Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved (medium.com) 83
Joshua Topolsky, co-founder of The Verge and Vox Media, and formerly Editor-in-chief of Engadget, has published an article on Medium wherein he analyzes the ongoing and long-term issues with digital media businesses and their increasingly growing thirst for more and more clicks. Topolsky says that the rate at which media outlets are adopting the new technologies and platforms (such as video, "bots, newsletters, a morning briefing app, a lean back iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter") in an attempt to capture more audience -- and save its receding loyal reader base -- isn't going to fix the problem. Topolsky, who left Bloomberg news outlet last year amid his disagreement with Michael Bloomberg himself, writes: The Problem is that we used to have a really neat and tidy version of a media business where very large interests controlled vast swaths of the things we read, watched, and listened to. Because that system was built on the concept of scarcity and locality -- the limits of what was physically possible -- it was very easy to keep the gates and fill the coffers. Put simply, there were far fewer players in the game with far fewer outlets for their content, so audiences were easy to sell to and easy to come by. [...] The media industry now largely thinks its only working business model is to reach as many people as possible, and sell -- usually programmatically, but sometimes not -- as many advertisements against that audience as it can. If they tell you otherwise, they are lying. [...] The truth is that the best and most important things the media (let's say specifically the news media) has ever made were not made to reach the most people -- they were made to reach the right people. Because human beings exist, and we are not content consumption machines. What will save the media industry -- or at least the part worth saving -- is when we start making Real Things for people again, instead of programming for algorithms or New Things.
Re:"we used to" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say, as far as network TV and the music industry goes, the golden age was between the 1950s and the 1990s, when, by and large, the business model remained static. By the first few years of the 2000s, broadband was becoming common enough that P2P began to impact those industries. Of course they completely misunderstood what was happening, as they continue to, and did not view piracy as an expression of consumer desire, giving new players like Netflix and Apple the opportunity to build new business models.
I simply don't think the traditional entertainment units know what to do. They see their profits in jeopardy, but I doubt piracy is their chief fear. Their chief fear is that their "new media" competitors are simply going to abandon them completely and produce their own content. Amazon and Netflix are doing this, and some musical artists are already beginning to think beyond the old paradigm of the record label.
Frankly, I think traditional media is screwed; whether that's network entertainment, network news, newspapers, radio; you name it. Maybe they can twist governments' arms for a decade or two, but in the end, if they don't abandon the old models, they're dead, and seeing as they still spend an astonishing amount of time trying to defend their turf through the courts, lawmakers and international treaties, I don't think they'll ever be in a position to adapt. They don't get the customer base, and cannot accept that the captive audience of yesteryear is rapidly becoming a distant memory.
When newspapers think using scam advertisers like Outbrain is an innovative way of creating revenue, you know that media group is fucked beyond all repair.
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Frankly, I think traditional media is screwed; whether that's network entertainment, network news, newspapers, radio; you name it
Good. There is no reason newspapers (or anyone) should have so much influence over the political process. People complain about corporations and rich people having too much influence in politics, but newspapers are just as bad (if not worse), and are corporations controlled by rich people.
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There is no reason newspapers (or anyone) should have so much influence over the political process.
Well actually there IS a reason, and it's pretty simple. People are lazy, and would rather have someone else tell them what to think.
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Newspapers used to be corporations, controlled by rich people who saw themselves as keepers of an important component of our democracy - with a responsibility to the ideals of journalism. Don't laugh - the old guard rich used to actually have a set of ethics they lived by - if only to burnish their names and atone for where their money came from.
Since Newspapers stopped being able to print money, though, they've been sold off one by one to rich people who either saw themselves as somehow brilliant enough t
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Don't laugh - the old guard rich used to actually have a set of ethics they lived by
When? When was this mythical time of ethics? By the late 1800s for sure the newspapers were corrupt.
But no, the New York times is not yet one of these vanity projects - and there are probably a few others.
The NYT does a lot of good reporting, there is no doubt about that. But they, like everyone else, choose what things to show and what not, and they choose based on their own biases and desires, and that is true even if their intentions are good.
Re:"we used to" (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't anyone watch Citizen Kane anymore?
No. It has a lousy name, it should have been called, "You'll Never Believe What Happens Next With to this Man and Sweet Rosebud (wait for it)"
Re:"we used to" (Score:5, Interesting)
Yellow Journalism has always existed, granted.
However, the actual respectable papers, from the tiny one-horse-town paper with its sole proprietor, all the way up to the biggest papers in New York City, did have examples among them of integrity, responsibility, and a code of ethics that they strove to live by.
The reason why was simple - back then, the tabloid rags and propaganda-disguised-as-newspapers didn't last very long (W.R. Hearst was an anomaly, not the norm), mostly because getting the story too wrong too often came at a business-killing cost (in circulation, litigation, etc). People meanwhile figured out fairly quickly which papers could be trusted, and which ones were crap. The crap tended to fade away fairly quickly.
Was it perfect? Of course not. But at least they did manage to get it mostly right, and until recently, journalism courses did teach to a strict set of ethics and rules.
As far as story selection? Some of it is obviously due to bias, but mostly it is because the media craves one thing above all others - advertising dollars. In order to get that, they have to attract eyeballs and ears. In order to do that, they amp up the drama. After all, does the typical viewer (not you dammit, but Joe Sixpack) want to see...
* a long, complex, in-depth, non-partisan, and objective analysis of economic effects from some pending legislation in terms that require an IQ well north of room temperature, or...
* loud spasms of anger, fear, and mud-slinging between the President, protestors and Congress, all conveniently compressed into slogans and sound-bites that appeal to ideological bias, and oh yeah - conveniently fits neatly in-between commercials?
I mean c'mon - there's a reason CNN (for example) spews Nancy Grace and her ilk all over their primetime slots. People apparently don't want to be informed about events that may affect them long-term - they want the salacious and gore-filled howling, by vapid talking heads of course, over some little girl who got raped and dismembered just last week out in West Bumfuck, Nebraska!
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Whole-heartedly agree. Where is my mod points when I need them?
Re:"we used to" (Score:5, Insightful)
They understood, but they were not interested in creating this business model. Because it meant losing control. They view it as their job to tell you what you can see and when you can see it. That you would prefer to watch your favorite show at another time than 10pm on a Thursday means nothing, because that's when they know you'll tune in for your favorite show, so at the 8pm timeslot on Friday, when you would understandably prefer to watch it, you will get something inferior because that's when you will watch anyway, no matter what you get offered.
That way they get your eyes twice instead of just once.
A business model that allowed you to decide what to view and when meant a net loss to them and was certainly not something they would offer. And in their hubris, used to eliminating competition and ensuring a monopoly position for too long, they didn't even think that someone might come and simply offer to you what YOU want.
And lo and behold, they're trying to fight it now. Yet another dinosaur that just refuses to die. Too bad we can't simply drop an asteroid on them to get rid of them.
Re:"we used to" (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end the studios and advertisers are going to walk. They already are in some cases. Newspapers are the canary in the coalmine. Mainstream advertisers are abandoning them to such an extent that the daily rag in many even medium sized towns is gone, and even the semi-weeklies are in serious trouble. Major newspapers are also suffering major revenue crunches, often with mountains of debt they have to service.
With the TV industry, sooner or later cord cutting and viewing alternatives (legal and illegal) are going to do the same thing to the broadcasters; their product will degrade to the point where advertisers just walk away.
Look at what one would consider the high point of traditional television; the MASH finale. Over 121 million people tuned in on February 28, 1983 to watch the show. For the traditional model it didn't get any better than that. By 1998, with so many more cable options, the Seinfeld finale mustered 76 million viewers. By 2004, a major network show like Friends could only muster 52.5 million, half of the Roots miniseries was able to get in front of a TV in 1977. In reality, the Internet is only finishing what the five hundred channel universe began two decades ago. How can the traditional networks survive with the steady erosion, and how long will the advertisers and the studios stick around to find out?
so dump the nonconformists, go micro-payment (Score:3)
if users could invest some money in a micropayment common service, and get debited for each article they read as a non-subscriber, a stable central "bank" would make these characters more money than they get from the malware-packing page-freezing Wild West of ad servers. just sayin'...
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Actually I think TV needs to go back to the way it used to work. I watch one broadcast channel and that is the one I can get with an antenna. The broadcast stations are missing out because the want the money that the cable companies have to pay to carry them. So I watch the local morning news before I go to work for traffic and weather as well as my local news. National news I get from the Internet.
As to VOX and the Verge, I used to really like the Verge when it first started. I followed the Endgadet people
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Their chief fear is that their "new media" competitors are simply going to abandon them completely
I read an interesting article along this line of thought back in the earliest days of piracy scares.
What big movie studios were really afraid of was becoming irrelevant.
Who needs a multibillion dollar movie studio and a hundred million dollar budget if some creative kid in the basement can produce better special effects or write a more creative movie, produce it on their computer for $500 and get ten million viewers to watch it.
Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you READ the comments at the threat you're linking? Aside of a handful of relevant ones discussing the quality of the hashes that were hacked, I read little but belittling and ridicule of those that got hacked. Relevant? Insightful? Informative? What mod did you expect? Even funny would not cut it because it simply was rarely funny. Or maybe I just don't get the joke, I don't play Minecraft.
And I dare to disagree on the downmodding into the negative. There are comments that are simply idiotic. From Golden Girls to our friend with the black hole fetish. I for one certainly don't mind NOT seeing them. And if you really want to, there's always the choice to step down into the cesspool. They're all there. Not a single Golden Cosmonaut will be lost to you.
Promote discussion, agreed. And as soon as you show me ONE comment at -1 or worse that is worthy of a discussion, we'll talk.
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I think it would resolve the frequent (?) down-mods that are solely done because someone doesn't like what was said.
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Slashdot could also add in (fairly easily) a Thumb-up/Down Agree/Disagree thats entirely separate from the Moderation, that ANYONE logged in can do without using "mod points". I think an Ars system and the existing Slashdot Moderation system would likely work quite well together.
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> "No comment here should ever be hidden"
Sounds like GNAA writing this post
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After that, all of the moderation data should be released publicly
No. Retaliation is a bad enough problem when APK thinks you're the one who downmodded them.
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After that, all of the moderation data should be released publicly. We should know who modded each comment, and what modding they gave.
Says the anonymous coward.
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Hammer and nail syndrome (Score:1)
Yep. The media companies got a shiny new hammer, and everything looks like a nail. Actually spray paint would be a better analogy. The media is like a tagger that found a bag full of cans that a great graf artist left as they fled the cops. Now he's throwing up all over web sites. Nobody wants to look at it, not even people who like street art.
Number of Ads on Medium (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Number of Ads on Medium (Score:4, Informative)
Comparing crap to rotting turds (Score:1)
Last time I checked, medium.com horribly broke my "reading experience", by being all stream-ish and stupidly slow in my browser, reinventing things otherwise working fine with faulty and slow javascript, and so on, and so forth. I really don't feel like letting a tab with a medium.com article in it eat a CPU while I'm doing something else for a bit, only to come back and find it has lost my reading place in the right here fscking article.
I'm not reading forbes, AND I'm not reading medium.com either. Both su
Has he stopped amd thought about... (Score:2)
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Have you missed this year's (US) presidential campaign then?
Candidate - Manufactured Outrage - Race/Gender Baiting
Clinton - Women's Rights - White Men!
Trump - Immigrants - Muslims! Mexicans!
Sanders - Capitalism - White Male Bankers!
And those are just the leaders in the popular polls. Overall I'd say outrage, and race/gender baiting is selling just fine.
Re:Has he stopped amd thought about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Way to conflate the sane ones with Trump - every aspect of whom is manufactured.
Clinton's focus on Women's rights isn't exactly outrage (manufactured or otherwise). It's a lifelong commitment to an issue - that occasionally gets used in opportunistic ways. But it's basically sincere. She doesn't race-bait white men - except in the sense, I suppose, that you may think women's advances have to come at their expense, which doesn't have to be true.
Likewise Sanders' problems with Capitalism go way back. He's a bit more outraged, but his critique is basically on target - hardly 'manufactured', beyond perhaps the tone of voice in a political speech. But c'mon - what's a political speech at all if not a drumbeat to action. He does blame bankers - and I guess maybe the majority of them are white males, but really. Can nobody criticize anybody without it being some form of race/gender baiting?
Of course, you're probably just angling for 'funny' mod points, but on the (not so) off chance that you really believe this "manufactured outrage / race-gender baiting" metric is even remotely informative...
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I don't follow politics, but I thought most people outside of reddit/slashdot/etc, were very unhappy with any of the candidates.
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Has he stopped and thought about the fact that his two sites (Verge and Vox) may just be shit sites?
Exactly. Both are warmed over reincarnations of Daily Kos, which died because it sucked.
that's a joke (Score:5, Funny)
So what will matter in the next age of media?
Compelling voices and stories, real and raw talent, new ideas that actually serve or delight an audience, brands that have meaning and ballast; these are things that matter in the next age of media.
No, that's a pipe dream. Talent doesn't matter. Compelling stories don't matter. New ideas don't matter, and brands don't matter.Click here to find out the seven things that a mom discovered that matter! [zerobugsan...faster.net]
"Quality news" has a real but small audience. Most people are looking for the next thing to click on to feed their buzzing squirrel brain.
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To keep the smallness of that market in perspective, I remind myself that this cat video got 91million views [youtube.com].
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This site [telegraph.co.uk] used to be a useful news site. In recent times, however, the site has gone to a subscription model (easily circumvented via blocking cookies or use of private browsing mode), dropped all reader comments (and hence reader engagement), and now adopted yet another new layout, where even m
I'm sure (Score:2)
I'm sure, that if you tried, you could write, a sentence that, rambles more, and has, more commas in it.
News vs Entertainment (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem is the bulk of that audience doesn't want real news, they want entertainment. When there was scarcity of outlets, they were mostly controlled by players who did both news and entertainment.
Today, much of what passes for "news" is really entertainment. Looking at what people I know pass around as news articles are really some blog repost, of a blog repost, of a (maybe) news article. The blog reposts contain opinionated rants, adding no inherent value other than confirming the already biased opinions of the readers. Frequently the original news article isn't actual "news", but a press release or FUD article that simply quotes a government statistic or celebrity/politician soundbite.
I'd appreciate it if the Slashdot overlords could contribute to the fight by editing submissions so they go to actual original articles and not click-bait blogs. (The ghost of Roland Piquepaille is watching you!)
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Micro-Embargo (Score:1)
The physical world has micro-embargos.
If a reporter from Newspaper X finished a story and was the first to publish it, then Newspaper X had an effective monopoly.
It lasted until the competition could assign their own reporter and get their own story in their own paper.
In the meantime, those who wanted The News needed to buy the paper with the breaking story.
On the Internet, that micro-embargo lasts until Google indexes and caches the content.
So the newspapers sell the only thing they can: advertising
Oh for... (Score:2)
Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved
I haven't got a media business. Are you so insecure in the quality of your stories that the only way you think you can get readers is to make people think the story personally affects them?
A somewhat rentier business got end run (Score:5, Interesting)
The business model was abusive and ripe for someone to do an end run.
The first sign I saw of this would be a local newspaper that carried just classifieds that were free for most purposes. They combined the online submission with print for the masses. I suspect that the news papers weren't happy with this.
The internet started to pick away at this. I would say the gut shot was craigslist and similar sites. Quite simply that was an instant lights out for an entire revenue stream.
The other was google adsense. Not that it is a great way to fund a site these days, but in the early days it was so damn easy to get started and your tiny site could instantly produce revenue. This allowed for some of the earliest web publications to make money and grow.
Google adsense wasn't just a slight revolution but it was a revolution in thinking. It had been proceeded by doubleclick. They were a huge pain in the ass if you were a nobody. They wanted to screen their prospective publishers to make sure they had the volumes and respectability. This translated to their preferring to land old media companies who were doing an online presence.
But what shocks me is that the old media companies have largely doubled down on what made them suck. They are still wildly biased. They don't seem to care about actual journalism such as taking down bad politicians or exposing evil companies. Then to add insult to all this they have adopted some of the worst practices of the internet such as clickbaiting or the various dark practises.
For instance, in my city there have been a spate of murders. Serious ones such as shootings on the core downtown streets. Reading the local newspapers they are talking about it in the general sense of a spate of murders. But no stories that paint a picture of who did what and why they might have had it coming, or not. Then I go on reddit and find eye-witness accounts, pictures, and stories about long running feuds between families. How is it that reddit has become the paper of record in a city of 1 million?
Then there are the autoplay videos. Wow what asshole came up with that gem. Not only do they autoplay, but they will follow you down the page, and even when paused will just start playing after a while. Then there are the videos that just keep streaming one video after another. These companies are wondering why we are all getting adblockers? Do they not understand that their cunning ways are effectively creating the drive and desire to dump them? That once dumped that we won't be coming back?
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I will live with images from ad servers if they are fast. Animations, video, and even sound have got to to as well as those ads that are embedded in the text of the site!
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They also became the de-facto source of news. If they liked a politician or a party then they would not cover it negatively. If a friend of the owners got in trouble there would be no reporting
Newspapers are corporations controlled by rich people.
Ubiquity of access != Success (Score:2)
.
With so many sources of content to compete with, the successful digital content provider does not go out to meet the content consumers, the content provider encourages the content consumers to come to meet it (i.e.,
is dying (Score:2)
Yep (Score:2)
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but it has something to do with "gamers are dead." Nope, guess gamers aren't dead. We're still right here where we've always been.
If so-called "gamers" actually read those articles instead of getting all butthurt and crying SJW, they'd have read what I read in those articles which was:
"Gamers as an exclusionary term is dead. Gamers aren't just 15-25 year old men playing shooters, and those young men and the industry as a whole needs to admit that."
You goddamned SJWs kept fucking insisting that a man (trans woman here--I know what I'm talking about, tranny please) in a mini-skirt two fucking sizes too small for HIM whose body language is and manner or speaking are utterly masculine has some fucking right to claim he's a woman. Is that fucking crossdresser you're trying to make me believe is a woman even on HRT?
You should know better than to doubt some OTHER transpersons internal identity based just on appearance. Would you have liked that if/when it happened to you? And tranny please, I'm also
Hey, look at the clock... (Score:2)
It can be saved (Score:2)
All about comics pages (Score:2)
Look, the dirty secret of both TV and newspaper media is that they exist only to sell words wrapped around the comics pages (newspaper) or the cartoons (TV).
Whenever they go away from that model, they die.
Was true when I worked as a teen in advertising at newspapers in the 70s.
Still is true.
People rarely read editorial pages - when I read the WSJ print edition, I skip past those two pages, suitable only for fishwrap.
Every step away from that model results in fewer readers or viewers.
Adapt.
He is partially wrong (Score:2)
Put simply, there were far fewer players in the game with far fewer outlets for their content, so audiences were easy to sell to and easy to come by.
Right there, he is 100% wrong by 180 degrees. The number of media outlets used to be HUGE AND VARIED in both Europe and America. Then Clinton and EU allowed for media to merge and we ended up with a relatively few large media companies trying hard to control access. Basically, had Clinton and EU NOT allowed for the massive growth via mergers, then we would not have the issues that we have today. It took groups like Murdoch's and clear channel to trying to buy and dominate that has caused the real issues.
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I remember Hurricane Charley (2004) . Every one of their FM stations was broadcasting AM580 news (the weather). Had to break out the shortwave to get MUSIC while waiting for the fallen trees to be removed.
3 words: Zero-Sum Game. (Score:4, Insightful)
They are all competing for a (more or less) fixed amount of time from a (more or less) fixed number of audience members. More competition == less for each competitor.
Sorry, I meant to say THIS ONE AMAZING FACT WILL EXPLAIN WHY YOUR BUSINESS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE!
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WTF? Not content consumption machines?! (Score:2)
From TFS:
Because human beings exist, and we are not content consumption machines.
Utter rubbish. Media, manufacturers and retailers have hitched their wagons to the star that is Mass Consumption and they did it decades ago. He's talking out of both ends or can't see the forest for the trees.
Warner Bros made 3 cartoons in the 50's, directed by Friz Freleng and paid for by Albert P. Sloan (That's General Motors). "By Word of Mouse," "Heir Conditioned" and "Yankee Dood It." Don't bother looking in youtube, I checked and couldn't find them. I do have them in my shelf of DVDs.
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Dammit, ALFRED, not Albert! T.T
The Preview button, it did not save me!
Noooo..... (Score:2)
"The Problem is that we used to have a really neat and tidy version of a media business where very large interests controlled vast swaths of the things we read, watched, and listened to."
Dear Media Companies,
No, the Problem is that most of your content is SHIT and CLICKBAIT and no one wants it. That's the Problem.
Signed,
Everyone
Too young (Score:2)
Topolsky is too young, he doesn't remember how things were before the 1990's when media companies started merging and becoming mega conglomerates. In the 1980's and prior there were far more media companies and they were far more independent than they are now. If CBS in bumhole Texas didn't want to air something they didn't have to, if ABC in jack-all Pennsylvania wanted to air gospel services they damn well did. It was easier to get movies into nationwide theaters, more choices for newspapers and magazines