Apologies for this being a day late - Slovakia (where I'm writing from) has temperamental WiFi it turns out... Welcome to new subscribers, and thanks again for reading.
Compass is changing direction
Some sad news from media startup Compass News this week: they're shutting down their editorial team and focussing on their technology instead. In the founders' (very frank) note to subscribers, they say it's because the numbers just didn't work: not enough people were willing to pay £1 a month for their news service.
I've been following Compass closely since its inception (I know lots of the team, who are all lovely and talented). The initial idea, an all-in-one subscription service for paywalled sites, was a fab one - but didn't work out for some reason (I don't know why: I imagine financial arrangements with publishers were tricky?).
The replacement product, where you paid for Compass’ original content (mostly summaries and explainers) was never going to work. Whilst Compass made a big deal about "breaking through the filter bubble", the reality is most young people don't care enough to pay for that, especially when they can read The Guardian and BBC for free.
I hope that this isn't viewed as a death knell for bundled media subscription services in general: IMO Compass' problems weren't intrinsic to their business model. It's sad regardless though - hopefully they can pull this pivot off successfully.
Monetising your archives
There's also positive subscription news! The NYT Cooking subscription has been a massive success - 120k subscribers in 18 months. That's all people paying extra for recipes and cooking articles. It was a great idea from the NYT, and it's astonishing more papers haven't done something similar.
Papers are sitting on a treasure trove of evergreen lifestyle content that is a) hard for readers to find and b) not effectively monetised. Travel tips, recipes, restaurant reviews, gift guides - surface the articles and package them up nicely and you've got content people will be more than willing to pay for. A startup that could help to do this quickly and easily would be immensely valuable for publishers, I'd imagine...
Mic Drop
The biggest media story this week was, depressingly, Mic laying off all its employees. There's been tons of stuff written about this: this piece from CJR is the best I've read. Hopefully everyone can learn a lesson from this: overreliance on a platform you don't control and reckless spending ($200k a month on rent in the World Trade Center!) is a recipe for disaster.
Shiny Things Syndrome
Oxford’s RISJ published a report this week about innovation in journalism. It's very long and a bit too full of business school buzzwords, but makes a couple of good points. The media has a problem with chasing "shiny things" - pursuing the latest technologies with not enough forethought, which eventually leads to wasted time/effort.
The proposed solution is to have better frameworks to evaluate innovative ideas, so publishers can judge whether there's actually any point doing them - are the rewards worth it? All very smart, but much easier said than done - and I worry that some executives, who are actively looking for ways to avoid innovation (stasis is easier and less work) will use this as an excuse to go too far the other way.
The report has a few methodological quirks too: the people interviewed were overwhelmingly from legacy organisations, and a few of them have... questionable credibility (execs from WikiTribune and Civil, both projects that have wasted tons of money on nonsensical ideas, are both represented in the paper). I always find these papers most interesting for what they reveal about publishers and executives: the Washington Post definitely come out best from this one, with an obviously smart and measured innovation strategy.
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Tech Tidbits
Amazon announced a bunch of new services for AWS this week. AWS Personalise is my favourite - a great example of difficult machine learning technologies becoming commoditised and democratised.
The majority of online traffic comes from bots - a reminder that website traffic statistics are a joke.
Came across this startup, Ultrahaptics, in the ST. They use ultrasound to create tactile sensations for VR. VR is way more immersive when you can feel things (The Void's Star Wars VR experience blew my mind when I instinctively reached out to grab a railing and it was physically there). This could be a great way of scaling that tactility.
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Final Thought
Between Compass, Mic and Rookie Mag (you should read the latter's closing note here), this has been a pretty depressing week in media. Sadly, I think things are only going to get worse. As Rafat Ali points out in this Twitter thread, we're in the good part of the economic cycle. There's a downturn coming in the next few years, and I don't think many media companies are well-equipped to weather that storm. It's going to be grim.
On that cheery note: thanks for reading and hope you all have a lovely week!