The magazine company preparing for its post-Google future

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From Techcrunch:

YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.

Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Currently, creators need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days.

This will probably piss off a lot of YouTubers who were on the verge of qualifying for the Partner Program, but I understand YouTube’s motivation. If it wants to keep growing, it needs to create incentives for higher-quality content that can attract blue-chip advertisers and convert more users into paying Premium subscribers. Raising the watch-time requirements makes it harder for low-quality, spammy accounts to gain traction and start monetizing.

Spammy content creators pose a real threat to any advertising platform. One of the biggest problems facing programmatic ad networks, for instance, is that they often allow in so-called Made for Advertising (MFA) websites — publishers that provide virtually no value and are designed primarily to trick visitors into viewing ads. The media industry loses tens of billions of dollars to MFA sites each year, and I’d argue that this has contributed to brands devoting a smaller and smaller share of their marketing budgets to display advertising.

YouTube wants to avoid this low-quality content death spiral and has the added benefit of controlling every aspect of its content ecosystem, which means it can be more effective at identifying bad actors and tweaking its revenue-sharing metrics to punish them. Overall, I think these changes will be good for the longterm health of YouTube’s monetization program.

Adam White explains how Front Office Sports grew from a college project into a media powerhouse.

Dave Jorgenson, the Washington Post’s former “TikTok guy” who struck off on his own a year ago, sat down with CJR to discuss how his independent media career is going. He had an interesting answer about what motivated him to launch an independent media venture:

At the Post, a lot of times when you do well, they want to promote you to an editor or manager role, which makes sense because they’re trying to find a way to pay you more. But I was always like, I would love you to pay me more, but I want to keep making things. I don’t want to manage people, necessarily, at least in that capacity. So it’s cool that I get to continue to do that and spend most of my time on the creative process while still having this company that we own.

I think this is a major flaw in how a lot of legacy media outlets operate. They identify their most talented journalists and then move them up to manager and editor roles, regardless of whether they show any aptitude for those jobs. And those journalists go along with it because it’s the only way to get paid more.

A major draw for independent media is you get more directly rewarded for actually creating the content. In fact, a lot of creators that scale up their businesses will hire out the managerial roles rather than assign those roles to themselves. They recognize what does and does not bring them joy and then outsource the latter.

MacKenzie Scott, who’s most widely known for divorcing Jeff Bezos and giving away billions to charity, is also a fairly accomplished novelist and has started serializing her latest novel on Substack. [NYT]

She’s not the first to do so — a number of high profile writers have dabbled in serialization on the platform, but I’ve yet to see any huge breakout successes. If you look at the fiction and culture leaderboards on Substack, most of the top bestsellers focus on literary criticism and aren’t publishing much actual fiction. Very few of them have the orange or purple checkmarks that denote at least 1,000 or 10,000 paid subscribers, respectively. Even the bestselling fiction authors on Substack mostly use it to publish essays and other non-fiction musings.

Every few years we get a few trend pieces about how serialized fiction is maybe making a comeback, but if it is succeeding, it’s probably on another platform that I’m only vaguely aware of.

(I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. The magazine company preparing for its post-Google future

2. The sunk cost fallacy comes for David Ellison

Let’s jump into it…