Welcome!
This week on Media Finance Monitor
Nobody understands user needs like the person robbing you
Someone still has to pay the lawyers
We sold the first account for our new EU media funding tool
Newsletter masterclass (x)
31 active calls (6 new)
Media Finance Monitor is where newsroom leaders, funders, and media entrepreneurs come to understand how money moves through the information ecosystem. We decode funding, business models, policy, and platform shifts and turn them into strategies you can actually use.
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Nobody understands user needs like the person robbing you
(by Peter)
I am the dad/prehistoric fish thing in this picture.
I need to be at the airport three hours early and I need to establish eye contact with my gate two hours before departure. I get a lot of grief for this from my wife and pretty much everyone who has ever travelled with me. I am not afraid of flying but for some reason I am very afraid of being late. We all have our idiosyncrasies.
So on Monday morning I was at Budapest airport at 6:00 for an 8:30 flight to London, where I had been asked to steer a day of strategy discussions for the MVM group, which brings together the largest international media development organisations.
At the counter they asked whether I had a visa. What visa?!!?! Since earlier this year, it turns out, an EU passport gets you into Britain only with an Electronic Travel Authorisation, applied for online. “It’s usually quick,” the agent said, which is not a sentence a person like me hears as reassurance with a narrow 150 minute window before the flight.
I felt the anxiety coming on as I Googled “UK ETA VISA”. The site was straightforward, some basic details, passport number, etc. There were two options, a standard fee, around €25 with a 3 day turnaround, or a two-hour express service for €270. Ugh. But I had made commitments so I clicked pay.
My bank’s app normally takes a thumbprint and moves on. This time it stopped and asked: Are we sure about this transaction?
That was when I first looked at the website and the URL properly.
By any reasonable measure, I am an extremely, terminally online person. I also had governments try to hack my accounts before, so I tend to be cautious. I smell a phishing email a mile away, I scroll past sponsored results on principle. But none of it mattered, because whoever built that site had apparently thought harder about my Monday morning than I had. They knew there would be someone at check-in discovering a requirement they had never heard of, being told it “usually” is very quick, with a flight in two hours. They knew that person would google, not read, and click the first thing that promised speed.
A perfect scam for a perfect moment. It worked on someone who writes about information ecosystems for a living.
Lucky for me, my Hungarian bank found the transaction suspicious even while I was actively confirming it. I would quite like Google to have applied comparable curiosity before selling these people the ad.
Reuters’ reporting on Meta’s internal documents last year put scam and banned-goods advertising at roughly a tenth of that company’s revenue. The scammer can afford the cost of buying those clicks because the payoff is €270 per frightened traveller.
Last year we wrote about dark user needs, but this is something else: a legitimate, urgent, need for information and a service, served exploitatively. Strip out the fraud and what remains is a deep understanding of users and their needs most newsrooms don’t have. Someone mapped the exact moment a specific person needs a specific information/service, and made sure they were the first thing that person saw.
Reaching that moment gets harder as AI becomes ambient and questions move inside a conversation with your phone. And the economics already favour the person who stands to make €270 from scamming you over the newsroom hoping to maybe earn a little advertising revenue by explaining why you shouldn’t pay.
Anyway, you can apply for the actual ETA through an app. The passport’s biometric chip against the phone, a selfie, a declaration that you are not a terrorist, £20. Approval took five minutes, so I still had an hour and forty to look at my gate.
Someone still has to pay the lawyers
(by Peter)
This story is from early August, but I missed it then and think it is super interesting. SpyTalk’s Jeff Stein faced a $1 million defamation suit after reporting that incoming Pentagon official Keith Bass had been forced out of the CIA. His lawyers argued it was a SLAPP, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, otherwise known as trying to silence criticism/scrutiny through legal means. It’s quite popular all over the world, especially in certain European jurisdictions.
Substack has a “Defender” programme against suits like this, and they bankrolled Stein’s legal defense. The initial legal work alone cost tens of thousands of dollars and without help, he was worried about having to sell his house. They won, the case was dismissed.
In Capital Stacks of Journalism, which we’re launching on 29 September (yes, you will hear quite often about Capital Stacks in the coming weeks/months/decades), we mostly study institutions. Newer, leaner ones – the outlets in it are startups of the last fifteen years, not the entrenched incumbents of Europe – but institutions all the same: owners, editors, standards, lawyers.
I’m broadly excited about an information ecosystem where more individuals and small teams can reach audiences and make money. This is a very large generalisation about a very complicated shift (I know, you come here for this kind of nuanced analysis). Still, institutions provide things we should be reluctant to lose. Like for example, lawyers of all things.
There is a reason so many difficult investigations still come from recognisable newsrooms. You need time to pursue something that might go nowhere, colleagues with different skills, editorial scrutiny, and someone keeping the publication running while you disappear into documents. Doing this alone, with subscribers expecting something every week, is harder.
And if you do hard hitting accountability journalism sooner or later someone will sue you and you need to be able to absorb that risk too, potentially putting your house on the line, which is not the most appealing prospect to most people.
A publisher is a bundle of functions: audience access, editorial standards, a team, legal cover, etc.. Substack does the first partly, the middle two not at all, and has now done the fourth. It is an infrastructure company picking up a publishing function, and that matters, because it is how the trade-offs of a more fragmented information ecosystem get hedged. Lower the legal risk to individuals and small teams, and more of the dicey public-interest stories get done outside institutions.
We sold the first account for the new EU media funding tool ❤️🔥🤑🎆💰👾
(by Peter)
Last week we dedicated an entire edition to the EU Media Funding Explorer. A day after launch, we had our first purchase. I spend a lot of time telling publishers that willingness to pay is useful feedback, and I’m happy to report that receiving it is also quite pleasant.
Since then, I’ve had many conversations about the tool, received thoughtful suggestions, and heard from several other organisations that seem close to joining. We also got shoutouts in Wayfinder and Splice Frames newsletters and on LinkedIn. Thank you to everyone who shared it, tried it, asked questions or pointed someone our way, it makes a real difference.
One purchase is perhaps a little early to declare a market conquered, but the combination of interest, specific feedback and someone actually paying makes me think we might be onto something.
(I promise not to report every subsequent purchase here. I suspect that’s not what you’re here for, and I’m hoping it would become a serious problem for word count.)
Newsletter masterclass (x)
(by Peter)
Fatchilli is running a masterclass on newsletter strategy. Disclosure first: they sponsored our Enterprise Publisher Newsletter Report, which covers 859 newsletter products across 32 publishers in ten European countries, so I am not a neutral arbiter. But I was enthusiastic about them before they became a sponsor: I approached them about getting involved exactly because I rate their product: REMP is one of the best CRM tools available to mid-sized and larger publishers, and I used it myself for years. They also have David Tvrdon, who knows more about newsletters than almost anyone in European publishing. Worth a look.
Here are the 31 active calls (6 new), with the largest at the top: