The TLDR: April 3, 2023

The TLDR powered by Barstool Sports highlights some of the biggest stories and trends Barstool execs and insiders (including Erika Ayers Badan ) are keeping an eye on in the world of sports, media & tech. The newsletter is carefully curated by Tyler Morin and drops every Monday morning.

Today's TLDR reflects the week beginning March 27th.

SPORTS

• The YES Network introduces a regional streaming service at $24.99/month, featuring live coverage of the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, and New York Liberty games. Read >
• The NFL and RedBird Capital launch EverPass Media for commercial establishments to stream NFL games starting from the 2023-24 season. Read >
• WWE Raw witnesses a 9% surge in its average viewership to 1.83 million viewers on USA Network in the first quarter of 2023 (per Nielsen live-plus-same-day data). Read >
• Men in Blazers, the popular sports media company born from a viral soccer podcast, hires Fabrizio Romano, a prominent sportscaster, to host a new podcast for its network. Read >
• Among the top 20 Final Four athletes with the largest Instagram audiences, 16 are women, including Caitlin Clark from Iowa and Angel Reese from LSU, dominating March Madness' social media buzz. Read >

MEDIA

• A recent experiment by BuzzFeed involves the publication of AI-generated, SEO-optimized travel articles by non-editorial staff. Read >
• Substack has raised over $5 million by offering investment opportunities to its newsletter writers and others. The funds are an extension of the $65 million Series B round from March 2021. Read >
• Rather than focusing on consolidation as a countermeasure to Google and Meta, digital media companies such as Vox, BuzzFeed, and Vice are shifting their attention to differentiation. Read >

TECH/SOCIAL MEDIA

• The New York Times (NYT), Los Angeles Times (LAT), and Washington Post (WaPo) declined to purchase Twitter Blue, while BuzzFeed, Politico, Semafor, and some other small outlets chose to reimburse their reporters for it. Read >
• In the past two months, the top 10 advertisers on Twitter only spent $7.6 million on ads, a decrease of 89% from the $71 million spent from September to October 2022. Read >
• Google launches an Ads Transparency Center, which displays all ads from verified advertisers on its platforms, including the formats, regions, and dates they ran. Read >
• Lemon8, ByteDance's Instagram rival launched in March 2020, has entered the top 10 of the US App Store, despite never ranking in the top 200 overall charts before. Read >
• Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and over 1,000 others have signed an open letter calling for AI labs to halt the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. Read >
• ChatGPT has evolved into an aggregator with the help of plugins, indicating a significant shift in its ambition and positioning OpenAI as a potential major consumer tech platform. Read >
• YouTube has added Shorts data to its Total Reach metric for artists, revealing that fan-created Shorts increased the average artist's unique viewers by over 80% in January 2023. Read >

Love the TLDR? Make sure to share it with friends, family & colleagues.