If micropayments are new and improved, why not the pivot to video? Snark aside, the shift from text to multimedia content is undeniable. Publishers would be idiotic to ignore this while, yes, learning the lessons of the past. Mistakes were made.
Speaking of video, I’m not quite ready to pivot to YouTube, but we are doing more video. We wrapped up TRB Conversations, powered by EX.CO. You can see all the conversations on the new TRB YouTube channel.
Another shift underway is the focus on communities. We’ll hear less about newsletters and more about building communities. I spoke to Daniel Scharff about building a niche community for direct-to-consumer consumer goods brands.
How Vox Drove 31% affiliate revenue growth
"We realized that actually we don't need all of that Google search traffic,” said Camilla Cho, svp of commerce and affiliate at Vox, in a TRB Expert Talk last week. “I can do find other sources of traffic, but also at the same time making sure that the visits I'm already getting are being monetized and optimized in a better way."
Camilla and NucleusLinks CEO Cornelius Frey joined me in a TRB Expert Session to break down how Vox has managed to grow affiliate revenue 31% in the face of traffic declines.
The most important takeaway: Optimization of what traffic you have is essential to any commerce strategy in the age of Google Zero.
Pivot to Video: The Sequel
Veterans of the Pivot to Video debacle of 2015-2017 got flashbacks this week.
The New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn said the Times is in a “race against time” in its efforts to be video-centric. "It's as big a transformation as the print-to-digital transformation,” he said. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines and others are putting their short-form videos on Netflix. A new pivot to video is underway.
This time is different. Publishers have memories of the original pivot to video, which was built on faulty assumptions and phony metrics. The strategy this time is more sound. Their businesses are more diversified. The emerging playbook is to embrace platform distribution – YouTube and Instagram are the new TV – as a top of the funnel play to reach new audiences and simply be relevant while drawing those audiences over time to owned platforms to develop direct relationships.
This Pivot to Video 2 is coming as the open web has collapsed and value of text content in an AI era is in doubt. USA Today Co Mike Reed told me that the Google search model is “dead” and the news publisher is considering pulling the plug on Google as a distribution source entirely. In its place are what we used to call “walled gardens.”
These walled gardens are even more powerful as information consumption shifts from text to video. The Atlantic had a classic Atlantic article declaring the death of reading. For the first time globally, social media and video networks (54%) now outrank news organizations' own websites and apps (51%) as a source of news, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Owned digital properties have lost 12 percentage points of reach since 2020. What’s more, video consumed on owned sites and apps declined 5%, according to the report.
“Despite all the pivots to video, not only are news publishers losing market share, they’re losing in absolute terms,” Jim Egan, one of the report’s authors, told me. “
In crafting video strategies, publishers will keep in mind the original pivot to video, which was in reality a pivot to platforms. Publishers were addicted to platform traffic, so as Facebook emphasized on-platform video, publishers needed to follow suit. The Times has been putting video front and center in its app, looking to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok as a top of the funnel. In a sign of its strategic importance, the Times isn’t monetizing its in-app video, CRO Joy Robbins told me. It has doubled its video output in the past year. Judging by Kahn’s interview, that should expand further.
Like the Times, the Wall Street Journal is producing more video and focusing on its paying audience. Chief Growth Officer Scott Havens told me its video strategy is focused its owned properties but also on platforms. “Forturnately or unfortunately, you have to be where your audiences, and the audiences you want, are,” he said. That means using social platforms for brand awareness, but it is developing subscriber-only video.
“The time and effort we put into it and the production is great,” he said. “We do see more consumption of news in video. It’s not clear to me that younger generations are going to say they’re fatigued and are going to start reading again more than they do today.”
The question will be whether this renewed pivot to video can resist leaving publishers again hostage to giant platforms. The lesson learned was to use these platforms as a top of the funnel distribution play while simultaneously serving a loyal, paying audience
“The great lesson of the current ecosystem shift in media is control your audience and have a direct revenue relationship with the customer,” Troy added on PvA.
Listen to this week’s episode of People vs Algorithms for more on the new pivot to video, alpha anxiety, and resisting dopamine hits as status symbol.
The Center Square is a nonprofit newsroom publishing original reporting across state and national markets. Before beehiiv, newsletters were managed externally, meaning slower turnaround, no direct access to subscriber data, and limited visibility into performance.
After migrating in-house on beehiiv, average open rates climbed from 52% to 72%, click-through rates increased 42.4%, and RSS automation saved more than 15 hours a week. A small internal team now manages 12 state and national newsletters without outside help, and the beehiiv Ad Network added a revenue stream that previously didn’t exist.
What publishers get wrong about community
Daniel Scharff isn't a media guy. He's a CPG operator who stumbled into community-building almost by accident, looking for people to talk to at trade shows. That accidental start turned into Startup CPG, a Slack-based community that's become a trusted gathering spot for direct-to-consumer operators in packaged goods.
We talk through what it actually takes to build a community that people show up for: why "the things that don't scale" are the whole point, why Slack works better than purpose-built community platforms despite not being designed for the job, how to think about trade shows versus owned events, and why being part of a community is a moat.
Making local news useful
The mindset shift underway in local news is making it a utility. The demise of local newspapers has many causes, but a glaring one is the product is not essential to enough people.
Bridget Williams, chief strategy and product officer at Hearst Newspapers, believes local newspapers got away from being simply useful. The local newspaper was abundle of news and coupons, obituaries, classifieds, real estate and auto. The decentralization of media frayed that bundle. The task now is to rebuild it to give people tools to help them live better lives.
"We have to move from giving the information to actually building the tool,” she said on PvA OT.
We discussed Hearst’s TX Tax tool that enables people to protest their property taxes. This kind of tool is enabled by AI, which not only helps generate text and crunch data but allows Hearst to punch above its weight in development. This will be important as The New York Times moves further into local markets.
“The New York Times is gonna get supercharged as well and they're gonna be ten times more effective, but it does allow us to do things that we don't have the size teams to do,” Bridget said.
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