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OpenAI releases ChatGPT, a16z sunsets future.com + OK Boomer with Jack Raines | E1626

This Week in Startups

CHAPTER

Is the New York Times Really the Amazon of Media Right Now?

Boomer: The New York Times is like the Amazon of media right now. It's going to be really hard, man. Some people might not work in media again for a year. They have to go do PR or go in house PR or do some corporate communications work until they can get another journalism job. When journalism contracts, it's very slow to rebound.

00:00
Speaker 1
The first type, the one the industry has built to support, let's call it iteration. It's like when someone comes along and says, how about a designer Whoopee cushion that inflates on its own? Novelty makers are all for that. David Wall, the director of Awesome, says it's kind of like writing jazz music. You
Speaker 5
have traditional tunes. And what happens is you put your own spin in that tune and you record it. And I think that having a novelty product that's an echo of another novelty product is good. Making this beautiful new music out of a reflection of what someone else has done is, you know, that's what creativity
Speaker 1
is. Using better rubber or developing a new valve that releases the air to make a new symphonic Whoopee cushion melody, that's all fair game. But problems come up when you get to the second type of imitation.
Speaker 5
That's when other companies start straight up ripping off your song. There are companies that exist only as a shadow of other companies. They just copy what other companies do as soon as they see what's popular. And when another company comes along and starts selling your exact same product, if
Speaker 1
you haven't legally protected it, there's not much you can do. And that matters when a product like The Whoopee cushion becomes a household name, but the company that created it is
Speaker 5
not. It obviously affects our sales and there is customer confusion, which is the worst part about it.
Speaker 1
There's one other kind of imitation and it is bad news for the entire novelty industry. That's when other companies don't just steal your idea and your customers and then make money. It's when their product is a cheap knockoff and even ruins the joke. While listening this happened with the razor blade through the thumb trick, a classic.
Speaker 5
I saw one not too long ago that wouldn't even fit on my pinky in the shape of a thumb because it was so small and it had no blood on it and it was just a gray razor sticking in the side of a little tiny thumb finger. So it takes away what the original object was until it just becomes this, it's like a Xerox copy of a
Speaker 1
Xerox copy of a Xerox copy. It renders the product useless. This again is Kirk Demaris. He studied how novelty items are sold and he says this phenomenon, what's called quality fade, has actually hurt novelty companies across the country.
Speaker 3
I think over time they became associated with cheap junk. I mean, if you go back to the dawn of the prank novelty industry, a lot of that stuff was made of metal and made of higher quality materials.
Speaker 1
As low quality imitations began to flood the market, it got harder and harder for consumers to tell the difference between the well-made, say whoopee cushion and some cheapo whoopee cushion. People don't really know which brands of novelty products are better than others, which ones they prefer, like their favorite shampoo or peanut butter. If you want to buy a whoopee cushion, you don't care if it's made by Jim Rubber Company or Johnson Smith or SS Adams. Novelty companies know this and it's reflected in how they advertise.
Speaker 3
I think they were selling an experience and they are selling this moment of astonishment when it comes to magic tricks or this moment of humiliation when it comes to pranks. The way that so many prank and novelty items were sold took the brand name out of the equation.
Speaker 1
So when someone buys a dinky, unconvincing razor blade through the thumb from one company or a cheaply made whoopee cushion from another, it hurts every company selling the same prank. This reality, along with a focus on innovations instead of legal protections, means that in the end,
Speaker 3
the novelty toy business is struggling. After the 80s, even the shops, standalone novelty shops and joke shops, they started closing down and now they're almost non-existent.
Speaker 1
SS Adams, the company that spearheaded the American novelty industry, was sold to an online store in 2009 and at the end of 2019, Johnson Smith, the company that put the whoopee cushion on the map in the US, it shuttered its doors after 105 years.
Speaker 4
Which I have to tell you makes me incredibly sad.
Speaker 1
Again, novelty collector, Marty
Speaker 4
Tim. Because they've been a part of my life for 35 years and I feel like I've just lost an old friend.
Speaker 1
After all those years of collecting, Marty and her husband are selling their collection. She hopes they'll find a new home fort in one piece so it doesn't just become a hodgepodge of stuff because she believes there's something to be learned from all those toys and pranks and jokes. People have a
Speaker 4
natural, funny bone and they need a release of some sort to just not look at life so seriously.
Speaker 1
To be honest, before we started working on the story, I hadn't really thought about the whoopee cushion in a while but I could immediately picture one, round, pink, scalloped edges and I thought who would be the perfect person I could use that on today. Because I'd like to think, no matter how old you are or how sophisticated you think you are, there are some practical jokes that if done right are always funny. But to confirm this, I decided to check with some experts.

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