It's FRIDAY!
1. Substack now has three million paid subscribers
I left Substack because I didn’t want to stay on a platform which lied about its status as a social network (mates, you have algorithmic recommendations – you’re a social network) or which was relaxed about out-and-out Nazis using it to radicalise people. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it seems to be doing OK, with three million subscribers in total. Of course, we are in the early stages of a cycle that should be familiar to everyone, where Substack will bend over backwards to get creators on the platform, then at some point pull the rug from under them by giving them less of a proportion of that subscriber money.
2. Why now?
I don’t often link to anything on LinkedIn, which has become the haven for the more serious end of the influencer spectrum, but this post from David Ruddock is an excellent summary of the forces which are pushing numerous online publishers to the brink, and leading to many lay-offs.
3. Meanwhile, The Verge gets it
Pushed down an article about promotions at The Verge was this: “This new leadership team will be tasked with continuing to grow The Verge’s direct loyal audience, a project Patel and Havlak believe to be critical to the future of The Verge’s journalism and business. The Verge has already made considerable progress against this goal in 2023 after an ambitious site redesign in late 2022.” The Verge gets it: the future is direct, loyal traffic rather than one-and-done SEO or Facebook. Everyone, of course, pays lip service to this, but few actually go all out to get it. The temptations of Google are generally too much.
4. How and why Apple gets the EU so, so wrong
You might have noticed that Apple has been acting a little weird lately. Baldur Bjarnason wrote the post I was going to create, which is good as I didn’t have the time. The short version: Apple doesn’t understand that regulating markets and preventing them from splitting away from the single market and into the control of private companies is an existential threat to the EU. The EU was founded to bring peace through a single market. It’s really not going to let Apple, or Google, get away with this.
5. Programmatic, CPMs, and other such barrels of laughs
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote something about the state of programmatic revenue, illustrated by the actual numbers from his site. Falling from nearly $1.7m in 2016 to just $75,000 in 2023 is quite the decline. There are many factors involved, and as Josh notes, they have focused much more heavily on subscribers than programmatic, but even so, that’s a lot of money to lose in a relatively short amount of time.
6. “If Steve were alive…”
I’m not generally a fan of the “if Steve Jobs was alive this would never have happened” approach to Apple punditry, but there is something in the view that the current shenanigans with the EU would never have happened if Steve were still around. Make no mistake: Steve Jobs was no saint. But his focus was very much on simply making better products than anyone else. This applied to making an App Store in the first place: anyone old enough to remember the pre-iPhone era of mobile software can remember how dreadful discovery, payment and so on were. Having an App Store was a huge step forward. These days, app stores are the default and everyone makes one – but not on iOS because rather than compete to make the best App Store, Apple has chosen to try and maintain a monopoly for its own financial well-being. I like to think that Steve wouldn’t have done that.
7. No, really you should look at LibreOffice
I have grown to love Paul Thurrott. He was once a bit of a nemesis, and a pugnacious one too. Back in the mesozoic era of blogging, I’m pretty sure I spent a fair few words on some punchy opinions about his articles.
These days, there isn’t that much on which Paul and I don’t see eye to eye. We inched a little closer a few days ago, when he wrote a post about how LibreOffice Writer is a viable alternative to Microsoft Word. And he’s right! If you haven’t looked at LibreOffice for a while, I would recommend you do because it’s basically all the good bits from Microsoft Office without the tying to other Microsoft services, constant nags to move things to OneDrive, and so on. And it’s free.
8. How much do developers already pay Apple?
This should really have been a “APPLE WTF?” special edition. In The Guardian, Alex Hern makes the excellent point that even if you assume developers “owe” Apple something for making great software which makes platforms more attractive to users (I do not think this), then they are already paying out quite a chunk of money. Of course, there’s the $99 developer fee. But developers also need to buy Macs to make iOS/iPadOS apps: someone like Spotify might be spending millions of dollars per year with Apple.
9. Is GenAI’s impact on productivity overblown?
A rare Betteridge’s Law exception: this pretty detailed look from the Harvard Business Review shows that yes, it is overblown. And there are consequences further down the line which businesses should be taking account of. Even summarisation, which you would think was low-hanging fruit for LLM use, is risky.
10. The money is in all the wrong places
I love long form writing, and this piece is just a really nice read. It also makes some serious points: the amount of money that creative people earn has stagnated in actual terms, which means it has declined in real terms. Freelance writing is a good example of this. I’ve done work for publications where the word rate hasn’t inched up in 20 years. I know because I literally have the receipts, as I worked for them back in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, executive salaries in creative industries have… well, let’s just say they aren’t having to sell the second home.
