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Tuesday 28th November: Newsletters aren’t business models
Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.
Mx3 AI is next week! Join Media Makers Meet and the Media Voices team in London on Dec 7th to explore how local news orgs, nationals, magazines and B2B publishers are getting to grips with AI.
Brian Morrissey has been writing about newsletters in his newsletter. Of course, he sees the success newsletter brands like Morning Brew and Industry Dive, but he is also cautioning against the tempation to forget that email is just a distribution channel and that long-term media success relies on developing multiple revenue streams.
“Over the last few years I’ve noticed that many of the flaws of scaled digital publishing creeping into email newsletters,” he writes. “the heavy reliance on optimisation and growth hacking, drift into arbitrage, the worship of easily gamed vanity metrics, and the short-term approach to building resilient business models.”
Basically he’s saying don’t repeat the same mistakes with newsletters that digital publishers have made elsewhere for the last 20+ years. He quotes Late Checkout’s Greg Isenberg who says: “Don't be in the newsletter business. Build a business powered by a newsletter.” Good advice that the best newsletter creators, Brian included, seem to be following.
The FT is reporting that the possibility that “the Torygraph” could soon be in the hands of owners with links to the Abu Dhabi government has sparked concern among members of the Conservative party. Meanwhile the UK Foreign Office is said to be angling for a softly, softly approach to any scrutiny of the Gulf state’s questionable record on media freedoms because they are eager to bolster Britain’s relations with the United Arab Emirates. Who’d be a Tory?
Esther’s been keeping it real over on the forum, explaining that with no sponsor for this year’s Media Moments report we’re toying with the idea of making it a paid download. Share your experiences of selling digital reports and help us decide what to do.
I’ve been looking at this story from Press Gazette for the subscriptions chapter of our Media Moments report. TLDR, Facebook subscriptions probably isn’t a scalable play for larger publishers, but for smaller publishers that can take advantage of existing Facebook audiences, it’s kind of a no brainer. Pulman’s Weekly News converted almost 30% of its Facebook followers to paying subscribers in just four weeks.
FIPP has launched a new report to ‘celebrate’ the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT. The report is exclusive to FIPP members, but this summary from Pierre de Villiers paints a picture of the threats and opportunities and maybe more importantly the need for collaboration among publishing groups looking to the next 12 months and beyond.
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