This week: The Hollywood Reporter's "Most Powerful People in Media" New York list is out on Thursday, Coachella starts on Friday, GoT's final season starts on Sunday and the NBA regular season comes to an end.
Last week: Snap's first-ever Partner Summit.
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Tracking patronage media
If you like what someone makes, why not just pay them directly? Creators, platforms and fans are quietly shifting to a patronage model, cutting out advertisers, publishers and networks while going direct-to-creator for content. Think Bandcamp, Patreon or Twitch. And, like all platforms that have their own incentive structures, as these new patronage platforms not only grow more popular but also evolve the content that we all read, watch and listen to will change, too. Substack, an email newsletter platform, recently updated its homepage to include a leaderboard for posts, paid newsletters and free newsletters. Substack was already positioned to become the de facto platform for writers who want to reach readers directly in a growing medium. Oddly, Medium missed the boat and now newsletters are hot. Newsletters are poised to follow podcasts, Twitch streams, premium Snapchat accounts, private Twitter pages and other forms of patronage media that allow people to directly support the creators whose content the love. But what's interesting about the addition of the leaderboards on Substack is how it will inevitably start influencing the content.
Patronage media has benefitted from its purity. There's no "going viral" like on Twitter, which seems to be the point of the platform nowadays thanks to built-in likes and algorithms. The podcasts on Patreon that have no networks or advertisers to answer to are free to expand their subject matter, explore the boundaries of their formats and please their fans. The same goes for the journalism, opinion writing and blogging that's happening on newsletter. As Matt Taibbi, the brilliant Rolling Stone journalist who's publishing his latest book Hate Inc. through Substack wrote in an AMA, "I think the subscription model is more likely to produce cool/experimental material than any model that tries to game Google/FB algorithms."Now, though, Substack has subtly introduced metrics to game. Sure, Patreon has long had leaderboards of their own. But podcasts are different in nature than blogs and Patreon is different in structure than Substack. You can sample any Substack newsletter for free, whereas podcasts on Patreon are typically locked behind paywalls and podcasts themselves are less transparent, more opaque pieces of content that take more time to skim.
So far, newsletters have been outside of the universe of free content where social media algorithms serve up easy to digest sameness. Now, Substack is further incentivizing writers to produce the same type of content that gets clicks elsewhere. Look what happened at Gawker: the best blog ever was famously obsessed with metrics. The result was content increasingly engineered to go viral. Posts on Substack have already had a custom "heart" button and integration into other platforms, but it still felt self-contained. Will the addition of leaderboards erase what's made Substack and patronage media so special thus far? Will Substack get subsumed by social media?
Meme-makers as kingmakers
Lil Nas X built his superstardom on top of a meme career. The song being nearly perfect doesn't hurt, but it was Lil Nas X's massive follower base that catapulted his underground hit "Old Town Road" to the top of multiple charts. Like Billie Eilish and Blueface before him, Lil Nas X is proving that the new path to hit-making is memes first, relentlessly making content that builds a loyal following and inundates the artist with data about their fans and what they love, then leveraging that knowledge and relationship to shape the music the artist eventually releases directly to them. Kingmakers used to be dj's and critics, people who gamed the system of the establishment music media and music industry. Now they're kids who game Twitter and Instagram. Lil Nas X is an expert at gaming virality on Twitter. The audience that he shrewdly consolidated was already there: Nicki Minajs stans aka Barbies. Lil Nas X simply changed his name from his old Nicki Minaj fan name to @LilNasX once his song took off.
Because I've long followed two similar accounts - one using Travis Scott as a jumping off point and the other Quavo - I've seen these accounts in action: ostensibly accounts for Travis Scott or Quavo fans, they mostly re-post any viral content and are often suspiciously similar because they are either run by the same person or they're run in close coordination with other meme accounts. For the curious, the type of content Lil Nas X used to post as a viral Nicki fan on Twitter, via Brian Feldman of New York:
"A 2012 video of a bus monitor getting bullied"A fake, but still viral, tweet about throwing a birthday party for his dog that nobody came to"'Scenario threads' on Twitter, choose-your-own adventures based on the threaded tweet format. The threads were viral enough that YouTubers would play them for their vlogs and narrate the experience."
I will save the part about how TikTok contributed to the massive success of the song because I plan on doing a deep dive into TikTok at some point. Feldman calls the way Lil Nas X built a fan base before ever putting out a song "artificially inflating" popularity. But it's just the way the world works now.
Facebook ads don't work?
Wrong. But unfortunately for Facebook and for America my example to prove it is the Trump campaign. In 2016, it was the Trump campaign's mastery of Facebook advertising, not the ads by the shady Russian Internet Research Agency, that won him the election. From Wired's Antonio Garcia Martinez: "During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money." Indeed, Trump's campaign director Brad Parscale even weighed in himself: "I bet we were 100x to 200x her. We had CPMs that were pennies in some cases. This is why @realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for FaceBook." [sic]And in the run-up to the 2020 election, according to data aggregated by Bully Pulpit, Donald Trump is spending almost 12 times as much on Facebook ads as the Democratic candidate who's spending the most on Facebook.
Sara Fischer has a thorough breakdown on why this strategy makes sense for the Trump campaign and the Democratic candidates. Obviously, Trump rode earned media in 2016, blanketing news coverage for a year and half before the election. But during 2015 and 2016, super smart (and anger-stoking) Facebook ad creative and Facebook ad buying may have contributed to the groundswell that created the TV coverage and earned media weight in the first place. Or maybe it was the thing that converted voters. Either way, Trump has a head start in 2020 when it comes to Facebook.
With an Instagram Story, Billie Eilish asked her fans to stream her album while they sleep. Genius!
One of my favorite things ever, Red Bull Music Academy, is shutting down. Very sad to hear it.
Great lead, from the Times on China: "Inside a fishing gear store on a busy city street, the owner sits behind a counter, furiously tapping a smartphone to improve his score on an app that has nothing to do with rods, reels and bait...The owner, Jiang Shuiqiu, a 35-year-old army veteran, has a different obsession: earning points on Study the Great Nation, a new app devoted to promoting President Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party."
Links: — Meet the Man Behind Trump’s Biden Tweet
A stay-at-home dad in Kansas reveals how the lines have blurred between viral trolling and the business of politics.
A Million People Live in These Underground Nuclear Bunkers
Beneath the streets of Beijing, people live in an underground universe constructed during the Cold War era.
The Left Can’t Meme
How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors
Ariana Grande Was Accused of Copying ‘7 Rings,’ Again and Again … and Again
But did she actually do anything wrong?
Kentucky Fried Chicken bought a time slot on Ultra Music Festival’s main stage
DJ Colonel Sanders played the Miami festival