BOTW: The slow death of BuzzFeed News (and RN); Murdoch's double defeat; why outdoor wants TV's spend; a verified Tweeter no more
BOTW: The slow death of BuzzFeed News (and RN); Murdoch's double defeat; why outdoor wants TV's spend; a verified Tweeter no more
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on Friday in Kirribilli.
Happy National Jelly Bean Day.
Today’s writing soundtrack: SBS Chill. You can safely assume that if no other soundtrack is listed, every newsletter is being written to SBS Chill. If Wednesday’s announcement of SBS joining the Listnr stack means ads, then I will exude zero chill. (Hopefully the deal is merely about adding reach for SBS via the Listnr platform, while giving Listnr more numbers to take on ARN’s iHeartMedia for bragging rights on the Podcast Ranker. More on that in a tick.)
Today: The slow decline of BuzzFeed, the rapid decline of Radio National; Netflix stagnates; the Murdochs take a couple of Ls; outdoor targets TV money; Twitter verification ends; and another wild week in AI.
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Hamish & Andy on top; RN’s new low
Speaking of the Podcast Ranker, let’s start there. March’s numbers were released on Wednesday during a busy week for audio metrics.
The sales representation battle saw Southern Cross Austereo’s Listnr return to the top, ahead of ARN’s iHeart. The two-horse race saw Listnr deliver more than 8m monthly listeners for the first time; iHeart topped 7m for the time.
The lead changed again for top podcasts too.
Hamish Blake and Andy Lee, who enjoy the privilege of taking a three month break from making new weekly episodes each year, returned to the top with 955,000 monthly listeners, just ahead of the iHeart-aligned Casefile True Crime which pulled in 930,000.
Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson saw their number fall slightly on February, which nudged them from top slot back to third.
The Podcast Ranker was the appetiser, with the release of the metro radio ratings on Thursday as the main course for the audio industry this week.
Most notable is the ongoing breakout in cumulative audience for the Kyle & Jackie O Show on Sydney’s Kiis 1065. The extraordinary growth spurt has been going for a year and a half now, and keeps hitting new, unprecedented numbers.
This time round, Kyle & Jackie O’s weekly cume hit 854,000, which is an amazing number for a single market.
And that’s the key thing. The audience is loudly telling Kiis owner ARN that this should be a national show. I don’t mean the best bits syndicated, I mean live into all markets, or the east coast at the very least.
In Sydney, Kyle & Jackie O are delivering an FM-dominating 15.1% share.
Their current, lucrative contract with ARN expires at the end of next year. That’s just 14 surveys’ time.
ARN will no doubt bust the bank to keep them. But the duo will want more than money this time round. The challenge of trying to deliver the first commercially viable national FM breakfast show may be just as attractive as cash. It would, however, leave ARN with all its eggs in one basket in the non-zero probability that Sandilands blows up.
The risk calculus is different for Southern Cross Austereo. SCA should be working on its own plan to bring Kyle & Jackie O home to 2Day FM, which has never recovered from their exit (although the latest set of numbers was a little better).
If I was the SCA board (and you may recall from last week’s disclosure, I now own a few shares, just as I do in ARN’s parent company HT&E), I’d issue new stock and offer Sandilands and Henderson 5% of the company. There switch would grow SCA’s value by far more, simply by changing market sentiment. Shareholders would cheerfully accept the dilution.
Meanwhile, the ABC’s radio problems continue. The metro audience for RN Breakfast with Patricia Karvelas hit another new low in Sydney, Australia’s biggest radio market.
An average of just 14,000 tuned into Karvelas in Sydney; that placed the program 14th in its timeslot in the city, behind even Sky Sports Radio. Four years ago, Fran Kelly delivered 43,000.
These days, one of the defences of ABC Radio National is a version of “Just wait til you see our podcast numbers”.
We’ll have to wait a little longer for that. After the big announcement back at the start of March that the ABC would start sharing its data with the Podcast Ranker, we’d been expecting to see their numbers in next month’s data release. However, I understand the ABC has not got its act together on the technicalities. The earliest we’ll see those numbers now is mid-June.
No blue tick
This week, Twitter earned the enmity of both those whose verification ticks it had removed because they wouldn’t pay for them and the enmity of the celebs who it pretended had paid for them; SpaceX’s giant new rocket blew up four minutes into its test flight; and Tesla’s share price crashed after a bad set of financial results. Or as Elon Musk would put it: Friday.
The major development for the Twitterati was the end of the verified blue ticks. I woke up yesterday to find mine was gone. It came as a relief. Musk’s behaviour has been so bad that a blue tick risks brand damage if people think you’re vain enough to pay for it.
Last night came a further development: Twitter has started telling clients that unless they buy themselves a blue tick they won’t be allowed to advertise.
That came at an amusing moment. This week, we decided to run a small test: promoting our AI conference humAIn - human creativity x AI via paid advertising. Our plan was to split our spend equally across LinkedIn, Facebook, the Google Display Network and Twitter, and find out which was most cost effective.
Our curator Cat McGinn argued to exclude Twitter from the test, on the grounds that Musk’s behaviour has been verging on immoral. If we did that, then what about Facebook which verges on the amoral, I’d argued. In the end we’d decided to test all the platforms, if only so we could know whether the principle was costing us money if we did then decide to drop Twitter.
It looks like Elon has saved us the trouble. We’re not buying a blue tick just so we can advertise. Looks like it’s now a three-way experiment.
JC Decaux: Big impact?
On Tuesday, out of home company JC Decaux began to move on its positioning after the loss of its defining Australian brand asset, the City of Sydney contract, now held by QMS.
In an event held at the Opera House, The French-owned outdoor giant relaunched the way it trades with the market. The day before, the trade press were briefed on the new approach in the JC Decaux boardroom.
Unlike the Ooh Media industry presentation of a few weeks ago, which was about consumers, JC Decaux was happy to talk about itself.
The company’s small frame formats - in print and increasingly in digital - remain the backbone of its offering, particularly in the suburbs. It comes at a time when the whole sector is offering more detailed planning tools and, as it steadily digitises, programmatic trading.
Just like News Corp’s D_Coded a few weeks back, one of the messages to planners was that outdoor deserves some of the ad budget allocated to TV.
With TV’s linear audiences falling, and the delay in rolling out a Total TV measure, television’s rival media outlets smell blood in the water.
Bye, bye BuzzFeed News
BuzzFeed News died yesterday.
BuzzFeed Inc lives on as the home of listicles, food videos and HuffPost, but the journalistic mission of the company that sprang into being off the back of repackaging viral Reddit content is over.
Founder Jonah Peretti sent the BuzzFeed news operation to the farm as he battles to save the rest of the publishing business which now has a market capitalisation of less than US$100m.
It’s a pity. Although the Australian operation of BuzzFeed’s news arm went through the same process back in 2019, BuzzFeed News was the company’s genuine attempt to create mission-driven content that went beyond cheap clicks. BuzzFeed was more high minded about journalism than it was given credit for.
There was a good piece in Slate yesterday, exploring how we got to this point (in summary: blame Facebook and the other platforms for offering traffic then taking it away).
Ironically, the Slate article was monetised with one of those shitty Taboola links to a fake crypto news article. You’d think that by now Taboola would know that news articles about wild claims purportedly made by Australian TV hosts about get rich quick schemes are always scams.
Making honest money in publishing is hard.
Not the Murdochs’ finest week…
It was a messy week for the Murdoch empire.
In the US, Fox News, owned by Fox Corp, settled its lawsuit with Dominion for one of the biggest sums in defamation history. The news network had repeatedly claimed Dominion, which makes voting systems, had tried to deny Donald Trump the presidency.
A few hours later Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of Fox Corp, withdrew his own defamation claim against Crikey, which had hyperbolically accused him in an opinion article of being a “co-conspirator” in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
The result was a vindication and a victory for Crikey and its proprietor Eric Beecher. The battle had been on-brand for Crikey, and burnishes its reputation with readers.
However, for the billionaire Murdoch it may yet seem like pocket change, even assuming he has to pay most of Crikey’s costs. He sent a signal to his enemies that unlike his father Rupert, who famously never sued, he is willing to do so.
Bizarrely, Fox Corp’s share price ended the week higher than it started. Investors may not have loved a billion dollar payout, but they hate uncertainty even more.
Netflix flattening again
Netflix revealed its quarterly numbers this week. Even with a lower priced tier supported by advertising, its number of paying subscribers is flatlining again. They rose only fractionally, from 230.8m to 232.5m.
The Week in AI: AutoGPT bites the marketing apple
Cat McGinn, curator of humAIn, writes:
God mode
It was another bananas week in the world of AI. AutoGPT was released some weeks ago, but this week, marketing use cases began to roll in for the autonomous AI service. It “will literally perform the role of a marketing professional with minimal supervision” Gene Marks wrote in Forbes.
From building apps, social media community management, optimising customer data to market research, AutoGPT began to deliver outcomes which far exceed the expectations one might have for a platform only weeks old.
Unlike the chat-based AI platforms, AutoGPT does not require a prompt or human supervision: instead, users provide it with a goal or task, and the AI figures out the steps required to complete the objective.
This requires problem-solving, memory and internet connectivity. Critics warned against “continuous” or god mode, in which the AI continues to work without human supervision or involvement.
Truth is in the AI of the beholder
Having called for a six-month pause on generative AI development just days ago, Elon Musk this week claimed he was building a new AI called TruthGPT, an endeavour the clown-shoe wearing billionaire said would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
Content without consent
As OG internet forum Reddit announced it would charge for the use of its content to train future AIs, and developer platform Stack Overflow followed suit, Washington Post journalists, along with researchers from the Allen Institute for AI analysed the online content used to train Google’s Large Language Model. They found a plethora of offensive, biased and problematic source material had been used, and copyrighted material appeared more than 200m times in the Google data set. ChatGPT has not shared information on its training sources.
Ghosted by the machine
Social media platform Snapchat expanded “My AI” to its entire 750 million subscriber base. The company initially made it available only to paying subscribers. Commentators believe the intention is to optimise the available data for a resurgence of Snap’s advertising platform, but it also raised concerns about the role AI will play in further disconnecting a pathologically online generation from real-world interactions.
Brain Deep Mountain High
The two rival Google AI teams of DeepMind and Brain were brought together as a single unit called Google DeepMind. The move signalled a more aggressive approach to the search giant’s role in the AI wars.
The Financial Times revealed Google’s plans to use generative AI to create advertisements based on material produced by (human) marketers. The new AI, which also powers the Bard chatbot, will enable Google to produce more sophisticated campaigns and repurpose brand assets at scale - another significant disruption for agencies. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been using an AI-based platform to this effect for some time.
mAIcrosoft
Microsoft moved to monetise its search AI with paid links showing up in chat results.
The paid links are not clearly delineated.
Newton’s law
On a closing note for the Week in AI, in this week’s Hard Fork podcast, host Casey Newton revealed the impact of ChatGPT on his peers. When tired of hearing someone talk, the buzz phrase de jour is to tell them to “Stop generating”.
Don’t forget - earlybird tickets to humAIn are on sale now.
Mostly red on the Unmade Index
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
The Unmade Index finished the week on a down note, dropping by 0.59% yesterday, to 683.6 points.
Like the wider ASX All Ordinaries, there were broad losses in share price across the Index, which tracks Australia’s listed media and marketing companies.
Among the larger stocks, broadcaster Southern Cross Austereo fell 1.76%, just ahead of print company IVE Group’s 1.61% fall. Ooh Media dropped 1.49%.
Research house Pureprofile was the only stock to grow, with an 8.33% rise after several days of falls.
Out of home advertising minnow Motio had the worst day, dropping 8.57%.
Campaign of the Week: Toyota Genuine Accessories
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting marketing campaign of the week
LBB’s AUNZ reporter Casey Martin writes:
The week's campaign features Dentsu’s work showcasing the everyday uses of Toyota’s car accessories.
Thew ad shows the Toyota accessories being repurposed for things like quick nappy changes, stargazing on a camping trip and getting a better view at the footy.
On the tarmac
Time for Team Unmade to stop generating.
As you receive this, I should be on the runway at Sydney Airport, ready to watch Friendly Jordies live in Launceston tonight (so you don’t have to).
Almost unbelievably, some people still haven’t found Unmade. If you know a colleague who may enjoy reading this, please forward it to them.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
It’ll be interesting to see where that Netflix graph goes when they further clamp down on password sharing. They’re claiming it’s increased subscribers in Canada, one of the test markets. If that’s true then we should be seeing an upward trajectory on that graph in the next few months, as it rolls out worldwide.
Why are TV audiences referred to as ''linear'' audiences? Is it because they can't talk back? What are radio audiences? Are these people different from ''digital'' audiences? They can talk back, and often do. I guess I know the answer, but there's no need for it anymore. I'm sure people in the comms business get that.