Study Hall Digest 11/20/2017

Hi

-Folks, it’s time for a new approach to money-making in the media. A bunch of bad news about new-media juggernauts dropped this week that somehow surprised people paid a lot of money to think about these things. But people have been predicting what finally happened this week for years. Ad-supported media was a ticking time bomb. The 2016 election held things off. It boosted page views and budgets and hid the structural crumbling that was taking place. Now with politics coverage cooled off and investors expecting sustained returns, we’re faced with reality: ads don’t pay enough for media to function well at any level, and so companies that have revenue models based mostly on partnering with companies to create ads, or on using banner ads, or both, are at the start of what will likely be a long-term cratering. This week, BuzzFeed missed revenue targets by a whopping $70 million. Vice missed its target by an unknown number too. And Mashable, once a semi-respectable website, was sold for the bargain-basement price of $50 million to Ziff Davis, which runs a conglomerate of sites that only make money through buzzword Google search clicks (e.g. TechBargains, AskMen, Offers.com). So basically bye bye to Mashable.

Publishers have been riding a shaky wave of ad dollars for years. That wave (like all waves) was destined to crash, but it lasted long enough for the most successful companies (BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Mic, etc.), that investors were convinced it’d be semi-permanent. Now the harsh truth sets in: It’s not only the revenue model that’ll need to change at these places, it’s the entire way they do business and produce content. They’ll have to make their content, podcasts, videos, etc., worth navigating toward and paying for, not just clicking on when it pops up on social media. With Facebook and Google sucking up virtually all new ad revenue, media companies now have to ask people to actually pay for things, whether that comes directly from paywalls like the New York Times and Washington Post, or indirectly, like purchasing tickets to a movie that is co-produced by BuzzFeed.

But this leaves companies with a huge problem: their entire identities are based on a ((cheap-to-produce-content x lots-of-clicks = lots-of-ad-revenue)) formula. People will not pay a monthly fee to access BuzzFeed listicles or Vox stories that are basically just roundups of reporting by legacy media (they’ll just pay NYT, WaPo, etc. directly for that).

That’s why you’re seeing BuzzFeed, Mic, et al scrambling to make their content more original, more exclusive and less replicable. (Go to Mic.com right now and peep how there are now “This one famous person standing up to sexism is bae” or whatever stories anymore—those stories stopped making money because people had no reason to navigate to them on Mic over any other website.)

Where we go from here is a little unclear. Five years ago many in the media were convinced the Times would wither and places like BuzzFeed and Vox would take its place. It now seems more likely to me that BuzzFeed will remain its current size or at least not really dominate the media, a lot of its ilk will die, and places that can really make an argument for their uniqueness, convince people to use them outside of social media, and directly pay for them, will thrive, or at least be okay.

I also predict (and I could be totally wrong) that as people ditch the outrage/inspiration-clickbait-ad economy, and get more accustomed to paying directly for content, that’ll open up the door for independent media to make a comeback. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence, but I predict a DNAInfo owned by its employees and funded by people in the cities it covers could do well in this upcoming era. As I’ve said before, Mask, Jacobin and others are showing what you can do with subscriptions already. It sucks that all these big companies are struggling because it means there’ll be more laid off workers, but it’s probably a good thing we’re getting away from our ad dependence.

Speaking of ad-supported websites not knowing how to make or manage money, Mic was paying George Takei tens of thousands of dollars to post a few stories on his Facebook.

Grindr’s INTO partnered with podcast Food 4 Thot. It’s the first podcast on a dating app. Cool! Cool?? Maybe these kinds of app/content partnerships will become more common.

Vox is trying to unionize! Good! Also, if you like seeing people getting owned, go to German Lopez’s Twitter.

Thanks to their union, DNAist workers will get four months of pay and a right to reuse the work they made while employed there. And in more DNAist news, DNAinfo Chicago staffers are launching their own local news publication.

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone, but VICE is a toxic, sexist, dangerous workplace.

Who do I root for, the multibillion dollar media conglomerate, or the upstart underdog shitbags who would probably beat me up in the locker room if we went to the same high school?

Final Thoughts

As I stared out the Andersen® window of the home I recently renovated with the help of Home Depot®, and furnished thanks to the reasonably priced wares I found at my local Target®, I pondered if the media was turning into a corporate-sponsored, dystopic parody of itself. The idea hurt my head. Thankfully, I had some Advil® at hand to ease my pain. As I washed down the pills with a refreshing Coca-Cola®, I thought, “boy oh boy, capitalism will kill us all.”