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We talk to the co-founder and CEO of the buzzy creator platform on which we toil, Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk, about his company’s new, ultimate set of tools … and why big-name Substack creators are increasingly switching sides …

Between widespread layoffs in legacy media (see our piece below about Disney’s latest cuts below) and the creator economy’s rapid ascendancy, it’s a good time to provide small shops of independent proles/media talent with, as Marx used to call it, the means of production (and distribution, and monetization).

Thus, look at the explosive growth in newsletters and newsletter-adjacent media over the past decade. Pulling from various sources suggests the number of newsletters has grown from less than a quarter-million the past 10 years to 3.4 million. Halfway through that period, Beehiiv launched out of the pandemic and now handles about 140,000 newsletters, including this one, as well as slightly bigger journalism initiatives from Time, TechCrunch and Sinclair.

The company is growing quickly despite competition from more established email and newsletter platforms, such as the venerable MailChimp and Substack, which use different business models to monetize themselves and their writers.

“We’re the antithesis of that,” Co-Founder and CEO Taylor Denk told the operators of one of his platform’s 75,000 newsletters, Next TMT, in our accompanying podcast. “Philosophically, I think we are very different. We don’t have a take rate or a fee. I think it’s a better business.”

In what it has termed its “most significant expansion to date,” Beehiiv just launched a flurry of new or expanded functions, including programmatic ad placement, just like all the big boys in video and beyond. Other additions include an AI “copilot” chatbot that ties its tools into the broader Claude/ChatGPT worlds, a new Community function for ongoing fan relationships sans the usual brutal social-media algorithms, and a WYSIWYG editor to better represent what a final draft of a newsletter will look like.

“The most successful content creators are multichannel now,” Denk said, which means they typically must wrestle with multiple apps for different aspects of their businesses. “I think most publishers don’t want to deal with that.”

Charging a flat fee versus the Substack way of taking 10% of all subscription revenue, Beehiiv has seized market share recently from its larger rival. Beehiiv said that one in seven new subscribers on its platform are Substack refugees.

Rick Ellis, the voice behind long-time video-focused newsletter AllYourScreens, said he left Substack after entertainment trade The Ankler, which frequently linked to AllYourScreens, departed to its own custom-built stack of publishing technology. Like most smaller operations, Ellis said he didn’t need all the challenges and investment of a bespoke system, so started casting around for better options.

“The transition wasn't pleasant,” Ellis said, despite a lot of help from Beehiiv. Particularly hard: Apple didn’t let his newsletter subscribers who had paid through its App Store easily transfer their account to Beehiiv without directly contacting Apple. Few did that, causing “a substantial financial hit. But that is an Apple thing, not something Beehiiv can control.”

Ellis said he’s been pleased with the integrated ad offerings, “which have provided some unexpected revenue.” That should be further boosted by Beehiiv’s new programmatic component, bringing even more automated ad sales on top of existing direct sales.

Ellis predicted newsletters in the future will see a divergence between bigger sites with their own complicated and unique systems, such as The Ankler, and “the middle class” of others who don’t have the reach, ambition or resources for that kind of pricey investment. As someone who helped Deadline transition (badly and painfully) to a new publishing system built on WordPress a decade ago, I can speak to the challenges.

The new Beehiiv approach “makes a lot of sense for people who are looking for a more robust product without having to build it themselves,” Ellis said.

— David Bloom

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While it paused closure of its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until after an Oakland, Calif. federal judge rules on August 3 as to whether to place a damning preliminary injunction on the deal, Paramount Global on Wednesday saw another major hurdle move out of its way.

European Union regulators signed off on the deal, pending Paramount’s divestment over the next 13 months of its European film-distribution joint-venture with Universal, United International Pictures. Paramount also agreed not to enter into any other film distribution agreement in Europe with Universal over the next 10 years.

Based on these comments, the EU agreement also limits Paramount’s collaboration with Disney:

“These commitments fully address the competition concerns identified by the Commission by enduring that the films of the merged entity will not be distributed jointly with those of Universal and Disney,” the EU said in its announcement.

The EU is known to have some of the world’s strictest antitrust guidelines, designed to protect against price-fixing, illegal cartels and various market-sharing schemes across nations. Will clearing this hurdle help Paramount in Oakland?

Speaking to The Ankler Tuesday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, leader of the legal resistance in California, appeared confident … and uninterested in capitulation via “structural remedies.”

The decision certainly focuses all attention on separate lawsuits filed by 12 states attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America, which will soon be consolidated if Paramount lawyers get their way.

Explaining her decision to grant a temporary restraining order to the AGs last week, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin cited potential harm to the theatrical exhibition market should two major players be consolidated.

This was a surprise to some analysts, who expected the judge to be more concerned about the impact to the linear pay TV market from having two major channel suppliers fold into one. Certainly, it would make divestment of WBD’s CNN make sense. That’s an outcome many folks, including Bari Weiss-deranged Next TMT, are hoping for.

But with the EU ruling, that might not be in the cards.

Paramount gained tough EU passage through concessions on made on theatrical distribution; who’s to say they can’t do the same with Judge Martinez-Olguin?

For their part, Paramount’s lawyers seem to see correlations, too.

“The conclusions reached by the European Commission directly refute key assumptions that underpin the state AG’s complaint seeking to block the transaction,” Paramount said in a press release responding to the EU decision.

For Paramount, dipping to a lower, more acceptable level of theatrical market control — established as being at under 30% — could mean divesting a film asset such as Warner’s New Line Cinema unit.

— Daniel Frankel

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The Five Spot
Some other things you oughta know…

Another round of layoffs descended across Disney this week, especially at Pixar, National Geographic and ESPN, where several notable on-air commentators were excised, one as he was trying to finish his own show.

That would be former NFL player Ryan Clark, who was part-way through Monday’s NFL Live broadcast when social-media reports of his imminent layoff led him to ask, “Should I be done now?” When the answer was yes, Clark departed, after more than a decade at the network.

Other notables jettisoned this round include former NFL MVP and fashion plate Cam Newton, known more for his arresting personal style than his useful observations, former player Bart Scott, Tom Pelissero, and 33-year vet Karl Ravech, an institution known particularly for his baseball work.

Front Office Sports has a more complete list of the befallen on-air talent, including links to their respective sign-offs on X.

Front Office Sports also had a copy of the memo that ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro sent to staff, explaining the layoffs.

Most of the cuts, however, were part of broader reductions of behind-the-scenes workers, related to ESPN’s deal, announced nearly a year ago, to take over distribution rights for the NFL Network. That’s no consolation for the workers, of course.

Also dismaying, cuts at animation powerhouse Pixar, whose films have mostly missed the mark the past couple of years. Hoppers grossed $389 million last winter, not bad these days for a Pixar original and more than double last year’s Elio. But compare that to this summer’s fifth(!)Toy Story, which has pulled in $962 million since June 17.

All the cuts are part of 3,600 planned reductions over 12 months as Disney becomes slightly less an entertainment company and slightly more a parks, resorts and cruise line operator.

— D.B.

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With the price of RAM increasing by as much as 400% in some global markets amid rabid demand from data centers and other AI-enabling infrastructure, Apple has strategically raised its prices on gear including tablets and MacBook Pros, seeking to pass the pain onto its more price-elastic customer segments.

Initially overlooked was what Apple just did with its Apple TV 4K, a streaming peripheral last upgraded (to version 3) back in November 2022. The MSRP just went from $139 - $199 for the 64 gigabyte version, and from $169 - $299 for the 128GB iteration.

Supporting all major HDR formats, along with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, the Apple TV 4K is still considered the Rolls Royce of streaming gadgets, preferred by discerning Gen-X graybeards — Next TMT included! — but no longer appearing to be a fit with Apple’s business strategy.

Apple TV sales appear to have peaked in 2013, when 10 million units moved globally, generating $1 billion in revenue.

Despite its strong qualitative reputation, Apple’s tvOS is now a niche player amid far more proliferate gateway OS rivals including Roku. And Apple has no smart TV product line or OEM deals with smart TV makers — these are table stakes now in the TVOS business, as peripherals slowly fall out of favor with consumers.

Apple’s TV platform business now exists in the hands of the company’s thriving $123 billion-a-year Services portfolio, with the Apple TV app controlling not only access to the Apple TV premium subscription service, but the company’s third-party “channels” aggregation market, as well.

Many consumers will be fine accessing that app with a $30 Roku Express versus a $400 deluxe streaming gadget.

— D.F.

Letterboxd, which bills itself as the social network for film lovers, has built an ardent fan base of 26 million enthusiasts, who show off and share their favorite films with diaries, lists, reviews, ratings and more.

Now the site is getting an onslaught of interest from another sort of fan base: potential buyers.

After majority owner Tiny commissioned boutique investment bank LionTree in April to explore a possible sale, potential buyers have multiplied like mosquitoes in a bayou. The latest additions with reported interest: indie distributor A24 and Comcast.

They join Comcast’s former corporate siblings at Versant, Netflix and former sparring partner Paramount Skydance, plus private equity giants TPG and RedBird Capital Partners, plus Reddit co-founder (and Mr. Serena Williams) Alexis Ohanian. Other, less public suitors may also be hovering.

The appeal: access to a hard-core fan base dedicated to movies. If Versant could turn movie-ticket and PVOD seller Fandango into a FAST network, and it did, adding Letterboxd’s fan base seems like a no-brainer extension for the spunky spinoff or any of the other media companies.

The question will be how well the young-skewing Letterboxd community might take any new corporate owner of their beloved indie-minded site, particularly if new owners planned to exploit that fan base for recommendations, marketing and e-commerce. Perhaps only Ohanian, with goodwill stocked from his long chairmanship of that ultimate fan repository Reddit, might avoid that blowback.

— D.B.

The trajectory of internet usage only goes up, as broadband analytics and solutions provider OpenVault has revealed in each of its quarterly U.S. market reports dating back more than seven years..

But the company’s Q2 report does indicate that the business fundamentals have shifted.

Driven by what OpenVault describes as “cloud sync, always-on connected devices and a new layer of AI-assisted workflows,” upstream usage is now the fastest growing segment of broadband consumption.

“This growth will increase as operators prioritize upstream headroom to accommodate increasing traffic,” OpenVault also said in its report. “Return path capacity, long treated as secondary, must be freed from performance constraints.” 

Hear, hear!

— D.F.

Not only did media journalist Rick Ellis serve as a great source for our lead story today, he tipped us off to this really disturbing post from Stephen Follows, publisher of Decoding the World Through Data.

The Numbers is a nearly 30-year old internet database, chock full of accumulated information about 78,000 movies and 236,000 film-business performers and workers, humbly launched back in 1997 by former IBM software developer Bruce Nash as a Geocities site.

According to Follows, who interviewed Nash, the site, viewed as a “definitive authority” for the movie biz, managed to technologically get by, serving around 8 million visits a year from journalists, academics, filmmakers … and search crawlers … that is, until March 5.

Starting in late 2024, Nash and his team struggled to keep The Numbers’ aging servers from buckling under the query load of a new hungry client based — AI crawlers on LLM training missions.

And according to Nash, the AI crawlers were “less well-behaved” versus the search bots, which increased the amount of daily work the small Numbers crew had to perform to keep the site running.

Then, last December, feces met fan, with AI agents emerging to aggressively scrape the pages of data-rich websites, repeatedly, on what Follows describes as “an industrial scale.”

Some of these agents were sent by LLMs based on user prompts. Others were created using LLMs by users themselves … and some of those arrived with malicious intent, exploiting any back door they could find for the purpose of accessing data not yet publicly available.

Blame the greed surrounding prediction markets, combined with the ability to make vibe-coding hackers of us all, for fomenting the most damaging of this virulent latter subset, intent on getting any edge it can.

On March 5, the site came crashing down, re-emerging a week later as a shell of itself, Nash and team slowly rebuilding it on newer, more defensibly capable technology ever since.

Nash packages his data and monetizes it in other ways, so happily, his business didn’t succumb. But Follows points to other mis-use cases, including open-source software hub Read the Docs — which observed a single agent download 73 terabytes of zipped HTMl files, running the site’s monthly ISP bill to $5,000.

Follows tallied the potential catastrophic loss with this: “The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.”

As the Cohen Bros.’ singing cowboy, Buster Scruggs, might say, there’s just gotta be a place where men ain’t low-down, and poker’s played fair…

— D.F.