Building a Future Proof Publisher
How would you design that from scratch, and who is closest right now?
Imagine you had a blank cheque and a blank sheet of paper and you wanted to design your ideal publisher. A publisher unburdened by legacy constraints, who could deliver engaged audiences and sustainable profits long into the future.
You’d start with the ambition to be both digital and global. That means designing scalable self serve products that didn't need much variation from country to country and kept technology and customer service costs down.
You know that the biggest fixed cost in most legacy publishers is editorial costs, susceptible to both inflation and long term liabilities. In your ideal model all content creation would be outsourced, with a massive freelance army of suppliers who could quickly adapt to cover any content area that consumers showed interest in.
You’d want the best contributors, and to keep them happy but also competitive with each other to keep quality high. To do that you would move from a fixed retainer to a revenue share model - you would share analytics with every contributor and cut them a percentage of your earnings purely according to their performance.
It can’t all be individual contributors - you’d probably want some heavy hitting content partners to give you a sports play, for example. For that you might pay a bigger cut or guarantee some revenue.
What kind of formats would you publish? If you were ruthlessly strategic, you’d worry about the competition that is coming for text and for pictures. Even if you could win the copyright fight you are still going to be defending against competition for your audience from generative search tools and personalised agents that can copy and adapt those more impersonal formats.
So you’d probably focus on more ‘personality’ driven formats, like audio, short form video and longer form TV type content. They seem more defendable, relying on talent not type, recognisably ‘authentic’ and legally simpler to protect.
The knock on advantage of that is you maximise the cross device utility of the content. Those formats can appear on smartphones, headphones, tablets, laptops, smart TVs, driverless cars etc etc. You just have to keep optimising the same content for different display surfaces.
In fact if you were good enough at that you could also offer other publishers views as a widget, enabling them to take advantage of your content to add engagement to their stories too.
You’d want everyone to register themselves, so you could produce deep data at every turn, across the whole universe of devices. To encourage this you could change navigation from sections to an intuitive search tool, plus get people to subscribe to their favourite types of content. Out of that it wouldn't be hard to build an intuitive recommendation system that always got people to stay a little longer with you by crowdsourcing habits and trends.
How would you make money? The publishers dream is to able to have multiple revenue streams, so advertising at scale for mass market content and premium subscriptions for the cream on top.
This ad play would be lucrative. By creating a publishing system that could move across devices you would be able gradually to create blended advertising CPMs that crept up the value chain. Programmatic and audio CPMs would move towards video levels. Video would move towards TV levels, the holy grail of ad CPMs. The data trove would allow targeted ads, the global ambition would deliver mass market reach.
The subs play would be simple - by sharing subs revenue with creators you would incentivise them to marketing their subscriptions themselves, and leave retention to them too - as the publisher you are able to see individual subscription based contributors decline and just replace them with new ones.
That feels like a good start. I think you’d get to something that on a ‘back of a fag packet’ sketch would look a bit like this.
And then.. you’d realise you’d just drawn YouTube.
I think you can make the argument that YouTube is the single most future proof publishing platform around right now.
How would I make that argument?
There’s the stuff that you already know. Closing in on 3bn users a month in over 100 countries. 500 hours of new video uploaded every minute. It has over 100 million channels and counting. Widely measured as the second most visited website in the world, behind its search-sister Google.
There’s some other bits though. It has a freelance creator crew of around 2 million, all making videos and being cut into the rev share models.
According to Edison Metrics, it is more popular as a podcast platform in the US than either Apple or Spotify. It has the biggest podcasts in the world from Joe Rogan and Stephen Bartlett, and is succeeding because it gives creators the best analytics of any podcast platform to help them optimise and earn.
In short form video it is doing 70bn views of Shorts a day, and will be the big winner in the US if TikTok gets banned, or bought as a shell without access to the TikTok algo.
In longer form content over a billion hours of content are watched on TV screens every day. According to Neal Mohan the CEO, for the first time more hours are watched on US TV screens than on mobile for the first time. According to Neilsen, YouTube has been the biggest streamer in America by watch time for the last two years.
And Sports? Look at the NFL Game Pass, the Premier League highlights, the TalkSport Radio YouTube watchalongs.. it’s the home of highlights and the place where sports rights holders go to get reach when they want some free to air oxygen.
Ah you say, but does it make money? Alphabet bought it for $1.65bn in 2006. In the past twelve months it has generated $50bn in revenue, so roughly making that investment back every twelve days.
YouTube by that count makes $1 in every $7 of Google’s revenue. It’s growing double digits and has pricing headroom to make you weep.
Does it have a weakness? Obviously antitrust is an issue, but most of the focus has been on the Google Search business. Any large scale break up there would take years of regulatory scrutiny and YouTube being spun off would likely help it by making it a smaller stand alone entity with more arguable competitors than the Google Search Monopoly Monster.
In fact if you asked me now to choose which would be the larger revenue in 2035 between either Google Search or YouTube I think I’d bet on the latter.
According to my crude sketches, it’s a future proof publisher by design….
This post was previously published on Substack. Subscribers to Substack get all posts first, free and directly to their inbox. Sign up at https://substack.com/@chrisduncania
Sources
Chief Revenue Officer & Managing Director at PA Media
5moThank you for sharing such a well-written and insightful article!
Head of Publishing - Vote office, House of Commons
5moGreat post Chris. Spot on. Enviable sketching skills too!
Co-founder of Agentic - AI media and research - Founder of Publishing Strategy - media consulting. Follow for a balanced take on AI
5moGreat post Chris Duncan - for us at Agentic we're looking at: Newsletter > build high value subscribers that can later convert into... High price point subscription with low volume, driven by editorial insight Top of funnel > YouTube. Podcast as networking tool for high value services Transcripts from last step editorialised for SEO Not there yet, but probably will be in 6 months