Dear Media Executives, Stop Asking for More "Users"

In a world where you've already lost the battle for attention to "The Apps," the goal isn't to draw users but to build audiences

Welcome back to Halftime, Posting Nexus’ weekly links round up and mini-essay. Today, thoughts from Simon Owens, Ashley Carman, Sean Monahan, and Nesrine Malik

But first…

Data!

1. ICYMI: Epic Games broke out some fascinating details around its creator program. the number of creators working within Epic’s Unreal Engine for Fortnite program nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, jumping from 24,000 contributors to more than 70,000. This resulted in nearly 200,000 in-game islands for players to experience, with an approximate 60,000 creator-made islands being played each day. Additionally, more than $350 million was paid to creators in 2024, up 11% compared to the same period measured in 2023. More than 37 creators made more than $1 million; 14 creators made north of $3 million, and seven creators or developer collectives collected more than $10 million in revenue from the program. I went long on this just a couple of days ago. (Posting Nexus) 

2. Bloomberg published a compelling, definitive analysis of how, exactly, YouTubers and podcasters pushed a group of younger men to vote for Trump. Although we’ve all speculated on this, and although we’ve all voiced our opinions on this, the team over at Bloomberg is the first to actually provide data to back it all up. Shout out to my friend and former colleague, Ashley Carman, on this undeniable investigation. — (Bloomberg)

Three Important Arguments 

1. Attention —  The brilliant Simon Owens asks a very, very good question: why is Spotify held to different standards than Meta? As Owens argues, Spotify paid out more to artists than companies like Meta or TikTok did, despite music being integral to the success of their products (like Reels). So why is the industry more up in arms over Spotify? I assume part of the reason is that music is the business that launched Spotify’s success and Spotify leads the charge for tech’s relationship to the music industry. Therefore, pressure from Spotify’s actions may lead to stronger negotiations when it comes to TikTok and Facebook. Owens’ thoughts are worth your time. — (Simon Owens) 

2. Identity — I’m a massive football fan. I’m also, usually, a sad one. (Saints fan.) And I, like many people around the country, hate that the Chiefs beat the Bills and are headed to the Super Bowl for a potentially historic third win. Hating a dynasty isn’t new. We all hated Tom Brady and the New England Patriots for more than a decade. But why do we hate the Chiefs so much? As Mike Jones points out in The Athletic, the speed at which the Chiefs went from “good team” to captains of the Death Star is remarkable. So why did it happen? — (The Athletic) 

3. Platform — How important is growth on Instagram at all costs to Meta? How opportunistic is it for Meta to take advantage of the TikTok shutdown? About $300,000 for top creators, according to a new Business Insider report. — (Business Insider)

Seven Must Reads of the Week 

1. What the hell is DeepSeek, and why is it the end of AI as we know it? —  (The Verge)

2. It’s been 15 years since Mass Effect 2, a groundbreaking video game that I love…mostly because it allowed me to dance and makeout with aliens. Why are we spending all our money on AI instead of better video games where you make out with aliens? Cass Marshall at Polygon has a lovely chat with Mass Effect 2’s writer to revisit what made the game so iconic — (Polygon)

3. The MIT Grad Whose Prediction Market Can Reveal What the Netflix #1 Will Be — (The Ankler)

4. A fascinating look at the post-internet world of avant-garde art, and the battle to reclaim the soul of visual works in a made-for-digital-age. — (8Ball)

5. The Guardian’s Nesrine Malik solemnly captures the devastation of the Palestinian-Israeli war through the eyes and experiences of those most in need of protection, and those who suffered the most: children. — (The Guardian)

6. Perhaps I’m including this link as a little piece of irony considering this newsletter publishes on Substack, but I found Inc’s conversation with Beehiv co-founder, Tyler Denk, on the business of newsletters and evading the claustrophobia of email rather illuminating. (Inc)

7. Arguably the most terrifyingly abysmal story on this list is that U.S. Intelligence is fully admitting that a small collection of corporations have more power than most nation states, including the U.S. government. Fun! — (Ken Klippenstein)

Three Fun Stories

1. Funny One — This one comes from my friend Taylor Lorenz’s excellent newsletter, User Mag, and I can’t stop laughing at the 30 Rock feel of it all. Linktree, the company behind the tool that influencers use in their social media bios to link out to all their other platforms and products, worked with Spencer Pratt to take out a billboard in Times Square to promote his wife, and Hills reality star, Heidi Montag’s, decade old song that recently saw a resurgence in popularity thanks to TikTok. 30 Rock as hell, right? — (TMZ)

2. Wild One — In an effort to do literally anything other than write The Winds of Winter, George R.R. Martin co-authored an actual peer-reviewed physics paper on the properties of a fictional virus that appears in a series of books he co-authored. On the one hand, sick as hell. On the other hand, George, please stop procrastinating. — (Ars Technica)

3. Endearing One — I applaud the Louvre for its decision to move Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to its own room. Most museums have an exhibit or two — or a permanent installation — that drives the majority of visitors’ journeys. That’s okay, we should support our museums in any way we can, but creating better traffic flows makes museum visits so much more rewarding. A great example is how the Field Museum in Chicago has its T-Rex “Sue” exhibit set-up. As someone who frequents museums almost weekly, more of these moves, please! — (The New York Times) 

A Movie, a TV show, a Podcast, and a Book 

1. Movie — No movie this week. Just a lot of football. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Go Birds. (I’ll always love you, Josh Allen.)

2. TV show — Law and Order: Organized Crime…redux (my partner has a sinus infection that has knocked him on his ass and he’s making his way through a show that unfortunately gives me more agita than anything in my actual life…so I’m rewatching it). — (Peacock)

3. Podcast — Can CNN Survive the Death of TV? — (The Grill Room)

4. Book — The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson 

Halftime Thesis: Dear Media, Stop Begging for “Users”

I don’t recall giving CNN my email, but handing out your email these days is equivalent to scanning a QR code at a restaurant: an inconvenient, but unavoidable reality. I only realized I signed up for CNN at some point because I received an email about subscription offerings. The subject line boasted fact checkers. Credit to Mark Thompson and team, zigging into where your assumed competitors (Instagram, X, YouTube) are zagging is good. Regardless, the subject line got me to open the dang thing, and the body got me to click through to the signup page. Great job, revenue team. 

Unfortunately, that’s where the good feelings about CNN awoke in me from the email and the promise of sanity to counterbalance the unavoidable insanity elsewhere, ended. Down in the FAQ section explaining why someone should pay $4 a month for CNN instead of just relying on free articles were references to the website’s users. How should users of CNN expect to have their experience enhanced by breaking through the paywall? God, isn’t corporate jargon so fucking boring? Somehow it’s even worse when the teased benefits don’t include live TV, nor access to CNN through Warner Bros. Discovery’s DTC service, Max. What can users expect? Benefits effectively boil down to recipes or wellness articles. I’m not defending ChatGPT by any means, but if you want people to pay for a news product, the offering must surpass what is easily searchable. 

Fickle distractions like the term “users” can sometimes derail entire experiments, but I thought that within this moment of continued uncertainty and great change around the news media, it was a decent enough peg to dig into some of the issues I see facing legacy brands like CNN. 

Internet evangelists have proclaimed this over and over again throughout the years, but it somehow hasn’t sunk in: users is a term used to describe addiction. America, as one of my best friends likes to remind me, is a country built on addiction. Tobacco, alcohol, food — and, now, social media. Numbers appearing on a line graph are nothing but users to the Elon Musks, Evan Spiegels, Mark Zuckerbergs, and Sundar Pichai’s of the world. They are hooked on a product they know is not good for them. Since they sell those users’ attention to advertisers — and dominate the market share for all advertisers — trying to play the same game the current tech overlords do is a silly attempt. Thinking of readers or viewers as users falls into their trap. 

A news product is the counter effect to the digital drug. People don’t use CNN, much like they shouldn’t consume CNN. Readers learn from CNN. They understand through CNN. They discover because of CNN. These are not terms that apply to users. There is some kind of continuous misunderstanding that in order to continue competing alongside the Facebooks or Google’s of the world, news organizations must build the same magnetic fly trap the brolilgarch imposes. I don’t subscribe to the mantra that because the world seems like it’s moving into a post-fact and post-truth environment, now news publications have to somehow trick readers or viewers into eating their vegetables by promising them cake first. 

Focus on Differentiation, Not Growth By All Means 

Two things can be true at once: readers do want fact checking, they want their news organizations to be more than the random person spewing an opinion on their Instagram Reels page. They also, however, have a new definition of value for a media product they’re paying for now that paywalls are being erected in every corner of the web. Copying the New York Times strategy is the usual move for many companies these days, but I’m going to use a chart — a chart that has nothing to do with news — to explain why that’s a bad idea in general. 

Data firm Luminate’s recent report on the entertainment (TV, Streaming, and Film) landscape included this chart looking at the share of viewership across each service when analyzed by genre. Dramas sit at the top of the pile for each service, each platform has roughly the same level of crime content, and nearly all the platforms are underdeveloped when it comes to comedy. Streaming didn’t just have a problem with competing for attention; it had a problem differentiating itself amongst a sea of series that are relatively aligned quality wise.

“Perhaps competitors in this space would be better served leaning harder into one particular genre or demographic for better brand definition in a cluttered category,” the Luminate team wrote in the report. Play out that mentality, and if most content is the same across the board, why pay for more than one or two services? Especially as leisure time continues to fragment even as it grows. 

I want to pair Luminate’s chart with another: Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report. Both Nielsen and Luminate use similar technologies (panels and screen capturing tools) to extrapolate viewership trends. You’ll see in the below chart that while streaming continues to gain audience share (up more than 50% since December 2021) individual usage amongst major platforms has stagnated while free streaming options, led by YouTube, have continued to increase. 

You may be asking what any of this has to do with CNN. Looking at some other data points focused on news publications tells a similar story to the charts above. The average number of news subscribers in the top 20 countries globally has remained at 17% over the last four years, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Nearly 60% of people said they would not consider paying for a “news” subscription at all. The average number of subscriptions that people do pay for in territories with higher news paying customers was one. One.

In the United States, more news subscribers paid for foreign publications (26%) than local news (20%). I also found this data point interesting: the number one reason for growth stagnation amongst media publications was uncertainty around readers' needs, according to a recent report from the International News Media Association in England. Nearly 40% of news managers “prioritized product decisions based on gut rather than research.” 

It just takes a glance at recent headlines, notably those at CNN and the Washington Post, to see how dire news subscriptions have become since the 2016 to 2020 (or Trump to COVID) peak. But what the data tells us across all media is that free is on the up, creators are front and center, and there are too many options providing too much of the same thing. CNN doesn’t need a food app or a games section if they’re competing for the same audience the New York Times has already cornered. If we extrapolate from that data, members subscribe to one publication so they don’t need to replicate an experience already available. Notably, the Times is the only major publication actually growing in subs. 

Another scary reality is that legacy media executives want to imagine they’re the sole exception to the truth that is pummeling their Google rankings every day and creeping within their revenue spreadsheets. There is no competing with the platforms to which they paid minor attention to until it was too late. The open web that they’re used to competing in is dead; but the open internet itself is not.

Rather than playing the same game over and over — instead of deciding the only way to be relevant tomorrow is to play the same game of people today — it’s time to break glass. Young Democrats know they can revolutionize their party because they saw the Republicans do it. New media executives want to rewrite the playbook because they saw conservative outlets do it. What’s missing from traditional media with strong brands is the conviction to redraw their approach to the audience while upholding the values of journalism. Sometimes that means changes in the outward appearance to protect the vital internal organs. 

Determining what readers want, and what they’re willing to pay for, requires refusing to look at people as users. Getting people hooked on an app is really only possible if that app provides connection to friends and infinite distraction, like having tens of millions of creators uploading videos every minute. Even thinking about all ethical and unethical ways to compete from a quantity position — using artificial intelligence, for example — doesn’t create the same kind of environment. News apps are by definition finite experiences. Even the Times understands that Cooking works around 6pm, Games occur in the morning, and news fills the rest of the time. Finite. 

You also don’t want people hooked on news. You want to be a resource, you want to build rapport and, most importantly, you want to be the destination readers or viewers know to go and trust to stay. This helps build a stronger, albeit smaller subscription business. It helps with brand partnerships. And it creates a stable business to navigate instead of a wonky one subject to the whims of the internet. 

I’m going to invoke my favorite news site here. The Verge (disclaimer: I used to work at The Verge for many years, and am still friendly with editors over there) introduced a paywall at the end of 2024. Its subscriptions business arrived as the site underwent a redesign a couple of years ago that highlighted three important elements of the site for an audience that still reached The Verge mainly through the homepage (traffic from loyal visitors jumped more than 60% between January and September of the redesign’s launch in 2023, according to AdWeek):

1. Quick updates on core audience interests across tech, policy, science, and culture 

2. Second-day analysis of the biggest stories within those industries often illustrated through quick updates — either a short blog or a tweet-like post on a vertical feed designed for mobile 

3. Podcasts and videos that built on the personalities readers come to know through a multi-media, multi-format approach 

The Verge didn’t get smaller, but focused. The website didn’t pull back but honed in. When executives talk about meeting audiences where they are, it’s not about finding ways to better monetize TikTok content or strictly leaning into vertical video. As I noted earlier this week, “When analysts talk about the creator revolution, it is not necessarily that 50 million new creators will take center stage in the next decade, but that as power laws continue to rule our media landscape, fewer platforms will generate significant time spent, and those planets that house individual creator networks that speak to niche interests as well as mainstream culture will reap the ultimate reward.” 

News organizations like The Verge bet on the traditional magazine selling point — targeted interests, great writers whose bylines resonate with readers — while also understanding that people want something to scroll. I would bet that The Verge’s team knows they’re not competing with Instagram and TikTok, but offering a destination for people who aren’t looking for an empty distraction for the five, 10, or 20 minutes they’re on their phone. 

The Verge does not treat its readers as users. Questions aren’t just about time on platform, but engagement — because engagement does become synonymous with love and preference. A wide spanning publication like CNN doesn’t need to find new ways to remain big; it needs to refocus what CNN for an audience of tomorrow looks like. That may look smaller, but it’s also more focused. That may look narrower, but it’s more targeted. And that may look like refusing to service an audience when it is in fact betting on being the go-to for a specific one. Tomorrow’s CNN will not look like today’s or yesterday’s. If teams accept that faster, they can move more strategically. 

Everything is getting tighter. The New York Times works for a highly educated, highly compensated group of readers looking for a news-lifestyle brand in one unified app. Business Insider is trying to become the go-to for the next generation of finance, tech, and business leaders of tomorrow. The Verge is a consumer-focused publication honed in on reaching and serving a hyper online, curious, and left-leaning audience. Not everything works, of course. Digital media is still a scarily uncertain industry. Recognizing some of the more concrete strategies behind these moves, however, will better illuminate and guide the news audience of tomorrow. 

If you asked someone what CNN does differently today, outside of its decaying linear network, I doubt many news connaisseurs could tell you, let alone the average person with a smartphone. It’s time to start thinking about what CNN’s audience should be, rather than honing in on building a user base. Trying that direction works for Meta. It doesn’t work for a company with a 65x smaller valuation and a crumbling runway.