Good morning,
It’s been about another month gap since my last one of these.
I don’t really have much of an excuse other than that I had the flu, my fiance and I have been busy with house guests and other regular life things, and I’ve decided to spend more time bumbling around pitching my last novel manuscript and working on a story that increasingly seems like it will be another novel manuscript. Why do I do it? Who knows? I mean, I know why (to complain), but really why do I do it?
But also—and this is going to be extraordinarily boring to hear once again—I’ve been very busy at work. As usual, you can read all about it here and also here (the second link is paywalled so DM me if you want a gift link). Both of those stories only capture a portion of what is happening and are varying degrees of accurate but I won’t really get into that. There’s just a lot going on.
In any event, I’m long overdue in my solemn duty of sharing my very important and essential assessment of the media trends to pay attention to this year. We’re already into Q2 for god’s sake! I’m so late. So, here are the storylines in media I’m paying attention to and thinking about.
Where Is This All Going?
Instead of leading up to the big question, I’m going to start with it: Where is all of this going? I mean truly, where is the internet, media, platforms, apps, all of the things that take up our attention and time, actually going?
This was sort of the crux of Ted Gioia’s “The State of Art and Culture, 2024” essay from February. If you haven’t read this essay yet, I highly recommend it. Honestly, if there were one link from this email to click out and read, it would be this one.
Gioia is a former Stanford professor with a lot of achievements to his name. He also has a lot of thoughts about culture. I’d say the major point of his essay is captured in this screen grab.
Funny graphic aside, do you disagree? The idea of the “attention” economy is nothing new. But I suppose what finally made me stand up and notice here was the phrase “ceaseless activity.” That’s often how I behave on my phone: I bounce from email, to Slack, to Reddit, back to my email, to Slack, to the weather app (am I sure it's not going to rain later?), to Notes, to Safari, to Spotify, back to my email. I’m ceaselessly moving around my screen. I am not enjoying art or being entertained, I am merely being distracted. I am distracting myself.
Why am I distracting myself? Gioia isn’t coy about answering that.
Again, nothing really new here. But enough time has passed with phones and platforms in our lives that it’s become a little bit easier to see the casualties around us. We are addicted.
I brought Gioia’s essay up at work when we were discussing whatever the hell is going on with this TikTok account and asking if this was content now? The answer is: Yeah, actually. This is content now and there’s probably gonna be more if it. Is this going to be ALL content? No. But this shit is easy to make and diverting enough. It can keep feeding the ceaseless activity that we pursue every day.
I think Gioia is a little dramatic in his delivery, but I don’t think he’s wrong. If media and the way much of it is delivered today is pushing us down the path toward addiction, then what are we doing and where are we going?
I know where the New York Times is going. They’re embracing distraction full on: they are a gaming company now!
Last Scale Standing
I’ll tell you where we aren’t going: Back to the days when the size of your audience meant everything. In a board meeting once, I was forced to describe the publication we were building at Artsy as “the Vice of the art world” in front of a chart that showed traffic going up and to the right that explained how we were going to 10x our traffic. That was a lifetime ago and I was still learning how to be a professional then. I’d never allow myself to say something like that just as part of a presentation script again.
For the most part, audience scale on websites is over. Why? Because “social media'' isn't whatever it once was anymore. Because Google can shut off the faucet whenever it wants to and will most likely continue to slowly keep you on its pages and within its products. And probably because most of that traffic wasn’t real or meaningful anyway.
Brian Morrissey has covered the current state of scale media in The Rebooting a few times already this year. Many of Morrissey’s points came out of his discussion with the CEO of Dotdash Meredith, Neil Vogel. It’s interesting to listen to Vogel describe what Dotdash Meredith does and what it is. He talks about their brands as unique, trusted, and powerful brands. I know Dotdash and its brands primarily as a company that learned how to play the SEO game the best. And they still seem to be the best at it. The company reported increases in organic search traffic and revenue year over year in Q4 of 2023. Most places did not. I wonder if Q1 was as kind.
Sure, scale media can still work for some people. It just strikes me as a ticking time bomb and a battlefield for maybe one or two players. Even BuzzFeed is getting out. (Full disclosure: I am engaged to a BuzzFeed employee.)
It’s my belief that people don’t really spend time on websites any more. They spend time in apps. But Vogel probably knows more about this stuff than I do. And if he wins the title of last scale publisher standing, then god bless.
Sustainable Media + Community = Future?
Not to toot Brian Morrissey and The Rebooting’s horn too much, but the recent newsletter and podcast he did with Axios’s Sara Fischer covering the bright spots in media in 2024 were some of the most heartening things I’ve read or listened to so far this year.
My fiance and I have often talked about what our jobs or careers would look like in 10 or 15 years. And in doing that we’ve often wondered if it would be possible to work at a media company where breaking even or even making just enough of a profit in order to reinvest in your operations and employees is considered a success.
That seems increasingly to be the case. Defector, 404 Media, Semafaor, and Puck are all places that are incrementally building their businesses. You can count Casey Newton’s Platformer and even Morrissey’s The Rebooting among those as well.
Hell there are even feel good stories like Jezebel and then The A.V. Club being purchased by Paste over the last six months. The plan seems to let them do good work, cultivate an audience, and then break even or even make a profit.
The idea here is simple: make good content, build an audience or community, and then show them the value of becoming a subscriber by offering quality products and services. It’s not that complicated of a formula. That is if you don’t need to answer to investors or shareholders on Wall Street. And maybe that’s the path forward.
Puck is perhaps one of the best examples. They’ve built a publication around individual writers primarily delivering newsletter products and some articles all covering specific beats that cater to high value audiences. (Gotta read Lauren Sherman’s must-read reporting about my very own company every week!) They let their talent work across brands too: Matthew Belloni’s newsletter and article “home” is Puck—but his podcast’s home is with Spotify and The Ringer. They just purchased the latest version of Marion Maneker’s art market newsletter. That kind of acquisition is the sort of thing we explored at Artsy but never figured out how to pull off. Puck is doing smart things.
The “community” part of all this is where things get blurry. Community is a major blur or buzzword right now. Everyone means something different when they say it and no one really has a clear idea of what they or anyone else means when they use the word. The team I work with is still trying to figure out what our definition of community means across the surfaces our brands operate on—the ones we own and don’t own—and how we get people to interact and move from one to the other. It’s not easy. And that brings me the next storyline.
What Is Social Media Even For?
Increasingly it seems like the only thing we’re supposed to do on the internet is shop. A lot has been made of the fatigue around TikTok’s shopping focus. But TikTok is leaning in because, well, uh, livestream shopping is actually pretty lucrative in China.
And then of course Instagram is known as a place for shopping research and impulse buys. That’s nothing really new. You’ve heard people say every other post on Instagram is an ad for years now.
Am I guilty of perpetuating this? Of course! We’re hard at work figuring out the best ways to deliver product and merch recommendations to our audiences using social video. It’s part of the game.
But in all honesty, why do you spend time on social media now? What do you do there? I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou. I only use social media for work and it’s been a lot of effort training myself keep it at that. I’m also almost 40 years old. No one needs me on social media. Plus I stink at posting anyway.
For work, social media no longer drives traffic to websites. Unless maybe you’re in the hard news, culture wars, outrage posting, or celeb and gossip games. I work in food media so none of those things really apply. What’s the point of social media for us now?
We’re figuring it out. But if platforms are going to give you tools like IG Broadcasts, we’re going to use them to turn passive followers into active followers. And hopefully that leads to something like a community that might decide paying for a subscription is worth the money because we’re adding something of value to their lives.
We’ll see how it goes.
Artificial Intelli..(LOUD POTENTIALLY ILL-ADVISED YAWN THAT MIGHT LEAD TO MY UNTIMELY DEATH AT THE HANDS OF AN ANDROID ONE DAY)
I have to say, I hate talking about AI. And I hate hearing about it. I really do.
Yes, AI is coming. Yes, it will take jobs. Yes, it will change industries. Yes, it is very dangerous if not regulated and used in the right ways. Yes, I need to spend more time educating myself about it and using it more to supplement and fuel my work.
But AI is also pretty boring. People were freaking out about Sora earlier this year. I understand the implications this technology has on professionals in media, in entertainment, in all kinds of fields. But this stuff still looks like a video game to me. The people in the videos are not real. I know that doesn’t mean that one day they might look more real. Or that people think they look real today. Or that the animation is actually pretty good and could put hard working artists out of their jobs now.
I’ve just been hearing about AI for about 18 months and am still not that impressed or interested. Scared, a little bit. Nervous and unsure. Yeah, sure. But interested? Not really. I’ll keep reading and learning about it and trying to stay informed.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep working on the things I do that may still belong to the unique qualifications of human beings in the decades to come. These are such things as taking pride in being an interested and empathetic people manager; being a willing listener and collaborator; and being someone who works at trying to imbue the written word with actual human emotion in order to hopefully move a reader to feel something true about themselves and the world through a work of art.
But when it comes to media and business, AI is big business. Reddit is DEFINITELY in the AI business. And that in turn means that Google is also DEFINITELY in the AI business. You are going to hear more and more about this going forward: Who has the real, human, consumer data (you know, the GOOD stuff) to train AI on? That’s going to be a whole lot of fun to follow!
The only issue is most of the buzzy AI products stink right now. Max Read put it very well (par for the course for him) in a newsletter earlier this year: what are AI chatbots for? I don’t think anyone has an answer for that yet. But chatbot news does make for good and scary headlines to click on right now.
The Next Phase of the Streaming Wars
And of course we need to talk about streaming. That’s kind of where most of the action is anyway.
In the first half of 2024, it seems like the streaming wars are at something of a detente. Netflix is regarded as the top of the heap right now. A major turnaround from the beginning of 2022.
Netflix’s turnaround has come from password crackdowns, introducing an advertising tier, and using licensed content as marketing and user acquisition and retention tools.
Now, everyone is trying to figure out how to use their platforms, assets, and libraries to beat Netflix. Disney is cutting new content production, cracking down on passwords, better leveraging its libraries and assets, improving its advertising technology with AI, getting into games, creating a standalone app for ESPN and also joining a sports streaming bundle (???), and distributing maybe the most talked about show of 2024 so far.
Meanwhile, Max (owned by Warner Brothers Discovery) is…cracking down on password sharing, joining a streaming sports bundle even while their own sports streaming numbers aren’t where they’d want them to be, releasing not very good but apparently much-watched shows, saying goodbye to classic shows, and maybe not releasing movies they’ve paid for. Well at least they have Dune 2 coming to Max soon (if you like crappy movies) and they can still license their content out to Netflix to remind people to come on back to Max where there is, uh, lots of stuff!
Otherwise, Paramount may or may not be sold. Peacock may be turning a corner thanks to the NFL, Oppenheimer, and the upcoming Olympics (but somehow remains the only streaming app that always has buffering problems for me). And Amazon suddenly introduced an ad tier that gives advertisers another reason to not spend their marketing dollars with other companies or on any other websites really at all.
I don’t pay myself enough to figure out where these companies are all going. And honestly, I don’t even know. I’d imagine most of the people running the show at these places don’t either. Remember, nobody knows anything.
But most likely we’ll all end up paying for something called streaming cable. It’s too stupid and makes too much sense.