How newsletters have become the MVP platform for digital media start-ups

Earlier in the week, I highlighted the views of two media entrepreneurs on how to scale a business, and now, we have a piece from Digiday on how newsletter publishers are growing and diversifying their business beyond newsletters. It's interesting to see how newsletters are becoming an entry point for media start-ups. They are becoming a productised MVP with a lot of infrastructure and services that have grown up around them, and they even have revenue infrastructure built-in to several of the platforms such as Substack and even the platform I'm using to write this, Beehiiv.

Of course, growing a sizeable digital audience is one step, but finding the best way to earn money from that audience has been a challenge in the digital age. The Press Gazette ranked who is meeting that challenge the best, in terms of the percentage of website visitors they have been able to convert to paying subscribers. The Athletic, which now is part of the New York Times' all access bundle, tops the list, and that must make the folks there very happy.

Nothing really all that surprising here: Younger audiences are into softer news, topics such as entertainment, lifestyle and technology. TikTok is growing rapidly in the UK as a source for news, but let's be statistically honest here: It's grown from 1% in 2020 to 7%. It's a sharp-ish spike, but it's still a relatively small piece of the pie. What would really be interesting to dig into would be what types of news and elements of the new experience on platforms such as TikTok.

David Cohn, who has been at the centre of many journalism innovation projects, says that AI will not replace reporting or fact-checking. But he says that it can be good at sparking ideas. I'll agree with that. The image for this newsletter-post was created with Midjourney, and I'm finding it really works for creating images for things like newsletters and presentations.

Podcast listeners and creators turn to YouTube, and NPR looks to Spotify to help it increase ad revenue on its podcasts

Nieman Lab summarises research into people listening to or watching podcasts on YouTube. It attracts a younger audience, and podcasters start to earn money with their shows faster on YouTube than on other platforms.

I've been having an interesting conversation about media job cuts this year on Twitter, and one of the outlets that has cut jobs quickly this year was NPR. A major, multi-million dollar hole opened up in their finances as corporate sponsorship dried up as the economy became uncertain. NPR has been working to grow a paying audience for their podcasts with deals with Apple and now to increase ads on Spotify.

Today's Drama at Twitter: NPR Leaves Twitter

NPR, major NPR stations and PBS are all leaving Twitter after Elon Musk added first a "state-affiliated" media label and now a "government-funded" label to their profiles. When NPR announced its decision to leave Twitter, Musk then tweeted calling on NPR to be defunded, and Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert hopped on the bandwagon and said that she had been saying that for some time.

A look at some of the most innovative digital news projects in Africa. We try to keep it global here.