How the Newspaper Industry Lost $40B

All right, so we're going to talk about how the newspaper industry saw $40 billion in annual revenue evaporate. So I have some charts here that unfortunately we can't screen share right now, but I'm going to tell you what this chart says over here. This is a tweet. So the tweet says, and this is from the Missing Data Depot, it says, the beginning of the social media era coincided with nearly a $40 billion collapse in newspaper advertising revenue. So context here, in 2006, Neil, American newspapers collected $49 billion in advertising revenue. In 2022, that number was Wow.

And you're talking about physical newspapers or does it also cover the websites?

It's physical. Yeah.

Yeah, but a lot of these guys have shifted to subscriptions and going to all digital.

Well, I mean, that's like New York Times. I actually don't— it doesn't break it out here. So it could— here's what it says. Okay, here's the sources. News Media Alliance, formerly Newspaper Association of America. I have to assume it sounds like papers. But like, to your point, a lot of them could have transitioned.

Yeah. And if you look at New York Times stock, I haven't checked it in the last few days, but overall it seems like it was doing pretty decent when I looked at like the last 5 years.

So, I think what's worth calling out here at the end of the day, it's not really like— sometimes a medium will expire, right? So newspapers, for example, but then the medium actually transitions over to digital. And what matters at the end of the day still, like it still is a content business. So, I don't think it's anything that's super— The number to me that's shocking is that $40 billion is a lot of money. And that was pretty fast too.

It is. But if you look at New York Times stock, and I just pulled it up, over the last 5 years, it's up 95.19%.

But for every New York Times, how many people are in the graveyard?

I don't know. But here's what's interesting.

Remember Buffett sold all his newspaper stuff.

Yeah. And I'm not saying he's wrong or right. I don't know. But if you look at like annually, if you go back to 2018, They did $1.73 million. This is in New York Times. Then 2019 was $1.78, 2020 was $1.75, then $2.05 in 2021 and $2.28 in 2022. So they're slowly climbing up. Their stock has still doubled. And I think the main reason for a lot of this is the shift to digital. But the point I'm getting here is if you look at the revenue, it hasn't drastically gone down. Like the article, which my guess would be, 'cause New York Times is one of the bigger players in this space, the shift has gone from people spending on the print version to the digital version.

I saw something around this recently. I can't remember where I pulled it up from, but basically what it implied was New York Times was like the only one that came out strong, and then the rest got destroyed.

Well, Washington Post got bought out by Bezos, right?

Yes.

And I think they still operate independently.

I don't know how well they do. Yes, Washington Post is a good one. New York Times is a good one as well. My point is there aren't many good ones. A lot of people—

LA Times has shifted to a lot of digital subscription. There's quite a few, I'm guessing, that have done all right.

Yeah. So, look, I still think 90% got destroyed. I think the ones that pivoted, great job. But still, what we're saying at the end of the day though, the medium doesn't matter as much. It's more so the message. Which goes to our— we were talking on the phone yesterday about this. When it comes to creating good content, like why is our content getting better?

It's because we're putting in the time and effort.

Yeah, we're putting in more time and effort. I mean, look, we have this nice setup right now. We got Brad supporting us. Everyone shout out to Brad, right? Brad, what's your video thing called?

Record Edit Podcast.

Record Edit Podcast, there you go, .com.

All right, anyway. He's like, it's not .com. Yeah, it is, all right.

It's not .com, good.

But yeah, we're putting in the effort. And if you look at a lot of the effort, and I know we've been talking about this as well, you and I have been creating a lot more short-form content, which I think I did a trend analysis when we analyzed, I think it was like 100 and something thousand pieces of content. Was it 6 million? I forgot which post I'm talking about because I post a lot of stats these days on Twitter, but it was either, it was a significant sample size. And the winning piece of content on social media over the last 30 days was short-form content. Then it was long-form content, which was a close number 2. And then number 3 was podcasts or interviews or expert talks. And in theory, you can actually just do long-form content like we're doing right now, and then chop it up into both short-form and leverage expert all at the same time. So you can actually tackle 1, 2, and 3 in all one shot.

You know, Mark Manson actually brought this up. This actually ties in with one of the things I had around. So he's got some creator economy predictions for 2024. And there's 2 bullet points that stand out to me. The first bullet point is Platforms will quietly start to de-emphasize short form in 2024. And so here's what, here's what he says. I kind of agree with this. TikTok is already pushing its creators to create longer videos. Zuck is admitting on earnings calls that Reels are a loss leader for Instagram, and 90% of YouTube creators I talked to only make Shorts because they feel like they have to, not because they actually want to. And so he's basically saying, look, we're 3 years into the short-form explosion. Seems pretty clear that the ad revenue isn't there. And so even TikTok, for example, is switching more to try to compete with Amazon more, right?

With the shop. Yep. What's funny is I had a research piece that I rolled out a few days ago and it kind of goes into the creator economy and it talks about influencers because a lot of these creators are quote unquote influencers. And we did a survey and I said that there was going to be a rude awakening in influencers this year. And I was talking about how one number tells it all and that number was $323.19. So we surveyed 5,920 influencers, marketers, content creators, and we found that the average monthly income they generate from their social media profiles is $323.19.

Of Shorts?

Just in general from all social media. So, and then when we looked at all the users that had between 100,000 followers and 999,000 followers, so one less than a million, their average income didn't improve by much. It was $1,727.29 per month. And then when we looked at all the people who had over a million followers, so a million or more, Their average income did jump, but it still wasn't that great. It was $6 million— I mean, sorry, it was $6,109.83.

Not enough to survive.

Yeah, not enough to survive. And it's funny because, dude, people always get asked the question, would you choose a million followers or a million dollars? And, you know, in my post I ended up responding with, this just shows people should just take the million dollars because it would take roughly 13 years to Recuperate that money.

Yep. Yeah, most people should. We did give caveats around this. Well, if it's like, you know, a million of the richest people in the world, you know, yeah, we'll take that. But like, yeah, in general, you would take the million dollars.

But the reason I think there's going to be a crazy reckoning with content creators, influencer marketers, because most content creators are just trying to build their personal brand, right? They're trying to be quote unquote influencers. The big issue is, is they're going for mass appeal. When you go for the mass audience, it's really hard to monetize. You and I, our audience works because I specifically talk about marketing. I think you talk about marketing and business.

Business and marketing, that's all we talk about.

Right? And I found that it drives leads. And I try to specifically only talk about marketing. And I try to use stats and data so it appeals more to like global 1,000 companies versus just saying like, before a lot of my content was step 1, do this, step 2, do this, step 3, do this. But the problem is, is most global 1,000 companies don't care to follow the steps, they just want to hire someone.

If you're global 1,000, you love reading the stats. It's like a nice dopamine hit. I remember when I used to work corporate, I was always like, oh yeah, stats. And I'd go to do a meeting and I'd reveal the stats and then the stats make you sound smart. So that's why it's actually good to talk about the stats. Most people don't talk about that.

Dude, you want to know this?

Oh, you've never worked somewhere before. You want to know that?

I've never worked somewhere.

Yeah, there's a secret for you. Go ahead.

Yeah. What's funny is I share so much more stats on my reels on Instagram now. And you know when you get the messages on Instagram, like people just messaging you, like it notifies you when they're sharing a story and they tag you in it. I'm getting around like 3 to 4 times more People mentioning me in the stories than they were before. And a lot of it, when I look at it, it's mainly them mentioning the stats.

Well, there you go. So let me ask you this. So I don't create that. Yeah, I don't create Shorts natively anymore. I don't do direct to camera anymore. You still do. Do you enjoy it when you're doing it?

Yes, because it only takes me like today I recorded 17. I did 17 in like 33, 34 minutes.

Wow. Okay. So you enjoy it. I hate doing it. I hate doing direct to camera. Like, I like talking like I'm talking to you right now.

But how do you do your Shorts normally? Like, what's the process?

Now they just get chopped up.

What was it before?

Before it was, I would crank out, I would batch record like 10 to 15 at a time.

But how'd you come up with the ideas?

I sat and came up with the ideas from scratch, which you don't do that.

I know I do.

You repurpose your ideas.

Kind of. I'll break down my process. Okay, so after you came up with the 10, 15 ideas, let's just go with 10, easy number. What'd you do after?

I would just start— oh, you have to write the script.

For each one. So you would write the script and then you would—

Then I would record.

And then when you record, you record it word for word?

No. So my script, sorry, it's more of an outline. So what I do is I put the headline and I put a couple bullet points and then I'll have like a little thing that will say, hey, at 10 seconds, like we're going for this, you know, 30 seconds, we're going for this or whatever. So it's like a, it's a high-level outline and I just follow it and I riff.

So what's worked out really well for me is I try to tweet once or twice or 3 times a day. I've been Breaking that in the last few days because I've just been busy with some other stuff. And then I take the winning variations. Can you hear my kid? It has to be my kid, only kid in the building. And then I take the winning variations and then I, you know, AJ comes with a few guys. One is tracking which number we're on. The other person is, you know, has set up all the lighting and camera. And then AJ is controlling the teleprompter. So it's uploaded word for word from the text.

So you have a teleprompter?

Yeah. And I'm just reading it line for line. And I don't have to do much more than that. So I can crank them out. It's fast. I just look into the camera. It's been super effective.

I could never tell you're on the teleprompter. There's no way I could tell.

So the key with the teleprompter is you got to make the script really narrow. Most people, when they use teleprompters, they make it wide so you can see the eyes scanning left and right. So you got to make it narrow so you don't really see as much scanning.

I just hate Shorts in general. I like this once we chop it up. Our YouTube's getting more and more play now. I think, look, Here's the other point Mark had here and we can move on. So the other prediction was YouTube will aggressively push podcasts. So YouTube's already the most popular platform for podcast listening, maybe for video.

Video podcasts. I wouldn't say for audio.

Yeah. Google Podcasts is shutting down, right? It's still Apple for number 1 and Spotify number 2. But I do agree with this. YouTube has the best discoverability algorithm. And so like an interview I did a couple of weeks ago, That one's popping off. Like, I think it's at 140,000 views right now, and I think it'll just continue to go more. And I think there's just gonna be a lot more of that. So I enjoy doing this and chopping it up. And the fact that we're live in person, these just do a lot better too.

Dude, randomly, I know you were talking about podcasting. You and I were discussing this the other day, but most people don't— who aren't listening or who haven't listened in before, the number one way to climb the charts on Apple iTunes or whatever the podcast thing is, is the number of people that not necessarily listen to your podcast, it's actually subscribe. So what a lot of people are doing these days and they're climbing the podcast charts really fast is they're running ads and contests, getting people to subscribe. It helps them climb the charts and then boom, they're naturally getting other people who are discovering them when they look at categories like business or marketing or health or fitness or whatever you're doing. Great way to hack the podcasting scene on Apple And just skyrocket your quote-unquote organic listens.

Yep. So go for the subscribes, maybe not so much the ratings and reviews, but those are good too. Last thing here on my side, I mean, this is an interesting prediction too. So it says last year was peak MrBeast. And so basically the whole idea here is like people were watching MrBeast stuff. Sometimes people had no interest in YouTube or MrBeast. It's just that people were talking about him, so they just started watching it. And he feels like this novelty is starting to wear off. And in 2024, we're going to start to see his views per video decline pretty dramatically.

Wait, this is from MrBeast?

No, this is from Mark Manson, the author of the— he's an author of a couple things, but he had some interesting creator predictions here, which this is what we're going through.

But that's with most people, right? Like when you first have Lady Gaga come on scene, everyone's like, oh my God, this is Lady Gaga. Her music's amazing. Or Sia or— Tom Cruise or whoever it is. Now everyone's like, yeah, we know Tom Cruise. Cool. I'd rather talk about Justin Bieber. Does it mean Tom Cruise is terrible? No. But people have the latest thing that they want to talk about.

Yeah.

And even though MrBeast has done extremely well, and I think he will still do well in 2024, that's my take. And the only reason I say that is the guy's so crazy in a good way on how much he'll spend to get the attention and not in an egotistical way. He'll spend to just create really high-quality production content.

You know, here's an interesting counterpoint here. So here's what he said. I do agree here with what Mark's saying, right? So I also think he's going to find out the hard way that spending more money doesn't necessarily make a video better, but can at times make it worse.

I agree with that. But I do think he's spending enough to create something that's high quality that others aren't willing to do, like his Squid Game concept. It's hard to create that kind of video for like $100 grand. It's just, you're not going to get the quality. Does it mean he needs to spend $20 million? No, I don't know what he spent. But I do agree there's a balance with how much money he's spending. He can probably save millions of dollars a year, if not way more, tens of millions of dollars on production and get similar quality and generate a much better ROI.

I think no doubt he'll be popular no matter what. I do think it's going to wane a little bit. So, you know, that's what it is. But I— here's what we'll end with here. So podcasts on YouTube going to go up. Shorts will still be around. People use it for discoverability. People are realizing you're not They're just not going to make that much money off of Shorts. And then MrBeast, at the end of the day, look, he'll wane a little bit, but he'll still be popular. Anything else?

Even if Shorts— the last thing I would add is even if the networks don't monetize Shorts as well, if that's what people want to consume, they'll show it more still.

Oh yeah.

Because they want the eyeballs. And then next thing you know, Instagram will just copy TikTok on monetization.

Yeah, well, we'll see where that goes, but that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Someone called us out for begging. We are begging, so give us a 5-star review.

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