News Review: Instacash, more cash less dash for Tortoise, and Substack gets into video

A quick round-up of the week's audience strategy news, as presented to my students at City, at the first in-campus session with me of the year…

Instacash

The ‘gram wants in on that sweet creator economy revenue, following Twitter’s Super Follows, Substack, etc…

Instagram launches early test of creator subscriptions in the US – TechCrunch

Instagram is giving creators more ways to make money with today’s launch of Instagram Subscriptions. The feature, which was spotted hitting the App Store back in November, is now officially in early testing with a small group of U.S. creators who will be able to offer their followers paid acc…

TechCrunchSarah Perez

Slow Money

The “slow news” title takes £10m in additional funding. It made a loss of £8.5m last year, from 55,000 paying subscribers.

Tortoise completes £10m funding round with plans to pivot to podcasting

News start-up Tortoise has completed a £10m series A funding round which it says will help fund a pivot towards creating more audio journalism and events.

Press GazetteTwitter

Video killed the newsletter star

The newsletter platform launches native video for newsletters — following Ghost which did the same before Christmas.

Exclusive: Substack adding video to lure new creators

The move comes as Big Tech platforms muscle in on the creator economy.

AxiosSara Fischer

Apple News News

Apple News is now the UK’s most used news app…

Revealed: the most popular news apps in the UK ranked

Data from Ipsos iris reveals the most popular news apps in the UK for December. Apple News reaches the biggest audience; Mail Online has most engagement.

Press GazetteTwitter

Illegal Analytics?

Austrian data regulator says that the cookies from Google Analytics can breach GDPR…

Europe’s Move Against Google Analytics Is Just the Beginning

Austria’s data regulator has found that the use of Google Analytics is a breach of GDPR. In the absence of a new EU-US data deal, other countries may follow.

WIRED UKCondé Nast

Flocking NFTs

Twitter is playing with two more enhancements to its service: NFT user icons (look for the hexagons which distinguish them from the normal circular ones) and a close circle feature called your Flock…

Twitter’s experimental ‘Flock’ feature will let you share tweets with your closest friends – TechCrunch

Twitter is still working on a feature that will give you a way to blast tweets that can only be seen by the friends you choose first revealed in July last year.

TechCrunchMariella Moon