Sponsorship rates by audience size: what creators should charge at each tier
Audience size sets the floor of a brand deal. Niche, engagement and format decide where above the floor you land.
Michael Hayes · September 18, 2026Print inventory management: when to shift budget to digital and what backlist stock really costs
The warehouse, the returns reserve, and the capital tied up in unsold copies all shape when a print run stops making sense.
Gabriela Montoya · September 16, 2026
Why search algorithm updates keep reshaping publisher traffic
Core updates now hit whole sites, not single pages — and Google tells publishers almost nothing about why.
Michael Hayes · September 13, 2026
What Meta's Canada news ban actually did to publisher traffic
Two years after links disappeared from Canadian feeds, the measurable result is a durable drop in social referrals — and a search-shaped hole most coverage never priced.
Amara Okonkwo · August 28, 2026
What a free newsletter subscriber is actually worth
Gabriela Montoya · August 26, 2026
What five years of product bundling did to The New York Times' subscriber math
Bundling news with Games, Cooking, Audio and The Athletic pushed The New York Times past 12.5 million digital subscribers — but the company's own numbers show the easy gains are already behind it.
Gabriela Montoya · August 21, 2026Substack takes 10% of newsletter subscriptions; beehiiv and Ghost take none
Gabriela Montoya · August 19, 2026Publisher–AI licensing deals explained: what the News Corp–OpenAI agreement established
The May 2024 deal — reported at over $250 million over five years — created the template every publisher–AI negotiation since has worked from; here is what is actually in these agreements.
Gabriela Montoya · July 23, 2026
The 1,000 true fans math, redone with 2026 numbers
Kevin Kelly's 2008 essay promised a living at 1,000 paying fans; eighteen years of platform fees, taxes and churn later, the honest arithmetic needs more fans or more dollars each.
Michael Hayes · February 9, 2026Digital
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Service providers now field over a million DMCA notices a day
The six elements a takedown notice needs, why a platform needs a registered copyright agent, and what actually happens once a subscriber counter-notices.
Amara Okonkwo · August 15, 2026
The 2024 Gmail and Yahoo sender rules, two years on: what publishers changed and what still bites
One-time authentication, spam-rate ceilings and easy unsubscribe became mandatory for bulk senders in February 2024 — the publishers who treated them as strategy, not compliance, came out ahead.
Amara Okonkwo · July 27, 2026
First-party data for publishers: what to collect, what it's worth, and what not to do
As third-party cookies finally fade and AI search eats anonymous traffic, logged-in reader data became the advertising and product asset publishers actually own.
Michael Hayes · July 5, 2026
Does your publication actually need an app? The honest decision framework
Most publishers do not need a native app; a small set with specific audience behaviors does — and the difference is a checklist, not a budget.
Amara Okonkwo · June 12, 2026Creators
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What Patreon, Substack, Ghost, and YouTube actually take from creator revenue
Four platforms publish four different fee structures. Here's what each one's own documentation says creators keep, before payment processing takes its own cut.
Michael Hayes · August 12, 2026
Sustainable cadence: how creators publish for years without burning out
The creator economy runs on consistency, and burns out its most consistent people — the operators who last treat output like a budget, not a sprint.
Michael Hayes · August 10, 2026The first hires a solo creator should make — in order
The correct first hire buys back the founder's hours at the highest revenue per hour — and the sequence that works is shorter than most creators think.
Michael Hayes · July 18, 2026How creators should price brand deals: a working framework
Brand deals pay multiples of platform payouts, and pricing them by follower count is the industry's most expensive habit — rate cards should start from value delivered, not audience size.
Michael Hayes · June 25, 2026Media News
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Why Substack keeps 10% of subscriber revenue and two rivals keep 0%
Amara Okonkwo · August 17, 2026
YouTube raises new-channel monetization to 8,000 watch hours
Amara Okonkwo · August 16, 2026Why media consolidation accelerated in 2025 — and what the deal logic actually was
Scale for AI negotiations, streaming mergers for survival, and local groups merging back offices: three different consolidation logics ran through one year of deals.
Amara Okonkwo · August 1, 2026The podcast ad market in numbers: growth, video's rise and what creators actually earn
US podcast ad revenue grew past the $2 billion mark and kept climbing, per IAB's annual reports — but the market's shape changed more than its size.
Colin Reyes · July 9, 2026Business News
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How The New York Times bundled its way past 11 million digital subscribers
Michael Hayes · August 24, 2026
The New York Times raised prices for loyal subscribers, and ARPU followed
Michael Hayes · August 21, 2026How Google Discover picks stories, and why publishers can't game it directly
Discover runs on the same ranking signals as Search, not a separate optimization channel — which is why the traffic it sends is real, personalized, and mostly outside a publisher's control.
Michael Hayes · August 10, 2026Structuring a small newsroom's product team: what to build, buy and skip
A newsroom under fifty people does not need a Silicon Valley product org — it needs one embedded owner, two or three priorities and ruthless restraint on tooling.
Michael Hayes · August 5, 2026