February Must Reads

For Allan ☕️

👋 Welcome back to Must Reads friends 👋

If you notice the subject line and wonder who’s it for, this is a quick shout-out to the people who hit reply, ask questions or want to discuss articles and content I share, if you’d like to star in the subject line or have a question just hit reply and you can be in the subject line next edition.

In this instalment of Must Reads you will want to look out for:

  • The business world and the family feuds shaping media and TV stars

  • Sports — tennis dopping is a wild ride & slightly concerning

  • How one particular well-known celebrity took back her profile and owned their path

  • Succession planning

  • The business of gossip pushing Reddit forward

  • And a deep dive on the next social network

» As a reminder: I am a coach, consultant and company advisor so if you need any help or someone in your team does, hit reply or reach out [email protected] or read through my website and testimonials.

By Me

  1. I break down the LinkedIn Algorithm and why so many people forget what they share could be an ad (and it’s likely impacting you) - https://www.dannydenhard.co.uk/blog/linkedin-algorithm

  2. How to own your successes as a CMO (or any C-Suite member) - https://www.dannydenhard.co.uk/blog/cmo-success

  3. I was interviewed by CMO Martin aka Dot Martin on why so many CMOs fail and what founders can do to improve their recruitment hit rate - https://www.dotmartin.io/p/why-startup-cmos-fail

  4. My breakdown of AI and how we will go from doing the work to reviewing the work (and how to write a great prompt to make AI work for you) https://www.dannydenhard.co.uk/blog/ai-from-doing-to-review Or watch me below from 14:02.

» THE MUST READ ARTICLES

  • 🧗The return of apps driving IRL and why in-person is being selected over (URL) online and apps

  • 🤖 With the threat of AI and leveraging cheaper work through AI this is a lovely read (or listen) on what it’s like to be an audiobook narrator. It might be cheaper to use AI but nuance and connecting to a narrator is incredibly powerful

  • 👏 Monica Lewinski Reclaiming Her Own Story - Monica’s story is incredible, in more recent times it likely wouldn’t have been so public and she might have had a different career but her story and her journey are an incredible story of being strong enough to overcome years of pain, taking years to reclaim the narrative about her and understand her new journey (& being terrified to start a podcast after everything she was put through) I highly recommend her TED talk 

  • 🤯 The Succession Murdoch’s Story- If you have watched Succession you will know it is likely based on the Murdoch children’s battle to take over from their father. In recent weeks there have been some incredible documents (including emails and text messages) released. Let’s just say you wouldn’t want to be one of their siblings.

  • Bitcoin’s biggest theft - $1.5b lost in one digital wallet hack…maybe this is why Crypto gets a bad rep

  • 👻 The Chinese ghost cities - long-time readers would have seen ghost cities shared before. Huge buildings and areas were left vacant some were due to host 700k people to live. Ghost cities aren’t always down to big events or disastrous events, often it’s down to lack of money and when investment is pulled. If you want to go deeper YouTube has many deep dives.

  • OUT! Turbulent Tennis 🎾

    • Men’s number 1 Jannik Sinner has been banned for 3 months (it should have been 1-2 years) for a doping scandal. This has been a political play from his team and the tennis authorities - TLDR Sinner’s team may or may not have given him a banned substance without him knowing and he came forward to say as much. Respected tennis players aren’t as forgiving as the tennis authorities have been and have questioned how clean the sport is. I suspect this won’t be the last high-profile player who is done for dopping but I suspect the penalties will be harsher - just ask Simona Halep who had to retire recently…

    • Last week we saw another incident of ‘fixated behaviour’ in women’s tennis, unfortunately, we have seen in the past horrific incidents. When we have sports professionals in the spotlight (especially across social media) parasocial relationships occur and it’s taken to unacceptable levels. Do we do enough to care for the athletes? Do we do enough to teach the general public about one-sided relationships? Do platforms do enough… I hope in the near future we actively do more to help. We do not want another Monica Selers incident

  • 🤐 How snark posts drive huge engagement on Reddit - and why gossip and strong opinions are something that still drives the web - 

  • 🤳 How the web has been re-engineered moving from following to being served content and entertainment algorithms predict we will engage with. This State of Create from Patreon is a good read. This video interview with Patreon Jack Conte and internet culture journalist Taylor Lorenz is a set-up.

  • 💳 Why creators leave creating - a unique look behind the scenes of Carla Lalli and the maths behind why YouTube just isn’t viable even with 2m plus views

  • 🤪 Elon’s AI - Here’s an interesting observation, Grok (Elon’s AI venture) beat out ChatGPT last week and made more money than all other competitors in a few days. Grok is built on X/Twitter data and scraped web data so it has some unique features and data sets but will it be able to capture more people’s wallets if AI is already huge and saturated with the large dominant web players winning the important internal work battles? (Work in Microsoft you get co-pilot, work on Google Suite you get Gemini). Is Elon going to be the factor for most not to want to pay…maybe…

» THE DEEP DIVES

🔓 Another Social Network - Deep Dive 🔓

Why the internet is broken according to the memo

What SNARF is and why we need a positive web & social experience

Or Is it too little too late? 

  • Buzzfeed’s CEO writes famous memos when the company is on the verge of a big change. This time Buzzfeed has called out social media companies for creating addictive content that we mindlessly scroll.

  • And in no surprise, they are considering creating their own version of a positive social media platform dubbed Island (which has been an existing platform).

  • SNARF content is - Stakes - Novelty - Anger - Retention - Fear all geared to drive enragement to generate engagement and mindless scrolling.

  • I’m all in for better platforms but the challenge every new social network has is generating networks you want to join with enough good content and good accounts you want to follow.

  • Platforms like Reddit are closing off their content and going behind paywalls - with an advertising play and an inbuilt rewards system we are seeing shifts to new models and hybrid models to make social networks work financially

  • With most social networks now 90% viewers (aka lurkers, those who do not generate any content) 9% creators and 1% super creators it’s a huge feat to create something that people will choose to use over their friends and celebrities on Insta, the endless stream of edutainment on TikTok or doom scrolling AI written LinkedIn updates

  • A case for 👍️ - we often seek out new networks and want to replace old ones. Mindless scrolling is happening everywhere, we have forgotten how to be bored and we seek out places to fill micro slots of time (toilet breaks, commutes, on walks etc). Substack has had some success with superfans of the platform with their move towards more social interactions and their notes product

  • A case against 👎️ - most social media is actually taking place on chat apps like iMessage and WhatsApp we are actively joining smaller groups and communities and being engaged here versus being performative and on display on social networks like TikTok and Instagram. I can’t see if Threads and Bluesky are struggling for daily and weekly users that a platform that likely will act like a platform around status and engagement will convert users.

I like what Buzzfeed created, it is the original viral publisher, I like Jonah (their CEO) but social networks aren’t just about content, it’s about signal, status, connection, velocity of content sharing and being responsible for something that changes sub-culture and communities.

A positive social network will take years to engineer for long-term success. Even if they brought on someone like Nikita Bier who has engineered two incredibly popular apps that have socially engineered teen sharing and sold to Discord and Facebook, I don’t think or see a new social product can be sticky enough to displace what’s out there. I will be happy to be wrong :-)

» THE MUST WATCH VIDEOS


Smart Penguin saving itself from seal

@pubity

Leopard seals are one of the primary predators of penguins, using their speed and agility in the water to hunt them. Penguins often try to... See more

How Mark Zuckerberg pitched buying Oculus ($1b ;-) )

Fancy titles are the confidence that they belong -

@boardroom

This energy in 2025. #barackobama

RTO is everywhere and CEOs aren’t fans, this leaked audio from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is something else

@barrons

EXCLUSIVE: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon offered up candid, lengthy thoughts about remote work, bureaucracy, and inefficiency during an interna... See more

Thanks for reading again today.

Want to chat about any of these stories or videos? Just hit reply or DM me on LinkedIn.

Have a great week!

Danny D