more diverse audiences that it is finding increasingly hard to reach. ‘I am thinking about how to get to audiences that aren’t serviced by linear output,’ says the BBC’s Editorial Director Kamal Ahmed, who has commissioned The Next Episode, a weekly show that is aimed at under 35s and addresses issues such as identity politics and online safety. Podcasting allows the BBC to reach niche audiences without alienating the mainstream but also to take more risks in terms of format and length. Current affairs commissions include pod-first thrillers like Rat Line and Tunnel 29, a serialised story of a man who dug a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. Both shows started life as podcasts but also became radio hits. The BBC also seeks to find new ways of delivering its public remit, with the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast covering every day of the harrowing testimony – a process that ran to more than 100 episodes.

One breakout hit has been Brexitcast/Electioncast, where the BBC’s top correspondents discuss events in a much more informal and light-hearted way than would normally be the case within the constraints of traditional radio. The show is rebroadcast on radio and is now shown on television, but it still manages to retain its podcast sensibility.

Because of the difficulty of building audiences for one-off podcast series, the BBC has been using its flagship Beyond Today podcast to showcase its best original reporting around big issues. TV reporter Jane Corbin recently used it is as vehicle to talk about her investigation into the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. For Head of Current Affairs Jo Carr, this was a really interesting example of how podcasts can be used to ‘get really interesting blue-chip journalism out to different audiences’.

Swedish Radio (SR)

SR dominates the spoken-word landscape in Sweden and has more than 150 news podcasts alone in the Apple directory. Many of these are popular radio shows distributed in a podcast format, but there is also a pod-first commissioning strategy. Existing shows are being remade with a sharper beginning and more of a narrative structure, ‘It’s a mix between remaking the traditional titles and also making them more podcast first,’ says Head of News Olle Zachrison. The idea is increasingly to take successful podcasts about US politics and Brexit and bring that different tone and approach to radio audiences too: ‘We’re broadcasting them in the linear channel because it’s great content and they’re very contemporary.’

One of Swedish radio’s biggest podcast successes has been its P3 documentary strand, which routinely gets around 500,000 unique listeners for the on-demand version: ‘Immediately when the first minute comes on the audience in the linear channel drops because people don’t want to spoil their podcast experience,’ says Zachrison, who recognises that podcasts may cannibalise radio, but that the wider strategy is to reach listeners with quality audio content on any platform in the right format for listeners.

In terms of news content, SR has been focusing on extending its main news brand Ekot into the on-demand space with updating bulletins that can be accessed via podcast as well as voice devices such as Google Home. SR has also been testing a new native news podcast of around eight minutes that combines a brief news update with a deep-dive into one item of current affairs. Over time, SR expects to commission more episodic series such as one about the changing nature of China.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)

ABC has around 300 podcasts in the Apple directory and 31 in the news category. While the majority are catch-up radio programmes, ABC has set up its own studios team to create and commission shows that are digital-first. ‘With those podcasts the intro is often different,’ says Head of Studios Kellie Riordan. ‘We remove all that radio-speak (“welcome to the show today”, etc.) – and instead put you at the plot point. You start the show where the person has a gun to someone’s head and then you rewind back to what happened to get to this point.’ Unlike the BBC and SR, much of the ABC’s podcast content does not make it back onto the radio. ‘I would argue that I’ve probably failed in my job to create distinctive immersive earbud podcast experiences, if those shows fit neatly on the radio,’ adds Riordan. She says that a scripting and production style that is designed for younger audiences may not always work for traditional radio listeners.

Overall, ABC makes around 40 digital-first shows, including a number for younger children, families, women, and younger men. Research shows that the latter were interested in both sport and comedy so this led to a mash-up with a comedian presenting a show about football. A show aimed at women called Ladies We Need to Talk deals with health, sexuality, and relationships but is steeped in health journalism and feminist theory. There is also a life-hacking show called The Pineapple Project, which tackles issues like careers, money, and networking at work: ‘It’s about fitting in to a woman’s busy life with content that she can actually use,’ says Riordan. The studios also specialise in serialised documentaries told in an episodic way across six to eight episodes, including a popular true crime series.

Radio France (France Inter, France Culture, etc.)

Like other broadcasters, Radio France sees podcasting as a way to reach younger and more diverse audiences, but also to refresh and reinvigorate radio formats: ‘The podcast is something that allows you to take editorial risks, to experiment with different types of production,’ says Ari de Sousa, head of digital products and marketing at Radio France. But the simplicity and speed of podcast creation has raised sensitive questions in an organisation that is heavily unionised and where roles have been clearly delineated for decades. Despite this, new production agreements are being discussed, with some experiments underway. Deputy Editor Lucas Menget at the news division France Info would prefer to tread cautiously: ‘I’m in favour of doing a few shows well, rather than go in all directions. This year, if we launch four podcasts it will be the maximum.’ A regular podcast on the US elections is in the pipeline, along with a stand-back look at the mayoral battle for Paris, which has already started and will continue until March next year.

France Info has also started a partnership with Bayard Presse to help develop podcasts for younger audiences. ‘It is the joining of their know-how on youth and our know-how on audio,’ says Menget.

France Inter has also recently launched several native podcasts, including 13 Novembre l’enquête, about the terror attacks in Paris (Bataclan); Oli, stories for kids told by celebrities; and Intérieur Queer, a programme about gay culture.

Divergent Strategies and Motivations

Podcasts clearly risk cannibalising existing radio audiences and raise difficult internal questions for broadcasters. Investment in podcasting is often accompanied by cuts in radio budgets, which has caused tension at both the BBC and Radio France.16 Public broadcasters tend to take an extremely wide view of podcasting since they have a much broader brief than just news. In this respect they have more of a vested interest in defining the on-demand audio space and much more to lose.

By contrast, newspaper and digital-born players have less content and less heritage in audio, and are proving more willing to innovate in exploring both commercial and editorial possibilities.

6. Future Developments and Potential Impact for Publishers

In this final chapter we look at changing business models, the role of platforms and other intermediaries, and the implications for news publishers.

How Business Models Could Develop

Advertising As we have already discovered, some publishers are already making good money from podcasting. In the US alone, advertisers will have spent almost $700m by the end of 2019 and the podcast market is expected to be worth more than $1bn by 2021.17 This is still some way behind radio, which is expected to earn $18bn.

Podcast advertising revenue 2015–2021 (in millions) Total market estimate

IAB 2018 Podcast US Ad Revenue Study conducted by PwC. Estimates based on self-reported data to around 65% of total. * estimates

News is the biggest and fastest-growing area of spend, with growth of 38% during 2018. In the UK, agencies that sell podcast advertising say there has been a real turnaround in the last 18 months due to rising consumption, the growing amount of quality content, and data which show how podcasts resonate with hard-to-reach younger demographics. Michael Williamson is Audio Video Investment Director at Manning Gottlieb, OMG, which represents more than 30 brands. He says the majority of these clients are now buying podcasts: ‘They are all seeing positive results and are talking about “can we do it again?”. It’s really nice to see a media that is definitely in growth.’

As interest grows, the big US players have been setting up operations in Europe to sell local advertising and promote their content: ‘This is the first time the Americans are looking outside of America to grow their audiences,’ says Ruth Fitzsimons, MD of Podfront, which is a London-based collaboration between Stitcher and Wondery set up to represent their big productions. For these shows, she says, around 20% of listening is now happening outside the US: ‘We’re starting to see more spend coming out of the agencies just on podcasts [in Europe] and this is where it now becomes viable.’

In Australia, too, the three biggest advertisers – the Australian Post, the Commonwealth Bank, and Telstra (telco) – have started to look at podcasts: ‘They’re all jumping in,’ says Robert Loewenthal, CEO of Whooshkaa, which hosts thousands of podcasts and helps with monetisation. ‘When they allocate their budget and strategy sessions, they are saying “how much will we allocate to podcasts this year?” A couple of years ago it was zero.’

Host reads remain the most popular – and highly priced – ad format for podcasts, but these are hard to scale and are problematic for news, a genre where the lines between editorial and advertising need to be clear and transparent. On the other hand, publishers do not want to undermine their carefully constructed intimate podcasts by accepting too many low-quality spot advertisements. New technology now allows any ad to be inserted dynamically at the point of play/download and more of this advertising is being sold programmatically.

While advertising rates are currently high and US publishers are doing well, some are concerned about these changing dynamics: ‘You know we’ve seen what digital advertising has done in every other form of media and where the value accrues to large platforms,’ says Erik Borenstein at the New York Times. Spotify and Google in particular are looking to offer advertisers an easier and more scalable way of buying podcast ads. As more content is consumed on their platforms, they can use the data they collect to deliver better ad targeting. It is a familiar story that worries publishers: ‘If they are building big advertising businesses on the back of publisher audio, I would hope that they are sharing some of that value back with the publisher,’ says Borenstein.

But others point out that the market for podcasting ads is still relatively competitive, with no dominant advertising platform. The majority of ads are bought through companies like Acast, Audioboom, DAX (Global radio), Stitcher (US), or Whooshkaa (Australia). Each of these represents the interests of a number of publishers and in some cases sell their own content too. Though consolidation is likely, Michael Williamson does not see one ad platform dominating in the short term at least. Nor does he see a race to the bottom in the advertising market: ‘Pricing is valid and justified. You are paying to get real association with quality content. There is value to that and it is not going to go down.’

Platforms for Paid Content While the vast majority of podcasts remain free at the point of use, the last 18 months have seen the emergence of a range of premium services that aim to change the dynamics of the market. Luminary, a well-funded start-up that was billed as the Netflix of podcasts, had a troubled launch but still plans to spend more than $100m on original content to persuade consumers to pay $8 a month. Spotify has committed even more money to acquire original podcasts that it can bundle with its $10 a month music service. Stitcher has also started Stitcher Premium, charging $5 a month for exclusive content and ad-free versions of podcasts in its network. Himalaya is combining premium podcasts with a tipping feature for free podcasts. Audible has been stepping up its production of paid-for narrative series as part of its wider books offer. ‘I think we’ll start to see more pure distribution licensing deals for professional higher-quality shows,’ says Stitcher CEO Eric Diehn. ‘I think people are naturally going to start looking for places where they can separate out exceptionally well-made stuff from the very long tail.’

Europe has also seen its fair share of podcast start-ups. Majelan aims to be the leading app for French-speaking listeners. It launched in June 2019 with around 20 original series and a premium layer costing around US $4.99. Sybel is another new French provider that aims to create more exclusive and high-quality native podcasts, such as a new documentary about a French serial killer, called Le Grêlé. The Sybel app already has hundreds of thousands of active users according to CEO Virginie Maire but the task now is to convert them to paying subscribers: ‘If you can give good content at a good price with a good experience, then yes, I’m sure that people will pay for that.’

Podimo is a Danish start-up that aims to provide a ‘superior experience’ in discovery and recommendation compared to existing podcast streaming and download services. ‘We want to be the one company in Europe basically for podcasts,’ says co-founder Andreas Sachse who talks about the desire to grow the market across Europe to a much wider demographic. The initial offer provides exclusive and ad-free content for 39 Danish Krone (around US $6), with publishers getting between 20 and 50% of revenue depending on the level of exclusivity. A German launch is also scheduled.

Various paid-for apps are bidding to become the ‘Netflix of podcasting’

Most publishers that we spoke to for this research were sceptical about the value of creating exclusive content for a third party. They have been burned before with platforms offering money for content only to withdraw it later. On the other hand, platform money could help publishers to experiment with new formats and Spotify, the biggest player in this space, does have a long-term track record of paying music artists for their content. It is possible that similar approaches could be applied sustainably to funding podcasts.

Despite the uncertainty and the scepticism there is general agreement that the amount of money coming into podcasts, better measurement, and the increased range of funding options is good news for consumers, producers, and advertisers alike. ‘I’d say we’re past the beginning, perhaps in some ways through the mid-part of podcasting growing into a mature medium,’ says Stitcher CEO Erik Diehn. ‘I think the Wild West is largely over. There are aspects of the industry that are untested, unproven, and still forming. But there is a definite sweep of professionalisation and maturation that’s occurring right now.’

More consolidation is also likely to be on the way. Spotify has already bought Gimlet, perhaps the best-known independent podcast studio, and has incorporated the Anchor platform, which enables any creator to create and monetise podcasts easily. Apple is rumoured to be about to invest large sums in original podcasts,18 while Netflix has started to produce its own podcasts. There are currently too many apps and platforms chasing content, audiences, and advertisers. Not all of these are likely to survive.

Platform Power and the Discovery Challenge

For many years podcasting was closely associated with Apple and its breakthrough iPod devices. That association continued with the advent of the iPhone and iPad and was given a further boost in 2014 when the Apple podcasts app was pre-installed on every device. But in the last two years Apple’s dominance has been eroding as new players have come into the market. Apple’s market share has fallen from around 80% to 57% according to the latest figures from the main US hosting platform Libsyn, with Spotify now at 13%, almost double the figure from a year ago. In some European markets, the share of new players may be even higher. According to French hosting platform Ausha, Spotify and Deezer taken together account for 20% of the market, with Apple down to under half (49%).19

Share of usage by podcast aggregator

These platform shifts are important because they have the potential to drive podcasting to a wider audience: ‘It is essential that we start to think beyond the trendy bubble audience that we know about,’ says James Cator, Head of Podcasts, EMEA, at Spotify. ‘It is easy to make podcasts for that Gimlet/Brooklyn hipster audience that everyone knows, flat whites and all that.’20

Part of Spotify’s strategy is to commission more original content, such as comedy, sport, and music documentaries, that will draw more listeners to the platform. Spotify has noticed that people who listen to podcasts spend twice as long with Spotify than people who don’t and they also listen to more music as well.21 Spotify is putting around $500m into podcasting, which is far more money that even the largest publishers could begin to consider.

Spotify is also hoping to solve podcasting’s discovery challenge by helping listeners find shows that they like. No company has made an audio recommendation algorithm as successful as the one Netflix has created for movies and TV, but with almost 200,000 podcasts on the platform Spotify has the critical mass and engineering skills to make a difference. One early experiment has been Spotify Drive, a personalised playlist that mixes music and podcasts to suit your morning or evening commute. Short news bulletins like NPR News Now are now automatically inserted or ‘programmed’ between favourite tracks in the US. They are experimenting with different lengths of content and the service is likely to be expanded elsewhere.

Spotify Originals and Daily Drive playlists

Services like Spotify Drive are likely to encourage the production of more short-form news or atomised audio that has been struggling to gain an audience through smart speakers. ‘When you get to a place with voice-activated audio in cars, radio is still going to be important, but they’re going to have a little bit more competition,’ says Robert Loewenthal from Whooshkaa. Both Google and Amazon with their successful voice assistants are likely to be more important audio gateways in this version of the future. Amazon also owns Audible, which is branching out into original podcasts.

Publisher Dilemmas

For publishers these developments are a mixed blessing. Better discovery and promotion of podcasts can help reach new and diverse audiences, but there is a fear that publishers will lose their direct connection with audiences – including data that are crucial to develop services – and that the platform rather than the publisher will take the credit for the content itself. ‘We have an existential issue with a unlevel playing field on third and dominant third-party platforms that are seeking to preference and push their own services,’ says the BBC’s Director of Distribution and Business Development Kieran Clifton. The BBC has removed its content from Google podcasts because consumers are exclusively pointed from Google Search to play back in the Google podcast experience, and not in any other service, including BBC Sounds.

Google is addressing this issue by allowing publishers to specify the experience within Google products, but broadcasters are particularly sensitive on this issue because they are investing millions in audio destinations (see also SR Play and NPR One), where they can control the experience and onward recommendations. In Australia, ABC is currently withholding content from Spotify, and Radio France has withdrawn its content from Spotify and Majelan: ‘We would like to control our distribution better, to favour our own proprietary media,’ says Ari de Sousa, Head of Digital Products and Marketing at Radio France: ‘If you cut the link between us and our audience, it’s hard to deliver a public service.’ Beyond these objections, Radio France argues that any company that aims to make money out of podcasts should be paying for the privilege.

Increasingly, publishers like the BBC are releasing content first in their own properties, only later publishing to third-party platforms. The New York Times was one of the first to try this approach, releasing its blockbuster series Caliphate a week before everyone else.22 We are likely to see more of this ‘windowing’ strategy across the industry, as producers of original content try to maximise their investment with loyal users without losing the benefits of wider distribution. These challenges over platforms are not new and some publishers bear the scars of earlier battles. But audio may follow a different path with new opportunities and challenges. This is a critical time because the rules and terms of trade are being laid down today. Once established they will be hard to shift.

7. Conclusions

This report has documented the growth in supply of native news podcasts across five countries and illustrated how new formats such as short-form bulletins and deep daily dives are increasingly resonating with audiences. Daily news podcast episodes are frequently in the top ten of all podcasts and are prized for the loyalty and engagement that they create – as well as the younger, well-educated demographics. Partly as a result, we find positive signs around monetisation, at least in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Major advertisers are now allocating significant budgets to podcasts and this is changing the economics, making it far more attractive for publishers to invest in quality content. The advertising market in Sweden and France is more nascent but even here most publishers are optimistic in the medium to long term.

We have also found substantial differences in terms of production. Digital-born and legacy print publishers have focused more on chat formats and deep-dives that allow them to showcase the storytelling talents of their newsrooms. Broadcasters, by contrast, have tended to make the most of their existing output (catch-up radio), only investing in native podcasts where they are focused on addressing younger or more diverse audiences that cannot be reached in traditional ways.

Broadcasters are also experimenting with narrative podcasts reusing documentary-making skills, but in daily news it has often been the print and digital-born publishers who have shown most innovation (e.g. The Daily from the New York Times or 7am from Schwartz Media). They have not been afraid to tear up existing rules in terms of format and tone, while broadcasters have often been constrained by existing culture and the fear of cannibalising linear output. With almost 50,000 news podcasts, and 12,000 new ones in the last year alone, it is clear that broadcasters are losing their monopoly over audio news. ‘This will be our next wave of disruption,’ says Naja Nielsen, Digital Director at BBC News. ‘Digitisation of the newspapers was a reinvention of the newspaper article and then we had television disrupted with all types of video and now the same is going to happen with audio.’ Bulletins and programmes are already being supplemented by a range of digital formats such as micro-bulletins, atomised audio, news round-ups across different genres, deep-dives, talk shows, narrative series, and long reads. The term podcasting itself feels increasingly inadequate as a descriptor. Meanwhile the abundance of content will inevitably reduce the reach of traditional players even if the market as a whole grows.

But have we reached peak podcast? Most of those we talked to felt there was still considerable room for audience growth while new technologies like voice and on-demand platforms in the car will make audio easier to access than ever before. But as with other digital content, publishers won’t have it all their own way. They will have to fight with platforms and intermediaries for distribution and for a fair share of the value. But there is, as yet, no dominant platform for audio, and publishers still have a considerable amount of agency over outcomes. They are able to use their existing powerful brands to promote their own destinations (BBC Sounds/SR Play) or even build franchises around single podcasts (The Daily, This American Life) where they can leverage millions of people to try something new. Others are creating networks around content and advertising (Vox) that give them critical mass in specific areas; others still are forging ad-hoc partnerships (The Economist/Slate, Wall Street Journal/Wondery) to share skills and maximise distribution.

The big question is whether podcasting can become a mass market phenomenon like radio or will remain an important niche catering to educated elites. Big platforms will have a role to play here, just as Netflix has helped popularise on-demand television. Major money investment in sport, comedy, true crime, and celebrity chat are likely to be the key vehicles for reaching wider demographics.

In terms of news itself, our research suggests that the US and the UK already have very competitive markets and it will be hard for new entrants to find audiences. But elsewhere there are still many gaps and opportunities creatively and commercially. Podcasting started as a cottage industry, something consumed by a small group of aficionados in the know – and it has remained under the radar for over a decade. But those days are over and we are in the midst of an era of professionalisation that is bringing more money into the industry and raising the bar in terms of quality too. In this context, it is possible that some of the magic and the diversity could be lost. In the future it will still be possible for an individual podcaster to find an audience for something unique but we are also likely to see more high-quality audio content that people are prepared to pay for. Unlike the pivot to video, the skills required to produce compelling podcasts are largely in house or easy to acquire. It will be fascinating to watch the market develop in the years to come.

Appendix A: List of Interviewees

https://ift.tt/38479aU via Digital News Report December 3, 2019 at 08:14PM

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5 Finest Small Company Credit Card Processing Companies|Merchant Radical

The 5 Best Small Business Credit Card Processing Companies

Advertiser Disclosure: Our unbiased reviews and content are supported in part by affiliate partnerships, and we adhere to strict guidelines to preserve editorial integrity.

Trying to choose the best credit card processing company can be overwhelming. This is especially true when you are a new small business owner who has never even heard of a “merchant account” before — but the truth is that even seasoned CEOs can get dizzy while researching the payment processing industry. (Trust us, we’ve spoken to them.) There are so many processing companies, they all seem to be doing more or less the same thing, and they all have both glowing testimonials and terrible complaints. How are you supposed to choose the best company under these circumstances? Who can you trust?

We get it. We’ve been reviewing credit card processing companies for years. We hear from dozens of small business owners every day all trying to answer the same question: “Which merchant services solution is the best of my business?” And our answer is always the same: “It depends.”

There is no simple answer to this question. But over the years we’ve found that there are some good guidelines to follow, and by using these guidelines we’ve created this short list of the best small business credit card processing companies, whittling down the field of providers to a manageable number. Some of these payment processors are good for ecommerce via your website, others for mobile payments on your smartphone, others for retail with a credit card machine, for phone order with a virtual terminal, for large transactions, for iPad POS, for high-risk businesses. (I told you, it depends.) But all of them follow some simple rules that we live by, which we’ll discuss in detail below.

The Best Credit Card Processing Companies for Small Businesses in 2018

Good for higher volume (over $20K/month)

Good for mid volume ($10K-20K/month)

Good for lower volume (under $10K/month)

Here’s a quick look at our list of the highest-ranking credit card processing companies for small businesses. (They’re great for medium and large business too, for the record.) Scroll down for in-depth discussions.

How to Choose the Best Credit Card Processing Company

We have four simple rules for picking a high-quality company to accept credit and debit card payment with. We followed them closely to formulate our list of the best credit card processors. You can use them in your search as well.

Rule 1: Transparency is the best policy

For any credit card processor to make it onto our list of recommendations, there can be no hidden fees and no surprises. That’s why we insist that our featured merchant account providers use a pricing system that separates wholesale from markup cost (interchange-plus, aka “pass-through” pricing). The interchange rates are set by the credit card brands (Visa and Mastercard foremost) and are the same for every credit card processor. It’s the markup that really matters here. In addition to using this cost-plus pricing model, all our top picks make in-depth fee disclosures up front. All of our top-rated processing companies will also meet or beat your current rate if it’s lower than their advertised price. And all new businesses are guaranteed a fair starting rate thanks to the standardized public rate disclosures.

We do not tolerate high-pressure sales tactics or long-term commitments. Some salespeople will say anything to get you to sign the dotted line — and then will force you to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars when the company doesn’t live up to its promises. We only recommend companies that employ honest, respectful sales reps and offer service with no long-term contract commitments. You should be able to accept credit cards without making a deal with the devil.

Rule 3: Look for value and savings

Some credit card processing companies only give you barebones service, but they do so at rock-bottom prices. Others charge a bit more, but provide valuable software as part of the service. Which is best for you? That depends on your budget and your wants/needs. The cheapest credit card processor isn’t always the best. Likewise, you don’t always get what you pay for. It’s important to determine the value of a merchant account to your particular business needs. The topic of credit card processing fees is way too broad for us to cover completely in this post, but if you’re interested we have an in-depth resource that explains everything you could ever want to know about card payment processing rates and fees.

Rule 4: Reputation matters

We carefully consider every complaint we find to figure out what went wrong. We then weigh these conclusions against the number of businesses the credit card processor services to make decisions about which companies we feel comfortable recommending. Our top-rated merchant account providers have extremely low complaint counts and numerous independent reviews validating good practices. A proven track record of satisfaction is imperative for us.

That’s not so much to ask, is it? We don’t think so, and we never settle for less.

Should You Just Take Cards With Square?

If you’ve done much reading (or purchasing) recently, you’ve no doubt come across Square Payments. I said earlier that “Which merchant service solution is the best of my business?” is the most common question we receive. Well, after that, it’s “Should I use Square?” The simple answer is that if you process small transactions (maybe $15 or less on average), you process only a couple thousand dollars each month, or you just absolutely positively do not want to pay any monthly fees, then you really need to at least give Square some consideration. For many small business owners, especially in retail or small food service businesses, it’s an excellent value given the low cost and high-quality software. Larger businesses, however, can end up saving hundreds or thousands of dollars each month by not using Square. So, again, it depends. High-risk businesses should avoid Square at all costs because Square is incredibly risk-averse and will shut down your account and hold your money if you are high-risk.

Square vs. Merchant Account for Payment Processing

Merchant Account Square Payments Reviews CompareReview Visit SiteLowest Cost ForMost BusinessesSmall-Ticket or Low-VolumeGood for Large-Ticket BusinessesYesNoGood for All Business TypesYesNoGood for Low-Volume/Sporadic BusinessesNoYesIncludes Mobile POSUsually, sometimes basicYes, high-qualityMonthly FeeUsually $10+$0 for basic serviceRatesBetter for transactions over $15Better for transactions under $15Rate matching/negotiable pricingYesNoEarly Termination FeeNoNoWorks with most POS softwareYesOnly Square POSIncludes Free Card ReaderSometimesYes, magstripe only

ReadereCommerceRetailFood ServiceFree App & ReaderSquare eCommerceSquare for RetailSquare for RestaurantsGet StartedGet StartedGet StartedGet StartedFree, general-purpose POS software and reader for iOS and AndroidEasy integration with popular platforms plus API for customizationSpecialized software for more complex retail storesSpecialized software for full-service restaurants$0/month$0/month$60/month$60/monthAlways FreeAlways FreeFree TrialFree Trial

Does Square Offer the Best Credit Card Machines for Your Business?

There are positives and negatives to using Square’s credit card processing hardware for small businesses. While the Square swipe reader is free and the Bluetooth payment terminal is only $49, neither of these devices can perform all the functions that a traditional countertop credit card machine can. Here’s a rundown of the feature comparison.

Features to Look For in a Credit Card Machine

Still can’t decide? Check out our in-depth post on reasons why Square may or may not be the best way for your business to accept credit card payments. You could always try both. Since none of our top merchant services providers lock you into long-term contracts, it’s safe to try it out for a few months with no major commitment. If you’re set on getting a Square-like option but you feel skeptical of Square as a company, we have a post dedicated to Square alternatives for you to consider.

Pick The Best Credit Card Processor

It’s hard to make superlative claims in an industry this large, but we truly believe these merchant services providers are the best around, especially when it comes to setting up accounts online and over the phone. Each has excellent products, services, marketing, and sales practices. Take a look and see what you think.

Payment Depot

Payment Depot is a merchant account provider headquartered in Orange, California. The company has been in business since 2013 and is best known for its use of subscription or membership-based pricing, a spinoff of the interchange-plus model. While it isn’t the only provider in the industry to offer this type of pricing, Payment Depot’s reputation for open, honest sales practices and excellent customer support put it ahead of many of its competitors using this relatively new pricing model.

So, how does it work? Most providers offering interchange-plus pricing will charge “interchange + markup” rates, with the markup including both a small percentage of the sale and a per-transaction fee. You’ll also incur several monthly and annual fees for individual services, such as PCI compliance and account statements. In contrast, Payment Depot’s model combines all your monthly fees into a single monthly subscription ranging from $49.00 to $199.00 per month, depending on which plan you choose. You’ll also pay lower processing rates, with the elimination of the percentage markup. Your rates will be the interchange rate, plus a per-transaction fee that varies between $0.15 and $0.05 per transaction, depending on your pricing plan.

Best All-Purpose Credit Card Processing Company

Payment Depot accounts are month-to-month, but you can also save money on your subscription fees by paying them annually instead of monthly. Annual subscriptions are protected with a 90-day satisfaction guarantee, so merchants who are not satisfied with their service within the first 90 days will be refunded their membership fees (not interchange fees or transaction fees, of course). This is a fair, reasonable offer, and should give you some peace of mind.

For more information about this company, contact them now or see our in-depth Payment Depot review.

We like Fattmerchant (see our review) for every business type, but it really shines for ecommerce and card-not-present merchants. One of our favorite things about this company is its subscription pricing model. With this fee structure, you have a 0% mark up alongside a small per transaction fee ($0.08 – $0.15) and a larger monthly fee ($99). Don’t let that monthly fee discourage you. The truth is that the 0% mark up saves most small businesses so much money that it more than pays for the monthly fee. This is especially true for ecommerce and other card-not-present business because Fattmerchant does not charge an inflated mark up on these accounts. Just about every other merchant services provider, even our favorites, charge a lot extra for phone order and ecommerce businesses. Because you don’t pay a percentage mark up on your processing volume, you save more as you process more. This is exactly how the markup process had ought to work in our opinion.

Best Payment Processing and Billing Platform

Still not convinced that it’s worth it? Well, Fattmerchant adds even more value to your account with high-quality invoicing and billing tools, customer management, virtual terminal, POS app, inventory management, detailed reporting analytics, and more. It’s a growing platform that is constantly improving and adding new features, so the value you get from the service will only grow over time. Even now, the tools Fattmerchant offers rival the offerings of the ever-popular Square Payments service. Fattmerchant’s invoicing and billing tools are the stand-out solutions of this service.

So whether you are a standard retail business, an online store, a phone order business, a professional service provider, or just about any other seller, we recommend Fattmerchant as a good place to start your search. It’s our top all-in-one payment processor pick because of its versatility, predictability, reliability, and value for a wide range of business types.

For more information about this company, see our in-depth Fattmerchant review.

Dharma Merchant Services

Dharma Merchant Services (see our review) takes its name from the term dharma, which is found in several Eastern religions. While it can mean many different things and there is no direct translation, it roughly refers to a “right way of living.” The folks at Dharma take this seriously, offering a full range of credit card processing services for a fair and reasonable price alongside some of the most in-depth and accurate educational material we’ve ever seen. Its fee structure is transparent – interchange-plus pricing is used exclusively, and there are no annual fees. This includes OptBlue pricing for accepting American Express transactions. They also don’t charge account setup fees, early termination fees, or have a monthly minimum. Fees that they do charge (including PCI compliance fees) are fully disclosed on their website. This is a company that strives to do the right thing with all its business practices. 

Best Nonprofit Credit Card Processing Company

Dharma is unique in the world of credit card processing companies in that they donate a significant percentage of their profits to charity, living up to their motto “Commerce with Compassion.” Related to that, Dharma provides discounted rates for nonprofit businesses. Our guide for nonprofit payment processing discounts has more information for charities looking to save money on credit card acceptance. While many believe that nonprofits get the best rates with a software specialist like Blackbaud Merchant Services, Dharma provides much lower rates and better service. Nonprofits that accept credit card with Dharma pay a markup of only a 0.20% + $0.10 markup for in-person payments. And Dharma Merchant Services will meet or beat your current rate to win your business and rate are always negotiable in this industry. We recommend Dharma highly to nonprofits, but this company serves all merchants well and made it onto our list of the best retail credit card processing companies too.

While there is no minimum monthly volume requirement, Dharma openly acknowledges that their full-service merchant accounts don’t make financial sense for low-volume businesses processing less than $10,000 per month in transactions. If your business falls into that category, they recommend Square (see our review).

For more information about this company, see our in-depth Dharma Merchant Services review.

Payline Data (see our review) covers all the bases for small business transactions, from mobile and online payments to in-store sales. They offer easy-to-understand pricing plans that are very affordable, especially for low-volume sellers. However, the company’s website fully explains all of the extra features and their associated costs, so you know up front what you’ll have to pay. Payline also stands out from the crowd for their corporate philosophy of charitable giving and support for non-profits through discounted pricing and their “Commercial Co-Venture” program.

Credit Card Processing Company For Best Overall Value

The company offers four standardized pricing plans, all of which feature interchange-plus pricing and come with free hardware and software to get you up and running in no time. A standard feature of all four plans is a virtual terminal that allows you to process credit card transactions from any internet-connected computer. Transactions can be keyed in manually or swiped with an optional USB card reader. All plans also feature month-to-month billing with no long-term contracts and no early termination fees. These are great terms, but be aware that these plans also come with a $25.00 monthly minimum. (As a point of comparison, this means that Payline is still less expensive than Square as long as you process around $1,000 per month.)

For brand-new or mobile businesses, Payline Start is the most affordable plan. There’s no monthly fee, and pass-through markup rates are set at 0.30% + $0.10 per transaction. In addition to the free virtual terminal, you’ll also receive a free Ingenico GX5 card reader and the Payline Mobile app to go with it. If you’re looking for value, but want better equipment and lower rates, the Payline Shop plan might be right for you. This plan includes the same features as the Payline Start plan, but lowers your processing rate. The plan costs $10 per month, and markup rates are set at 0.20% + $0.10 per transaction. Mobile businesses and small to medium retailers will benefit the most from this plan.

Payline also offers accounts to for high-risk merchants through partner banks that specialize in difficult to place accounts. Our short list of the best high-risk payment processing options can help you make some comparisons if you’re having trouble getting approved for a merchant account.

For more information, see our complete Payline Data review.

Another one of our favorite providers, CDGcommerce (see our review) has been around since 1998 – long enough to have figured out what it takes to run a successful processing company and keep customers happy. CDG stands out from the crowd by not charging you any of the nickel-and-dime hidden fees that most other companies in the industry are notorious for while also managing to add significant value to your account with a variety of free products and services. CDG merchant accounts come with no account setup fees, no PCI compliance fees, no monthly minimums, and month-to-month billing with no early termination fees.

Best Online Credit Card Processing Company

A basic merchant account with CDGcommerce costs only $10.00 per month and includes free use of its Quantum payment gateway/virtual terminal (a free Authorize.Net gateway is also available as an alternative). While we generally highly recommend buying your credit card terminals outright instead of leasing them, we’ve made an exception for CDG. Rather than lock you into an expensive, four-year lease, CDG only charges $79 per year (that works out to $7 per month) for terminal insurance. This is a much better deal than a standard terminal lease, which can end up costing you thousands of dollars over the full term of the lease. So even though CDGcommerce makes the grade as one of the best online credit card processing companies out there, it also provides solid benefits for retail merchants.

CDG also offers very competitive processing rates. All advanced pricing is interchange-plus and disclosed on their website. Swiped retail and mobile businesses see a standard markup rate of 0.25% + $0.10 per transaction, while online and other card-not-present businesses pay 0.30% + $0.15 per transaction. Rates are negotiable for higher volume businesses and CGD will meet or beat your current rate to win your business.

For a more detailed look at CDGcommerce, be sure to check out our full review.

“Trust, transparency, and fair pricing” is Helcim’s motto, and they live up to it by providing the most up-front, clearly-explained pricing structure of any of the credit card processing companies we’ve reviewed here. A Canadian company, Helcim (see our review) also has an office in Seattle and provide full support to US-based merchants. Beyond being a fantastic option for Canadian businesses, Helcim provides an exceptionally well-equipped all-in-one payment processing package that includes POS, inventory, mobile payments, invoicing, billing, an API, and more. This adds a ton of value to every Helcim account.

Best Canadian Credit Card Processing Company

Helcim’s website features a variety of EMV-compliant and NFC-capable credit card terminals (to accept payments from chip cards and digital wallets), starting at $199. Unlike many of their competitors, they encourage US customers to buy their terminals outright, rather than renting or leasing. Helcim will reprogram your current equipment for free if it’s up-to-date. If your current terminal isn’t compatible, they’ll exchange it for a refurbished terminal for $75.00. Unfortunately, Canadian EMV-compliant terminals are not designed to be transferred or resold, so Canadian customers will have to use the rental option or buy a new machine. Renting on a month-to-month basis (which is not the same as leasing) is usually the best option for Canadian merchants. Our comprehensive post on the best and worst Canadian credit card payment processing companies will give you a complete rundown of your options. Helcim will be the best bet for most Canadian businesses.

Helcim uses a Cost+ pricing model, which includes a monthly subscription fee and interchange-plus pricing for each transaction. Retail users pay $15.00 per month, while eCommerce users pay $35.00 per month. In addition to the per-transaction interchange rate charged by the issuing credit card company, Helcim charges a markup of 0.25% + $0.08 per transaction for retail and mobile payments. Online transactions are charged 0.45% + $0.25 per transaction, plus the applicable interchange rate. Of course, these rates are negotiable for higher-volume businesses and Helcim will meet or beat your current quote to get you onboard. Helcim supports e-check payments (also known as ACH or EFT processing) for an extra $25 per month and $0.25 per transaction. Helcim also includes excellent resources to help you understand how American Express card payments are priced.  If you’re curious about the pros and cons of accepting e-check payments, take a look at our guide to ACH payment processing. Helcim’s website includes a detailed explanation of their fees, plus some truly eye-opening disclosures about how their bank-owned competitors are ripping you off with hidden fees and long-term contracts.

For more information about this company, see our in-depth Helcim Commerce review.

All-In-One on a Budget: Square vs. Shopify

Finally, no review of small business credit card processing companies would be complete without a look at the biggest all-in-one processors out there. To us, that means Square Payments and Shopify Payments. You could make an argument for PayPal to be included in this comparison, but it lacks some core features that Square and Shopify offer. And while Stripe and Braintree are certainly major names, they both (like PayPal) are really designed primarily for web developers and businesses that want to create custom solutions. In this side-by-side comparison, we look at both features and pricing for Square and Shopify to help you make the best decision regarding value for your business. Neither will be as versatile or as inexpensive as a merchant account, but each has its own merits.

Comparing Industry Leaders for Low-Cost Multichannel Payments

Square was the first company to offer smartphone-based mobile payments when it launched back in 2009. Today, it has plenty of competitors, but its lack of a monthly fee, reasonable transaction fees, and robust features still make it a great choice, especially for low-volume sellers. Square replaces the traditional credit card terminal with a simple credit card reader that connects to your smartphone or tablet and works in conjunction with Square’s mobile app to process credit or debit cards. (Check out our post on the best credit card readers for small businesses to make more comparisons.) Square supports retail locations, ecommerce, and (naturally) mobile payments.

Shopify has a very similar offering to Square, but with more of an emphasis on online selling. While most businesses on a budget can get by with the webstore building tools that Square provides, those in need of more features and great control will find a much more powerful solution at Shopify. These businesses will also be stuck paying a larger monthly fee, but remember that high value always trumps low cost alone.

Unfortunately, one of the downsides to using Square or Shopify Payments is that stability issues for high-risk businesses or brand new businesses without a processing history arise at a rate that’s well above the industry average. This often results in sudden, unexplained account terminations and account holds of up to 180 days. There are multiple reasons for this, but one major factor is that Square accounts are aggregated together (aka, third-party payments), rather than each account having its own unique Merchant ID number. To make matters worse, phone-based customer service from these companies hasn’t always been the best.

Many businesses considering Square and Shopify are looking for the least expensive option available. If that describes you, take a look at our guide to the cheapest credit card processing services. Square is often — but not always — the best option. Note that some low-cost options are too good to be true, as we outline in our in-depth look at so-called free credit card payment processing companies.

A Full List of Credit Card Processing Companies We Recommend

The top companies at a glance…

Final Thoughts on Credit Card Processors

Whether you’re trying to juggle multiple retail locations or just selling products online, one of the five services we’ve highlighted here should be a “best match” for your business. While each service has its own standout features, they all offer competitive rates, transparent pricing, and an easy, low-cost setup. While all of them perform more or less the same essential service (connecting an acquiring bank to an issuing bank), each brings its own value to the floor. Square is a solid contender for very small, low volume businesses, while Fattmerchant, Payline, Helcim, and CDGcommerce are better for larger retail establishments. If you’re running a non-profit, Dharma may very well be your best choice. In any event, all of these services will, in most cases, provide you with a better, more affordable service than you’re likely to get with any of the traditional, bank-owned credit card processing companies. You can also compare our top processors (except for Square) head-to-head using our merchant account comparison chart. Those interested in mobile credit card processing specifically should consult our mobile chart. And those most interested in ecommerce tools can take a look at our shopping cart software comparison.

Here’s a final look at your options. We hope one of these will be the best choice for your small, medium-sized, or even enterprise business! Let us know how it goes.

A final look at your payment processing options…

headingPayment DepotSquareFattmerchantDharma

Payment Depot

Square Payments

Fattmerchant

Dharma Merchant Services

Get Started

Review

Get Started

Review

Get Started

Review

Get Started

Review

Availability

US-based businesses

US, Canada, UK

US-based businesses

US-based businesses

Serves in-store, mobile, and eCommerce

✓

✓

✓

✓

No early termination fees

✓

✓

✓

✓

Compatible with most POS systems

✓

✓

✓

Rate matching / negotiable 

✓

✓

✓

High-quality sales and customer service

✓

✓

✓

Pricing model

Interchange-plus

Flat rate

Interchange-plus

Interchange-plus

Monthly fee

$49

$0

$99

$10

Standard retail rates

0% + $0.15 markup

2.75% total

0% + $0.08 markup

0.20% + $0.08 markup

Good for higher volume (over $20K/month)

✓

✓

✓

Good for mid volume ($10K-20K/month)

✓

✓

✓

Good for lower volume (under $10K/month)

✓

✓

Good for selling occasionally

✓

Instant account setup

✓

Get Started

with PaymentDepot

Get Started

with Square

Get Started

with Fattmerchant

Get Started

with Dharma

Good for higher volume (over $20K/month)

Good for mid volume ($10K-20K/month)

Good for lower volume (under $10K/month)

Frank Kehl

Frank Kehl has been writing about merchant services, payment gateways, and international money transfer services since 2015. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State and a Juris Doctorate from the Ventura College of Law. After a long and enjoyable career of traveling around the world as an Air Force navigator, he’s comfortably settled down in the wine country town of Paso Robles in California’s scenic Central Coast region. He enjoys reading, photography, hiking, and numerous other outdoor pursuits.

[mlmcompanies]

When you see a legal advisor embroiled in ongoing legal battles, you can’t help but wonder…

If they’re the real deal, why can’t they defend themselves?

But LegalShield may finally have their act together. The question now is whether you can make any money with this MLM.

LegalShield was once a big, bad, publicly-traded company with a network marketing opportunity on the New York Stock Exchange…until they went private faster than a celebrity in rehab.

Judging from some of their past scandals and legal troubles, going private was definitely a smart move. But are they worth joining? We’ll let you decide.

FAQ

1. What does LegalShield sell? LegalShield gives access to affordable legal coverage to its members, no matter how traumatic or trivial the situation. They’re the No. 1 subscription-based provider of legal plans to families and small businesses across the U.S. and Canada.

2. What are LegalShield’s most popular products? LegalShield’s Personal Legal Plan costs about the same as a dinner out ($24.95/month) and gives you coverage for you, your spouse or partner, and your children. Included with your membership are advice, letters/phone calls on your behalf, legal document review, standard will preparation, 24/7 emergency assistance, and trial defense services. Another popular service is ID Shield, which protects your identity, including customized alerts, complete identity monitoring, credit scores, and unlimited consultation.

3. How much does it cost to join LegalShield? It costs $99 plus any applicable state licensing fees to become a LegalShield associate. This gives you an Associate Start-Up Kit with brochures and applications so you can begin your business right away.

4. Is LegalShield a scam? No, LegalShield is a legitimate business with 1.7 million members in 50 states and 4 provinces. They have provider law firms across the United States and Canada, so the legal support you get comes from a lawyer who’s well acquainted with your local laws and regulations. What does feel scammy is the lack of full disclosure about becoming an Associate and how much you can earn. If it’s such a great opportunity, why aren’t they more forthcoming with information about how to join?

5. What is LegalShield’s BBB rating? A+

6. How long has LegalShield been in business? Since 1972

7. What is LegalShield’s revenue? $457 million

8. How many LegalShield distributors are there? 287,812

9. What lawsuits have been filed? In 2001, Wyoming came down on Pre-Paid Legal Services (which was LegalShield’s original name) for making income representations that were prohibited by Wyoming law. [1] The SEC also required them to stop counting commissions as assets instead of expenses. Complying with their ruling essentially cut their reported earnings by more than half. [2] In 2005, LegalShield lost a case related to deceptive advertising and fraud and paid $9.9 million in punitive damages. [3] In 2007, the FTC began investigating their marketing, saying it was misleading. Fortunately for LegalShield, in 2010 the investigation ended without any action. [4] In 2018, LC Technology International filed a proposed class action against Harvard Risk Management and LegalShield for sending unlawful, unsolicited fax messages as part of a pyramid sales scheme. [5]

10. Comparable companies: Market America, Life Leadership, Primerica

So should you join LegalShield?

I’m not a hater of the company at all, there’s definitely a market for legal advice and resources. But as far as passive income opportunities go, there are better options out there.

Click here for my #1 recommendation

Either way, here’s the full review on LegalShield.

Overview

LegalShield was founded in 1972 under the name Sportsman’s Motor Club in Ada, Oklahoma. A couple of years later, they changed their name to Pre-Paid Legal and went public, selling its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

In 2011, the company was acquired by MidOcean Partners, a private equity firm worth $3.5 billion, for $650 million. They then went private and changed their name to LegalShield. In 2011, before they went private, they were raking in an annual revenue of $461 million. [6]

Back in 2001, they were hit twice by the law – first by the state of Wyoming for misrepresenting distributor earnings, and again by the SEC for counting commissions as assets to inflate their stock prices. They also faced legal troubles in Missouri that year. [7]

In 2009, they were subpoenaed by the SEC for various documents which were never sent over to the SEC despite multiple demands. After that, the FTC filed a complaint against LegalShield for multiple violations, including misleading representations. [8]

Jeff Bell is LegalShield’s new CEO, and this guy is no joke.

Bell got his MBA from none other than the Wharton School of Business back in 1989. He’s worked in key positions at Ford Motors, Chrysler, NBCUniversal, Advertising Age, where he won them their first-ever Online Marketer of the Year award in 2005, and Microsoft, where he oversaw the launch of Halo 3, among other major releases, as Vice President of Global. [9, 10]

He’s got decades of experience in marketing and advertising at some of the world’s biggest corporations, and he was named as LegalShield’s new leader in 2014. [11]

Hopefully, he can replicate his success in the world of multi-level marketing. This will be his first MLM, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe his credentials can fend off the FTC.

So maybe he can turn their rep around. However, in March of 2016, he made the decision to leave the Direct Selling Association, the regulatory body that pretty much ensures that an MLM is at least semi-legit (see the full MLM rankings here).

Bell claims their decision to leave the DSA is because the DSA actually isn’t enforcing its own Code of Ethics against other MLMs who are clearly breaking it, and thus is weakening the direct selling industry as a whole. Wouldn’t be the first time. [12]

As of January 2016, LegalShield membership began a steady increase, hitting 1,612,183 members before the end of the year. Now, they’re over 1.7 million members. Smells like a comeback.

How much does LegalShield cost?

At the time of writing this, it costs $99 for a New Associate Start-Up Kit, which includes online training, materials, sponsor support, a back office, and a few other perks.

Products

LegalShield sells legal services, in case their name didn’t tip you off. They claim to offer direct and affordable access to law firms.

They have a network of almost 7,000 independent attorneys throughout the United States and Canada who offer these services. For your monthly membership fee, which varies by state but usually comes out to just under $25/month, you get:

Legal Advice: If you ever need advice or consultation from a legal representative, you always have one at your service.

Legal Representation: In the case that you should need legal representation, you have their independent attorneys at your disposal.

Automotive Defense: Accident defense and moving violation assistance.

Familial and IRS Legal Services: This covers everything from divorce and name changes to IRS audits.

Considering legal advice can cost hundreds, and representation from an attorney can cost anywhere from $150-$500 per hour, it’s not a bad deal.

The company also now sells identity theft protection services starting at $9.95/month. The basic plan covers you and a spouse, and includes:

Credit report and credit score analysis

Credit restoration

Unlimited ID theft consultations

Minor protection

Credit monitoring and alerts

Honestly, if you have even a halfway decent bank or own a credit card, you probably already have access to all of these services for free.

Compensation Plan

You’re selling a monthly membership, and when you get a new customer, LegalShield pays you an advance for a year’s worth of that customer’s membership. Sounds great, right? Yeah, until that customer decides to cancel, and you have to pay back a huge chunk of that advance.

The compensation plan is nowhere to be found on their website, and the information you can find is very vague. It doesn’t list any specific commission rates.

There are four ways to earn:

Personal Sales

You make a percentage on each membership you sell, which varies by rank. This is roughly what you can make, according to rank:

Junior Associate: Up to 50%

Associate: Up to $75 on each sale

Senior Associate: Up to $100 on each sale

Manager: Up to $125 on each sale

Director: Up to $150 on each sale

Executive Director: Up to $182.50 on each sale

These numbers look generous, but remember, they are advances on 12 months of membership payments. Also, it’s very, very difficult to move up even past Junior Associate, let alone all the way to director levels.

Build a Team

Team commissions are offered in the form of bonuses for every membership they sell. Exact numbers are not specified.

Residual Income

After a membership that you’ve sold lasts a year, you make a monthly commission on each month they stay active. Whether or not this commission is the same as before isn’t stated, but this is basically number one rehashed.

Performance Club

Each time you sell memberships and recruit new associates, you earn points. If you earn enough (fat chance), you can start earning cash bonuses and prizes.

Recap

The company is not without their scandals. They’ve got a pretty colorful history, to say the least.

However, it seems that the worst might be over for them. They’ve survived dozens of legal battles, and since going private, they’ve only had one claim made against them. (It looks pretty frivolous; they’ll probably pull it out.) On top of that, they’re being run by a rock star CEO, and so far, he’s doing good things for the company.

That being said, the commission plan is vague, at best. It’s really not clear how much money you’d make as an associate. One thing that is clear – you’re probably not getting rich here.

I’ve been involved with network marketing for over ten years so I know what to look for when you consider a new opportunity.

After reviewing 200+ business opportunities and systems out there, here is the one I would recommend:

Click here for my #1 recommendation

[antionetterparker]

LegalShield: Are their legal services really legal? [Review]

When you see a legal advisor embroiled in ongoing legal battles, you can’t help but wonder…

If they’re the real deal, why can’t they defend themselves?

But LegalShield may finally have their act together. The question now is whether you can make any money with this MLM.

LegalShield was once a big, bad, publicly-traded company with a network marketing opportunity on the New York Stock Exchange…until they went private faster than a celebrity in rehab.

Judging from some of their past scandals and legal troubles, going private was definitely a smart move. But are they worth joining? We’ll let you decide.

FAQ

1. What does LegalShield sell? LegalShield gives access to affordable legal coverage to its members, no matter how traumatic or trivial the situation. They’re the No. 1 subscription-based provider of legal plans to families and small businesses across the U.S. and Canada.

2. What are LegalShield’s most popular products? LegalShield’s Personal Legal Plan costs about the same as a dinner out ($24.95/month) and gives you coverage for you, your spouse or partner, and your children. Included with your membership are advice, letters/phone calls on your behalf, legal document review, standard will preparation, 24/7 emergency assistance, and trial defense services. Another popular service is ID Shield, which protects your identity, including customized alerts, complete identity monitoring, credit scores, and unlimited consultation.

3. How much does it cost to join LegalShield? It costs $99 plus any applicable state licensing fees to become a LegalShield associate. This gives you an Associate Start-Up Kit with brochures and applications so you can begin your business right away.

4. Is LegalShield a scam? No, LegalShield is a legitimate business with 1.7 million members in 50 states and 4 provinces. They have provider law firms across the United States and Canada, so the legal support you get comes from a lawyer who’s well acquainted with your local laws and regulations. What does feel scammy is the lack of full disclosure about becoming an Associate and how much you can earn. If it’s such a great opportunity, why aren’t they more forthcoming with information about how to join?

5. What is LegalShield’s BBB rating? A+

6. How long has LegalShield been in business? Since 1972

7. What is LegalShield’s revenue? $457 million

8. How many LegalShield distributors are there? 287,812

9. What lawsuits have been filed? In 2001, Wyoming came down on Pre-Paid Legal Services (which was LegalShield’s original name) for making income representations that were prohibited by Wyoming law. [1] The SEC also required them to stop counting commissions as assets instead of expenses. Complying with their ruling essentially cut their reported earnings by more than half. [2] In 2005, LegalShield lost a case related to deceptive advertising and fraud and paid $9.9 million in punitive damages. [3] In 2007, the FTC began investigating their marketing, saying it was misleading. Fortunately for LegalShield, in 2010 the investigation ended without any action. [4] In 2018, LC Technology International filed a proposed class action against Harvard Risk Management and LegalShield for sending unlawful, unsolicited fax messages as part of a pyramid sales scheme. [5]

10. Comparable companies: Market America, Life Leadership, Primerica

So should you join LegalShield?

I’m not a hater of the company at all, there’s definitely a market for legal advice and resources. But as far as passive income opportunities go, there are better options out there.

Click here for my #1 recommendation

Either way, here’s the full review on LegalShield.

Overview

LegalShield was founded in 1972 under the name Sportsman’s Motor Club in Ada, Oklahoma. A couple of years later, they changed their name to Pre-Paid Legal and went public, selling its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

In 2011, the company was acquired by MidOcean Partners, a private equity firm worth $3.5 billion, for $650 million. They then went private and changed their name to LegalShield. In 2011, before they went private, they were raking in an annual revenue of $461 million. [6]

Back in 2001, they were hit twice by the law – first by the state of Wyoming for misrepresenting distributor earnings, and again by the SEC for counting commissions as assets to inflate their stock prices. They also faced legal troubles in Missouri that year. [7]

In 2009, they were subpoenaed by the SEC for various documents which were never sent over to the SEC despite multiple demands. After that, the FTC filed a complaint against LegalShield for multiple violations, including misleading representations. [8]

Jeff Bell is LegalShield’s new CEO, and this guy is no joke.

Bell got his MBA from none other than the Wharton School of Business back in 1989. He’s worked in key positions at Ford Motors, Chrysler, NBCUniversal, Advertising Age, where he won them their first-ever Online Marketer of the Year award in 2005, and Microsoft, where he oversaw the launch of Halo 3, among other major releases, as Vice President of Global. [9, 10]

He’s got decades of experience in marketing and advertising at some of the world’s biggest corporations, and he was named as LegalShield’s new leader in 2014. [11]

Hopefully, he can replicate his success in the world of multi-level marketing. This will be his first MLM, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe his credentials can fend off the FTC.

So maybe he can turn their rep around. However, in March of 2016, he made the decision to leave the Direct Selling Association, the regulatory body that pretty much ensures that an MLM is at least semi-legit (see the full MLM rankings here).

Bell claims their decision to leave the DSA is because the DSA actually isn’t enforcing its own Code of Ethics against other MLMs who are clearly breaking it, and thus is weakening the direct selling industry as a whole. Wouldn’t be the first time. [12]

As of January 2016, LegalShield membership began a steady increase, hitting 1,612,183 members before the end of the year. Now, they’re over 1.7 million members. Smells like a comeback.

How much does LegalShield cost?

At the time of writing this, it costs $99 for a New Associate Start-Up Kit, which includes online training, materials, sponsor support, a back office, and a few other perks.

Products

LegalShield sells legal services, in case their name didn’t tip you off. They claim to offer direct and affordable access to law firms.

They have a network of almost 7,000 independent attorneys throughout the United States and Canada who offer these services. For your monthly membership fee, which varies by state but usually comes out to just under $25/month, you get:

Legal Advice: If you ever need advice or consultation from a legal representative, you always have one at your service.

Legal Representation: In the case that you should need legal representation, you have their independent attorneys at your disposal.

Automotive Defense: Accident defense and moving violation assistance.

Familial and IRS Legal Services: This covers everything from divorce and name changes to IRS audits.

Considering legal advice can cost hundreds, and representation from an attorney can cost anywhere from $150-$500 per hour, it’s not a bad deal.

The company also now sells identity theft protection services starting at $9.95/month. The basic plan covers you and a spouse, and includes:

Credit report and credit score analysis

Credit restoration

Unlimited ID theft consultations

Minor protection

Credit monitoring and alerts

Honestly, if you have even a halfway decent bank or own a credit card, you probably already have access to all of these services for free.

Compensation Plan

You’re selling a monthly membership, and when you get a new customer, LegalShield pays you an advance for a year’s worth of that customer’s membership. Sounds great, right? Yeah, until that customer decides to cancel, and you have to pay back a huge chunk of that advance.

The compensation plan is nowhere to be found on their website, and the information you can find is very vague. It doesn’t list any specific commission rates.

There are four ways to earn:

Personal Sales

You make a percentage on each membership you sell, which varies by rank. This is roughly what you can make, according to rank:

Junior Associate: Up to 50%

Associate: Up to $75 on each sale

Senior Associate: Up to $100 on each sale

Manager: Up to $125 on each sale

Director: Up to $150 on each sale

Executive Director: Up to $182.50 on each sale

These numbers look generous, but remember, they are advances on 12 months of membership payments. Also, it’s very, very difficult to move up even past Junior Associate, let alone all the way to director levels.

Build a Team

Team commissions are offered in the form of bonuses for every membership they sell. Exact numbers are not specified.

Residual Income

After a membership that you’ve sold lasts a year, you make a monthly commission on each month they stay active. Whether or not this commission is the same as before isn’t stated, but this is basically number one rehashed.

Performance Club

Each time you sell memberships and recruit new associates, you earn points. If you earn enough (fat chance), you can start earning cash bonuses and prizes.

Recap

The company is not without their scandals. They’ve got a pretty colorful history, to say the least.

However, it seems that the worst might be over for them. They’ve survived dozens of legal battles, and since going private, they’ve only had one claim made against them. (It looks pretty frivolous; they’ll probably pull it out.) On top of that, they’re being run by a rock star CEO, and so far, he’s doing good things for the company.

That being said, the commission plan is vague, at best. It’s really not clear how much money you’d make as an associate. One thing that is clear – you’re probably not getting rich here.

I’ve been involved with network marketing for over ten years so I know what to look for when you consider a new opportunity.

After reviewing 200+ business opportunities and systems out there, here is the one I would recommend:

Click here for my #1 recommendation

via https://mlmcompanies.org/legalshield/

[pattersondonaldblk5]

How Technology Can Help Artists Make a Living Through Their Online Audiences

It’s been no secret that the music industry has been struggling over the past couple decades. After years of spiraling album sales, the industry hit a new low in 2016, with just over 100 million units sold — a nearly 14 percent decrease from the previous year, reflecting declines in both physical and digital album sales.

That’s not the whole story, of course. The music industry’s sluggish sales gave way to music streaming, which overtook physical music in terms of revenue last year. With streaming music’s revenues skyrocketing to $6.6 billion — representing growth of 41 percent — the music industry has championed streaming as its new golden goose.

This is a good change — the music industry lost billions by fighting the shift to streaming. By focusing on CDs and digital downloads, never mind the fact that CDs saw an 84 percent decline in sales over a decade, the industry found itself “fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars,” as The New York Times pointed out.

Musicians Take the Hit

This sea change of embracing the technology the music industry once feared hasn’t necessarily paid off for musicians, however. Music manager Troy Carter told TechCrunch that labels are hoarding the royalties earned through streaming, keeping more than 70 percent of the fees. The contracts musicians sign with labels are intended to drive revenue for the record labels, not the artists themselves. The common refrain is that for every 20 artists signed to a label, only one is successful — with that math, it makes sense that labels hedge their bets to fund all 20.

Carter believes, however, that streaming payouts could approach CDs’ revenue heyday as more users sign up. Platforms like Repost are making the same bet. The platform, designed to help musicians make a living through their online audiences, works with artists and their teams to monetize their music distribution and promote their work.

Despite the democratization of many platforms and technologies, it’s been incredibly difficult for musicians to monetize their content, and fragmentation is a big part of the problem. “The music industry is way more complicated than it needs to be,” says Repost’s CTO Joey Mason. “Despite all of the advancement in tech, the structures in place on the revenue collection side are incredibly inefficient. To make matters worse, the copyright rules and regulations differ for each territory, so often, it’s not cost-effective to try to collect revenues in certain territories.”

Mason says that for artists, this problem is compounded by the fact that there’s no seamless way to collect all of their earnings. They’d have to work with multiple entities — performing rights organizations, publishers, labels, distributors — to collect every cent they’ve entitled to. This forces artists to spend more time developing business skills than creating new music.

Consolidating an Entire Industry

When Mason and his co-founder, CEO Jeff Ponchick, built Repost, they aimed to eliminate as many of the distractions for artists as they could. They recognized that most of the artists they spoke to struggled primarily in terms of exposure — they hit a wall as independent musicians and needed help getting to the next step. These independent musicians then faced a laundry list of tasks: optimize music on every platform; earn press write-ups; find promotional outlets; collect checks from SoundCloud, YouTube, etc.

Seeing how confusing and draining this was for artists, Repost built itself as a one-stop shop for doing everything. By eliminating multiple distribution and payment touchpoints, the platform also removed the burden of dealing with a variety of infrastructures, accounting practices, and more.

“A lot of people don’t know the difference between a music distributor and a record label,” Ponchick says. “For a distributor, we’d be seen as insanely expensive, taking 30 percent of artists’ money while others take 5 percent. But we offer label services and marketing the way a record label does, without taking any ownership of the music itself. It’s a way to make it OK to remain independent, for musicians to avoid signing with a label. They can make $20,000 to $30,000 per month and retain ownership.”

Chance the Rapper is one well-known indie artist who’s avoided the dreaded “sellout” label and made a successful go of it. While his success is considered a “fairytale” within the industry, Repost’s team aims to make independent success attainable. It started its quest with an algorithm. Artists apply to join Repost’s platform with their SoundCloud IDs; the platform’s algorithm combs the artist’s channel, assessing her average play count per upload, follower count, and biggest and smallest track to determine her likelihood of making money through the platform.

This data-driven approach has resulted in 100,000 rejected applications and 5,000 acceptances. But it enables Repost to put its focus and efforts behind the artists who are best positioned to benefit from its hands-on bevy of services, ensuring it doesn’t spread itself too thin or do what many in the music industry have done: sold a bill of goods to artists.

Making Tech Music’s Best Friend

Repost has recognized one thing many — other than artists — have failed to see: It’s inherently difficult to manage the varied tech infrastructures presented by SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, and others. And that remains true whether an artist is independent or well-established, selling out arenas.

“Every music platform is unique in how its content is delivered, monetized, and consumed. In order to maximize revenue, artists need to have a solid understanding of best practices and a monetization strategy for each store,” Mason says. “They need to work with a distributor that provides them a high level of insight and control of their content on a per-platform basis.”

Unfortunately, Mason says, most distributors take the one-size-fits-all approach, meaning artists’ revenue generation can’t be maximized. Repost has sidestepped that issue by building deep technical integrations with the platforms artists value most, with an emphasis on marketing, monetization, and content protection. And it’s worked: Repost’s client base has been driven through word of mouth, and it’s currently paying tens of millions of dollars to artists annually.

For example, Repost does fingerprinting through YouTube to drive revenue back to artists. Repost aggregates, packages, and delivers sound recording rights information to YouTube at scale for thousands of artists; using this data, YouTube utilizes audio fingerprinting to find videos on its platform that match the provided sound recording. When a match has been found, the YouTube video is “claimed” on behalf of the artist. Any advertisement or subscription revenues generated by the video are then sent back to the artist through Repost.

Technology is making what was once impossible possible for the music industry, and it’s democratizing music creation. “Music production is cheaper and more accessible than ever before — anyone with a laptop and Ableton can produce a hit track,” Mason explains. “Because of this, a ‘middle class’ of musicians has emerged, and more and more money is shifting into the mid- and long tail. Record labels aren’t equipped to handle this scale. They’re not tech companies, and their business models are built around breaking a smaller roster of artists and, ultimately, taking ownership of their clients’ music.”

Repost sees itself as a tech company in music, not a music company in tech. Because its business model is built around working with thousands, not hundreds, of artists, it’s invested heavily in automation. That’s enabled it to operate on a revenue-share model, not an ownership model. “This is better for creators, which is why so many artists are choosing to go independent rather than work with labels,” Mason says.

While the music industry has been struggling for years, technology is on track to put an end to that. With companies like Repost applying automation and technology to the many hoops the industry has erected over the years, they’re putting music on a path to become as streamlined as businesses in other industries. And that’s exactly what music needs.

https://ift.tt/2K8PYaS

[dustinwootenne]

How Technology Can Help Artists Make a Living Through Their Online Audiences

It’s been no secret that the music industry has been struggling over the past couple decades. After years of spiraling album sales, the industry hit a new low in 2016, with just over 100 million units sold — a nearly 14 percent decrease from the previous year, reflecting declines in both physical and digital album sales.

That’s not the whole story, of course. The music industry’s sluggish sales gave way to music streaming, which overtook physical music in terms of revenue last year. With streaming music’s revenues skyrocketing to $6.6 billion — representing growth of 41 percent — the music industry has championed streaming as its new golden goose.

This is a good change — the music industry lost billions by fighting the shift to streaming. By focusing on CDs and digital downloads, never mind the fact that CDs saw an 84 percent decline in sales over a decade, the industry found itself “fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars,” as The New York Times pointed out.

Musicians Take the Hit

This sea change of embracing the technology the music industry once feared hasn’t necessarily paid off for musicians, however. Music manager Troy Carter told TechCrunch that labels are hoarding the royalties earned through streaming, keeping more than 70 percent of the fees. The contracts musicians sign with labels are intended to drive revenue for the record labels, not the artists themselves. The common refrain is that for every 20 artists signed to a label, only one is successful — with that math, it makes sense that labels hedge their bets to fund all 20.

Carter believes, however, that streaming payouts could approach CDs’ revenue heyday as more users sign up. Platforms like Repost are making the same bet. The platform, designed to help musicians make a living through their online audiences, works with artists and their teams to monetize their music distribution and promote their work.

Despite the democratization of many platforms and technologies, it’s been incredibly difficult for musicians to monetize their content, and fragmentation is a big part of the problem. “The music industry is way more complicated than it needs to be,” says Repost’s CTO Joey Mason. “Despite all of the advancement in tech, the structures in place on the revenue collection side are incredibly inefficient. To make matters worse, the copyright rules and regulations differ for each territory, so often, it’s not cost-effective to try to collect revenues in certain territories.”

Mason says that for artists, this problem is compounded by the fact that there’s no seamless way to collect all of their earnings. They’d have to work with multiple entities — performing rights organizations, publishers, labels, distributors — to collect every cent they’ve entitled to. This forces artists to spend more time developing business skills than creating new music.

Consolidating an Entire Industry

When Mason and his co-founder, CEO Jeff Ponchick, built Repost, they aimed to eliminate as many of the distractions for artists as they could. They recognized that most of the artists they spoke to struggled primarily in terms of exposure — they hit a wall as independent musicians and needed help getting to the next step. These independent musicians then faced a laundry list of tasks: optimize music on every platform; earn press write-ups; find promotional outlets; collect checks from SoundCloud, YouTube, etc.

Seeing how confusing and draining this was for artists, Repost built itself as a one-stop shop for doing everything. By eliminating multiple distribution and payment touchpoints, the platform also removed the burden of dealing with a variety of infrastructures, accounting practices, and more.

“A lot of people don’t know the difference between a music distributor and a record label,” Ponchick says. “For a distributor, we’d be seen as insanely expensive, taking 30 percent of artists’ money while others take 5 percent. But we offer label services and marketing the way a record label does, without taking any ownership of the music itself. It’s a way to make it OK to remain independent, for musicians to avoid signing with a label. They can make $20,000 to $30,000 per month and retain ownership.”

Chance the Rapper is one well-known indie artist who’s avoided the dreaded “sellout” label and made a successful go of it. While his success is considered a “fairytale” within the industry, Repost’s team aims to make independent success attainable. It started its quest with an algorithm. Artists apply to join Repost’s platform with their SoundCloud IDs; the platform’s algorithm combs the artist’s channel, assessing her average play count per upload, follower count, and biggest and smallest track to determine her likelihood of making money through the platform.

This data-driven approach has resulted in 100,000 rejected applications and 5,000 acceptances. But it enables Repost to put its focus and efforts behind the artists who are best positioned to benefit from its hands-on bevy of services, ensuring it doesn’t spread itself too thin or do what many in the music industry have done: sold a bill of goods to artists.

Making Tech Music’s Best Friend

Repost has recognized one thing many — other than artists — have failed to see: It’s inherently difficult to manage the varied tech infrastructures presented by SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, and others. And that remains true whether an artist is independent or well-established, selling out arenas.

“Every music platform is unique in how its content is delivered, monetized, and consumed. In order to maximize revenue, artists need to have a solid understanding of best practices and a monetization strategy for each store,” Mason says. “They need to work with a distributor that provides them a high level of insight and control of their content on a per-platform basis.”

Unfortunately, Mason says, most distributors take the one-size-fits-all approach, meaning artists’ revenue generation can’t be maximized. Repost has sidestepped that issue by building deep technical integrations with the platforms artists value most, with an emphasis on marketing, monetization, and content protection. And it’s worked: Repost’s client base has been driven through word of mouth, and it’s currently paying tens of millions of dollars to artists annually.

For example, Repost does fingerprinting through YouTube to drive revenue back to artists. Repost aggregates, packages, and delivers sound recording rights information to YouTube at scale for thousands of artists; using this data, YouTube utilizes audio fingerprinting to find videos on its platform that match the provided sound recording. When a match has been found, the YouTube video is “claimed” on behalf of the artist. Any advertisement or subscription revenues generated by the video are then sent back to the artist through Repost.

Technology is making what was once impossible possible for the music industry, and it’s democratizing music creation. “Music production is cheaper and more accessible than ever before — anyone with a laptop and Ableton can produce a hit track,” Mason explains. “Because of this, a ‘middle class’ of musicians has emerged, and more and more money is shifting into the mid- and long tail. Record labels aren’t equipped to handle this scale. They’re not tech companies, and their business models are built around breaking a smaller roster of artists and, ultimately, taking ownership of their clients’ music.”

Repost sees itself as a tech company in music, not a music company in tech. Because its business model is built around working with thousands, not hundreds, of artists, it’s invested heavily in automation. That’s enabled it to operate on a revenue-share model, not an ownership model. “This is better for creators, which is why so many artists are choosing to go independent rather than work with labels,” Mason says.

While the music industry has been struggling for years, technology is on track to put an end to that. With companies like Repost applying automation and technology to the many hoops the industry has erected over the years, they’re putting music on a path to become as streamlined as businesses in other industries. And that’s exactly what music needs.

https://ift.tt/2K8PYaS

[mariaaklnthony]

How Technology Can Help Artists Make a Living Through Their Online Audiences

It’s been no secret that the music industry has been struggling over the past couple decades. After years of spiraling album sales, the industry hit a new low in 2016, with just over 100 million units sold — a nearly 14 percent decrease from the previous year, reflecting declines in both physical and digital album sales.

That’s not the whole story, of course. The music industry’s sluggish sales gave way to music streaming, which overtook physical music in terms of revenue last year. With streaming music’s revenues skyrocketing to $6.6 billion — representing growth of 41 percent — the music industry has championed streaming as its new golden goose.

This is a good change — the music industry lost billions by fighting the shift to streaming. By focusing on CDs and digital downloads, never mind the fact that CDs saw an 84 percent decline in sales over a decade, the industry found itself “fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars,” as The New York Times pointed out.

Musicians Take the Hit

This sea change of embracing the technology the music industry once feared hasn’t necessarily paid off for musicians, however. Music manager Troy Carter told TechCrunch that labels are hoarding the royalties earned through streaming, keeping more than 70 percent of the fees. The contracts musicians sign with labels are intended to drive revenue for the record labels, not the artists themselves. The common refrain is that for every 20 artists signed to a label, only one is successful — with that math, it makes sense that labels hedge their bets to fund all 20.

Carter believes, however, that streaming payouts could approach CDs’ revenue heyday as more users sign up. Platforms like Repost are making the same bet. The platform, designed to help musicians make a living through their online audiences, works with artists and their teams to monetize their music distribution and promote their work.

Despite the democratization of many platforms and technologies, it’s been incredibly difficult for musicians to monetize their content, and fragmentation is a big part of the problem. “The music industry is way more complicated than it needs to be,” says Repost’s CTO Joey Mason. “Despite all of the advancement in tech, the structures in place on the revenue collection side are incredibly inefficient. To make matters worse, the copyright rules and regulations differ for each territory, so often, it’s not cost-effective to try to collect revenues in certain territories.”

Mason says that for artists, this problem is compounded by the fact that there’s no seamless way to collect all of their earnings. They’d have to work with multiple entities — performing rights organizations, publishers, labels, distributors — to collect every cent they’ve entitled to. This forces artists to spend more time developing business skills than creating new music.

Consolidating an Entire Industry

When Mason and his co-founder, CEO Jeff Ponchick, built Repost, they aimed to eliminate as many of the distractions for artists as they could. They recognized that most of the artists they spoke to struggled primarily in terms of exposure — they hit a wall as independent musicians and needed help getting to the next step. These independent musicians then faced a laundry list of tasks: optimize music on every platform; earn press write-ups; find promotional outlets; collect checks from SoundCloud, YouTube, etc.

Seeing how confusing and draining this was for artists, Repost built itself as a one-stop shop for doing everything. By eliminating multiple distribution and payment touchpoints, the platform also removed the burden of dealing with a variety of infrastructures, accounting practices, and more.

“A lot of people don’t know the difference between a music distributor and a record label,” Ponchick says. “For a distributor, we’d be seen as insanely expensive, taking 30 percent of artists’ money while others take 5 percent. But we offer label services and marketing the way a record label does, without taking any ownership of the music itself. It’s a way to make it OK to remain independent, for musicians to avoid signing with a label. They can make $20,000 to $30,000 per month and retain ownership.”

Chance the Rapper is one well-known indie artist who’s avoided the dreaded “sellout” label and made a successful go of it. While his success is considered a “fairytale” within the industry, Repost’s team aims to make independent success attainable. It started its quest with an algorithm. Artists apply to join Repost’s platform with their SoundCloud IDs; the platform’s algorithm combs the artist’s channel, assessing her average play count per upload, follower count, and biggest and smallest track to determine her likelihood of making money through the platform.

This data-driven approach has resulted in 100,000 rejected applications and 5,000 acceptances. But it enables Repost to put its focus and efforts behind the artists who are best positioned to benefit from its hands-on bevy of services, ensuring it doesn’t spread itself too thin or do what many in the music industry have done: sold a bill of goods to artists.

Making Tech Music’s Best Friend

Repost has recognized one thing many — other than artists — have failed to see: It’s inherently difficult to manage the varied tech infrastructures presented by SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, and others. And that remains true whether an artist is independent or well-established, selling out arenas.

“Every music platform is unique in how its content is delivered, monetized, and consumed. In order to maximize revenue, artists need to have a solid understanding of best practices and a monetization strategy for each store,” Mason says. “They need to work with a distributor that provides them a high level of insight and control of their content on a per-platform basis.”

Unfortunately, Mason says, most distributors take the one-size-fits-all approach, meaning artists’ revenue generation can’t be maximized. Repost has sidestepped that issue by building deep technical integrations with the platforms artists value most, with an emphasis on marketing, monetization, and content protection. And it’s worked: Repost’s client base has been driven through word of mouth, and it’s currently paying tens of millions of dollars to artists annually.

For example, Repost does fingerprinting through YouTube to drive revenue back to artists. Repost aggregates, packages, and delivers sound recording rights information to YouTube at scale for thousands of artists; using this data, YouTube utilizes audio fingerprinting to find videos on its platform that match the provided sound recording. When a match has been found, the YouTube video is “claimed” on behalf of the artist. Any advertisement or subscription revenues generated by the video are then sent back to the artist through Repost.

Technology is making what was once impossible possible for the music industry, and it’s democratizing music creation. “Music production is cheaper and more accessible than ever before — anyone with a laptop and Ableton can produce a hit track,” Mason explains. “Because of this, a ‘middle class’ of musicians has emerged, and more and more money is shifting into the mid- and long tail. Record labels aren’t equipped to handle this scale. They’re not tech companies, and their business models are built around breaking a smaller roster of artists and, ultimately, taking ownership of their clients’ music.”

Repost sees itself as a tech company in music, not a music company in tech. Because its business model is built around working with thousands, not hundreds, of artists, it’s invested heavily in automation. That’s enabled it to operate on a revenue-share model, not an ownership model. “This is better for creators, which is why so many artists are choosing to go independent rather than work with labels,” Mason says.

While the music industry has been struggling for years, technology is on track to put an end to that. With companies like Repost applying automation and technology to the many hoops the industry has erected over the years, they’re putting music on a path to become as streamlined as businesses in other industries. And that’s exactly what music needs.

https://ift.tt/2K8PYaS

[joannlyfgnch]

How Technology Can Help Artists Make a Living Through Their Online Audiences

It’s been no secret that the music industry has been struggling over the past couple decades. After years of spiraling album sales, the industry hit a new low in 2016, with just over 100 million units sold — a nearly 14 percent decrease from the previous year, reflecting declines in both physical and digital album sales.

That’s not the whole story, of course. The music industry’s sluggish sales gave way to music streaming, which overtook physical music in terms of revenue last year. With streaming music’s revenues skyrocketing to $6.6 billion — representing growth of 41 percent — the music industry has championed streaming as its new golden goose.

This is a good change — the music industry lost billions by fighting the shift to streaming. By focusing on CDs and digital downloads, never mind the fact that CDs saw an 84 percent decline in sales over a decade, the industry found itself “fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars,” as The New York Times pointed out.

Musicians Take the Hit

This sea change of embracing the technology the music industry once feared hasn’t necessarily paid off for musicians, however. Music manager Troy Carter told TechCrunch that labels are hoarding the royalties earned through streaming, keeping more than 70 percent of the fees. The contracts musicians sign with labels are intended to drive revenue for the record labels, not the artists themselves. The common refrain is that for every 20 artists signed to a label, only one is successful — with that math, it makes sense that labels hedge their bets to fund all 20.

Carter believes, however, that streaming payouts could approach CDs’ revenue heyday as more users sign up. Platforms like Repost are making the same bet. The platform, designed to help musicians make a living through their online audiences, works with artists and their teams to monetize their music distribution and promote their work.

Despite the democratization of many platforms and technologies, it’s been incredibly difficult for musicians to monetize their content, and fragmentation is a big part of the problem. “The music industry is way more complicated than it needs to be,” says Repost’s CTO Joey Mason. “Despite all of the advancement in tech, the structures in place on the revenue collection side are incredibly inefficient. To make matters worse, the copyright rules and regulations differ for each territory, so often, it’s not cost-effective to try to collect revenues in certain territories.”

Mason says that for artists, this problem is compounded by the fact that there’s no seamless way to collect all of their earnings. They’d have to work with multiple entities — performing rights organizations, publishers, labels, distributors — to collect every cent they’ve entitled to. This forces artists to spend more time developing business skills than creating new music.

Consolidating an Entire Industry

When Mason and his co-founder, CEO Jeff Ponchick, built Repost, they aimed to eliminate as many of the distractions for artists as they could. They recognized that most of the artists they spoke to struggled primarily in terms of exposure — they hit a wall as independent musicians and needed help getting to the next step. These independent musicians then faced a laundry list of tasks: optimize music on every platform; earn press write-ups; find promotional outlets; collect checks from SoundCloud, YouTube, etc.

Seeing how confusing and draining this was for artists, Repost built itself as a one-stop shop for doing everything. By eliminating multiple distribution and payment touchpoints, the platform also removed the burden of dealing with a variety of infrastructures, accounting practices, and more.

“A lot of people don’t know the difference between a music distributor and a record label,” Ponchick says. “For a distributor, we’d be seen as insanely expensive, taking 30 percent of artists’ money while others take 5 percent. But we offer label services and marketing the way a record label does, without taking any ownership of the music itself. It’s a way to make it OK to remain independent, for musicians to avoid signing with a label. They can make $20,000 to $30,000 per month and retain ownership.”

Chance the Rapper is one well-known indie artist who’s avoided the dreaded “sellout” label and made a successful go of it. While his success is considered a “fairytale” within the industry, Repost’s team aims to make independent success attainable. It started its quest with an algorithm. Artists apply to join Repost’s platform with their SoundCloud IDs; the platform’s algorithm combs the artist’s channel, assessing her average play count per upload, follower count, and biggest and smallest track to determine her likelihood of making money through the platform.

This data-driven approach has resulted in 100,000 rejected applications and 5,000 acceptances. But it enables Repost to put its focus and efforts behind the artists who are best positioned to benefit from its hands-on bevy of services, ensuring it doesn’t spread itself too thin or do what many in the music industry have done: sold a bill of goods to artists.

Making Tech Music’s Best Friend

Repost has recognized one thing many — other than artists — have failed to see: It’s inherently difficult to manage the varied tech infrastructures presented by SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, and others. And that remains true whether an artist is independent or well-established, selling out arenas.

“Every music platform is unique in how its content is delivered, monetized, and consumed. In order to maximize revenue, artists need to have a solid understanding of best practices and a monetization strategy for each store,” Mason says. “They need to work with a distributor that provides them a high level of insight and control of their content on a per-platform basis.”

Unfortunately, Mason says, most distributors take the one-size-fits-all approach, meaning artists’ revenue generation can’t be maximized. Repost has sidestepped that issue by building deep technical integrations with the platforms artists value most, with an emphasis on marketing, monetization, and content protection. And it’s worked: Repost’s client base has been driven through word of mouth, and it’s currently paying tens of millions of dollars to artists annually.

For example, Repost does fingerprinting through YouTube to drive revenue back to artists. Repost aggregates, packages, and delivers sound recording rights information to YouTube at scale for thousands of artists; using this data, YouTube utilizes audio fingerprinting to find videos on its platform that match the provided sound recording. When a match has been found, the YouTube video is “claimed” on behalf of the artist. Any advertisement or subscription revenues generated by the video are then sent back to the artist through Repost.

Technology is making what was once impossible possible for the music industry, and it’s democratizing music creation. “Music production is cheaper and more accessible than ever before — anyone with a laptop and Ableton can produce a hit track,” Mason explains. “Because of this, a ‘middle class’ of musicians has emerged, and more and more money is shifting into the mid- and long tail. Record labels aren’t equipped to handle this scale. They’re not tech companies, and their business models are built around breaking a smaller roster of artists and, ultimately, taking ownership of their clients’ music.”

Repost sees itself as a tech company in music, not a music company in tech. Because its business model is built around working with thousands, not hundreds, of artists, it’s invested heavily in automation. That’s enabled it to operate on a revenue-share model, not an ownership model. “This is better for creators, which is why so many artists are choosing to go independent rather than work with labels,” Mason says.

While the music industry has been struggling for years, technology is on track to put an end to that. With companies like Repost applying automation and technology to the many hoops the industry has erected over the years, they’re putting music on a path to become as streamlined as businesses in other industries. And that’s exactly what music needs.

https://ift.tt/2K8PYaS

[abckidstvyara]

Medium has abruptly pulled a feature that allowed publishers to operate paywalls on its platform, leaving some independent media scrambling for alternative options to maintain a crucial source of revenue.

The company this week shuttered a two-year program that let media run paid subscription services on its site. Nieman Lab reports that Medium contacted its 21 remaining subscription publishing partners at the end of April to give them a week’s notice on the shutdown. Although Medium said it offered to extend the deadline for those who needed more time.

A lot can happen in a week, but it’s not a lot of time when it comes to rejigging business models — particularly in the media industry where revenue is sacred and direct relationships with readers are savored.

Of course, because this is life, there were some complications.

One publication, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ), said the shutdown came out of the blue as it apparently didn’t get the notification email.

I was too busy to deal with this yesterday, but am sad and pretty much perplexed to report that @Medium curiously and without notice cancelled all of the @BINJreports memberships (https://t.co/dIVpPhEHsU). This is money we rely on for reporting. #media #journalism

— Chris Faraone (@Fara1) May 8, 2018

But even those who did had to scramble.

Another partner, Electric Literature, faced a rush to find an alternative subscription product and get its subscribers to move over without churn. Executive editor Halimah Marcus said the publication’s subscription income is worth $25,000 per year.

.@ElectricLit is facing a $25,000 loss of contributed income because of Medium's latest "pivot." If you'd like to support our mission to make literature exciting, accessible, and inclusive, we've moved our membership program to @drip. https://t.co/h6mnRTATDO

— Halimah Marcus (@HalimahMarcus) May 9, 2018

Medium told Nieman that the move was primarily a result of the introduction of Medium’s own $5 per month subscription product last year. Those paying that fee — which unlocks all content on Medium — weren’t able to access stories from the likes of BINJ or Electric Literature which Medium said created “confusion.”

As is so often the case in social media — where it be Facebook, Medium or others — building on someone else’s platform carries the risk that they might make changes that negatively impact your business. That’s the case here, as even Medium seemed to acknowledge by pointing out that other media had already left for new shores.

“Since Medium introduced its own subscription product in March of 2017, publications that want to build their own subscriber bases have largely found other avenues via which to build that base,” Medium’s head of partnerships Basil Enan added in a statement.

Still, news of the change came just days after a rather flattering New York Times story focused on how Medium CEO Evan Williams — of Twitter and Blogger co-founder fame — plans to “fix the internet.” Williams penned an essay on the problems of advertising-based models and the good that technology can do.

[jamieclawhorn]

Top stocks for January

We asked our writers to share their top stock picks for the month of January, and this is what they had to say:

G A Chester: Centamin

FTSE 250 gold miner Centamin (LSE: CEY) reported record production at its Sukari mine in Egypt in Q3. And strong production from its existing operations is complemented by continuing exploration not only in Egypt, but also in Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire.

A P/E of 17.5, falling to 15 for 2018 on the back of 16% forecast earnings growth, looks good value to my eye. And there’s also a 3.3% dividend yield, rising to 4% next year. Just for good measure, it has bags of cash and no debt. As such, it’s a stock I’d be happy to buy today.

G A Chester has no position in Centamin.

Paul Summers: Computacenter

Shares in IT infrastructure services provider Computacenter (LSE: CCC) performed admirably in 2017. I think this momentum is likely to continue ahead of full-year results on 22nd January, especially as November’s trading update suggested these will now be “comfortably in excess of previous expectations”.  

As a further incentive, Hatfield-based Computacenter — whose clients include Domino’s Pizza and John Lewis — recently restated its intention to return £100m to investors through a tender offer. Although details are still to be finalised, those invested can reasonably expect the share buyback to happen at a premium to the current price.

Paul Summers has no position in Computacenter.

Bilaal Mohamed: Costain

My top stock for January is international engineering and construction group Costain (LSE: COST). The Maidenhead-based firm deploys technology-based solutions to meet urgent national needs across the UK’s energy, water, and transportation infrastructures.

  The group’s strong market position, reputation for innovation, and wide range of integrated services has enabled it to secure a raft of new contract awards and extensions to existing contracts over the past year, leaving the firm with a very healthy order book.

  Rapid growth in recent years has led to a doubling of the share price since 2013, but I think there’s plenty of value left in the shares at their present rating of 13 times 2018 earnings.

  Bilaal has no position in Costain Group.

Rupert Hargreaves: Man Group

Shares in Man Group (LSE: EMG) surged by nearly 100% during 2017, and I expect this trend to continue into 2018. 

After several years of turbulence, it looks as if the asset manager has finally got back on track with earnings per share set to jump 55% this year, and 22% for 2018. Based on these estimates, shares in the publicly listed hedge fund trade at a forward (2018) P/E of 13.7, which isn’t too expensive considering the growth on offer here. 

As earnings grow, City analysts expect the company to increase its dividend payout per share next year. A total distribution of 8.8p per share is expected, up 14% year-on-year giving a yield of 4.4%. If you’re looking for a cheap growth play, with an income upside in 2018, Man could be the firm for you. 

Rupert Hargreaves does not own shares in Man Group.

Roland Head: Mitchells & Butlers

I think pub group Mitchells & Butlers  (LSE: MAB) could perform strongly in January. The firm has recently reported tough trading conditions, but managed to maintain like-for-like sales growth of 1.8% during the year to 30 September. 

Adjusted earnings only fell by 1.4% last year and cash flow remained healthy. Investors have also supported the board’s prudent decision to suspend the interim dividend this year.

Encouragingly, like-for-like sales rose by a more energetic 2.3% during the first seven weeks of the firm’s current financial year. I believe a strong post-Christmas trading update in January could push the stock closer to 300p.

Roland Head does not own shares of Mitchells & Butlers.

Alan Oscroft: On The Beach Group

If this cold winter has got you thinking of roasting on a beach somewhere instead of staring miserably out at the sleet and snow, you certainly won’t be alone. And that brings home what I like about On The Beach Group (LSE: OTB). The company has a single and simple focus — it does short-haul beach holidays. 

There’s been plenty of growth already, with the shares having doubled since flotation in 2015. And we’re looking at a P/E valuation of around 20. But On The Beach has only just started on its overseas expansion into Scandinavia and beyond, and I think we’re at the start of a longer growth phase.

Alan Oscroft has no position in On The Beach Group.

Royston Wild: PageGroup

I reckon PageGroup  (LSE: PAGE) could be the share to get your investment portfolio off to a bang in 2018.

Investors headed for the exits in October after third-quarter trading numbers underlined the troubles PageGroup is facing in the UK. But I reckon the brilliant revenues opportunities in its foreign markets, and particularly in the US and China, makes it a great dip pick today (sales in these regions rose 29% and 21% respectively in Q3).

PageGroup is expected to generate a 9% earnings improvement in 2018, resulting in an undemanding forward P/E ratio of 15.9 times. A jumbo 4.3% dividend yield adds extra appeal.

Royston Wild does not own shares in PageGroup.

Kevin Godbold: Tate & Lyle

I’m seeing an attractive blend of quality, value and momentum in food and beverage sweetener and ingredients provider Tate & Lyle (LSE: TATE). In the November half-year report, the company said it expects underlying adjusted profit before tax in constant currency for the full year to be “modestly higher than we anticipated… driven by the strong first half performance.”

At 705p, the stock sits some 13% higher than it did at the end of September, momentum that looks set to continue into the new year. Meanwhile, a well-covered forward dividend in excess of 4% will keep shareholders warm while waiting.

Kevin does not hold shares in Tate & Lyle.

Peter Stephens: Tesco 

Companies that are focused on the UK are not currently en vogue. Risks associated with Brexit are keeping investor sentiment pegged back. However, this could create a long-term buying opportunity in stocks such as Tesco  (LSE: TSCO). The supermarket may face a competitive industry where shoppers are under pressure because of higher inflation, but it is forecast to grow its earnings by 56% this year and by a further 24% next year.

Such strong growth rates mean that Tesco has a PEG ratio of just 0.6. With dividends set to rise by over 60% next year, it could also become an enticing income play.

Peter Stephens owns shares in Tesco

Edward Sheldon: WPP

My top stock for January is advertising giant WPP (LSE: WPP).

WPP endured a terrible 2017, with its share price falling over 30% between March and November. Sentiment towards advertising stocks was low in general, and a cautious outlook from the company in March and a cyber attack in June didn’t help.

However, at the current share price, I believe the shares offer value. With analysts forecasting earnings of 121p for FY2017, the stock trades on a P/E of just 11.3. Furthermore, an attractive dividend yield of 4.4% is on offer.

In the short term, the World Cup and the Olympics this year should help boost sentiment. In the long run, exposure to the emerging markets and digital advertising should propel revenues and earnings higher.

Edward Sheldon owns shares in WPP.

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To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify

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To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify

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Startups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t that anyone was stealing SoundCloud’s underground rappers, bedroom remixers and garage bands. SoundCloud stumbled because it neglected these hardcore loyalists as it wrongly strove to usurp Spotify as the streaming home of music’s superstars.

But four months ago, after laying off 40 percent of its staff, SoundCloud scored a do-or-die investment of $169.5 million that saved the company and brought in a new CEO. Now the question is whether SoundCloud can get back in the groove. I sounded the alarm about SoundCloud’s mishandled headcount cuts, misguided direction and morale problems, so it feels important to lend some suggestions alongside the criticism.

SoundCloud has something no one else does: the world’s biggest archive of user-uploaded music and audio — around 120 million tracks. And so that must be the center of the service.

It once was, but rather than doubling down on independent creators, helping them monetize with ads and commerce and selling subscriptions to enhanced ad-free access, SoundCloud wasted years chasing the major record labels in hopes of building a Spotify competitor full of the most popular music. Finally in mid-2016 it launched the $9.99 SoundCloud Go+ subscription with ad-free access to mainstream music and indie stuff, but it was already years behind Spotify and Apple Music.

In the meantime, the distraction led to extraordinarily slow progress on scaling up advertising, both in terms of the volume of ads on the sites and the independent artists who could get a revenue share. Ads weren’t a big part of SoundCloud, so many users don’t feel it’s worth paying to get rid of them. Creators strayed to YouTube and Patreon, investing their attention and driving their audience to where they could earn money. And spurious take-downs of creators’ music that they already paid SoundCloud to host further burned the company’s cred with its core constituents.

It’s on this guy, SoundCloud’s new CEO Kerry Trainor, to right the ship. I’ve met him, and he’s cooler than he seems.  (Photo by Todd Williamson/WireImage)

Luckily, SoundCloud has now booted its former management team, replacing Alex Ljung with former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor. That gives SoundCloud an opportunity to realign its strategy with the creators who made it unique in the first place. Here’s what we think it needs to do:

Don’t fight Spotify head on

SoundCloud will never be the No. 1 pop music streaming platform, and it needs to accept that. It got started on subscriptions too late and doesn’t have the industry buy-in the way Spotify does from taking the labels on as investors, nor the recommendation data Spotify got from acquiring Echo Nest, nor the massive device install base or war chest to leverage like Apple Music, nor massive ad-supported audience like 1 billion-user YouTube.

So instead of trying to compete with the big dogs directly, SoundCloud should invade from downstream. Rather than marketing its $10 SoundCloud Go+ subscription to casual music fans, it should concentrate on locking in hardcore listeners who love its indie stuff via its free tier or $5 SoundCloud Go subscription just for user-generated content. Then it should upsell them to the $10 plan by touting the convenience of listening to everything in one place, rather than paying $10 a month just for mainstream music elsewhere. The $5 plan should be the focus, and the $10 plan should be the bonus.

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Protect the legal grey area of music

SoundCloud buddied up to the major labels at the expense of the DJs who fueled its ascent. The legal grey area of unofficial remixes and DJ sets are what made SoundCloud indispensable, but are also what got criminalized and sometimes booted off the platform after its label deals. SoundCloud needs to figure out how to settle the copyright payouts on this kind of content so it can stay up on the platform. Whether that means developing its own rights disbursement technology, partnering with a provider of this payout distribution tech like Dubset or outright acquiring it, SoundCloud must be a safe home for this content you can’t find anywhere else. Otherwise, SoundCloud isn’t special.

Become the musician fan club platform

Everyone knows streaming music platforms only pay out a fraction of a cent per listen. That can add up to millions a year if you’re Taylor Swift, but often isn’t enough to support the livelihood of smaller niche artists. But no matter how big or small, almost every artist has a percentage of listeners who are die-hard fans, willing to pay far more than they’d earn a creator in streaming royalties or ad-revenue share.

That’s why artists of all types have turned to subscription patronage platforms like Patreon, where you don’t need millions of fans, just a few thousand paying a buck a month. YouTube, Apple Music and even Spotify have failed to go deep in assisting artists with direct commerce. YouTube is testing Patreon-esque Sponsorships, and Spotify offers some tiny merchandise and concert ticket options on artist profiles.

BYRON BAY, AUSTRALIA – MARCH 27: Fans react to The Wailers performing live onstage at the 2016 Byron Bay Bluesfest on March 27, 2016 in Byron Bay, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

But SoundCloud has a massive opportunity here because it knows its artists can’t sustain themselves on royalties, and the type of listeners on SoundCloud are serious music aficionados. SoundCloud should provide bold options for artists to sell merch and tickets and teach them how to use data to create goods their fans want to buy.

That also means pushing artists toward new revenue streams like offering exclusive experiences. Help artists sell phone calls, meet-and-greets, signed memorabilia, webcam footage of studio sessions, exclusive video streams and more. And finally, provide a channel for artists to communicate directly with their top listeners in more intimate ways than email blasts and Twitter broadcasts.

SoundCloud should be the modern fan club. In an era where you don’t “own” music anymore, the app’s audience of early adopting hipsters might be eager to show their allegiance to their favorite artists with their wallets, not just their ears. And that’s good for everyone.

Let Spotify and Apple Music be the impersonal place for superstars who don’t care about you. SoundCloud could give listeners a deeper experience, artists a bigger paycheck and itself a lucrative corner of the otherwise overcrowded music space. So, Kerry, what are you gonna do?

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch