Ephemeral brands

• Read original article here

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to reply. I’m always interested in hearing from people with ideas and feedback. Send a note by hitting reply or emailing me atbmorrissey@gmail.com.

Big thanks to Outbrain, which is kicking off a sponsorship campaign with The Rebooting. I’ve known the team there since the early days. It’s telling how Outbrain has evolved from a content recommendation network toprovide optimization techfor the different facets needed for sustainable publishing models.

There’s more to discover across the open web. As publishers build for the long-term, Outbrain is a total business partner to help them drive sustainable revenue and deeper editorial engagement.

Our latest innovation,Keystone by Outbrain, uses Outbrain's optimization technology to support every publisher business initiative — driving better outcomes across subscriptions, podcasts, events, and more. Learn how Outbrain is empowering publishers to diversify revenue across their unique business goals while providing the best user experience for consumers who depend on them.

Earlier this week, I was taking a walk with a visiting publishing executive. We were catching up after several years, and he remarked to me that he and others were likely wrong in believing that digital brands would rise up to replace legacy brands. There was a time when this was a mostly unchallenged assumption. The question was not if a company would become “the next Condé Nast,” it was more which digital media company would fill that role.

In 2022, the evaluation is quite different. BuzzFeed has languished as a publicly traded company andhas seen time spent with its brands decline 19% year over year. Bustle Digital Group, a collection of lifestyle properties thatplausibly could be a digital equivalent to Condé, iscutting costs, titles and people. Vice Media, including Refinery29, faces an uncertain future aftera scrapped SPACandtalk of chopping up the company. The candidates for the next Condé are dwindling whena collection of B2B newsletters gets put forth. The Times, once seen as hopelessly behind, is lapping the field,even if people there are also grumpy. Why is that?

The uncomfortable truth could very well be that digital media moves and shifts so quickly that it operates in a different rhythm than analog media. The permanence of brands built in the analog era was fostered over decades as these businesses were protected, to a degree, from the fierce competitive pressures of upstarts. You could not easily spin up a newspaper. Starting a magazine likePortfolio cost $100 million over two years before Condé shut it in 2007.

That’s gone. And the costs of starting a media brand have never been lower. Publishers used to brag about their fancy content management systems, but those platforms are often now a depreciating asset. Earlier today, I spoke to Reid Wilson, a former reporter from The Hill and The Washington Post, whohas begun a new publication to cover politics at the state level, Pluribus News.The new brandhas a readymade business model proven out by Politico and Axios: Get close to legislators and those influencing them, tap into corporate affairs budgets while pairing that, ideally, with high-priced and expensable subscriptions. These are not models that require millions in financing. Theimmediate success of models like Punchbowl Newsshow the vibrancy of the market for influencing legislation. There’sundeniable opportunity in niches, particularly thosecatering to the rich and powerful, but there is scant evidence of many digital media brands establishing the kind of staying power of previous eras.

That’s an amazing benefit. The success of top creators on YouTube and elsewhere show that brands can be built very quickly and very efficiently. Such a low cost of entry means more entrants and more competition, more fragmentation. I’m unconvinced creators who build huge followings off stunt videos are creating 100-year brands. What’s more, digital media is fleeting. For years, publishers wanted big brand advertisers to find the same cachet in websites as they did in magazines. The “problem” was often assumed to be one of needing a “bigger canvas” or new “storytelling” formats for ads. But the reality is website-centric publishing brands never had the heft of their analog counterparts. I’m not sure ifthe newsletter boom turns any more durable, particularly as many of the most successful newsletters are tied to individuals. Casey Newtonnoted in our recent podcastthat maybe it’s best to view these models as ephemeral by default.

I’ve come to believe that most digitally native brands will prove ephemeral, not because of poor execution but because the cycle of life in digital media is on warp speed. That doesn’t mean the life of every digital media brand is short. If anything, it’s hard to fully kill a brand online; thanks to SEO, almost any brand can live on in some kind of zombified state. But most will have a shelf life, a brief period in which they’re at their peak followed by a decline. The good news is, more will be created to take their place.

Speaking of new brands,Semafor is launching soon. I was glad to get an offer for a newsletter swap, which is basically a trade of promotional posts for two publications to each increase their reach. For those who have notgotten one of the Twitter ads, Semafor is a new global news company focused on transparent storytelling, distilled views, and global perspectives.  It will launch with a slate of newsletters from must-read reporters. 

I’ll be speaking to Semafor CEO Justin Smith on next week’s episode of The Rebooting Show. In the meantime,check out the Semafor newsletters– they’realready breaking news before the site launches.

Winter is coming. Jamie Dimon is warning of coming gloom to the economy, with the expectation of a recession in the next six to nine months. Even President Biden isallowing for a “slight” recession. Even with rate hikes,Inflation isn’t subsiding enough, meaning even more and possibly steeper rate hikes. More people I speak to, this feels likethe Phony War at the start of World War II.Companies mostly aren’t yet seeing a dramatic pullback, but they’re preparing for one. Advertising is the canary in the coal mine, as pulling back on such discretionary expenses is preferable to other cost-cutting measures that have more lasting effects. I would assume that’s why the unemployment rate remains so low despite big rate increases –companies don’t want to find themselves shorthanded again, like they were after cutting workers during Covid. Publishers are already taking steps to rein in expenses, with Gannet rolling outa raft of cost-cutting measures, including suspending 401(k) matching (I have somehow never had this benefit in my life) and enacting a round of buyouts. If more companies follow this path, that will put more pressure on cutbacks to areas like advertising and travel to events.

Experimental stuff is always the first to go.That doesn’t portend a great future for publisher web3/NFT projects. In June 2021, when Bitcoin traded at $35,585, CNN rolled out an NFT project called Vault by CNN to allow people tobid on and “own” notable moments from the CNN TV archives. Fast forward 16 months, Bitcoin is trading at $19,125 and CNN is under new management that is in efficiency mode, so no surprise thatCNN is pulling the plug on Vault. 

There’s always room for contrarian bets. Many publishers are shifting their focus to areas like newsletters and podcasts, finding high-value, niche audiences and spinning up direct revenue and commerce businesses.The News Movement is going back to the futureby betting on a distributed media strategy tied to social platforms.

Substack’s model might not work for a broad swath of writers, but for the top of the pyramid,it works very well. Matt Yglesias, who writes Slow Boring,shared his impressive progress, showing over 13,000 paying subscribers with a free list of 75,000. That’s a remarkable 17% conversion rate – and at his $80 a year annual subscription, a $1 million business.

Dark patterns are everywhere.The more data we collect and the more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the line between “helpful persuasion” and “dark patterns” will blur even more.Consider the case of touch-screen tipping, which relies on social pressure to expand the number of places expecting tips and the overall amount tipped, thanks to the power of defaults and user experience tweaks.

Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback:bmorrissey@gmail.com

For information about sponsoring The Rebooting and reaching business decisionmakers in the publishing industry,check out the sales kitand get in touch.

Sign up to receive information and invitation to upcoming events from The Rebooting.