📺Kid's TV: The Real Pivot to Video
Monetizing the pundit-industrial complex + more: CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 108
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Hey there.
Today:
TechStars LA Recap
Newsletters: Monetizing the Pundit-Industrial Complex
It’s CoCoMelon’s World, We Just Live In It
Sensationalist Framing of Vaccine Mandates
Parting Notes
TechStars LA
I recently (very recently) wrapped up work as a mentor for Techstars LA’s 2021 cohort. This year’s cohort did a great job under challenging circumstances which entailed a bit more remote collaboration and video chatting than originally expected.
I worked with several participating startups on marketing and communications strategies—everything from engaging with the press to SEO to tailoring messaging to markets—and it’s been a great experience. This meant having the opportunity to serve as a lead mentor to SanityDesk, an all-in-one growth platform for small businesses, and as an ad-hoc mentor to several other startup.
Here’s our demo day. I’m very happy with how this went.
Newsletters: Monetizing the Pundit-Industrial Complex
When the historians write their histories of the early-21st century internet, I have a strong suspicion Substack will be remembered for enabling pundits to become self-employed entrepreneurs. (Paging Bari Weiss, Matt Yglesias…)
This is less of a function of Substack’s platform itself then a function of the journalism industry, which is increasingly clustering around a few digitally-nimble megaoutlets that also operate as self-sustaining media universes. If it wasn’t Substack having this moment, it would have been Mailchimp, Revue, or any of a host of other competitors.
Anyway, the email format is perfectly designed for pundits scaling, monetizing and growing their audiences. RSS’ transformation into a zombie format and the defeat of the manual sort web by the algorithmic feed web mean that it’s hard to reach your audience. Email resolves a lot of these concerns… not to mention that the inbox just feels a lot more intimate than seeing a new podcast from a favorite podcaster show up in your listening app or a new video from your favorite YouTuber showing up on the homepage.
Which is why it’s so interesting to see huge media companies jumping in on the pundit newsletter subscription game. I just stumbled on Axios’ old announcement about the New York Times launching Substack-style newsletters from contributors expected (Kara Swisher, Frank Bruni) and unexpected (the wonderfully contrarian linguist John McWhorter). Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine just came aboard for a guest stint. Consisting of a mix of gated and non-gated newsletter content, the newsletter program seems to be doing pretty damn well.
If I were a betting man—and I am—I’d bet more media outlets (not just newspapers and magazines!) are going to get on the pundit email newsletter train in the future. And that more columnists/essaysists with an entrepreneurial bent are going to migrate to the paid newsletter format.
Stay tuned…
It’s CoCoMelon’s World, We Just Live In It
If you have a child in your life, odds are you’re familiar with YouTube-friendly kids video production houses like CoCoMelon, Blippi, and Little Baby Bum. Apparently, these companies are worth HOLY HELL LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, reporters Benjamin Mullin, Lillian Rizzo, and Miriam Gottfried got the nice scoop that CoCoMelon is seeking either acquisition or IPO at a $3 billion valuation. Dude…
All three companies have a relatively similar MO: Produce low-cost content that’s high-quality enough for kids to rewatch time upon time upon time. Their content can be easily localized in different countries/languages and isn’t tied to one regional market. Most importantly, their content can easily be chopped up into shorter 3-5 minute bites or expanded into longer 60-90 minute compilations and shared across a range of streaming platforms like YouTube, Prime Video, Hulu, and YouTube.
That’s a genius business strategy, and one that traditional kid video incumbents like Disney could never pull off because it’s just not in their institutional DNA.
Johnny Johnny? Yes papa. Making money? Yes papa.
Sensationalist Framing of Vaccine Mandates
Finally, homing in on our home turf here in Chicago, let’s take a look at how news media is framing one particular story.
Approximately 64% of the Chicago Police Department recently complied with a city government mandate to report their COVID vaccination status by October 15.
This metric, which is positive (albeit with large room for improval), quickly turned into headlines like More than a third of Chicago police officers defy city vaccine mandate (CNN) and Compliance with vaccine mandate for city employees worst among police, firefighters (Chicago Sun-Times).
The fact that the vast majority of that number of CPD reported being fully vaccinated was, of course, buried far below the fold. So was the context (Chicago police officers being told not to comply with the mandate by Fraternal Order of Police boss John Catanzara, as part of Chicago’s long tradition of police vs. city hall fights).
So instead of the focus on the good news (a pretty-good-but-not-perfect 64% number), we instead have the focus on the bad news (one-third holdouts). 🤦🏾♂️
Parting Notes
Jacques Pepin teaches you to make a salad.
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