Welcome to the many new subscribers! It’s been a week full of #innovative #content – here’s what I think was worth reading.
Notification Overload
I missed this report from the Tow Center just before Christmas – thanks to my Finimize colleagues for flagging it up. It’s a (too) long piece about how news orgs are now treating mobile push notifications as a standalone platform, putting a lot of thought into what they push and how they word the notifications.
The baffling thing to me is the sheer quantity of notifications: some publications were doing up to 16 per day (the WSJ did 71 a week!). I think notification overload is fast becoming a thing, and this over-use will usher that along. People are being driven to breaking point by the sheer number of times our phones buzz, and there’ll come a point very soon where people turn off notifications en masse.
News notifications are particularly egregious: you rarely need to know every piece of breaking news (especially for each minute development in a story), and it’s very unlikely that I’ll be in the mood to read your deep-dive into millennial burnout at the exact moment you send me a notification. Just have the content ready and waiting for me, and let me access it on my own terms.
Reuters Report
The Reuters Institute’s annual predictions report was published this week. I find it more useful as something that gives a sense of what news orgs’ strategic thinking is, rather than as a guide for what’s going to happen.
Key points:
The majority of polled publishers expect subscriptions to be their main revenue focus (alongside the caveat that “in most countries only a small minority is prepared to take out digital subscriptions”)
Publishers are cooling on the importance of Facebook, and are really into Google/SEO. I’ve got this nagging feeling that Google are going to change their algorithm this year though: every search query these days is met by a semi-relevant SEO-bait explainer, which is a terrible user experience.
78% of respondents think they need to invest more in AI. The three trends highlighted are AI for personalisation, robojournalism (including virtual news anchors) and tools to help journalists’ workflow.
Publishers love podcasts now. I’m getting a bit of déjà vu from the video bubble a few years back – the lack of good audio ad metrics makes me think this might be about to implode too.
Couple interesting startups: Kinzen, a paid curation service from ex-Storyful people that sounds like what Compass now do for free – so I’m not optimistic for its success; and Curio, a quality audio-news aggregator (includes Economist, FT, WaPo) that strikes me as being a little too expensive for what it is.
If you don’t want to read the whole report, Adam Tinworth has a great blog post with his takeaways on it here.
Alternative Capital
I’ve spent all weekend reading and writing about startup funding, so this NYT article (paywall) about startups rejecting venture capital is of particular interest to me. There’s a perfect quote from Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne: “The VC path forces you into this binary outcome of acquisition or IPO, or pretty much bust. People are starting to question that.”
He’s absolutely right: the VC model doesn’t work for the vast majority of companies, because its mechanics demand huge hits. I think this has been particularly evident in media: VC-funded media companies have disappointed not because they’ve been failures, but because they couldn’t grow to the levels VCs wanted. That shouldn’t have been surprising: a media business simply can’t support VC economics!
The article discusses a few alternative funding models that are being tried: my favourite is Earnest Capital’s Shared Earnings Agreement. They’ll take a percentage of the company’s net income + founder salaries, with the return capped at 3x the investment. It seems a much more sustainable and founder-friendly way to build a business – it’s just a shame we’ll have to wait a decade to see if it works.
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Tidbits
Love the look of these Nreal AR glasses – though they’re too pricey.
Paywall provider Piano has raised $22m. Refreshing to see a mediatech startup proving there is a market for B2B media products if you get it right.
NYT is launching a 3 minute “flash audio briefing” for Alexa. 3 mins still seems too long for me.
The Sun’s doing a good job of collaboration across products: using their loyalty scheme to drive print revenue and improve their audience data collection/ad targeting.
This is a hilarious thread from Ed Zitron on all the nonsense he saw at this year’s CES. ‘Water for the modern age’, I swear to god.
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Final Thought
Carrying on with the tech-is-broken-and-so-is-the-funding theme: “WeWork has flown its entire global team to LA for 3 days, rented Universal Studios and hired the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Let’s remember this when the down rounds come.” (Dave Thomson). This is the same company that just raised $2 billion from SoftBank. We’re screwed!
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