How Bloomberg drove revenue and subscriber growth during the pandemic PLUS The business logic behind Substack's new app

March 10, 2022

Poytner has an excellent overview of how Bloomberg has driven revenue and advertising growth during the pandemic. The numbers are impressive. Poynter's Rick Edmonds attributes the success to being able to charge premium digital prices by growing its portfolio of digital products. And Bloomberg has a solid proposition of high-value business intelligence for people who will use that knowledge to manage their money. It is the other half of Stewart Brand's famous line that information wants to be free, which is rarely added. "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life." Or makes you money.

I've also included a really important product strategy guide that hits an important theme of the role of product in an organisation. One of the key points is that goals aren't a strategy, they measure progress towards creating long-term value. And too often, I have been in meetings when the word strategy is used over-broadly when people often mean tactics or processes. "We need a YouTube strategy." No, you don't. It should actually be a question: Does YouTube fit into our strategy? And if so, what are your tactics to create long-term value using that platform. There are a lot of great lines in the piece, and I'll highlight one of them. "Creating a product strategy without a thorough understanding of the company strategy is like going to the grocery store with a list of ingredients to buy, but without a plan for the recipes you want to cook." It's a really good piece to understand the importance of product strategy and also its place in the larger company strategy.

PLUS Google's Core Vitals were rolled out to mobile, but now the search giant is extending them to desktop. How to be ready. Be careful out there, fake fact-checking is being used to spread pro-Russian disinformation. Meta is updating Facebook Groups to help quash misinformation.

Attribute its success to fighting the digital wars on many fronts at once and building a sound guiding strategy and patiently sticking to it.

Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn’t stop them from being featured on Russian state TV.

The desktop landing of Core Web Vitals (CWVs) shouldn’t be a surprise. Two years on from Google’s Page Experience announcement, publishers have had plenty of notice about the new metrics. Particularly as CWVs are already factors for search rankings on mobile. Nevertheless, with the desktop rollout now complete, it’s likely many publishers are hurrying to …

Substack has launched an app for reading — available now for iOS only, with an Android waiting list, as well as in the previously launched web format — that lets readers peruse all their subscriptions to Substack content in one spot and also lets them add RSS feeds from outside publications. …

Substack has launched a reader app for iOS, turning itself from a newsletter company into a platform one. Publishers — beware.

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Ravi Mehta, former CPO at Tinder & Product Exec at TripAdvisor, shares his framework for crafting a crisp product strategy for startups — a 5-step system called the "Product Strategy Stack." He also makes the case for setting "non-goals" and using an alternative to OKRs.