Everything you wanted to know about the publishing business from that time Random House tried to buy Simon & Schuster and the DOJ sued making “the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers …”.
“I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).“
These 16 companies dominate Google search results. Odds are you haven’t heard of any of them.
“Across 10,000 terms where affiliates are ranking, which cover products in every niche you can think of (home, beauty, tech, automotive, cooking, travel, sports, education and many more), these 16 companies ranked on the first page of 8,574 (or 85%) of them.“
“At the end of 2015, a scant seven and one-half years ago, the margin between linear listening and on-demand listening was 38 percentage points. But drop by drop, quarter by quarter and year by year, the margin was erased, and now on-demand leads.“
“linear” audio refers to – radio over the air, radio streams, Pandora’s free radio service, satellite radio, etc. and “on-demand” audio – paid streaming, podcasts, owned music, etc.
“As you can see, transaction prices for sports franchises have been marching upwards for the last two decades, with NBA and NFL teams registering the biggest increases, but have seen breakaway surges in the last few years.”
Disney is planning to charge $35 for its standalone ESPN service.
As a result, The Information now calculates that after all the prices rises for streaming a permutation of the main “channels” starts to cost $90 per month … the price of Comcast’s cable package.
Data for the UK suggests we have hit saturation point.
“The growth of SVoD household penetration slowed in 2022, and this continued into early 2023 as the rising cost of living, combined with SVoD service price rises, put greater strain on household budgets.“
Strikes me as a very important move by the US towards “open access” academic research.
By 2026 all US federal agency funded research must be free to read immediately on publication.
This has been talked about for a very long time.
In a recent transcript from Stream by AlphaSense (sign up for two free weeks here), a former Elsevier Director, argued the effect on RELX business will be a “small negative” as they will find ways to charge for ancillary parts of research (reviews, data etc). The hit to smaller publishers will be worse.
Interesting argument by an ex FT/FTAV journalist, who has recently started her own newsletter, on why she didn’t chose Substack.
One thing that stood out is legal cover. “As it stands, Substack can shift the biggest risk and cost in all journalism — libel risk — onto the shoulders of individual authors.”
This ties in with news they have dropped their Series C round (at a valuation of $750m – $1bn).
The reason is likely down to the fact they made only $9m of revenue last year, suggesting even their previous valuation of $650m is too high.
The other thing is moderation – as any platform grows moderation becomes an issue, something other publishers have been quick to point out.
Great contrarian podcast about the future of music streaming with Economist Will Page.
“Page believes the music industry is transitioning from a “herbivore market” to a “carnivore” one. In other words, future growth will not come from brand-new customers — it’ll come from the streaming services eating into each other’s market share. Not only has subscriber counts possibly tapped out in Page’s opinion, but streaming services have also put a ceiling on revenues by charging only $9.99, a price that hasn’t budged in 20 years despite giant leaps in technology and music catalog size.”
