Topic

digital strategy

A collection of 5 issues

We’re all annoyed and they call it optimization

Music critic Ted Goia wrote about "an ugly new marketing strategy" that’s driving us all nuts.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.


Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.


You will pay just to get rid of the ad.


In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this—YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.


That’s not marketing—it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.

Call them dark patterns, bad marketing, whatever. It's a symptom of the broken attention economy that demands from us more than we are willing to give—attention, purchases, email address, loyalty. All of it, wholesale, and often, more.

That we’re annoyed is a good sign. We shouldn't accept these annoying tactics as the norm.

True fans are willing to pay to read newsletters

Yes, even in this economy.

This stands out in Logan Sachon’s NYT piece, How Much Do People Pay for Newsletters Like Substack? It Can Be Surprising.

It doesn't explicitly reference Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans concept, but it perfectly illustrates it.

In the last few years, more people are spending a significant amount of money on email newsletters from their favorite writers. As a result, some have also fallen into a familiar budgeting trap: It can be difficult to keep track of how many newsletters they’ve signed up for and how much they’re paying for them.

Despite the surprise, Ms. Hermann-Johnson didn’t consider culling her list. As she read through her paid newsletters — among them from Nora McInerny, a grief writer; Laura McKowen, a sobriety writer; and Catherine Newman, a memoirist and novelist — there were no surprises. All were writers she read, loved and felt good about giving money to.

“I just want to support them and their work, and that’s how I feel like I can do it,” she said.

It’s not just about the budgeting trap. Many of the most successful web services know exactly where to put friction.

Subscription-based newsletters like Substack don’t provide users with their total money spent on paid newsletters. That's friction. But no friction when it comes to finding and subscribing to newsletters. It only takes a few clicks.

The model works because, again, true fans are more than willing to support authors who deliver consistently.

In The State of the Email Newsletters report by the What If Media Group, 20.4% of subscribers were willing to pay up to $120 per year on a newsletter for an ad-free reading experience.

Those who stay on budget adopted a video streamer’s tactic — pausing or rotating subscriptions.

Here’s a revealing example from the NYT article:

Some subscribers know exactly whom they are paying for, and even develop systems to spread their dollars around.

Phyllis Unterschuetz, 76, is a retiree in Atlanta. “My husband and I are living on Social Security, which does not reach,” she said.

She answers paid online surveys to fund her newsletter subscriptions and can earn enough to afford three to five at a time. When she feels it’s time to rotate to another publication, she sends a note to explain that she is canceling not because of the content but because she needs to free up dollars to support other writers.

On peak newsletter and subscription fatigue

Vanity Fair declared we're at peak newsletter back in 2019. Yet Axios co-founder made a counter-argument in 2022: "It’s not peak newsletters — it’s the end of weak newsletters."

Clearly, the humble email newsletter is not yet done. Substack, Ghost, and Beehiiv are fueling the independent creator and alternative media era. With more newsletters launching daily, I can't help but ask: Have we finally reached peak newsletter?

In a podcast episode's final few minutes, Ghost's John O'Nolan thinks subscription fatigue is possible but we're not there yet.

Dot Social with Mike McCue, interview with John O'Nolan

We call it subscription fatigue. This theory that once everything's a subscription, you don't want any more subscriptions. We have thought about it, but what we've seen play out so far is it doesn't really seem to happen, or at least not in the space we operate in.

The reason for that is that it's not really 50 people subscribing all to the same three or ten publications. It's ten publications and 50 people, and each subscribes to something different. You might have this handful of really popular creators that everyone subscribes to, but broadly the way we see people interacting with subscriptions is far more niche.

They're all subscribed to different stuff. There's not necessarily a giant overlap. It's not quite like having Apple TV, Netflix, Prime, and whatever else subscription. It's more like following three individuals who cater to my specific hobbies, where I can't get that content anywhere else. I can only get it from this person.

Is Tumblr back?

For Gen Z, yes. Gen Zers are 60% of new sign ups according to data shared with Business Insider:

Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them.

Tumblr also benefits from TikTok's near-ban and platform politics backlash:

Tumblr seems to be a refuge for people searching for new social sites. In January, people launched communities on Tumblr to post and preserve their favorite TikTok videos. Meanwhile, progressives mad at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for going full MAGA and are ditching Facebook and X as punishment.

I do find myself increasingly nostalgic for the older internet. The one with less algorithm and more human curation. Less influencing, more "this could be interesting." Good to know Gen Z is feeling it too.

NYT Cooking's recipe for a post-cookbook world

NYT's food vertical found the right ingredients for a post-cookbook world, Bloomberg reports.

One ingredient: the right talent. NYT Cooking’s YouTube channel features contributions from chef and cookbook author Claire Saffitz. The chef’s croissant video hit 5.1M views—proof that the appetite for quality culinary content remains strong when done right. NYT also brought over two staffers from Buzzfeed’s Tasty.

Another ingredient: authenticity.

... the videos the Times produces are “more intimate” than the polished cooking shows on the Food Network. The team wants to make the chefs seem human and doesn’t necessarily edit out mistakes, such as a burnt dish.

Add a thoughtfully designed app that serves personalized recommendations into the mix.

By Q4 last year, NYT added 350K digital subscribers, reaching 10.82 million total. Nearly half (5.44 million) were bundle subscribers with access to News, Games, and Cooking.

“Bundle and multiproduct subscribers now make up approximately 48% of our total subscribers, well along the path to exceeding 50% by the end of next year,” New York Times Chief Executive Officer Meredith Kopit Levien said on the company’s latest earnings call in February.