Stenberg on Streaming: Last week I joined the State of Streaming podcast to discuss my recent coverage of Meta, its $17 billion legal settlement, and the forthcoming changes coming to teenagers’ social media experience. As I mentioned during the conversation, courtroom verdicts rarely seem to spur changes in advertising strategies, and most of the media buyers I spoke with had no immediate plans to pull back their spend on Meta. The more interesting conversation concerns how Snap, TikTok, and YouTube respond to the nifty bit of legal jiu jitsu that Meta pulled off, the company made around $5 billion of its settlement payment contingent on its competitors implementing the same restrictions it now has to follow.
Serenity at MS Now: MS Now launched its membership program on Wednesday, a $7.99 monthly payment that aims to convert its most ardent fans into paying supporters and includes a partnership with the meditation service Calm. The gambit is part of a broader campaign afoot at Versant, the owner of MS Now and several other brands following their spin-out from NBCU in January. Executives at Versant are trying to reposition MS Now and its sister properties, which include CNBC, USA Network, and the Golf Channel, as standalone brands with audiences across multiple touchpoints rather than cable channels scrambling for their second act. The strategy has its merits: treating the assets as brands whose television audiences serve as organic marketing makes them far more compelling, and it opens up new commercial opportunities. The drawback is that a diversified bundle of cable channels is a strength, whereas a motley group of unrelated brands is a management nightmare. I expect pruning and reorganization are on the horizon.
Raptive Round Up: The media network Raptive, which helps monetize thousands of independent websites by collating their inventory, has long been a useful proxy to gauge the health of the open internet. It is telling, then, that its latest move is to launch Raptive Communities, a platform that encourages website visitors to log in and engage with one another on their favorite websites or by downloading the Raptive Community app. The launch is part of a broader trend of content creators looking to make their user experiences stickier by offering exclusive functionality or content to encourage deeper engagement. The new offering, while tactically intelligent for the websites involved, reflects the broader tragedy of the commons engulfing the open web. Every website now needs to behave as a brand, capturing your first-party data and moving you from a casual visitor into a direct relationship. This will benefit individual sites but deprecate the open web as a whole, creating a user experience that consists of hopping between walled-gardens.
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Sam Lessin is a founding partner at the venture capital firm Slow Ventures, and an early investor in companies including Venmo, Airtable, Birchbox, and Solana. He previously was a vice president of product at Facebook and is married to Jessica Lessin, the founder of the technology news publisher The Information.
Under Lessin, Slow Ventures has become one of the more prominent sources of venture investment in the creator economy. The firm has a specific investment thesis for creators, in which it provides early-stage capital to qualified creators in exchange for an equity stake in a holding company that houses the products that the creators launch.
This interview has been edited.
