Finding leverage

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This week, I wrote about the importance of leverage and understanding how to use it, both as as a publishing business and a person. First, a message from The Rebooting supporter Omeda, a full-stack marketing technology platform that manages first-party data.

Those of us who send a lot of email newsletters end up worrying a lot about email fatigue. I’ve heard too many false reports of “the death of email” to bet against email. The reason so much email is sent is because it is such a powerful way of establishing a direct connection with an audience and is growing even more important as it becomes the leading contender for acting as an audience identifier for advertising. Omeda tracks trends in email based off the 1.6 million emails it sent in the fourth quarter of 2022. A few things that stood out in the Email Engagement Report:

• Open rates are stabilizing. Apple’s mail privacy protection made email open rates harder to track. Omeda found unique open rates have stabilized and even grew 3.7%.
• Click rates are declining. The click rate is a key health metric for newsletters. Omeda found total click rates declined 12%.
• Unsubscribes have declined. On the upside, fewer people are opting out of email. Total unsubscribes fell 6.7%.

Leverage

One of the subjects that should be taught in school is leverage. We get sent into life that will often be determined by leverage: Who has it and who uses it effectively.

The last era of digital media eradicated all traditional forms of leverage for publishers. The decision to separate the media impression from the audience data (and measure effectiveness by clicks) was the capitulation of the publishing industry. At that point, the leverage shifted to the buy side and platform intermediaries, while publishers fought for scraps. Those who were willing to pursue a whatever-it-takes approach to vacuuming up audiences with SEO chop shops, Facebook chum and assorted growth hacks fared the best, particularly if they pushed the envelope on monetization to the edges of plausibility. The excitement around artificial intelligence will produce more of the same. Shamelessness is the final moat.

Media businesses have different forms of leverage. There’s traditional financial and operating leverage prized by scaled enterprises. There’s also distribution leverage through preferred partnerships or by excelling at the growth hack du jour. Of course, having more resources than others is no guarantee for success, particularly in media. Ask Quibi.

Most forms of leverage in digital media have proved fleeting, resulting in few lasting brands. The latest death of Gawker is yet another reminder of that. Few digital publishing brands could be considered iconic, but Gawker was. It was the Spy magazine of its era. And that wasn’t enough, at least to save it from a bitter billionaire and its own excesses. The Gawker revival never quite felt like the real thing; more New Coke than Coke Classic. It was like an NFL team switching cities but retaining the name. At that point, it’s just a different team. Have the decency to change the name like the Sonics did after decamping to Oklahoma City, of all places.

Figuring out your leverage is figuring out how you’re going to win. To succeed, you need to create a competitive advantage, no mean feat in an industry flattened by feeds and algorithms, where brands are reduced to miniature icons in a stream of content constructed by someone else or, more likely, a robot. And now the robots are going to do the writing, although they seem just as bad at getting things right. The check on the rampant use of AI to churn out synthetic SEO content is the leverage Google has over publishers. It’s telling that CNET managers were less concerned about publishing inaccurate content and eroding trust with their audience but instead with the impact “irregular content” would have on how it’s treated in future Google algorithm rankings. The spreadsheet people don’t care about moral injury; they’ll tell you you’re being naive.