Author of Principles for Newsletters, A Lesser Photographer, and The Van Halen Encyclopedia: https://nitter.cf/t.co/vfbJpOKV59
Chicago
Joined April 2008
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I spent 2 years condensing 37 years worth of newsletter publishing lessons I've learned into a book that's less than 100 pages for $5. Because...I felt like it...and why not?! Take advantage of my insanity here: cjchilvers.com/blog/principl…
CJ Chilvers retweeted
Industry Dive sold for just north of $500M a few years back, something like 6x what Morning Brew went for and about half of Politico. A bundle of boring trade publications outsold the media brands everyone actually talks about. Being essential to a small industry beats being famous to a big one, and B2B still underrates that trade.
CJ Chilvers retweeted
Just bought georgemack.com
If you only write on social media, you end up with social media thoughts. So I'm going to write more essays, so I end up with more essay thoughts.
In the era of infinite slop, quality > quantity.
Back in 2023, B2B PMs were screaming for more “AI use case” content. They said it was the most effective sales tool they had. We’re creeping up on 2027 and I don’t think much has changed.
Share your best AI workflow and get featured in my
newsletter!
We're all sick of overhyped AI demos and workflows. Stuff that looks/sounds amazing but doesn't actually work. This project we're calling "Hype(less)" aims to collect and share the most real, impactful, and repeatable AI workflows that have created real value for you and your teams.
You have until Friday, Oct 30th to submit your entry: tally.so/r/dWL6Xd
A factor in the AI bubble I don't hear much about: The extreme demand to stockpile GPUs/memory will not just increase prices, it will decrease quality. There's no check on this when your supply comes from 1 or 2 places. I see at least 2 more bubbles within this imbalance.
Massive mistake, if true. 1. Every customer service interaction determines your brand. Why hand off even a fraction of it (if you believe in your brand)? 2. This stinks of panic and every customer will sense it.
McDonald’s tests placing ads for other brands on its menu screens chicagobusiness.com/restaura…
CJ Chilvers retweeted
Newsletters
USA Today is not alone. Across the media industry, including highly engaged sports media brands, search traffic is down roughly 40% year over year, and for some, much more.
AI has accelerated the shift. Platforms can now repackage original reporting and analysis from media brands and creators, often with little more than buried attribution and virtually no monetization flowing back to the people who created it.
The path forward is increasingly clear: original insider content, differentiated talent, and strong communities. There will be some big winners in this new world — and a lot of losers. Anyone who built media companies during the Facebook era could see this coming. We’ve watched this movie before.
Media companies have no choice but to adjust their cost structures and concentrate resources on the people and products that actually move the needle. That’s not gloom and doom; it’s economics. If audience and revenue decline 40%, opportunities for journalists and creators will inevitably contract as well.
The same dynamic is playing out in the creator economy. More creators enter these platforms every year, with most fighting for pennies in real economic terms. A relatively small number break through and build audiences large enough to support a full-time career — and, in some cases, a staff. In sports, much of that ecosystem has been supported by sports betting and prediction companies. Like it or not, that is the reality.
This is the world we live in. Adapt or die. And if you have a good thing right now, you damn sure better appreciate it.
From the beginning, at On3 we’ve tried to build a moat against this obvious tide: direct audience, subscriptions, differentiated insider content and community. It hasn’t been easy, and it won’t get easier.
A formula still exists for media companies and their talent to survive and thrive. But both sides will have to be willing to pay the price required to execute it. Those that do will capture an increasingly disproportionate share of the opportunities.
Do you have the stomach for it?
OK, @Super70sSports, now I see that south side in you. This is a good one. @DavidLeeRoth @GregRenoff @VanHalenNews super70ssportsstore.com/prod…
Just pinning this for everyone who looks down on “resellers.” Turns out, you can make a few bucks from it.
BREAKING: The Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record-breaking price over $12 billion, according to @ramonashelburne.
Mark Walter purchased a controlling stake in the Lakers for $10 billion last year, but will now sell the team at a significant markup less than a year after NBA owners approved his initial purchase.
They killed the most lucrative handshake deal in the history of business because they got stingy and protective over content they never owned. I really hope AI Overviews were worth the short-term ROI, because no publisher will ever trust them again.
You gotta pump that ROI number up. Them's rookie numbers.
True, but misleading. Measuring actual opens is not possible and clicks is only reliable based on other factors, which I’m sure @neilpatel is aware of. REPLIES and BUYS remain the best measurements of engagement. This is why enterprise is focusing on “outcomes” now.
There are readers that I’m proud to have, but scared to talk about, because I’m worried I might lose them. @om was one of those readers. A shocking loss for us all today. om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/
It’s happening! The OGs are coming around one last time. youtube.com/shorts/tns4ow3S4…
This is rampant in enterprise. It’s less so in small business, in my experience, because the leadership is so much closer to the action.
Publishers: don’t hand off your reading experience to a third party who does this (in your name, btw).
Hey @Substack — as a writer and a reader on your platform, I have to say it's incredibly hard to cancel subscriptions. The tool to manage subs is very hard to find, and once you find it, you have to click through to each sub to cancel it. So bad. It's unethical. Fix this!
Yep. Google has broken the so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” that made search engines possible decades ago. ‘You can scrape our content, if you send us new readers.’ Now, they just scrape. Consequences incoming for both sides.
After several years of declining search traffic, Condé Nast CEO @rogerlynch has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero.
He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone.
And that if you run a media business that doesn't have an authoritative brand, a very strong niche, or a direct audience, you're going to be fighting hostile algo changes all the way down.
He describes a recent board meeting:
"We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago. And what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the ten blue links."
"Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get sponsored stuff."
"Each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, and we'd put forecasts in of search traffic declining. Because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative."
"Every year, our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, 'Assume there's no search.' You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero, we expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic."
I’ve been telling people for years: owning your list is the feature that really matters. Substack is free for a reason.
Dear @Substack I am deeply disappointed in you. You are not allowing me to add my email list these are my clients and for the last 3 days we has been trying to add them into our email list and you have been constantly denied without any notice. That's enough I'm leaving forever.