So small

Hangovers from the scale era

Brian Morrissey

Brian Morrissey

— 5 min read

This week: 

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What's driving email engagement

Evaluate your email performance with benchmark data from 1.9B emails sent from our media industry clients in Q3 2024. In this report, find: Benchmark data and analysis, focusing on opens, clicks and CTR Tips for mitigating subscriber fatigue with examples from legacy media, indie newsletters and senders like you. Learn more

Upstreamed and downstreamed

The true test of a “real New Yorker” is if they know what upstreaming is. In the media business, tech has gotten upstream of media companies by controlling the interface and distribution of information and programming. But now, there’s further pressure as a combination of curators in the form of podcasters and newsletter and a new class of aggregators like Google’s AI Overviews, Artifact, Apple News, Particle and Perplexity leach value downstream. This is most perilous for those in the business of text, which is the easiest to reconfigure. The result: More personalities, interactive experiences and multimedia content as information delivery becomes more automated and commoditized. More on last week’s episode of People vs Algorithms. Listin on Apple | Spotify | Other podcast platforms

Audience-first revenue strategies

The Rebooting’s upcoming Online Forum focused on why publishers can’t afford to kick the can down the road on getting a better handle on their first-party data. On Oct 31 at 1:00pmET, I’ll be joined by BlueConic director of core sales Patrick Crane and Actable cofounder Craig Schinn to discuss:

  • Staying ahead by implementing new first-party and consent-based data strategies
  • Building consent-driven datasets
  • Enriching first-party data to create more valuable, addressable audiences for advertisers.

Note: Those who register will be sent a replay to the hourlong session.

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Small is sustainable

The New York magazine package on media leaders mostly lamenting the state of their business, while taking the occasional catty potshot at rivals, offered only a few hopeful silver linings for models that are growing. 

The Substack box was ticked, with acknowledgment that for the doom and gloom that invariably envelopes packaged media, there are a mounting number of success cases of individuals building their own platforms. That usually came with caveats that these businesses are uninspiring. 

It was captured by the anonymous swipe of what is surely a “seasoned” executive who likely never built anything from scratch: 

“I’m surprised that people are OK with the subscription model, where they don’t have that many listeners or viewers but are making money, so they’re just good with it,” says one of them. “The Substack writers, people with Patreon podcasts. My generation was wired completely differently. We wanted to be read or listened to by as many people as possible. And now this new generation is like, I’m totally cool with having 9,000 die-hard fans.”

This is insane.

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