Audio Insurgent went after podcasting’s pivot to video with consumption numbers rather than vibes. Ninety percent of podcast consumption is still audio. Video’s growth is real but it isn’t evidence that the medium is switching. If you’re an indie show…
→ Nick Gray Counted His Website Traffic. Humans Were 1 in 215.
Nick Gray runs PatronView, a database of nonprofit donor lists, and spent the past year logging exactly what’s hitting his servers. The count: 2.5 million requests in one week, 1.28 million pages served, and just under 6,000 of those views…
→ Hollywood’s AI Actress Stumbled Through Her First Live Interview
Ted Gioia — who’s spent much of this year tracking Hollywood’s push to replace actors with AI on his Substack — flagged this one over the weekend. Tilly Norwood, pitched to studios as the industry’s first AI-generated movie star, sat…
→ It took $3.75 and no ID check to hijack a real band’s Spotify page
Folks who know me understand I listen to a lot of Squeeze. A few years ago, I noticed a surprise new track in my Apple Music library, but I knew right away it wasn’t by a band that’s been around…
→ Marc Elias built his own publishing stack so nobody could switch him off
“We did not do this through corporate investors — it has none. We did not do this by relying on big aspiring tech companies like Substack, which platforms hate groups and may well become just another tech giant feeding you…
→ The creators topping this new ranking aren’t the biggest ones
Evan Shapiro used to run Seeso, an early comedy streaming platform that was a little too ahead of its time. Today, he edits Media War & Peace, a newsletter about the fight for attention, and this issue introduces the Affinity…
→ Before you publish, know your defamation risk
The Authors Guild is running a free webinar this Wednesday on defamation in fiction and nonfiction, walking through what happens when a book — invented or not — cuts too close to a real person. Traditional publishers have lawyers who…
→ Steven Pressfield’s first agent told him 427 minus one equals zero
Steven Pressfield tells the story of the first agent he ever had, and the arithmetic she gave him about unfinished work. If the finished book is 427 and you’ve written 426, you don’t have 426/427ths of a book. You have…
→ Every freelancer marketing strategy, ranked and sortable by where you actually are
Double Your Freelancing built a sortable ranking of every freelancer marketing strategy, organised by where you actually are right now. There’s no best strategy, only what’s best for you given your goals and experience — which sounds like a hedge…
→ The barter agreement behind eighteen years of A Working Library
Mandy Brown has been publishing A Working Library for eighteen years. Saturday’s issue is a memorial for Nevan Scott, a teacher and developer who died this year, and who had been quietly keeping the site running since he wrote in…
→ James Clear on the business behind Atomic Habits
Nathan Barry got James Clear on stage at Craft + Commerce, years after the last time Clear spoke there — back when Atomic Habits hadn’t come out yet. Thirty million copies later, the conversation is about the four-million-subscriber email list…
→ Publishers took the AI settlement money and didn’t pass it down
Ben Werdmuller spends most Fridays rounding up links that caught his eye at the intersection of technology, media and society. This week, the top slot went to the newsroom lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, and to who actually ends up…