Google Update, YouTube's Power Play, Community Sales?

Welcome to this week's issue of the Niche Media Publishing Newsletter.

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Let’s get started with this week’s topics.

Google Throws a Bone

The big news this week is Google’s long awaited core update to help smaller publishers recover some search traffic.

I’ve been watching some litmus tests like Retro Dodo and HouseFresh. So far, both appear to be benefiting.

Across our portfolios, I’m seeing some similar upticks for a handful of sites. It’s still not “full recovery” territory by any stretch of the imagination, but nice to see the bleeding halted and some incremental lift.

While Google may be in damage control mode with publishers, I’m not betting anything on a “Google Search” recovery. Google isn’t our friend!

Our North Star remains building resilient brands with email lists and community at their core.

YouTube Formalizes Affiliate

Intriguing news from YouTube with their recent announcement of a partnership with Shopify to make it easier for publishers and creators to drop product mentions and get compensated for it.

Doing a bit of digging, I found YouTube’s officially partnered brands under their affiliate earnings program.

This alliance with Shopify is notable in light of the big affiliate elephant in the room that is NOT included: Amazon.

Perhaps we can view this as a proxy battle for video creators between Amazon and Google. Amazon’s influencer program has seen a ton of traction recently. They similarly removed the friction of link-building & management by incentivizing video creators on-platform.

While this is likely a short term lucrative opportunity for creators, I’m wary of “Big Tech” eating more of the affiliate pie and locking indie media out of the monetization stack.

Need Traffic? Want to Build Community?

I’m “all in” on Reddit right now as the fastest way to acquire users and build community.

As such, my course is a fluid, evolving project. I’m adding new modules weekly!

Are Communities the Next Digital Asset Class?

I’ve started to see this topic come up in a few arenas I circle in. It’s a good question.

I do think this asset class will develop, particularly if the AI arms race continues without attribution for content creators.

Reddit is clearly the largest de facto community tech infrastructure, so I’m most interested in what they do, first.

There are a few solid community tech stacks out there with Circle, Heartbeat, and now Skool, but I’m not convinced we are quite “there” yet with these tech platforms.

There’s still work to do in evangelizing and modernizing the community tech stacks:

Just like with newsletters, I also see “key person” risk with many community-run businesses.

Most are still tied to a personal brand and replacing this operator is not an easy task (practically and financially).

So, before I’m comfortable calling “community” an asset class, I’d need to see:

• Sustained tech platform growth and tech innovation (could be Reddit paywalls, for example).

• Scaled community operations, run at a profit (e.g. not just a media personality with a Slack or Skool community working “in the business”).

• Established KPI norms for valuing communities (churn, net promotor?)

The best example of this is the Hustle & Trends community (also for email lists), but I haven’t seen this replicated too often yet.

Other Things I Read Recently

These are some articles I enjoyed, but don’t really have anything to add to!

Other Newsletters Worth Following

Here are some other publications I subscribe to, author, or co-sign.

If you are operating a newsletter (or even just interested), this next one is one of my “must opens” every week as a newsletter operator myself:

For some of the best breakdowns of creator success stories:

If you want to go deeper with Reddit (one of my favorite creator ecosysystems right now), check out my sister publication:

And don’t miss Amy’s excellent insights into wants happening in the world of content marketers.

Interested in Booking an Ad?

I’ve put together a resource sheet over at Passionfruit here.

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OK, that's it for this week...

Please do reply to this email with any feedback or suggestions.

Ewen