Does media have the right stuff to win if tech stumbles?
A four-year-old keynote I gave in San Francisco is back in focus as publishers ask themselves whether they can survive after Big Tech...
Today’s newsletter is inspired by a confluence of events over the weekend.
I’m starting a global speaking tour in Canada and the US next week.
The CEO of a billion-dollar publisher confirmed one of my biggest fears, and
Another read me back the strategy I shared in this presentation as their own.
It led back to a landmark keynote, given in San Francisco on a sunny October morning four years ago, that I called Moonshot. It’s worth dusting down today.
But before I do, join me in welcoming new subscribers from Apple, Yahoo, Bauer, Roku, Thinknewsbrands, Essencemediacom, Hispanic media giant Canela, Al Jazeera, The Hindustan Times, Ziff Davis, and WordPress among others. Hey all 👋
And thank our sponsor.
OK, Moonshot, but before we get there, let me set the scene for context...
Look outside, and it’s 2024, and the publishing industry has just earned the glimmer of a chance of a new era.
Courts are loosening Big Tech’s grip, and public and political sentiment has put wind in the sails.
Winning a war with Google is a beginning, but winning the peace will need new energy, unswerving belief, and courageous leadership. Losing from here will be catastrophic.
A multi-billion-dollar media CEO echoed my fears on a call last week when he said that the media might have lost the mojo needed to recover the lost ground.
He asked me: “Even with Big Tech out of the way, do you think that those left behind have enough in them to climb off the canvas to build a better future?”
My view is that we’ve fought well enough for the chance to try. It’s no mean feat to turn the tables on trillionaire titans and haul their asses into court for judgement.
That legal process is now in train, chugging through rulings and appeals, and no doubt being derailed as we speak by political lobbying far beyond the sight of justice.
But in this window, in this gap, and while others toil for our benefit, it’s timely, and our responsibility to look forward, and ask ourselves the toughest questions.
If we get Google broken up, what are we as an industry going to deliver that’s better than search? Or Maps, or Gmail, or ad tech?
What genius ideas do we have fermenting down in our R&D labs that will spin AI into a better consumer outcome than Gemini, or AI Overviews?
What’s our product vision to convince billions of people subverted by social media to give any shits about tomorrow’s news?
This list could go on, and for the record, I have lots of ideas, but you get the gist.
Or, might it be, as my CEO friend fears, that media innovation has been so deenergised by decades of inaction, that even without competition, it’ll founder.
And that will be fatal.
Know this.
Governments and the public love Google and Meta. They’ve been willing to overlook their obvious failings for years because of the benefits they bestow.
Four billion daily users and trillions of interactions prove that.
Yet both have taken huge personal and electoral risk to provide the news industry with a chance. They love you too, and believe you deserve to thrive as well.
But if you blink - if you stall in the face of opportunity, history will remember that you broke something that works for a promise that you failed to deliver.
And if you lose the love and faith of the audience who took a risk on you, that will be unrecoverable, and the era of mass media will end, at least for living memory.
The gap will be filled by others, not because of commercial incentive, but because people have an insatiable need to share and consume information. It’s innate.
We will experience the rise of masses of media; millions of new voices epitomised by newsletters like this.
And a flourishing tide of news innovations across Substack, Ghost, TikTok, and whatever great minds will imagine next.
I have a foot in multiple media camps on purpose. I’ve publicly stated this newsletter generates $700,000 a year, but I’m also invested in traditional, social and digital media too.
I see the numbers, and the trends, and in 2024, there’s no reason that traditional media has to lose. It’s not an inevitability, not yet. The window remains open.
But the only way to get there is with courageous leadership, fearless foresight, a mongrel-like hunger to fight, burning anger, and the bottomless energy that fuels.
And a message that unites the industry under a North Star. That’s what is lacking.
Want to hear one?
Over the nine years I led my plucky video AI start-up Oovvuu, I flew long haul every three weeks.
It was on me and no-one else to take the message that premium contextual video in articles would transform earnings for publishers across the globe.
130 billion page views provides 130 billion opportunities to embed a video multiplied by a $30 video CPM = $4 billion a month.
Most publishers opted not to give it a go. Any of these ring a bell?
“It’s too hard.” “Data shows our readers hate video.” “It’s not the right time.” “Google gave us YouTube for free.” “Our focus is long form documentaries.” “our readers don’t want third party video.” “Advertisers don’t want video ads.” “Video uses too much data.” “People only want hyper-local video.” “There’s no engagement.”
The data I had unearthed was later spotted by Google-owned YouTube, and it acted.
It coerced publishers to provide content to scale, hiked CPMs from $7 to $70, shared data on massive engagement, and just reported an $8 billion quarter to investors.
FFS.
Here’s some more publisher maths: Zero gumption multiplied by zero ambition multiplied by zero effort = zero dollars.
But I wasn’t going to give up.
I had a proven solution to refloat the earnings of publishers worldwide in my hands and felt compelled to keep trying.
It’s what led me to study Cassandra Complex, which is now the central trope in Netflix’s latest hit Kaos.
Travel peaked in 2019 with 399,000kms in economy, criss-crossing from Sydney to London, New York, LA, San Francisco, Washington DC, Dallas, Chicago, and more.
As well as three trips to Osaka, two to Tokyo, five times to New Zealand, four trips to Singapore, and half a dozen to Johannesburg, and Cape Town.
Some were pitches. Others were managing existing customers. More were investor meets, funding rounds. I met and presented on stage to half a million people.
My travel routine was crisp, with its own autopilot. Favourite coffee shops at every airport, a bag always packed, movies and music. Qantas aircrew knew me on sight.
When shocked friends saw the toll it was taking, they asked why I kept fighting. I told them: “Out-and-out rage. Big Tech’s f***ing with my tribe, and they deserve a chance.”
This is what it takes.
You need to get off your arse to get your business off the ground.
The energy needs to come from you, and only you, and as a leader, there are no excuses.
If you’ve done it, you know what I mean.
And if you’re the CEO of a legacy media business it’s what you need to do now or get out of the road for those who will.
One of the benefits of all that flying is time.
It’s an opportunity to read, reflect, and learn. I research history as I find lessons for the future there.
On a flight 25,000ft over the ocean north of Antarctica I learned the story below.
A few weeks later, I presented it as my keynote at the International News Media Association’s Silicon Valley thought leadership event in San Francisco.
That was four years ago next week, and I’ve reproduced it today unchanged, because it’s aged well.
Ironically, one of the publishers that was in the room that day just read back to me what I said as their own strategy, and asked if I thought the idea was realistic. (!)
What I said then was true then, and just as true now, and will be forever. Act, and don’t wait. No matter how enormous the task, it can be done.
Find the energy, no matter what, because that’s your job as the leader. And lead fearlessly, with a message that mobilises an army to the goal.
This is Moonshot, and I hope you enjoy it.
By Ricky Sutton
On a cloudy day in May 1961, John F Kennedy declared that America would put a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth before the decade was out.
He did not ask permission. He didn’t tell his wife. He didn’t tell his cabinet. He didn’t even tell NASA, before he issued the challenge.
He led from the front. And his leadership took the world to his vision.
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The response was instant and global, as 400,000 of the world's greatest minds dropped what they were doing to join.
For many, this meant overcoming terrible enmities. Nazi rocket scientists in lab coats joined British counterparts they’d been locked in a bloody war with just years earlier.
More than 70 nationalities corralled their knowledge.
60,000 innovative new companies were formed, and
5.5 million unique new parts were invented and built.
The world came together to focus on collaborating to achieve One Giant Leap for Mankind.
And their success was, and remains, the crowning achievement of our species.
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Fast forward 50 years, and the world’s 400,000 best minds, the greatest DNA in history and enabled by the best technology, work with Google and Facebook to sell us ads.
We’re journalists. It’s our job to put a lens on the world. To bring our experience to bear, and to see past the past and onto the implications for the future.
We live in an era of global warming, fraying democracy, a deficit of trust, and the widest wealth and opportunity gap in generations.
Is it time for us to stop and ask ourselves if this is really the best we can do?
And if not, what do we do about it?
At Oovvuu, the team and I have an idea, and it’s a big, dangerous one.
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Two months after Man set foot on the moon, late one October night in 1969, a group of lank-haired scientists at the University of California connected their computer to another at Stanford and launched the internet age.
The first digital signal was meant to be the word Login, but the link crashed after just two letters.
L and O.
...lo.
It was prophetic. Biblical. A signal that launched the Information Age.
I quit print for the internet in the mid-1990s, and that was how it felt then. I was giddy at a world of new opportunities.
The first time I wrote an article in a CMS and published it to the world in a click, was an epiphany.
Suddenly, I could share with everyone, in an instant. Rich or poor. East or west. Educated or not.
I was born in East Africa and spent my early childhood there.
The web was an opportunity for me to share information with impoverished communities that had never had access to news or information.
The saying goes that you if you give a farmer a meal, it’ll feed a family for a day but teach the farmer husbandry and the knowledge will feed the entire village forever.
That was the internet for me. The democratisation of information, and a chance to engage with the world, and use my time to raise prospects for the planet.
But the web that was promised is not the web we have. We must all be aware of that now.
Instead of an Information Age for all humanity, we have one polluted by disinformation for the commercial gain of a few.
In times just like this, it is up to us in the news media to have the courage to step up, and use our voice, and our experience, to reset. Like JFK, we must step up to lead.
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The work we do every day reporting the events of the world around us is more important than ever.
And while the control that Google and Facebook exert on us is daunting, it’s also likely to be short-lived.
We cannot take our eyes off the prize of reporting the news better into 2020 and beyond.
My belief is that video will play an increasingly important part in how news is told in the future.
I believe that here in 2019, we are in the first of three-phase shift.
Today, news publishers embed videos in articles when they have them. This phase is ending.
Tomorrow, publishers will put a video in every article, because the world’s video will be ubiquitously available. That’s what Oovvuu is enabling now.
The third age will be more challenging. I believe video will become the primary method of news telling within a decade. It will shift to mobile and apps, and advertising will explode. In this future, words and pictures will become secondary.
You don’t need to agree with my wildest prediction, but I am sure we all agree that everyone on Earth benefits from having access to the video we need.
That’s my Moonshot.
But…
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The past decade has been tough for publishing as we have lost ground to the duopoly.
But:
Whether it’s the US Department of Justice bringing antitrust cases.
Or the US States Attorney’s General bringing prosecutions on child harms.
Whether it’s GDPR bringing privacy into focus in Europe and beyond.
Criminal inquiries into electoral donation frauds in the UK.
News media bargaining codes emerging in Australia, and elsewhere, or
Hundreds of other legal and social movements around the world.
…there is a rising consensus that some form of Big Tech break-up is inevitable.
It’s just a question of when.
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I am proud that news media has the role of placing a lens on history.
One thing you learn when you look back is that success is always fleeting. In the internet, even more so.
When I began working in the internet in 1996, the top websites were AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Geocities, Lycos, Excite, Netscape, Infoseek, Webcrawler Compuserve, and Primenet.
Yes, I’m a bit older than some of you here, but that also means I had the opportunity to be in the board meetings of MySpace when Facebook was first mentioned.
I was in there the first time, and the second, and third, and then there were no more MySpace board meetings.
Time and power shifts fast online, and while success creates unnatural amounts of noise and commotion, irrelevance commonly follows fast.
I’ve seen the rises and the falls.
It means I know that the present is just that. The present. It’s not the future, as that’s not written yet.
But for you as media leaders, know this: The end of the duopoly era is going to happen on our watch.
The fallout from it will be an opportunity for every one of us in this room now, and for the first time in a decade, you need to begin preparing.
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Imagine for a moment, that the billions of ad dollars you’ve lost over the past decade are suddenly available again. What are you going to do?
Imagine what your business looks like if the duopoly fizzles out.
What if Google and Facebook explode like pinatas, and $20 billion in ad cash is looking for a home. Will you be ready? Has it even occurred to you yet?
Let me make some predictions:
You will not be able to take that money back in display, yet you are still hopelessly over-reliant here. It’s what you know, so it’s what you do, but with display yields collapsing, the volume of readers you need to deliver to bank $20 billion cannot be found on Earth. Display can’t be your future.
So, subscription, right? But no, in your heart of hearts you know that this is already topping out. It’s hard and expensive and will never pay the bills. It cannot, and will not, sustain your business mid-term so why are you focusing there?
As this future emerges, you will turn to video. Know why?
People want it.
It’s high yielding.
Blends seamlessly into news-telling.
Enables stunning apps, and
Works on every device from desktop to mobile to TV, and whatever’s next…
It’s inevitable. And if you doubt me, which you will, ask yourself this:
Is it likely that more people will watch more video in the future?
Do you think technologists will invent better video devices over time?
If more people watch, will more and better video be made?
Will viewers grow as the second half of the world comes online, and
And more people are watching more, will advertising revenue follow?
Good luck finding a no in there.
And if they are all yes, that means you can’t afford to not be in video at scale now.
Stall and you’ll miss it. Your competitors will not.
You have stalled and missed twice already with search and social. Miss video, and you might not survive.
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I first saw this trend emerging in 2011. I went to work at an Australian publisher to prove I was right. Soon other publishers were jealous.
So, at their request, I quit my job to found Oovvuu to solve it for the industry.
I invested my life savings, and raised tens of millions more from VCs, to build what’s now the world’s leading platform to use AI to match contextual video with articles.
This is why:
A billion watch news videos on news sites every day, and they want more. I know that’s true because whenever we add more, it gets watched. And the data shows that 87 per cent of viewers watch the videos all the way to the end.
But…
Major news brands publish as many as 2,500 story URLs every hour, and they lack the resources to make enough video to match them. That’s why just seven per cent of articles feature video.
But…
Broadcasters are covering the same stories, and they are making real-time video that fills the gaps. The problem is that they lack an efficient distribution system and a monetisation model that makes them money. Oovvuu solves that.
And…
Advertisers are looking for brand safe video, and highly engaged audiences at enormous scale - in the billions. They have relied upon Facebook and Google for years, but now they want new distribution from publishers.
We know this is true because we hired the CEO of Group M, and work daily with all the world’s largest holding groups. They are ready to move money back to publishers.
So…
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Advertisers are in, and the money is there waiting.
Broadcasters are in, and the video is available.
We’re on the cusp of a global coalition of willing participants focused on reoxygenating publishing with lost revenue, and building a news our readers deserve, now and in the future.
We have built an AI called Compass that literally reads articles, watches videos, and matches them together in a fraction of a second.
Imagine, your newsroom is writing a story about refugees fleeing Syria.
Compass is recommending relevant videos in real time within your CMS.
It recommends a BBC video from minutes ago, updates it with a more recent one from AP, and another with a slightly different angle from ITN.
You pick the video, click and it’s done with ads and earning money.
Thousands of journalists do this every minute, 24/7 across the world.
At Media24 in South Africa, or NDTV in India, or Stuff in NZ, video viewing is up 30x.
The time people are spending on page is up to 90 seconds - up 26x.
Pre-rolls ads are $30 CPM increasing the value of each page by 30x.
Publishers are generating $200,000 of new revenue monthly, by reporting the news better to their existing audiences, and future-proofing themselves for growth.
But…
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I suspect that you’ve been taught by your tech and editorial teams that video is hard. And it’s expensive. And it’s free if we let Google do it for us…
Everything’s hard when you do it for the first time, and anyone that does anything for you for free is making you pay for it somewhere else.
Video was hard for us too when we started, but we have invested tens of thousands of hours and tens of millions in the solution.
This is a moment where publishing and broadcasting can partner in a global coalition with a common mission to report the news better, and service billions of consumers.
Is this what Big Tech is doing, or does it have an ulterior motive? Aren’t you here today because you’re looking for an alternative to being under tech’s yoke?
We’re journalists who built tech to solve newsroom problems.
Tech uses journalism to drive revenue by solving its scale problem.
Ask yourself this. They are getting richer every day. Are you? So, who’s winning?
I live by this:
Technology can be learned, but trust must be earned.
I know tech can be learned because I built a global AI company without knowing a single line of code.
And I know trust must be earned because when big stories break, people don’t run to Facebook, they come to the BBC, Bloomberg etc.
Better still, Oovvuu is an AI that we built way back in 2017. That means every time you embed a video in a page, and every person who watches it, teaches to be smarter.
At dawn in New Zealand, reporters begin covering the day’s news. Three hours later, when Australia wakes, newsrooms there benefit from that work.
Then Asia, India, Africa, Europe and the US. When the US signs off, New Zealand picks up where it left off, and on we go in a perpetual cycle of partnership. A global newsroom for the video era.
Every embed, every view, combined with your journalism teaches the Oovvuu AI how to distribute trust on a global scale.
It is the opposite of Big Tech which publishes anything, true or false, just to sell an ad.
That’s why I’m on the front foot at events like this, and others all over the world, meeting you, to share the work.
Ours is a future everyone can believe in.
Now…
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Imagine for just a moment that Google and Facebook’s duopoly is broken up in the next five years.
Instead of those 4am night terrors you have worrying about balancing the P&L or losing more staff, think differently.
Tonight allow yourself to have a 4am dream. Dream that the duopoly is broken, and tens of billions of cash are back.
That’s coming, in just a few years, as antitrust does its work.
When that is reality, demand for news video will be peaking. It will be ubiquitous and demand from consumers and advertisers will be massive and overwhelming.
It will be an arms race, with everyone today and new entrants. You’re not in this fight yet, and you have no time to mess around.
There will be no time for you to experiment then on how to do video at scale.
No time to discover what people want to watch.
No time to A/B test what video to make and what to syndicate.
Or who to get video from, and at what volume or price.
No time.
To discover what advertising works best?
No time.
The time to do your learning is today, to be ready.
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Who’s read Douglas Adams’ book The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, and can tell me the answer to life, the universe and everything?
The Deep Thought supercomputer (think Google) in the book calculated it was 42.
It’s wrong. It’s 26.
The world’s 26 largest publishers and broadcasters combined deliver more pages of content than Facebook and Google.
The power is in our own hands if we as an industry can work together.
26 is one conference. It’s a fraction of an industry group. It can be done by just you in the room now. 26 people with 26 coffees to reach one agreement.
It’s not that hard is it? Not much effort to benefit billions of people and deliverable a sustainable model for news for decades.
Broadcasters have donated the video, advertisers have the ads. All you need to do is put them in articles and tell the news better.
So…
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John F Kennedy’s singular focus to succeed with a moonshot, put hundreds of thousands to work, and united the world in an amazing mission.
I visited his grave in the Arlington National Cemetery this past weekend to pay my respects.
His moon missions and vision spawned innovations that still drive technology today.
GPS.
CAT scanners.
Microchips.
Cordless tools.
Freeze dried food.
The joystick.
Water filters.
Smoke detectors.
Memory foam.
These all came from his moonshot.
When the world puts a value on a common goal everyone wins.
Think about what we could achieve as an industry, if we can just do one thing: Say yes, and work together.
Very thought-provoking read, Ricky. There need to be more Moonshot rallying calls in the boardrooms and town halls of big publishers right now.