Weekly Media News
It wasn’t the biggest week in media news… but perhaps, given I was deep into our social trust deck! Do make time to read the excerpts below from the NYT story on Discovery’s streaming app and the content driving its success: Have you watched 90 Day Fiancé for 100 hours straight? Apparently, millions of Americans have. I found it interesting that purchasing CNN was thrown around as a prospect to bundle. I can see high-quality newsrooms being coveted add-ins for streaming bundles. I left several pull quotes from this story to help you speed read.
Discovery’s new app has taken off - NYT
Discovery says it has 12 million paid subscriptions around the world, a more than respectable start that has helped make the company’s stock among the best performing on the S&P 500 this year (though it’s also riding a broader wave in the market). Discovery’s new app has taken off largely because viewers love watching people fix houses, tour diners, and bicker about their relationships.
That’s Mr. Zaslav’s unromantic version of the old declaration that content is king. And it’s a punctuation mark to a media era that began with a vertiginous sense of transformation. It has instead devolved into me explaining to my 11-year-old Disney’s devious strategy of releasing a single episode of “WandaVision” at the same time each week, producing an experience mysteriously identical to the way we used to watch television.
The smooth start of Discovery+ comes as streamers closer to the heart of the media class are struggling. Apple’s service is off to a slow start. WarnerMedia’s HBO Max has been defined by stumbles. But Discovery remains in an odd position in the media business: The company, which is valued at more than $23 billion, is far smaller than the handful of dominant media and telecommunications conglomerates.
“He should use this opportunity to make his business stronger,” said Mr. Nathanson, the media analyst, who suggested that Discovery “buy CNN.”
Mr. Zaslav, who was involved in the creation of CNBC and MSNBC as an executive at NBC from 1989 to 2006, has begun to play in the global news business. Discovery is an investor in GB News, a right-of-center television challenger to the BBC. Mr. Zaslav said the investments in those channels were part of a strategy to sell streaming services as a bundle with news and sports.
But he said he hadn’t talked to CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, an East Hampton golf partner, about buying the network from its parent company, AT&T, and signaled that he was leery of the political charge that comes with top-shelf American cable news. “News is very overplayed and excoriated here in the U.S.,” he said.
Google Crushed Many Digital Ad Rivals. But Trade Desk is Rising - WSJ
The Trade Desk, second in the market for buying ads across publishers’ sites, has made inroads versus Google by investing in online advertising segments like audio and streaming TV where Google hadn’t already cornered the market. Pandemic-struck 2020 was especially good for business. Homebound Americans consumed more digital media. Brands moved money from TV advertising to digital. Trade Desk revenue shot up 26% compared with 2019, hitting $836 million.
A rival for Google. - Tortoise UK (no link, member site)
Clubhouse audio likely sparks the interest in audio ads, even more. At last, there’s a player in the online ad business not being ground into submission or oblivion by Google. Its name is The Trade Desk, and the WSJ has an in-depth report on how it’s thrived during the pandemic by focusing on selling ads alongside audio and streaming content “where Google hadn’t already cornered the market”. The company reported revenues of $836 million last year and is valued at $30 billion, which – if proof were needed that the future is a different place – is more than the world’s two biggest ad agency groups combined. Google, by the way, still controls five times as much of The Trade Desk’s niche market as The Trade Desk does. It’s just that, unusually, this minnow’s growing. How long until it’s eaten?
Tim Wu, leading antitrust critic of big tech and antimonopoly, named as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy - NYT
Facebook to lift political ad ban imposed after November election - Axios
Facebook will finally allow advertisers to resume running political and social issue ads in the U.S. on Thursday, according to a company update. Google lifted its political ad ban Dec. 10, allowing campaigns to run ads around the Georgia runoff election in January. It reinstated its political ad ban following the Capitol siege and then lifted it in late February.
Facebook also temporarily let advertisers run ads targeting Georgia voters about the state's Jan. 5 runoff elections, starting Dec. 16.
Google says goodbye to individual user tracking - Axios
Many OpEds and Twitter threads about how this will really change things.
Copying China’s Online Blockade. Nice interview with Paul Mozur - NYT
How other countries’ efforts to control the internet compare with China’s Great Firewall. Iran and North Korea also have nearly complete control over the internet, and Myanmar and Cambodia are potentially trying to do something similar.
Can Tech Break Us Out of Our Bubbles? - NYT
Online services like YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok digest what you have already watched or its computer systems infer your tastes and then suggest more of the same. Websites like Facebook and Twitter expose you to what your friends like or to material that many other people already find engaging.
Those approaches have drawbacks. A big one is that they encourage us to stay inside our bubbles.
EU to charge Apple with antitrust abuse for the first time - FT
Brussels will formally charge iPhone maker two years after Spotify complained about the App Store. The EU is set to bring antitrust charges against Apple for the first time, putting more pressure on the iPhone maker to change the way it runs its App Store. According to several people familiar with the case, the EU will act on a complaint brought two years ago by the music streaming site Spotify, which said Apple was taking a 30 percent cut of its subscription fees for featuring it in the App Store and denying it the right to tell its users that other ways of upgrading were available.
Is Substack the panacea local news is looking for? - Poynter
Local newsrooms have some competition — their own best beat reporters
David Brooks in hot water for not revealing funding - Buzzfeed
New York Times columnist David Brooks is drawing a second salary for his work on an Aspen Institute project funded by Facebook and other large donors — a fact he has not disclosed in his columns.
A Times spokesperson refused to tell BuzzFeed News whether the paper was aware Brooks was taking a salary for his work on Weave, a project he founded and leads for the Aspen Institute, a prominent think tank based in Washington, DC. The spokesperson also wouldn’t say if the Times knew that Weave took money from Facebook.
How the Associated Press Tap New Revenue Streams - Advertising Week 360
Good old interview on how AP makes money.
(As always, much of this is cut verbatim and not original reporting)