☀️Summer's Final Stretch. Short & Sweet.
☀️Summer's Final Stretch. Short & Sweet.
A Quick Post, This Time: Context Collapse #306
Happy mid-August, dear newsletter friends.
Today’s issue is on the shorter side. Unfortunately, my five-year-old son broke his wrist earlier this week playing with his friends and trying to jump from up high.
He successfully made the jump, but he also broke his wrist in the process. Kiddo is scheduled to start kindergarten later this August and the timing was a little less than ideal. Wishing him a swift recovery and, on the bright side, he has a really badass cast.
We’re also smack in the middle of August and the slowest work month of the year. If I was French, I’d be at the beach right now, but I’m American. My work ethic means I work even while I sleep. If you’re not glued to Microsoft Teams while you’re brushing your teeth at night, are you even working? C’mon now.
So this week’s newsletter = short and sweet. We’re skipping weekend links as well this week… Do you dig the short format as much as I do? I hope so.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how Tubi became the fifth most viewed streaming service in the US. Tubi, owned by Fox, is a free streaming service that’s ad supported and mostly features older TV and movie content.
John Koblin has a good take on it over at the New York Times:
Tubi has also established a particularly strong following among Black viewers. In June, 46 percent of Tubi’s audience was Black, far more than its competitors, according to Nielsen. It is the only major streaming service that has a greater share of Black viewers than white viewers. (The average share of Black viewers for all streaming services in the United States is 20 percent.)
“We have literally thousands — thousands — of shows and films that star Black talent or are created by Black talent,” Ms. Sud said.
The Tubi audience also skews older. A little more than half its audience is over the age of 50, according to Nielsen. The audience of paid streaming services is generally younger than that. (Tubi executives said that adults under the age of 50 is one of its fastest-growing groups).
People like free. They also like streaming services where it’s easy to find shows. Tubi is good at both of those. So are Roku, Pluto TV, Freevee and its other peers. There was an alternate universe where Crackle could have had Tubi success, but we’re not in that alternate universe.
There are tens of millions upon tens of millions of Americans for whom streaming services are expensive luxuries as opposed to must-have essentials. I should know, I grew up in one of those families before getting all fancy. When my family was finally able to afford basic cable growing up, it was a big deal.
Tubi, Roku, and Pluto understand that market. They will be very successful with that market. Bravo.
Over at Tablet, Jeremy Stern writes about how VR Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey has reinvented himself as a defense contractor:
After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system—a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.
It’s a long read, and one that’s worth your time. The confluence of tech, media and crypto in the 2000s-2010s made for some very unlikely millionaires and billionaires; Luckey is one of the highest-profile examples of these.
Last but not least, The Wirecutter is starting a podcast.
This is wild! The Wirecutter is a New York Times brand all about product reviews that generates revenue through affiliate links and subscriptions. Branching out into a podcast doesn’t really fit into that business model.
Except it does when you think about the fact that The Wirecutter has community. It has a solid brand identity in a way that very few product review-centered sites do, and podcasts are great for building community.
Basically, podcasts are the new radio and you can make podcasts about anything that can find (or not find) their community.
Leverage that.
Until next week,
Neal