In the new media world of subscriptions there’s really no motivation to chase eyeballs. In the past few weeks, we’ve been surfing this newsletter moment for the telltale signs of a change in the quality of content. I’m not saying mainstream media is polluted by conflict of interest, but certainly the motivations of personal publishing are worn frankly on the sleeve. In the process of testing out various paywall strategies, a common quality begins to surface.
Some of the most compelling newsletter voices come from the remnants of the magazine business. When print moved to the Web and advertising to Google and Facebook, paywalls and sliding triggers established a threshold for subscriptions. I’ve read the New York Times since puberty, so that one became a cost of doing business, as did the Wall Street Journal in the world of business. Recently, I picked up the Washington Post habit when Jeff Bezos bought it, and in the tech space, The Information. The rest were bundled in Apple’s News.com, with a random assortment of You’ve just read your last free post warnings fleshing out my decaying relationship with print. Also a part of the weaning process: cable news, which in the pandemic and Trump years scavenged much of their content from the Times and Post, new media sites like Axios, and competitors’ lower thirds and clips.
But as the pandemic drones on despite wishful thinking, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes a weekly story masquerading as daily, the news networks are lurching back to Trump bites Biden and Trump calls Putin a very stable genius. It won’t work as much as further exacerbate the feeling that the media is eyeball-crazy. In a work-from-everywhere world, where do we go to take a break? Streaming is the answer, and nothing sells that story more than the Slap. When I hazarded a guess on the Gang recorded a few hours before the Oscars, I thought the show would be better than the movies it awarded.
The Gang groaned, and rightly so. But I was wrong, because we watched Coda later that night with a flood of tears bathing away the desperation of our malaise. This was no little movie, but big in every way that deserved Best Picture. It was also the first streaming win for the top award, a film financed and marketed as a subscription product for a major tech firm, Apple. Amazon has Prime, and Disney its catalogue, but what drove Mickey’s bottom line was the show (on ABC) and social media. It may have been the second smallest Oscars telecast, yet Twitter lit up big and still hasn’t subsided. But this isn’t about the Slap; it is at least in part because of it.
In newsletter airspace, the war is omnipresent, Trump a close second, and the Slap a distant third. In a crossover newsletter such as CNN’s Reliable Sources, it’s still third, but a strong third. I have no official numbers, but in notifications from mainstream media, the Slap is number one. Armchair emotional analysis: we need to distract ourselves from reality’s grinding pain and loss. Even in the drip drip details of the Slap narrative, the revelation that the two men have not met or talked to each other speaks volumes. In a time of Don’t listen to what I say, check Google Maps for the real story, we’re looking for who to trust.
CNN+ is rolling out this week, in effect asking the musical question “If you don’t like the conflicted feel of 24/7 ad-based lower thirds, how much will you pay for it?” I can’t get over the feeling that if C+ is better than its cable half then why not just slap ads on C- and pitch the subscription as paying for no ads. Either way, it’s the first newsletter play for cable news, and it suggests a bundle with other civilian newsletters might be in the offing. I’ve been using the Substack Reader now, and successfully added my one paid subscription to Stratechery via RSS. It’s a short distance from this to a bundle of favorite newsletters, podcasts, and video, as the analytics convert to include video views, minutes, and share of Web, email, and IOS app. After two updates, I’m getting some 8 percent from the Reader with correspondingly less email sources.
Digging deeper, I’m learning the impact of trust on various subscription strategies. The analytics document the number and urls of clicking a link, so you can see who is clicking on what, even if the destination page is paywalled or partially truncated. That’s how Stratechery got my sub, by telling me in the free section what I was missing in the Daily Updates. Another strategy is to make a post public, but paywall a followup. So far that hasn’t worked but gives me a chance to warm to the possibility. Or not.
Even with the tentative vagaries of the model, the one constant is the credibility and motivation of the product. As hybrids like CNN+ enter the market, they compete not only with their new competitors but their own “free” products. Offering more value in a pay product tends to undercut their ad-supported legacy stream, particularly as newsletters and live audio sites begin to cross-promote each other. Substack’s move to video and a Reader app create a new destination that uses notifications to lock people in to a hybrid free/partial paywall model that could resonate with in-app subscriptions as Google and Apple loosen up their cut. Substackers and RSS-compatible independents may encourage Reader improvements to record and leaderboard Likes and shares based on what other stacks are subscribed to and surfaced in analytics.
The Slap continues to boomerang on Will Smith as he resigns from the Academy rather than wait for its judgement. Perhaps this will lead to a phone call between the two, where we can feel empathy not just for the principals but all of us who are touched by the emotions of these times. For many, the Oscars are about celebrity and dreams. This year’s event came some distance back toward what we can recognize as normal, where what’s right and excellent meet for a drink at the water cooler. It’s always a reminder that seldom do great actors write their own words, and comedians mostly do. In that way, the new media is more like standup than a sitcom, and the risks of live television are not for the timid or the opposite.
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