Edition #490
On the outpost play, zero followers required and Bernard Arnault.
Thanks to Ben for his tweets out of Possible this week, he had a couple of Gary Vee bangers. I remember watching Gary in the very early days, where he was mostly focused on the wine (and then some bangers).
But one thing shared was this idea:
And that’s super interesting, basically, the algorithms and ‘For You’ tabs are so powerful, if you get the right content, they’re going to do the heavy lifting to get your content out there.
Of course, followers are helpful, but as he says, not needed.
The other observation is how traditional publishers are joining Substack, Time, Allure & New York Magazine have all set up outposts. Not with their core offerings, but as additional newsletters, or shifting some across.
I’ve long been a fan of the outpost strategy, how it works is you set up an outpost on a new platform, bring new/unique content – and your credibility from your off platform activity. But then it gives you room to experiment, to learn, to try something new that you wouldn’t with the flagship. A skunk works if you will. But then it also gets your brand in front of incremental new audiences, who you might not reach either way.
This also lends credence to Substack and the culture it has created around it. I know someone that recently left Substack, for another platform and also immediately regretted it, they like the community features, and their audience didn’t even care that they’d shifted. So they went back.
There is something really valuable in, the easiest way to gain a subscriber, is to ask someone who already subscribes to something else.
Notable stories this week
- Puma launches Go Wild podcast.
- Unpacking the creator economy battleground.
- Hollywood found a new moneymaker with branded content. Trump and his tariffs are crashing the party.
- Stuck in content hell.
- Hack psychology, not the algorithm.
- Traditional publishers are joining Substack.
- Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads.
- WTF are gray bots?
- The outcomes era is dead. Long live the quality era.
- Publishers, don’t fear curation fees, they’re just the same old ad tech tax.
- Paypal is launching programmatic ads powered by shopping data.
- Snap plunges 13% on ‘headwinds’ to start quarter, inability to offer guidance.
- Simplifi and Bombora partnership to expand native contextual offering with B2B targeting.
- Spotify CEO eyes growth amid economic uncertainty.
- Digital creator jobs jump 7.5x since pandemic.
- Yahoo joins the CAPI trend.
- Google is finally showing buyers where Pmax ads run.
- The limited scope of third party cookies.
- OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT search with shopping features.
- Sundar Pichai is hopeful to have an agreement with Apple to have Gemini as an option of Apple Intelligence by the middle of the year.
- Media product in the ‘more with less’ era.
- Washington Post aims to drive double digit revenue growth by hosting fewer, bigger events.
- [Long read] The group chats that changed America.
Deals/M&A
- Yahoo Sports selling Rivals to On3 ownership group.
Smartest commentary
- “Recently, I went viral on TikTok for being a tight ass…. When you create content, instead of asking “What’s the message we want to communicate?”, ask “What do we want people to feel?” –Jane Killingsworth.
- “You cannot dream when you talk numbers. When you create desire, profits are a consequence.” –Bernard Arnault.
- “Measuring brand is like measuring love and god.” –Gary Vaynerchuk.
Datapoints of note
- YouTube ad revenue jumps 10.3% to $8.9b.
- The number of people with full-time equivalent jobs as digital creators in the US jumped from 200,000 to 1.5m in 2024.
- Alphabet has over 270m paid subscribers.
- Bain found that 80 per cent of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40 per cent of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by up to 25 per cent. About 60 per cent of searches now end without the users clicking through to another website.
- X lost 11m users in the EU over the past 5 months.
- Microsoft ad revenue surpassed $20b.
- Spotify has paid $100m to podcasts since January.
Events
- Media breakfast coming up in May, let me know if you want to join.
View all 2024 datapoints of note.
That’s it for this week.
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