The Death Of Click-Bait

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1:25Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osman, hello Marina. Hello Richard, how are you? I'm very well. I'm supposed to be writing for the last week for the new Thursday Motor Club book but all I've been doing is looking at the graphic of the Royal Albert Hall and how many tickets are left. Literally all week, it's looking good, it's okay. In case you didn't hear this last week, we are doing a live show at the Royal Albert Hall which is going to be super festive, have all sorts of games and delights and surprises. Special guests. Special prizes.

1:56And it's on December the 4th. I do want to say sorry because some people tried to book tickets on the first possible day and got themselves into a whole thing because there was a mistake and people felt that they had to pay another£55 just to be a member of the Royal Albert Hall. So I want to say very sorry to those people. This issue is no longer occurring. Anyone you did pay that has been refunded. But if you wish for a smooth experience, it is now available. Exactly. I would do it this week though. Listen, as Kanye said, tell the promoter we need more seats. we just sold out all the floor seats.

2:27But yeah, and also exclusive, we're going to give away a House Against Wheelie Luggage as one of our prizes. Right, well that's the stampede. That's exciting, isn't it? That's the end of the podcast. No one's going to listen after that. But essentially, yeah, I've done that all week instead of writing. I was supposed to be writing, but I just keep clicking that thing and seeing the kind of coloured dots disappear. It's quite mesmerising. It is mesmerising. Okay, but what are we going to talk about this week? Well, it's Halloween. So spooky, isn't it? It is so spooky. My house is very spooky. Are you a Halloween fan?

2:55Yeah, I've got three children of that age. I have to be. It's like the law. I mean, genuinely, I think it has been passed into law now. Anyway, we're going to take the fun out of Halloween by talking about the box office of horror and how it's the last great genre in filmmaking. And there have been some extraordinary success stories. On a less spooky note, we're talking about Hallmark. They've begun their countdown to Christmas and we're going to talk about how that's going and what it entails. And also Reach, which owns lots of local... It is the largest local news provider and also in national news titles.

3:24The money-saving expert Martin Lewis noticed, or his attention was drawn to the fact that he was a subject of about 40 reach stories in one day. And we're going to be talking about churnalism. Churnalism. So horror, hallmark and churnalism. Shall we start with... It's so spooky. It is. Halloween. Pour yourself a pumpkin spice martini and settle down. Is that a thing? No, I don't know. It will be a thing, by the way. That's why you like Halloween. It will be. I don't think I would like a pumpkin spice martini, I've got to say. Plain mum, absolutely fine. We're going to talk about horror. It is horror, Hollywood's most successful genre, bar none.

4:05Of the 50 most profitable movies in Hollywood history... That means made for the cheapest and then made them at Return on Investment. A third of them are horror. Something like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. were going to come to Blumhouse Horror, which made Paranormal Activity. But both of those, you'll remember, used found footage, as it were. And so they were made incredibly cheaply and the greatest return on investment in Hollywood history. But right back in the day, certain sort of places were associated with horror, like Universal, founded by Karl Lemler. They started and they carved out a niche for themselves.

4:39And they had, you know, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, and they were always known as the horror kind of studio. and it's interesting that lots of these sort of horrors, Blumhouse, distributes still through Universal today. Blumhouse is run by a man called Blum. We're going to talk about him. Okay, we're going to talk about Blum himself. But horror is thriving, really thriving. Now, they've had 28 titles have gone into wide release in 2024, which is by far the most in the modern era. Audiences go to cinemas for horror. And young audiences particularly. Young audiences. Horror fans want to see stuff in theatres.

5:13The box office is very good this year. It has been better, but that's partly a function of there just being more films out there. So if you look at the low-budget successes at the moment, there's been Long Legs, which has made... Have you seen that? I've seen this one. Nick Cage. Nicholas Cage. He's like a sort of occultist who murders families with young daughters. Oh, does he? Yeah, that's a classic Cage role. The Substance, which is this, you know, that body horror thing. To me, more stars, and I'm not even joking. Wow. Then Terrifier 3. Now, this is a major success. That's just come out. The first one, by the way, didn't even go into cinemas.

5:47It did belatedly, but that was just made for absolutely no money. The first one was made for like$38 ,000 or something. Exactly. Now, Terrify 3 cost, I think,$2 million, and it opened at over$18 million in just one weekend. And it genuinely looks, it's a bit sort of Saw-ish, like almost all these films are. It's about a clown called Art the Clown, but it's genuinely, really, absolutely appalling. I mean, listen, except if you like that sort of thing, in which case it's amazing. But yeah, Made for 2 million, which I mean, that's an episode of a TV drama. Literally nothing. It's nothing. And if you look at, I mean, this is really, Joker Foliadur, which was, as we've talked about, has been a big flop and cost 200 million and they would have to spend at least 150 to market it.

6:32Terrify 3 comes out at weekend two of Joker 2 and obviously should have been quite far down the list, but beats it. First of all, for a third series of a franchise, as people always tell you, like franchises get worse and blah, blah, blah. This one is built and built and it's becoming more and more successful. It is also, by the way, an amazing name for a film. Yeah. Terrifier 3. You know what you're getting. Yeah, you really do though, don't you? And it has great audience scores, great critic reviews. Then the next weekend after that, you had Smile 2 come out, which obviously lots of things come out in Halloween month.

7:01Now that was made for 28 million because it's more expensive. It's come from Paramount and it did very well the first one. But in the first weekend, it got 23 million. So that's, again, you should say, oh, it's hard to sustain with a sequel. But these things really draw people back in. The horror franchises, people go back and back in. And the interesting thing with Smile 2 as well, firstly, not a great name for a film. Certainly a horror film. Smile 2, okay, I mean, that could be Hallmark. But one of the stars of it is called Ray Nicholson. And you can see him with this sort of great big, here's Johnny type grin.

7:32And that's because he is Jack Nicholson's son. And they've got so much amazing kind of traction from him being in that movie. But yes, it's a follow up to Smile 1. unbelievably uh yeah it's made over 200 million worldwide already i mean that's that's a crazy number in a world where as you say joker's foliar de has done a boris johnson unleashed and has absolutely tanked did very badly in week two by the way the boris johnson book i know i still people keep picking up your story and then i saw somebody floating the conspiracy theory that bookshops have been telling people they haven't got it yeah yeah yeah that's what's happening yes bookshops are always trying not to make money yeah exactly they're really trying not to sell a £30 hardback on the lead up to Christmas.

8:10That they've got in stock. Speak No Evil, which has come out earlier this year, that cost£15 million. That's a Blumhouse film. And it has, again, great scores, great credit reviews. That's already made£75 million. Now, let's talk about Blumhouse. Blumhouse is a company which makes mostly horrors, not entirely, but mostly, headed up by Jason Blum. By the way, he is really interesting and articulate and brash. I hear a lot of people think he's a complete dick. Having said that, I find him quite compelling to listen to. You like a bad boy. Well, he's an interesting boy because I tell you what he's done is in that same way that lots of our listeners will be familiar with the story of Moneyball with Billy Bean, the general manager of the Oakland A's, who works at this baseball system, and they've now obviously made Michael Lewis wrote a great book about it and became a film.

8:58Stats-based creativity. Who works a stats-based system to kind of overperform for the amount of money in baseball. Now, Jason Blum did something slightly similar, which is that he thought all those things that we said earlier, like horror is the best performing genre. You can make cheap horror. What I would say about horror is that like a not very good, a really quite good drama can still lose you money. Yeah. And a really quite bad horror can still be an investment. And he has worked out all of these sorts of things. Paranormal Activity was a Blumhouse one. Now that cost£15 ,000. And also with that, he found the template of how they were going to market their films.

9:34they have even audience shots reaction shots in the trailer so they had like shots of people sort of like oh my god this is terrifying because he understood that you could get people out to theaters because these young people want to go that company has been incredibly ruthless and disciplined with budget they do let creators and directors like have their way but they don't really ever want to go over 20 million this has been a slightly substandard year for them by comparison of recent years 2023 they had five nights at freddy's megan insidious five exorcist believer collectively blumhouse movies made 800 million dollars last year that's amazing and again and they don't have huge stars in them they don't worry about that you know the idea itself is the star and the fright is the star culturally people are happy to go out and see that it's like horror in some ways is it's sort of like nando's in that you go there if you're you know teenage boys will always go for the extra extra extra hot you know just just just to prove that they can do it it's not i'm lemon and herb isn't that terrible oh my god yeah but i don't like horror either i'm listen i'm scared talking about it but yeah but bloomhouse with their the quality control over what they do it's sort of a license to print money it's like it's like a wonker factory of horror but the studios you know we have to say this guy is showing you how it is possible to do this you don't have to spend these huge amounts of money it's relatively low risk if most of your films are successful and one that costs 12, 13, 14 goes wrong, it doesn't really matter that much.

11:03So much of this is so basic, but they don't want to hear it at the studios. They don't want to look back at their own annals and think the biggest banker really is horror. Also, all the things that we keep saying, it gets young people out to the cinema and they want to be in the cinema. What's really lovely about it is that it matters more and the feelings, the feels are more intense when you're in an audience. People want to be scared together and they want to have that theatre experience. That is lovely. Yeah, I think it's amazing. And, you know, again, you can lead these horses to watch. And by the way, if you want to be scared in a big crowd, we'll have a hall December the 4th.

11:39That will be ours. But, you know, sometimes we talk about budget and we think, oh, why are we talking about that? We want to talk about creativity. But I do think that in this genre particularly, creativity and budget kind of go hand in hand. It's almost a function of the genre. in that we're scared of what we can't see, which is both terrifying and inexpensive. And anticipation is a terrifying thing. POV the killer is often more scary in Hollywood than you see Michael Myers or whatever, but actually Michael Myers' point of view is more scary. It's the same thing that happens in Jaws where they can't get the shark working and Spielberg's having this absolute nightmare and it becomes the mother of invention.

12:18And so in general, they have to do all those amazing shots, which are so iconic. and looking up from below are people swimming, silhouetted against the light in the sky above. And that is far more terrifying in many ways. Never show the shark. Yeah. That's the key. But we've talked a little bit recently in TV and in movies about talent and talent pay. And the other message, you know, and the other lesson to learn from horror is you don't need to be spending 25 million on actors. No. People are going to come out to these movies. As you say, they're happy to come to the movies. They're happy to watch horror.

12:51They do not need Timothee Chalamet to be in your horror film. It's such a lesson for studios which is people will come and see the films. People are not going out to see actors particularly most of the time. Occasionally it'll work with a rom-com and stuff like that. But again, it's not a lesson that anybody ever seems to learn. It launches lots of young brilliant people who become brilliant actors and who become much more successful. Lots of final girls as they call it. You know, the last person not to be dead in a horror movie who has to face and fight the killer alone. Lots of great actresses in Hollywood have been launched as kind of final girls in lots of these franchises, but you don't need to spend money.

13:29And I would also say that they have a long afterlife, as it was. Sorry. My apologies. Long Afterlife 2 is one of my favourites. There are these streaming services like Shudder, Shout Factory, Screenbox. Screenbox? Screenbox. You must have made up at least one of those. No, I haven't. Shudder, Shout Factory and Screenbox. People pay for them. They're really well subscribed to. People pay£5 a month for them just because they're horror fans and they want to get those dedicated channels. They're really committed and they want to experience things in the cinema and they will have the communal terror, the communal joy.

14:05These are all the things that we're supposed to still want to happen in moviemaking and we say don't happen anymore, but they do within horror. Yeah, and it's interesting because is that just because it's horror? I do think there are wider lessons to be learned. One is you start looking at the numbers and this idea that young people don't go to the cinema. They do. Older people don't go to the cinema. They're the ones who got out of the habit of it because we used to go to the cinema and now suddenly everything's at home. And so for us, that's like, oh my God, this is a novelty. This is extraordinary.

14:32I can watch this big movie at home. I can just be in my house. I don't have to get a babysitter. I don't have to stay out late. So for our generation, that's a huge thing. For the younger generation, it's the exact opposite, which is they can sit at home and watch everything they want by themselves. And someone is then saying to them, oh, by the way, do you know this? sort of theme park where you can go and do this with loads of other people and you know there's snack you can get snacks and you can kind of scream it doesn't have to be three hours ten minutes it's really fine for it to be an hour 38 people are very happy with that so that's that's a generation for whom cinema is an incredible novelty and we're the generation for whom home cinema is an incredible novelty so a make films for those people b they don't really show much interest in who the stars of these things are um you know that's not something that interests them particularly and so if you do want to start making big hit movies you know just write great scripts that appeal to young people and don't put loads of stars in it it's going to save a fortune horror directors and writers and many of them are directors and writers really think about what the audience wants and what they wanted and they really know the fan base and they are the fan base and i know we've talked we talk so often about audience and it's amazing how often people go into projects without actually considering what the audience for that project is whereas these people consider it all the time because they are it that's 100 right and it's funny really so we talked about mr beast as well about how he absolutely understands every single aspect of his audience and understands exactly what thumbnail to use and understands exactly what wording to use i think we're going to get onto something in in that realm um when we talk about reach as well but this is where i genuinely think that ai is going to come into things for the studios because AI would understand what you're talking about.

16:11For Hollywood, it's hard culturally to understand that you can make a cheaper movie with fewer stars in it because it's not in their DNA. It's just not, you know, they're the star system. They're going to parties and, you know, they're putting people on pedestals. AI doesn't care about any of that. AI will take every bit of data you've got and say, no, this person is not worth 12 million. This person is not worth 17 million. You can get someone for$100 ,000 to do this and it wouldn't make the tiniest, tiniest bit of difference to your bottom line and i do think the big high ups at the studio i don't think they're particularly using um ai for creative things i think that's a busted flush slightly i mean you can you know there's various you know bits of grunt work you can you can do um but using it for audience research and using it for the for the moneyballization using it to take the studio executives jobs yeah exactly if you will if i was a studio executive they're the ones who are most at risk in the studio system of AI.

17:04But yeah, I do think that that's such an obvious point, the horror thing and the lack of stars in it and the younger audience. It's such an obvious point, but the Hollywood does not seem to be getting. But I tell you, who would get that? A machine. A machine would understand that and would churn out, not a script, but how about do a film like this with these sorts of people in it and release it at this time of year? That's an easy win. But it's interesting because we both sort of know and everyone listening knows that's sort of not what's going to happen. No. Of course the studio executives are not going to, they're going to be the last people sort of still holed up in the studios.

17:34And yet you look at it now and you think, well, that feels like the thing. Yeah, this isn't Hollywood, Richard. The villains are going to win. And talking of AI and what have you, can we talk about Reach, which is this newspaper conglomerate which owns some national newspapers and lots of regional ones as well. People will know Reach without knowing they know them. We'll explain why. They have the Express, the Star, the Mirror, but they also have absolutely tons of local titles, Matchdreaming News, Liverpool Echo, and loads and loads of kind of local titles. And you will be able to see you're on a Reach website, I want to say, because it's not loading properly.

18:09Honestly, this is where people will really know Reach. You know, whenever you click on a story and it is impossible to read on your phone and there are 50 different pop-ups and it's like continue reading and then you've clicked on an Omaze advert and then, you know, suddenly you're on a train and it's like playing a loud advert and even though your phone is off. and it's absolutely impossible to navigate in any way whatsoever. That's Reach. I'm afraid it is. And by the way, none of what follows is any shade whatsoever on Reach journalists who I have nothing but sympathy for. And we will come to who I consider to be the various, don't want to say, well, villains of the piece.

18:44It's been all about villains, hasn't it? Yeah, it's all of it. Reach 2. Yeah. Now, there was a slight sort of play on, this got a bit of traction last week because Martin Lewis, someone pointed out to Martin Lewis that he was the subject of about 40 stories in a day on reach websites, all of which were sort of saying the same variety of nothing. And also all taken from things that he had written himself. On his own, on his money-saving expert.com. So it wasn't a journalist finding something out. It was a journalist looking at what he'd written and then putting that in a slightly different form of words and 40 of them in one day.

19:16Exactly. And actually, it ties in with something that we heard of a few weeks ago when it was discovered that Reach journalists were being told they needed to try and hit eight stories a day. Now, as someone who's worked a very long time in journalism, eight stories a day, you're not doing any form of what anyone normal would consider journalism. You're just sitting in an office typing things. And they've lost 800 journalists this year at Reach. I know they've recently hired six or whatever, but they've got a really tricky situation. I'm not saying that local news isn't hard. and we'll come to some people who are doing brilliantly local news in a bit but they rely on ad revenue which is why these websites when you try and lower them are completely broken and all this stuff kind of pops up then they also have relied on trying to get people to their content via social media and they've also got other liabilities they've got a big pension deficit and they've got all these phone hacking claims that each year take a big sort of write down on those Apart from that though Apart from that so the websites have so much on them because what they've gone for is quantity and not quality this idea of journalism.

20:19And, you know, we were talking about those adapt, we've talked about Netflix trying to adapt the thumbnails so that each is tailored to you. This is like a really weird lo-fi way of doing that, not a Mr. Beast way. If they're going to do a story about Martin Lewis and everyone's got one Martin Lewis story, they reckon, and they're just trying to find a way of getting that via the headline. And if you're sort of like, you know, and it results in local people who should be local news reporters sitting there in perhaps Liverpool, perhaps one of the other places where they own sort of big local news presences, writing stories about what happened to Liam Payne and trying to write sort of 10 of them a day because that's going to drive traffic.

20:59Now, in my view, this is a real death spiral in terms of like, you're not going to deal with the downturns in advertising by just chucking out more stuff. The CEO of Reach is some guy called Jim Mullen. I have fair to say, I don't know, I haven't spoken to a local journalist, but I've spoken to a Mirror and Express journalist. It's fair to say he's not loved by them and I imagine his appeal doesn't travel. He used to run Ladbrokes. I mean, I've got a bet for him. I bet he thinks he's in the ad business and not in journalism. And I bet his strategy, this strategy, is going to go tits up. I'm sorry, I just think it is.

21:34Recently he did some big speech about misinformation and the platforms and all this sort of stuff. The sort of thing that one feels one should do as a sort of publisher of news. It's like you're not a publisher of news. You seem to be in the ad business and you're failing at the ad business. There's a movement abroad in the advertising industry at the moment that understands that, say, for example, you have 9 ,000 subscribers to a newsletter. You're of great deal more value to the advertising industry than someone who might get kind of half a million eyeballs on a series of stories. They have begun to really understand that return and investment on these journalism clickbait things is absolutely not worth it.

22:11There's no money in it. You know, nothing is having cut through. If you're doing 40 stories on Martin Lewis and people are clicking on different versions of them and then something pops up, it's an incredibly inefficient way of doing advertising. So you're 100 % right. Reacher are in the ad business, but they are like in the ad business of the 2010s, certainly not of 2024. 2024, it is highly targeted, absolutely understanding the audience, absolutely appealing to a group of people, all of whom sort of share similar characteristics. so advertisers can absolutely target. That's the key thing for advertisers.

22:44And this feels like Death Spiral is sort of right because it doesn't feel to me like there's a good way out of this. If ever a story comes from this, for example, and Sean Plans, they'll do stuff, like I talked about that stuff, Nanogen, that people put in their hair, and that came up on. But, you know, it's on like Gloucestershire Live and Birmingham Live. And the poor person having to type this up, knowing that they're not helping the people of Birmingham. Yeah, our sympathies are totally with these people. And also, you can see that what people are doing now, if you're told to do it eight times a day, do you not think they're feeding into AI?

23:17Of course they are. They are self-mechanising because it's so completely disparaging to be a journalist and say, you need to do eight different stories about probably the same thing that Martin Lewis has said. If you don't think you're just feeding that into AI, saying write it again, but re-nose it on X, Y, or Z, it's completely pointless. But this, by the way, is not some new fly-by-night company who's set up to do this sort of thing. This is one of our great newspapers. It's lots of our great newspapers. And it's what's really, it's interesting, because I want to understand more about this, and I'm not brilliantly on the technical side, but someone who is, is at The Guardian, the head of editorial innovation, Chris Moran, who's absolutely brilliant.

23:53He joined in a really, what he would describe as a very junior SEO role a long time ago. And SEO is? Search engine optimization. Which is if you type in news, his job is to get The Guardian to be the first hit. And he said that right from the very start, when he was in that role, He thought, if I went into a commissioning meeting and said, this is trending now, we need to do some stories on it, people would look askance at him. He always understood that what The Guardian wanted to be about was responsible reach. So journalism we believe in that is read as widely as possible. So they kept looking at how to do lots of things better.

24:24And in 2016, they came to a really, I wish that reach would come to this knowledge now, which was that there was just too much stuff on The Guardian website. and they looked at it and they pulled the data and they thought, God, about a third of what we publish gets fewer than 5 ,000 page views, which is basically nothing. Just because the internet has intimate space, we can put everything here. And then you get problems because you think, oh, the sub doesn't know how to headline this story because it's actually quite boring and vague and we don't really know why it's here. It's been commissioned because it might become important.

24:52You can't give it any prominence because you don't quite know what it is. So they came up with a relatively simple plan, which is they said, we're not going to tell any of you what to write or what to commission, but could you please publish a third less? Could you just do exactly a third, because that's what the data was showing. Okay, so they gave them back the ability to say no to things, which is 50 % of commissioning. And everything became much more curated. And there was zero drop in page views. Oh, really? This is not to say, oh, it's so easy, just do less. But lots of people did follow that.

25:23It is quite clear that if you do things like that, you don't necessarily get a drop in pages. Also, people can find the good stuff. It's ridiculous for the CEO to stand up and do speeches about misinformation. Yeah, because you're just adding to the general sort of mulch of stuff on the internet and no one can sift through it to see what your important journalism is. There are important investigations in the Mirror, in Express, all sorts of things. But it's very difficult to find them if there are also 40 stories in one day about Martin Lewis or whatever it is. Now, journalists, they've taken sort of their lead from Mail Online, which is a sort of brilliant product and changed everything in lots of different ways.