Weekly Roundup – July 22nd, 2025
Roundup Links
Who Is Watching All These Podcasts?
"The following are the runtimes of some recent episodes of several of YouTube’s more popular podcasts:
“This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,” #595: Two hours, 14 minutes.
“Club Shay Shay,” #172: Two hours, 59 minutes.
“The Shawn Ryan Show,” #215: Five hours, four minutes.
“Lex Fridman Podcast,” #461: Five hours, 20 minutes.
These shows follow the same general format: people sitting in chairs, in generically designed studios, talking.
And, like many of the biggest podcasts these days, these shows are all released as videos.
They don’t feature particularly fancy camerawork, or flashy graphics, or narratives. All of them require time commitments typical of feature films, ball games or marathon performance art installations. Yet going by YouTube’s statistics, hundreds of thousands of people have viewed all of the above episodes."
Our Take: I will guarantee that the vast majority of viewers of video podcasts on platforms like YouTube are watching only a fraction of a given podcast. And if they get through a podcast, it is in stages punctuated by distractions like work, the dog, the kid, and the husband/wife needing you to take out the trash. Almost no one is sitting down and exclusively watching a 3 hour video podcast of Club Shay Shay. Video podcast consumption, like every other type of modern media (Shorts/Reels, scrolling through x, watching 15 minutes of Moana then another 15 of Bluey, sports betting, etc.) is fundamentally fragmented.
The pieces are lining up for a 'free-ish' revolution in sports media rights
"...We expect to see a free/freemium model develop for a significant number of sports over the next decade
For some former RSN rights, it’s already here. This spring, JioHotstar offered the first hour of Indian Premier League matches free and then required a subscription to watch the rest. That’s “freemium.” Another recent example was DAZN’s free streaming of the FIFA Club World Cup (CazéTV will stream all 2026 World Cup matches free in Brazil). Fox offered free streaming of the first 5 minutes of its soccer and college football games last year. The NFL’s Chiefs-Chargers season opener on Sept. 5 in Brazil will be available for free globally on YouTube, which claimed 12.5% of all U.S. viewing in May’s Nielsen Gauge, when streaming finally overtook linear TV. The next night, Netflix will stream the Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford fight globally. Considering its 300 million-plus worldwide subscribers, that’s “free-ish.”"
Our Take: It will become more economically viable to have an increasing number of free streaming sports properties as the information collected on the viewer becomes more sophisticated and actionable for advertisers. The Club World Cup being offered for free on DAZN was essentially a giant data collection exercise with novel ad insertion. Soccer has long been a refuge from ads as you have two continuous 45+ minute halves. At the club world cup, DAZN experimented with shrinking the pane showing the actual game to batter you with clunky adverts for DraftKings and upcoming fights between YouTube influencers and washed-up pro boxers. To a soccer purist, it was a garish display. To advertisers and investment firms, it was catnip.
Generative AI is Turning Publishing Into a Swamp of Slop
"...Over the past couple of years, as tools like ChatGPT have become more accessible, there have been a number of scandals involving so-called authors being caught using them to churn out title after title for a quick buck. Last month, readers caught out authors K.C. Crowne and Lena McDonald for leaving ChatGPT prompts in their unedited books. “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements,” reads a note in chapter three of McDonald’s Darkhollow Academy: Year 2. (J Bree is also an author of romance and fantasy novels.) McDonald explained her mess on her Amazon book page, claiming that she used AI “to help edit and shape parts of the book” because she couldn’t afford a professional editor. This doesn’t explain the prompt asking ChatGPT to copy another writer’s style.
More and more authors are finding their work being pilfered or weirdly duplicated by AI on platforms like Amazon. Writer Marie Arana told NPR that, after she published her book Latinoland, a 500+ page nonfiction piece she spent many years researching, a ton of titles popped up the very next day that were clearly related to her work. “Right below the cover of my book was another cover, and the cover said ‘America’s Largest And Least Understood Minority.’ And then it said ‘A Summary Of Latinoland’.” Joseph Cox had a similar experience, writing for 404 Media about an AI slop summary of his own book, sold on Amazon for $4.99, which “condensed each of my chapters into a few-page overview.” How could someone offer summaries and copycat titles of a book within 24 hours of it hitting the market? There’s only one answer to that."
Our Take: Retailers like Amazon are unlikely to meaningfully combat AI slop clogging up their online marketplace because at the end of the day it means more opportunities for transactions to be made on their platform. Eradicating AI slop would be cutting off a growing source of revenue. One also suspects that they are hedging their bets on AI fully dominating the publishing field so taking action now might create a precedent they would likely violate in the near future.
Instagram Tests Like Counts For Individual Frames in a Carousel
"Instagram’s testing a new addition to its post analytics which would show how many likes each specific frame within a carousel post has garnered (sort of), which could give you more insight into what your audience is most interest in.
As reported by Lindsey Gamble, Instagram’s new carousel frame data allocates like counts based on whatever frame was on screen when the like was applied, which is then attributed to a like count for each image."
Our Take: Yikes, we are really getting into the nitty gritty here. We're dataheads, but sometimes we wonder if there is too much noise.
Substack explores advertising strategy with $100 million funding boost
"Substack announced July 17, 2025, that it has raised $100 million in Series C funding while simultaneously indicating a strategic pivot toward advertising integration. The investment round, led by BOND and The Chernin Group with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Rich Paul of Klutch Sports Group, and Jens Grede of SKIMS, values the platform at $1.1 billion.
According to the company's announcement, BOND's Mood Rowghani will join Substack's board as part of the agreement. The nearly 70 percent valuation increase from its 2021 figure of $650 million reflects investor confidence in the platform's advertising potential."
Our Take: Substack, like most platforms that start with a user-first, ad-free ethos, now must make money. How will Substack make money? By introducing ads. This is the dilemma with most media startups nowadays: how to sustain growth without alienating your core users.
