Are you sick of the algorithms that serve you video on giant platforms like YouTube and TikTok?
Or are you a video-maker who’s sick of the algorithms that don’t serve your stuff to would-be watchers?
Andrew Morse would like to talk to you.
Morse, who spent years working in big media (Bloomberg, CNN) and most recently in local news (The Atlanta Journal-Constution), is building Phareo, a startup he hopes will one day rival internet media heavyweights. The secret sauce, he says: his own AI-powered discovery engine that will make both video-watchers and video-makers happy.
This is, to put it politely, a very tall order.
But it’s still worth talking about, since Morse is homing in on a problem you hear a lot about in creator circles these days: the sense that people who make content are getting increasingly bad deals from platforms, because they can’t control who sees their stuff.
Phareo (the name is an allusion to Pharos, the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria) says it can solve that problem by giving creators real incentives to make exclusive stuff for the company, via levers like revenue share and options. Morse plans to launch in January with an initial group of 25 creators. The app will start out as a free, ad-supported service, but he hopes to eventually offer a paid tier.
I talked to him this week about his plans, the shifting media landscape, and why he’s increasingly worried about the creator economy — at the same time he’s launching a creator economy app. This is an edited excerpt of our conversation:
Peter Kafka: You have a classic chicken/egg problem: Consumers are not going to use a new app unless it has compelling content they can’t get somewhere else. Content-makers don’t want to put their stuff there unless there’s a big audience.
Andrew Morse: It is the most important question we have to solve. It starts with dissatisfaction, and it starts with a belief from consumers and creators, that they’re not being currently served as well as they could be. So we’re working with creators who believe that there has to be a better alternative.
We don’t really have anything to lose, given the direction that the platforms are taking and given the overreliance that their creative work has on algorithms that don’t serve them. We’re going to build with creators and try to build a super-passionate core and grow from there.
But YouTube, TikTok, Reels, etc do a great job of giving me tons of video. And they have unlimited content. How do you move me over from the platforms I’m already using?
It’s an ironic conundrum — we’re trying to solve the discovery problem, but we have to be discovered ourselves.
Over the years, I’ve seen many companies say they’re trying to solve a discovery problem. But it doesn’t seem like consumers have a discovery problem. It’s the content owners who have a problem getting their stuff in front of consumers. What’s the incentive for consumers to move to a platform content-owners like?
There’s an inherent assumption that consumers are satisfied with the platforms. I don’t think that that’s true. I think consumers are on these platforms because they have to be. Whether they’re getting what they want in an efficient way is an entirely different story.
Any advice for your former CNN colleagues who are now working for David Ellison?
Stay focused on the work. It’s always the journalism that matters. And the truth and the facts and great storytelling will always rise to the top.
We have seen a steady stream of journalists leaving places like CNN and starting their own thing. Do you think that trend accelerates or stalls out as people realize how difficult it is to do solo media for a living?
I’m concerned about this creator economy — which is really about about businesses that have built themselves on the back of YouTube. If you go back to 2016, 2017, a number of really clever, really creative businesses were built on the back of social platforms. When the algorithms changed, it became almost impossible for these businesses to stay afloat. It was hard for us at CNN, but we had a big enough business that we were able to mitigate and ride the wave. For these other companies, it was disastrous.
I think you’re going to see more and more people trying to go out on their own — and that’s what scares me. Because I think that the sands may begin to shift a little bit.
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