Wednesday 6th March: TalkTV moves online, GB News losses mount

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OK, so I’d be lying if I said the two related stories in this piece from Sky News didn’t make my heart skip a beat. TalkTV following Piers to YouTube! GB News racking up £76 million in losses! It’s enough to make you think there is a God and she’s most definitely not an anti-woke, swivelled-eyed loon.

However… neither of these outlets is going away any time soon. TalkTV’s retreat to digital is a failure, but there are no plans to shutter it. And even though the GB News crew will trumpet the fact that they are the last right-wing TV channel, all their growth is online.

Why does it matter? I suppose I’d just like the UK media to be a bit kinder, a bit more objective, a bit less funded by billionaires that generally have no stake in making the country a better place to live because they live somewhere else. Still, GB News backers Legatum £76 million in the red and Rupert’s team relegated to YouTube is a start.

In the latest of our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes - just 10 to 15 minutes - I spoke with Maanas Mediratta, CEO at Bridged Media. We talked about the 95% of publishers who haven't yet adopted AI but want to and how Bridged’s work to make AI tools more accessible to publishers will help the whole publishing ecosystem.

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Everyone’s favourite professional social network is working with 400 publishers globally to get more journalism and news onto the platform, according to the company's editor-in-chief and vice president Dan Roth. However, Axios has looked at the numbers and although traffic referrals to news publishers have increased slightly from LinkedIn over the past three years, LinkedIn alone won't make up for the dramatic reduction in traffic referrals on other channels.

In news that could have been worse, Reach has reported a revenue decline of 5% for 2023. Falling revenues were blamed on falling referral traffic from Facebook and Google and lower yields from programmatic advertising. Print revenues were more resilient, down just 2%, with print still delivering 75% of Reach’s total revenues. Wonder if it’s something to do with actually being able to read the stories on the printed pages?

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