Facebook. YouTube. Snapchat. Apple News. All are platforms that have entered into revenue sharing partnerships with publishers. Here’s the thing though: those partnerships aren’t actually producing much money for the publishers. Were they wrong to sign a deal with the devil? I explore the topic in this video.
Recent earnings calls have revealed that Snapchat’s user growth is slowing, and many analysts have attributed this to Instagram copying many of its features. But Instagram isn’t the only threat to Snapchat. In this video, I explain why Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, both owned by Facebook, are bigger threats.
Richard Fidler, host of the radio show and podcast Conversations
There have been a number of disturbing reports coming out of Facebook recently, from its allowing Russian trolls to spend $100k on influencing our elections to the recent ProPublica investigation that revealed it allows advertisers to target anti-semites. As I explain in this video, almost all of these controversies can be traced back to one source: Facebook’s quest to operate at massive scale.
Every publisher is investing heavily in Facebook video and they’re bragging about hitting massive monthly view counts. But very few are making any real money with Facebook video and I have my doubts that the platform will bring in meaningful revenue. I explain why in this video.
During a recent podcast interview, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget admitted something astonishing: Business Insider is no longer seeking audience growth. Instead it’s now focused on wringing more engagement and revenue out of its already-existing audience. This is part of a larger trend in media in which news orgs are no longer pursuing traffic growth for the sake of traffic growth. In this video I explore why scaling your traffic doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll also be able to scale you revenue.
Daniel J Lewis, host of The Audacity to Podcast
You may think that if a YouTuber has over a million subscribers they’re rolling in money, but in most cases you’d be wrong. CPMs on YouTube ads have always been low and the recent “adpocalypse” has made things worse. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a living on YouTube. You just have to get creative about your monetization. I explain how in this video
Apple owes a lot of its success to Steve Jobs successfully negotiating with the record labels in the runup to the launch of the iTunes music store. That success led to the rise of the iPod, which paved the way for Apple’s comeback and eventual dominance. But though it had early success with music content, Apple has really struggled in recent years in the content wars. In this video I document how Apple has fallen behind on its attempts to distribute movies, television, music, books, and news content.
