POD 150: Everything is Fine (Really)
Out Friday AM. Listen.
Troy surveys the media landscape and finds a rich buffet of options and many admittedly smaller models that are working just fine, notwithstanding the gloom that shrouds large swathes of institutional media. Perhaps a sign of the times: renewed interest in niche print titles, particularly ones that cater to the affluent and can play a convening role. Alex laments Google's great escape from a structural antitrust remedy. Anonymous Banker weighs in on the logic behind Paramount buying The Free Press and why other Substack deals are coming. Plus: The case for $100 chicken nuggets topped with caviar box at the US Open, padel's rise and AI creativity's ick factor.
PVA CONVERSATION
Troy: Would you tell your kid to go into media?
Probably not. The industrial comforts are gone: cable is unwinding, search has turned hostile, old institutions no longer guarantee rent or relevance. Maybe the fragments will get swept up into some new oligopolistic equilibrium. Capitalism cleans things up, eventually.
If you survey the market broadly, and you look from the perspective of the super-served modern media consumer, you cannot help but to see a ton of healthy innovation. These may, in fact, be the best of times or at a minimum the beginning of something better. Let’s reconsider for a moment.
The new media auteurs
What’s working now shares a simple physics: a strong point of view, direct audience connection, operations stripped down to the talent. There is a long list of small and mighty upstarts that are shaking things up. A few that come to mind:
FeedMe Emily Sundberg brings refreshing insidery lifestyle vibes to business media with a New York twist;
Nicholas Carlson takes his Business Insider learnings to his Dynamo Media, YouTube first, fast video startup. Like this gem on abandoned oil rigs;
With Status, Oliver Darcy is working tirelessly to own the liberal media beat, independent of the crushing oversight of his old CNN bosses;
John Ellis aggregates with fury at his tasty morning read, News Items;
Tucker Carlson maintains the juice at TCN, free to be even more insane;
YouTube stars Dude Perfect crush and are now bringing “The Hero Tour” to hundreds of theaters in partnership with Regal;
Less than two years after leaving the Times, Bari Weiss is eyeing a $100m+ exit for her feisty anti-woke Free Press;
Tech Brothers Podcast Network (TBPN) bring handsome dude energy to their post-CNBC live format.
That is not to mention the dozens of successful podcast and YouTube personalities. Off the top of my head: the All In guys, Scott and Kara at Pivot, Marcus Brownley with BKDHD, Dax Shephard, the Armchair Expert, Alex Cooper and Call Her Daddy, Steve Bartlett at DOAC, Derek Thompson in Plain English, the How Long Gone dudes, Huberman, Smartless, Lex Fridman, Amy Poehler's new Good Hang, the Kelse brothers’ New Heights.
What changed? The cost of creation collapsed, platforms gave audiences an easy way to go direct and skip institutional hubris. Audiences can now move with you more easily—newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, social feeds. Subscriptions have stripped out friction, giving independents a path to sustainability even if ads remain hard to scale. “Exits” look less like M&A and more like long-term distribution deals—or simply staying independent and profitable until the music stops.
Talent aggregators
Puck has its own twist on the talent first media biz. Find smart “partners” to helm vertical coverage. People you would find in the Indies but might not want to go it alone. They smother the verticals and your inbox. If you care about the industries they cover, you kinda got to subscribe to be in the know. Podcasts round out the strategy. Events are secondary. Advertising, like in any vertical play, still matters a lot. The Puck brand, like media before, an important quality signal.
Other savvy aggregators like Vox fight to maintain relevance by sweeping talent into their podcast networks. Everybody in media is looking to bolt on talent. The singularly popular Pornoy just turned another trick and will bring his schtick to Fox for millions. Pat McAfee did it first at ESPN.
Making live a business
Semafor is a very different play. Now their strategy becomes clearer. Make a premium international journalistic product unconstrained by the subscription imperative. Use it to drive high levels of awareness and influence. Activate the audience with niche insider events that appeal to power centers in business and government. Lean on ads to pay the bills and find nice ways to not make them annoying.
Then parlay into the big tentpole franchise event, one that other people start to organize around. What if you could take the mantle from Davos? Give the event a big name “World Economy Summit”. The Senator business brain, Justin Smith seems comfortable here. Semafor made big new hires this week to support the strategy. The tentpole event game (Davos, SXSW, Cannes, CES…) is hard to win but when you do it’s a lucrative position. The strategy will force Ben Smith to focus on the real power in Washington and hand the media beat to a fresh-faced Max Tani.
All of this is fresh media energy. All have a shot at longevity.
Death stars
What about the big guys? Leaving cable's gravitation force expensive. You need huge content investment to maintain exit velocity and get anywhere close to a Netflix-like flywheel. Few can play.
ESPN is working hard to bridge past and future. An enviable set of sports rights and lots of profit to metabolize gives them permission. A fancy new app is a start but the byzantine authentication system is a pain and makes you long for days when you just turned on the TV. The recent NFL lock was a cool move. Expect more of these tight league / media relationships. (Aside…Puck’s Dylan Byers interviews Andrew Rosen who makes the case that ESPN can learn much from the NYT’s death star journey).
Paramount is doing the same with the largess of a bold rich new owner, David Ellison (and making fast moves like spending $1.5B on South Park, killing Late Night, dumping $7.7B on UFC, the Bari Weiss Free Press speculation, wrestling the rights to Call of Duty franchise). Fox One will work hard to parlay tribal appeal into its own planetary system.
Indeed, it was easier for the scaled news operations who already had direct connections and subscription expertise. NYT, WSJ and the FT got out. Poor Washington Post was left without a chair. These media brands emerge as hybrid, going beyond text to steal news primacy from cable news. The remaining competition is really the entire podcasting and YouTube ecosystem.
Of note, local media continues to struggle mightily through this transition. The weary soldier on. Scaled lifestyle magazine media is a slow-motion casualty. For consumers, that energy is replaced in a thousand ways across a the creator multiverse.
Soon it will be difficult to define media by media type. And with it opportunity! Taken together you see a thriving ecosystem. In all cases next gen have build connective tissue (POV, talent, rights, convening power, tribal affiliation, medium fluidity) that creates a localized gravitational field.
And content marketers kick in everywhere to fill in gaps. See A16’s sprawling media side-hustle. Or our very own Alex Schleifer’s Human Computer who understands to be a game maker means first being a content publisher. As Brian says, media is now a front for everything.
So, should you kid go into media? Why not? There’s so much opportunity for the enterprising. Especially if they can lean on you when things don’t go right at first.
Having said all of this, the biggest victim is not a lack of choice for consumers, or lack of opportunity for those who want to play the game…. but a lack of shared reality that all of this fragmentation has created. That’s for another day.
Alex: it’s fine
This weeks marks the launch of Hollow Knight Silksong, the long awaited follow up to Hollow Knight which sold $15m copies and was made by 3 people. I don’t say this because I feel games should be a bigger part of the conversation (it’s niche, it’s fine) but rather share an example of a successful media product that came from outside the establishment.
This new media ecosystem has broken free from the monoculture and while some might mourn a “common truth” media consumers are better served than ever before. From weird little niche things like people restoring old engines on YouTube to bonafide hits like K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix. I can watch, play and listen to anything old and know that there’s an infinite amount of new ahead. The indie space has some concrete success stories like MKBHD and Chicken Shop Date and Hollow Knight Silksong.
Yes, some of the big players will die off but that’s because the structures are inadequate in this day and age. The collapse of some of this company will spawn thousands of new media startups supported by robust “free” infrastructure and audiences connected via algorithms. You just need to make shit and if it’s good it’ll find an audience then you monetize that audience somehow. Simple right?
Noticing a flagrant omission here
AB is unmasked…