Threads, Media and Creator Crunches

Social Media has been dying for a long time, and it's going to impact a lot of journalists and creators.

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to talk a little about the disruption of media, the slow demise of Twitter, the false rise of Threads and trends I’m noticing in the Creator Economy. This is going to be a rant with some foul language, so sorry about that.

You might not realize this, but this Ads slowdown isn’t just hurting the advertising business, it impacts media, storytelling online and media jobs in a big way. There’s a lot that’s not being said.

Media companies are struggling with two Hollywood strikes, slumping ad revenue and money-losing streaming businesses. Suffice to say that the Creator Economy isn’t exactly booming in this period.

Twitter is in really rough shape, and Threads as a product is so bad people have stopped turning in (already!).

User traffic on Twitter has slowed since the launch of Meta’s text-based platform Threads, which has already surpassed 100 million sign-ups but still doesn’t even have a functional feed or basic things like DMs.

Broadly speaking though even as legacy TV is dying, streaming isn’t profitable yet. The Ads slowdown also shows how consumer apps aren’t exactly doing great. If I was bullish on Threads last week or when it launched, I’m hardly bullish about it any longer, the time on site has tanked.

While a strong start makes Threads a contender among possible Twitter replacements, daily active users dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week - SimiliarWeb

Twitter clones aren’t replacing Twitter, and the user experience on legacy platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, remain really pretty terrible.

Don’t tell that to Creators deemed credible by LinkedIn. LinkedIn Tech Creators can drive serious traffic now via their posts, like nothing I’ve seen in the last few years. Niche Creators still have to farm Linked or Threads if they can.

Not so Threading

Key takeaways

• On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.

• By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience.

• You can only imagine what it will be for the rest of July, 2023. It turns out rushing a bare bones “skin of Instagram” isn’t the brightest idea Mark and Meta have ever had.

The disruption in media, social media and even Advertising demonstrates a wider problem for the future of the internet and the viability of Creators and Creator platforms. You cannot all be Patreon, OnlyFans, Topmate or Gumroad. Every niche is a battlefield and it won’t end well for most Creator platforms and solutions.

Synthetic Media facilitation like I’m seeing on beehiiv is really pretty grim. It’s going to create an A.I. generated blackmarket for fake follower buying and trading, a pay-to-win ecosystem that could destroy the Newsletter economy and market fairly quickly. Regulators might literally have to step in.

What happens to these a16z and buzzy funded startups when they do?

Threads is still trending on Twitter, and Elon is making “Ad payouts” to Creators, but something doesn’t quite feel right.

Twitter Subscriptions and Twitter Ad sharing of revenue, could work out, but it could also backfire.

Source

It pays to be a “threadboi” in Twitter’s Universe since Elon Musk arrived?

I think what we are witnessing with Twitter and Threads and LinkedIn making professionals themselves Creators, is nothing short of the apocalypse of social media. The end times. The bifurcation of platforms really doesn’t seem to have a happy ending for anyone.

And I’m not just ranting even! Traditional TV is dying. Ad revenue is soft. Streaming isn’t profitable. And Hollywood is practically shut down as the actors and writers unions settle in for what is shaping up to be a long and bitter work stoppage.

• The Twitter Exodus and Threads formation is not going well.

• TV is dying.

• Ad revenue is in a prolonged dip.

• Streaming isn’t profitable.

• Holywood is striking.

• Reddit moderators are protesting.

• Substack subs are churning.

And the world goes on, but media jobs and heads will roll with this Synthetic media and ChatGPT stuff.

Netflix and Disney have a hard life ahead of themselves, and YouTube is just lucky it has no competition but TikTok, who will likely get banned.

I predict Twitter could go bankrupt before 2025.

iOS 17 will Disrupt Link Tracking

“Link Tracking Protection in Messages, Mail, and Safari Private Browsing

Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites. Now this information will be removed from the links users share in Messages and Mail, and the links will still work as expected. This information will also be removed from links in Safari Private Browsing.”

Twitter’s ongoing negative cash flow issue due to an approximately 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt burden. Twitter was never good at Ads and now it’s not trustworthy. Apple is going to make attribution even harder.

Apple will become its own Advertising machine and block its competitors. Amazon is surging in Advertising in recent years and so are the likes of ByteDance and Microsoft. This isn’t good news for Google or Meta, in the big picture.

How do you figure out something simple like open-rates if iOS 17 or some future version blocks you if you are a Newsletter platform?

We are literally probably witnessing the end of media as we knew it. Algorithms disrupting publishers was just the first phase of the campaign.

If you thought layoffs were bad in tech in 2023, look at media.

By the way, this chart above, it’s only the half mark of 2023.

The media industry has announced at least 17,436 job cuts so far this year, marking the highest year-to-date level of cuts on record, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

What will Generative A.I. do to advertising and marketing and content jobs do you suppose over the next five years? Care to take a guess? It’s going to be bad.

The fact that Threads is just a skin of Instagram without personalized or an improved experience from Twitter or its other clones, it’s a symptom of the media and social media apocalypse. Meta has never been a serious innovator, without the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, where would it even be?

And, all of this is connected.

According to Goldman Sachs, the creator economy is worth about $250 billion in 2023. So why is it harder than ever to make a living as a journalist or a creator? You want to cover the Creator Economy in 2023? You are likely doing pointless PR for the most part. The threadbois on Twitter or LinkedIn at this point in 2023, could be bots, they could be run by AutoGPTs now.

Threads is being touted by Meta executives as a more positive “public square” for communities “that never really embraced Twitter.” But Instagram was perhaps the most toxic app ever invented that was turned to the dark side by Facebook. Countless young women lost their lives due to it. It destroyed the female Millennial psyche, until their mental health got so bad, they had to leave Instagram. Sadly the replacement, Snap and TikTok didn’t always deliver a better experience.

Twitter won’t go bankrupt because it’s a terrible experience (which it is now), but by all the debt and lawsuits and the loss of B2B advertiser trust in it. Twitter wasn’t designed to be monetizable. Snap’s not either, none of them can be with the Ads duopoly of Google and Facebook. That element of Monopoly Capitalism could lead to the downfall of independent media (which it has) and the downfall of democracy which many believe is happening in progress. What happens to a state when its media fails and is corrupted by BigTech and bullied over by the one percent of tycoons, do you suppose?

The Creator Economy is a small segment of social media and Advertising traffic. The trickle into Substack is pitiful. Beehiiv Creators literally buy their followers on the black market. Hey guys, 100k followers in 4 months, a new record! If that’s not fraudulent, I don’t know what is. They can sell sponsorships for a while, until they realize that those clicks are not from their best-fit audience at all.

It’s all becoming a bit a broken system. The 100 million “users” of Threads is mostly fake itself, given that they are just Instagram accounts that are being migrated with a click of a few buttons. It’s not “real users”.

So if you aren’t the NYT or a NYT best selling author good luck to you. Elements of media, journalist jobs and the Creator Economy will continue to break down. It doesn’t matter how many “hidden gems” Threads has, if you don’t know how to do app marketing or build a winning product. ByteDance spent dozens of Billions of dollars to get TikTok to where it is today. Meta doesn’t even have a modest budget for Threads, that could rake in only about $8 Billion a year, even in an optimistic case scenario.

Most media watchers and Creator economy analysts don’t really give you a real picture of what is going on. They don’t understand what Generative A.I. will do to journalism or Hollywood for that matter. The strike – a result of the failed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – brings the industry to an immediate halt. The Creator Economy? Hard to bet against sex (OnlyFans), magic (NFTs) in comparison to the blood of writers and makers that we will see in the streets.

Elon Musk being corned into buying Twitter for $44 Billion might go down as his worst business decision of his life. Where does it even stand as a going business? How many months does it even have left? According to an estimate research firm Sensor Tower shared with Bloomberg, advertising spending fell by 89 percent to $7.6 million during a two-month period earlier this year. Per Reuters, Twitter has annual interest payments of about $1.5 billion due to the debt the company took on when Musk took it private for $44 billion.

Substack was more or less born as a marketing celebrity parasite of trending Twitter accounts. Until Elon Musk even sharply decreased their traffic, and it’s all coming home to roost. I’ve been telling Creators about LinkedIn for months, but now LinkedIn prefers you have a PhD or a career history in the field which you cover, otherwise it doesn’t easily consider you a legit source and your posts won’t be seen.

Big Trends

1. Advertising slowdown (multi-year)

2. Creator Economy recession like environment

3. Social media bifurcation and user exodus from legacy apps

4. Generative A.I. disrupting content and media with synthetic content

5. Journalism continues its decline and layoffs (those jobs never coming back)

6. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance continue their assault on Duopoly

So if you are’t a YouTube, where do you expect your traffic to come from? Substack Notes feels like Medium when it built its paywall. Notes is a great place to talk to other writers or get their wrath or sympathy. It’s not yet a place to find readers, somewhat ironically.

The small fish and niche platforms of media will be irrelevant. If as an ad-tech, marketer, journalist, or creator, your job can be automated, it will be. It’s already happening.

What would Twitter’s real world valuation even be now? $20 Billion, $12 Billion? Probably around $10 billion now and sinking fast. It won’t be able to go on like this as a going business for much longer. Elon Musk valued it at $20 Billion in March, 2023. A lot has happened in the last three months, and now there’s Threads.

Personal brands like Tucker Carlson have more hope than Twitter or Threads as this rate. Tucker Carlson has struck an ad deal worth more than $1million with an online conservative marketplace as he seeks to build his new media venture. PublicSq much? What the fuck America doing to itself, whatever it is, it’s not good.

I’d never give advice to a young person to get into journalism, independent media, or become a Creator in this climate. Unless you really had a deep expertise in a niche, had a budget, had an actual grant, accelerator or powerful friends. Blood on the streets for Creators remember, in this media and social media landscape.

beehiiv now thinks it’s a good idea to help Creators become operators of synthetic media businesses. The threadbois found a model of how to scale a business, even with absurdly low quality products. The Sponsors don’t seem to care as long as it leads to clicks. It’s a crisis of ethics in the Newsletter economy, not sure the hustle hard bros at this company have any clue as to what fraud, regulations or the danger of synthetic media are. It’s a pity, but I can see where it’s going to lead.

So you basically have a lot of inept leadership in the space. Newsletter platforms cloning each other and pretending like “recommendations” are a market replacement for targeted leads to black-markets for “selling your followers”, it’s shady as fuck. Recommendations or buying leads are never as aligned as you’d want them to be, it’s pumping your your vanity metrics without much sustainable ROI. Unless you make schemes related to sponsors and advertising. Which in turn degrades the actors and quality of the content of people who enter the game. And it all becomes a dire feedback loop.

Writers that want to say “fuck you” to Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn and platforms like behiiv are out of luck. That’s all that exists out there, there’s no competitive choice. Hanging out on Notes feels cozy, until you realize that readers are absent at the party. It fucks with your head. And a16z gets special privileges at the DJ microphone.

Ah that’s what a Free Press looks like.

Media is entirely screwed.