Friday 21st June: Buckle up for the next pivot to video

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I caught up with Nic Newman at last week’s Publisher Podcast Summit & Awards, and when he told me about this finding from the Digital News Report, I snorted into my drink. “Did no one learn from the last one?” I asked him. He assured me he thought, after many conversations with publishers and audiences, that this demand for video is a genuine and long-lasting shift.

I remain highly sceptical. My own experience from Instagram shows people are gaming the system in all sorts of ways, releasing text or slideshows with music and small animations to get on the right side of the reel-hungry algorithm. A pivot to video, or a pivot to “video”?

Still, there’s some interesting data here which is probably a great deal more reliable than my own anecdotes and millennial hatred of Instagram’s own pivot. Particularly notable is that much of the growth in video networks is coming from countries outside the US and Europe.

It’s nice to be able to include a story here that isn’t about a reputable brand being acquired, stripped down and turned into a traffic driver for betting sites. Even better, the vast majority of employees who were laid off during the transition of Sports Illustrated’s publishing rights from The Arena Group earlier this year have actually been rehired.

That MFA (made for advertising) row which emerged around Forbes having a shadow site to run ads on has been up for discussion by a number of publishing execs. One of the topics of conversation was where Outbrain and Taboola - responsible for most of the trashy clickbait recommendations on supposedly reputable sites - fit into this. Apparently if you’re a large publisher, they pay you an “exorbitant” amount of money to feature these boxes on your site. So to do away with that and the potentially dodgy practices that come with it, you have to find a way to fill “maybe a seven-or eight-figure hole” in budgets.

Damian Radcliffe has recently finished a study tour of 16 newsrooms, media outlets and tech companies in New York. Here are his takeaways about the state of media and content publishing today. My favourite: that publishers need to demonstrate distinctiveness and value. “That means leaning more into service journalism, exclusives, and formats like explainers, analysis, newsletters, and podcasts,” he writes.

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