Media

1. YouTube’s ad tweak
2. Content moderation
3. Democratic Substack
4. Meta ambushed
5. Influencer scripts
6. X in Turkey

Welcome back to Semafor Media, where we’ll keep writing words as long as you remember how to read.

One of the running questions of media reporting is: What exactly is the media beat? These days, one possible answer is YouTube.

The Google-owned platform has, to an astonishing degree, cemented its place as the backbone of a range of growing segments of media. It’s where stars are minted and cultural trends develop, where television clips get monetized, and where TV-style podcasters find their audiences. It has, unlike virtually all of its peers, found a way to play for real in the space of news and politics without getting burned. Through YouTubeTV, it will soon be the largest provider in the US of traditional television.

And yet YouTube tends to slip between the cracks of the old media beat, which focuses on politics, on personality drama, or on the endless spasms of the old TV giants. Our Mixed Signals interview this week with Neal Mohan, the company’s CEO, offers a glimpse at its secret. What keeps him up at night, he told me, isn’t a rival platform, but YouTube’s ability to provide audience and revenue for its biggest names: “If we are not delivering for our creators in two very fundamental ways then we’re in trouble.”

It’s hard to imagine competitors won’t start finding ways to take bites out of a business this dominant, and everyone from Tubi to Spotify is trying. But even as Meta plays hard in marketing and X steers MAGA politics, YouTube remains the biggest story in the media business. Max has a scoop today on how it plans to remain on top.

Also today: Democrats’ new play on Substack and two kinds of X drama. (Scoop count: 5)

We’re just a month out from our biggest in-person event yet: the Semafor World Economy Summit, April 23-25 in Washington, DC. We’ll be hosting a long list of leaders, including Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos. Apply for in-person or digital access today.

A tech tweak that could upend podcasting

YouTube is currently developing a feature that would allow host-read ads to be dynamically inserted and swapped out within individual YouTube videos, as is already the case on other platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, Max reports.

It’s a technical tweak that the average YouTube consumer is unlikely to notice. But the move would create significantly more advertising flexibility within YouTube, potentially unlocking a larger pool of ad dollars for podcasters — and helping the platform cement itself as a leader in podcasting, too.

Rethinking content moderation

YouTube’s approach to content moderation involves “being flexible and cognizant of the broader context,” CEO Neal Mohan told us in his Mixed Signals interview, offering a glimpse at the political pragmatism that has allowed the platform to dodge some of the heat X and Meta have absorbed. “What was happening in the world in March of 2020 is very different than what’s happening in the world in March of 2025,” he said. “It was a pretty crazy time. Having health-related policies that apply to that time is very different than five years from now, where we’ve deprecated, frankly, almost all of our COVID-19 policies.” I found myself arguing about this subject with NPR’s Eric Deggans at a recent New York Historical forum, where he lamented the floods of nonsense on social media. I think you can deplore the slop — and also acknowledge that the US ran an experiment in trying to suppress vaccine nonsense, and ended up with historically low rates of vaccine uptake. — Ben

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

A new #Resistance Substack

Key Democratic groups are turning to Substack, launching a new digital publication this week called How We Fight Back. The outlet, published by MoveOn, Indivisible, and Working Families Power (an arm of the Working Families Party) will offer analysis and direction for how readers and supporters can take action directly against Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans. “Our goal is simply to match the courage of everyday people in this country who are saying Enough,” said a copy of the first post shared with Semafor. “Enough of the greed and cruelty and corruption.” The move is part of a broader effort among Democrats to update their online strategy and maintain an active presence on all major platforms. 

Ambush publishing

Nobody saw it coming. Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People, a deeply negative portrait of Facebook-then-Meta’s approach to its impact on the world, was among other things an experiment in the element of surprise. The book had no pre-publication publicity, did not reach out to its subjects for comment (on the theory that it’s a memoir), and was already on shelves and bestseller lists by the time Meta got an arbitrator to gag the author. And Meta’s campaign has only boosted sales. I’m told the publisher saw the ambush as the best way to get through a Meta legal and PR gauntlet, and is delighted at the results. (A spokesperson for Macmillan, Marlena Bittner, didn’t respond to my inquiry but told the Times she’s “appalled” by Meta’s tactics.) You don’t often see sleepy print publishers stealing a march on powerful tech giants, but I suspect we can expect more of this.

— Ben

Dept. of Influence

The gray zone of paid political influence campaigning exploded into recriminations and apologies when a MAGA X figure, Nick Sortor, posted what appeared to be scripts for right-wing arguments against barring the use of food stamps to buy soda — and tweets following those scripts. “The narrative emphasizes how such regulation is an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice, especially considering the president himself is a Diet Coke enthusiast,” reads a document apparently from the marketing firm Influenceable, which offered hundreds of dollars or more a post. The influencers did not disclose the payments, as is typically required (but does not seem to be widely enforced), but one — a pro-DeSantis Florida writer — confessed to the “dumb” move. Influenceable CEO Cam Rafizadeh didn’t respond to an inquiry via LinkedIn about the flap, but the company has been flagged before for covert politicking.

X in Türkiye

X took down the accounts of Turkish opposition figures on the orders of the government over the weekend. On Sunday, X’s official global affairs account wrote that “we object to multiple court orders from the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority to block over 700 accounts of news organizations, journalists, political figures, students, and others within Türkiye,” and “look forward to defending these principles through the legal system.”

Even powerful platforms have gradually realized they need to comply with national courts, but in other contexts, X has fought first and complied later. “Rather than rushing to the courts for lodging appeals, you rushed into withholding all these accounts even though you know that they are unlawful and arbitrary,” complained one activist, Yaman Akdeniz.

Also worth asking: Will the platform’s actions become an overt tool of US foreign policy — in this case, protecting a complicated ally in crisis? (I emailed the platform’s new spokesman to ask this question, but he’s already out.)

— Ben

Alex Isenstadt is the author of ”Revenge″ and senior political reporter at Axios.

⁛ News

TNG for VOA: The NewsGuild is joining Voice of America employees’ lawsuit against the Trump administration over its decision to shutter the news agency. The groups will hold a press conference in New York on Monday in hopes of raising awareness about the suit and the Trump administration’s decision to make massive cuts to the US Agency for Global Media.

Pledge drive: The Guardian’s first-person essay on a Canadian trapped in immigration detention singlehandedly garnered $105,000 in pledged donations to the publication, per a spokesperson.

☊ Audio

More podcast news: Vox Media is making changes to its podcast leadership. The company is promoting Lillian Xu to VP of its increasingly important audio business and bringing in Sam Negrin as VP of advertising strategy and growth, with the goal of bringing in more money for the company’s podcasts. Xu has helped build out Vox’s sports podcast partnerships business, helping sign shows from athletes like Andy Roddick, Cam Heyward, and Lonzo Ball, while Negrin is being elevated within Vox Media after overseeing Vox’s cute-animal vertical, The Dodo.

⁋ Publishing

Book deals: Low public opinion of former President Joe Biden’s presidency isn’t keeping the former first family from speaking out. On Friday, NBC published a story noting that both Bidens are planning on writing books. Representatives for the former first lady are already speaking to publishers about her book, Semafor has learned.

More ‘cuteservatives’: The New York Times profiled Evie Magazine, the “conservative Cosmo” that Semafor mentioned in our piece on the growing market of conservative media publishers and creators focused on reaching younger women.

Cooking: New York Times Cooking continues to grow, according to data shared with Bloomberg. The Times’ cooking website and app garnered 456 million visits last year, as well as 72% more views on YouTube compared to the previous year.

⁌ TV

Game on: In addition to potentially bringing back its iconic NBA theme song, NBC Sports is considering reviving NBA Inside Stuff when the broadcaster begins broadcasting league games next season.

⁜ Tech

Platform wars: As Kyle Tharp writes, the popularity of the manosphere-adjacent Barstool Sports on TikTok dwarfs many major left-leaning influencers, and is an example of just how much ground liberals have lost on the platform.

✰ Hollywood

Fairest: Disney’s live-action Snow White has pissed off online conservatives, who didn’t like Rachel Zegler’s reinterpretation of the fairy tale as a story of female empowerment, and critics, who thought the movie was really bad. Still, despite a soft weekend opening, the political backlash isn’t what seemed to hurt the movie’s performance: Snow White overperformed in Republican-leaning areas, and did well among Latino and Hispanic audiences.

Math runs through Max Levchin’s thinking about Affirm, his biggest venture since he built PayPal with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and the rest of what became known as the PayPal Mafia.

The buy-now-pay-later loan service is what Soviet-born Levchin calls a “moral capitalist enterprise,” and has pledged to never charge its customers late fees. But that means there’s little room for error: “From the very beginning, the underwriting discipline here was the only thing that stood between us and losing money,” he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.