Wednesday 7th December: Riches in niches, general interest gets stitches

December 07, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris.

It's been said before, but it's worth repeating. The financials of digital publishing favour niches - right down to the creator level. At the same time, niches by definition don't cover all the stories that matter to the public, and certainly don't then fund traditional general interest news.

Jacob Cohen Donnelly takes a look at The Recount and a few other general interest sites that are struggling or have failed, including Grid News: "This goes back to my original point above: growing a media company takes a long time. Two million monthly visitors aren’t bad if you’re a niche publication, but it’s rough for a general interest publication. Specifically, it doesn’t provide the scale needed for advertisers."

And the overheads will mount long before most of these outlets can build a profitable model. It's going to be fascinating to watch how Semafor attempts to mitigate those issues - but for now the reality is that riches lie in niches, and general interest media mostly lies in ditches.

Relatedly - Adam Tinworth makes the claim that VC-backed journalism outlets are dead as disco as a concept. It's true that Future ended up being more of a tout for a16z's crypto investments, but maybe there are some VC funds that wouldn't be quite so obvious about it? Maybe?

Once again, absolutely livid to have to defend Meta and Google, even by proxy. The JCPA is, like its Australian counterpart, built on a flagrant misrepresentation of how the internet works, and will only benefit the biggest (and often worst) players in the media ecosystem.

The company cited three reasons for the cuts, the first two of which look like rightsizing. But then here comes the third, swimming through the murk with the Jaws theme playing... 'an ongoing audience shift to short-form, vertical video, which is still developing from a monetization standpoint.'

New podcast:

This special episode of Media Voices features the audio of our launch presentation for the Media Moments 2022 report. Chris, Peter and Esther each outline which media moment of the year they found interesting. The team are then joined by BuzzFeed’s Caroline Fenner, AdWeek’s Stephen Lepitak and Poool’s Ludivine Paquet to discuss what they’ve identified as the biggest shifts this year.

Our annual report has launched! Media Moments 2022 brings together the key events which have shaped the media and publishing industry this year, from the boom and bust cycles of the advertising market to news fatigue, the increasing prominence of climate coverage, and the impact of shifting trust.