The Mini Media Magnates: solo-publishers or micro-operations are now the media mainstream
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In recent weeks, I’ve found myself inadvertently playing the role of pundit on the subject of podcast regulation. It came after the BBC broke a story about Steven Bartlett, the crown prince of British podcasting, spreading medical misinformation through his hit show The Diary of a CEO. Could more be done to hold podcasts (and podcasters) to account? Does the absence of scrutiny necessarily beget a class of broadcasters who want to say their loony stuff without fear of repercussion? And are there any professional bodies who could intervene here?
Everything I’ve said on this subject has hinged on one simple fact: these ‘podcasters’ are the mainstream media now. Mainstream in audience reach and political impact, mainstream in revenue generation. And therefore they should be treated the way that any mature business should be treated, and regulated to make sure that the industry develops in a sensible way.
This is no fun as an opinion, but it is true. An excellent Bloomberg report recently looked into the content put out by 9 podcasters (I’ll keep using that term, even though these men are patently YouTubers, first and foremost) who interviewed Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2024 US Presidential election. The piece found that, having analysed over 1,300 hours of footage, these 9 men (Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Andrew Schulz, Adin Ross, Logan Paul, Shawn Ryan, Patrick Bet-David, Theo Von and ‘the Nelk Boys’ (who may, or may not, be a single person)) ended up giving the President an additional 113.6m views. Trump topped their amplification charts but was closely followed by Andrew Tate (80.6m), Tucker Carlson (49.7m) and Elon Musk (38.4m). Almost all of these interviewees were, in the run-up to November’s election, proactively pushing the cause of Trump and the Republican party. And he won (in case you’d forgotten).
If one were to attempt to make a coherent argument against regulating these new broadcasters, one would start with the question of reach. Linear TV still reaches a huge number of viewers, whether they’re watching in airport lounges or retirement homes. In January 2025 (the January we are still, just about, living through, if you can believe it), Fox News, America’s largest news channel by some distance, delivered an average 2.8 million viewers, a ratings coup based largely on their man’s return to the White House. And while comparing linear news broadcasting to YouTubers spouting off on a podcast is like comparing apples to the rotted, dark husks of fossilised lychees, it is hard to make an argument that one should be closely regulated while the other is treated liked a toddler with no personal autonomy. These are both powerful dissemination machines.
Another — possible — argument against regulating these guys, is the idea that they aren’t able to extract revenue with the same efficacy as CNN or the New York Post or NPR or wherever. It harks back to a time when podcasters were buying cheap sound-proof egg-crating off Amazon and decorating their mom’s basement. These podcasts might have been reaching decent audiences, but they sold few adverts at pitiful rates. There was no paywalling, back then. And so you had these digital media products which had reasonable penetration but limited commercial potential. That is, of course, a very antiquated view. The rise of digital advertising, whether that’s on YouTube or via the many providers (Acast, Audioboom, Spotify etc) who do this for podcasters, has enabled the majority of podcasts to perform some revenue extraction, even if it’s peanuts. The rise and rise (two rises, this time) of the subscription economy has also ensured that almost any creator can set their content behind a hard(ish) paywall. And so, the old idea — that podcasters and YouTubers and newsletter writers couldn’t properly monetise their product — is for the birds.
In fact, just look at this excellent research done, last week, by Press Gazette, here in London. They looked into the top revenue-generating Substacks in the world, to try and get a sense of what publishers were earning from this new platform. Substack is a pretty opaque platform, only categorising publications as ‘Hundreds of Paid Subscribers’, ‘Thousands of Paid Subscribers’, ‘Tens of Thousands of Paid Subscribers’, and ‘Hundreds of Thousands of Paid Subscribers’. Which doesn’t give analysts much to go on. But the fact is that, of the biggest Substacks — like The Pragmatic Engineer and Lenny’s Newsletter — most are labelled as ‘Tens of Thousands of Paid Subscribers’. Only one, Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson, reaches the ‘Hundreds of Thousands of Paid Subscribers’ level.
So, for the sake of this analysis, let’s assume that Heather Cox Richardson has exactly 100,000 paid subscribers. Richardson’s Substack is priced at £4 per month (or £3.33 if billed annually). Let’s split the difference (imprecisely) and say that £3.50 is the average, per month, earning from her subscribers. That means she’s making £350,000 per month (equivalent, today, to $436,425), or £4,200,000 (or $5,237,337) a year. It isn’t clear whether Richardson employs any full-time staff to help with the newsletter, though Kyle Munson reports that she works with a copy editor and a former advertising exec. I would assume they’re both part-time and remote, and that Letters from an American’s overheads come to no more than $50,000 a year (I may be wrong — who cares). But, for argument’s sake, let’s say that Richardson spends a quarter of a million dollars on help for her newsletter, that would still leave her with $5,000,000 a year, making her — arguably — the most well-remunerated journalist in the world.
It also means that, in my opinion, Richardson is by both reach and revenue, a mainstream publication. Not a mere journalist, but a publication; a brand. An incredibly lean, personalised publication, but something that is competing on its own, in revenue terms, with a small magazine — and destroying that magazine in terms of audience reach.
These mini media magnates are a product of the way that digital media has atomised in the past decade. It is a trend that is likely to become more entrenched and widespread. The beneficiaries, with early mover advantage, are here to stay — but there will be much more fragmentation from legacy media. Not a day goes by when there aren’t another big round of lay-offs at a media group. Not a week goes by when another star columnists fails to announce their migration to Substack.
This splintering is producing an ecosystem that is hard to keep tabs on. It was relatively clear, in days gone by, that if one were to look for powerful thinking on the centre-left in the UK, you’d turn to thoughtful magazines like the New Statesman and Prospect. And perhaps you still do. But might it not also be sensible to look at Comment is Freed, the newsletter from father/son duo Sam and Lawrence Freedman which has thousands of paid subscribers? Might we not also want to consider Phil Moorhouse’s A Different Bias YouTube channel with its 205k subscribers (compared to 156k for the NS or 9.6k for Prospect)? Shouldn’t we consider, first and foremost, the Rest is Politics podcast, which generates millions of pounds in advertising revenue, books the highest profile guests in the political world, and managed to sell out the Albert Hall and the O2? Aren’t these, when you think about it, more influential publishers than much of our swaying — staggering — legacy media?
Whether it’s Bari Weiss and The Free Press or The Joe Rogan Experience, media analysts and consumers need to wise up to the fact that some of the most potent media organisations in the world at the moment — the ones genuinely setting the agenda — are extremely lean, very profitable SMEs. They are liberated from the doom of all media empires: the ambition towards expansion. Podcasting was built on a simple principle — it was attractive to people who like the sound of their own voice. The same is true of YouTube, and even newsletters (hey, what the hell?!). And when you like the sound of your own voice, you feel compelled to get it out there; you don’t feel compelled, necessarily, to add it to a pluralised chorus.
And so these micro-publishers are making little to no investment in the industry. They are just extracting revenue with thrilling, seductive abandon. They occupy largely unregulated parts of the media, so don’t have to worry about compliance. It’s a perfect combination to create an unreliable and unsustainable future. And what’s more, traditional media is determined to continue to position them as outsiders, insurgents, disruptors etc because anything else would challenge their own position, their long established hegemony. It’s a catch-22: do you acknowledge that the mainstream has broken up and deprofessionalised, and, in the process, undermine your own status as the incumbent occupier of the orthodox position? Or do you continue to treat these start-ups as aberrations, curiosities, and allow them to escape the pressures and scrutiny required of the actual mainstream (thus allowing them to cannibalise more of that space)? There’s no easy answer.
If I ran a major media conglomerate, I would buy up a lot of these titles — put the brand/journalist on a healthy contract with a savage non-compete clause, and then eventually move to bundle them back into a single publication. I appreciate that I’ve just reinvented newspapers — reinvented TV, reinvented radio — but sometimes you have to just replay the classics.
