Before I get into today’s post (which is going to be a little disjointed) I want to thank everyone who reached out about my essay from Monday.
It was my best attempt to capture my relationship with my grandfather. I imagine the ways I think about him will change and I’ll look back on that piece of writing as imperfect and incomplete eventually but that’s the way these things go.
Good morning.
Happy Groundhog’s Day. Happy 142nd birthday to James Joyce. And happy birthday to Rich Lee. Some of you know him, but I’ve known him for 29 years.
We’re one month into 2024 and the media landscape is not looking good. The word apocalypse has been used a lot. And there have been many, many, many stories and many, many, many words written about how bad things are.
And it is all true. Things are bad.
No one sets out to get on a sinking ship. That is true in life and it is true in a career. But that is where myself and many other media professionals out there seemingly find themselves at the moment. I’m lucky to have a job right now and I don’t take that lightly. Like so many, I’m looking around and figuring out how long I want to stay on the ship, how to keep it from sinking, and what kind of lifeboats might be available to get me to dry land.
But in a lot of places, the dry land is actually quicksand. And from what I understand, getting caught in quicksand is just about the same as drowning. Plus the quicksand has been put there so that your company can look good to the people on Wall Street and set your stock prices soaring.
Now I’ve extended a crappy metaphor too far.
All that is to say is that this is not an inspiring start to 2024. But, like I said, I have a job right now. And all I know is that nobody knows anything. So, while I have my job, I’m going to do what I can to avoid the mistakes of the past, use my limited influence to avoid short term thinking, work with people who want to try their best to keep the ship from sinking, and hope that maybe, just maybe we make some kind of difference.
What else is there to do?
In a lot of the aforementioned recent writing about the current, dire state of media, people have covered many of the factors that brought us to this point and the challenges ahead.
The one on my mind at the moment is how live sports events are slowly becoming the next territory for streaming platforms. I’ve covered this before, but two recent stories should be on everyone’s radar.
The first one is the record streaming viewership Peacock had for the Wild Card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins in the NFL Playoffs. Now, who knows what those numbers actually mean, but the story and the moment represents a tipping point. Amazon has had crappy Thursday night NFL games for a few years now. And Max has slowly introduced the MLB playoffs and NBA regular season programming on their platform. But a playoff game in the most popular sports league (by a wide margin) in the United States on a streaming service no one really talks about (though they should because Mrs. Davis is off the charts and no one talked about it but I’m going to soon) is something entirely different.
It’s going to happen sooner than later: All of the major sports are going to be available exclusively on streaming platforms. Linear TV, network TV, or cable TV or whatever you called it or once called it is going to, not necessarily go away, but become irrelevant. All of the advertisers are going to move to the ad-supported tiers on streaming platforms, which have better user or viewer data and better ways of targeting potential customers for brands.
Peacock knows this. Disney knows this (though they seem strangely confused about what to do with ESPN). Amazon knows this (they just rolled out their ad-supported tier). And Netflix knows this.
That brings me to the second story: The announcement that Netflix will be the exclusive home of WWE Raw starting in 2025. Outside of the United States, they will also be the exclusive home of WWE’s other programming. Now, you may not be up to speed on whether or not the Bloodline storyline will wrap up at Wrestlemania this year or if The Rock will come back to fight Roman Reigns or if CM Punk will be at the big event after his much anticipated return to WWE and subsequent injury at the Royal Rumble last weekend, but this is a big story.
The WWE (despite its, uh, major recent controversies) remains a huge brand that people all over the world spend a lot of time with—whether at live events, watching those live events at home in real time or on demand, or watching old matches and events on streaming services. The fact that Netflix will now be the home for WWE Raw every single Monday night is a very big deal. There are people out there who still anticipate Raw starting every Monday night the way I did back in 1998 or 1999. Except going forward it won’t be on a cable network like USA—the way it was then and, after a few different homes, is now—it will be on Netflix.
If you would have told 13- or 14-year old me, back when I couldn’t wait to see what Stone Cold, HHH, The Rock, Shawn Michaels, Mick Foley, and Val Venis would do next, that one day people would be watching professional wrestling live on Netflix I wouldn’t have believed you. Mainly because Netflix didn’t exist and we had to get a second phone line installed so I could use the internet and not block any calls from coming in.
Now are streaming platforms, with their new, shiny, ad-supported tiers, just going to become cable all over again? I don’t know. I mean probably. Is it going to be a pain in the ass to find out where to watch things? Sure, but it kind of already is.
What I do know—or at least I think I know—is that there continues to be fewer and fewer reasons for any advertiser to spend money advertising on websites. Why would you? You’re guaranteed to be in front of live audiences during sporting events. Netflix knows more about its viewers than CBS, NBC, ABC, or Fox ever truly did. And on Amazon they can just pop over to the actual marketplace and add your product to their cart.
People don’t spend time on websites anymore. They spend the majority of their time on apps and some of their time in email. And that’s one of the main reasons why the media business is in trouble. They were slow to adapt to actually having websites and now they are slow to adapt to what websites should be: surfaces that approximate a “social media” experience and seamlessly take you to shoppable moments, video, longform journalism, audio, and cater your experience by getting you to log-in or subscribe so they can understand your interests to better cater advertising to you.
The websites can’t compete anymore. And all of the other supplementary content (video, audio, documentaries, etc.) no matter how good they are, are never going to beat the NFL. Even the NBA can’t beat the NFL.