Content Finds a Way
The goal is to help it, and to unlock more of it
Nuance. That was something I tried to focus on in yesterday’s post about the changes taking place at Medium. But it’s also hard to do nuance in 500 (ish) words. There’s always more… nuance. As such, I wanted to follow up on a couple of things.
First and foremost, while I’m obviously a big believer in the audacious goal Medium is going after, I recognize this is not for everyone. Having come from the content world, I heard from quite a few friends (as well as some frenimies) with thoughts about the state of the industry that many of them are still a part of. And while I do believe that by and large, the industry is on an unsustainable path, I think there are some folks doing things to mitigate risk and also move away from avenues untenable.
Everyone has seen and will continue to see a lot of the larger players in publishing move more and more operations to the video side of the equation. The reason why is neither secret nor accident. Advertising’s biggest business remains television and television is video. As such, television advertising translates more directly to video, even when on the internet. It’s usually not a direct conversion, nor should it be, and people are coming up with new an innovative ways to make video advertising work around content built for smartphones.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are many publishers who are not trying to “boil the ocean” and do everything, but instead are very vertically focused. Because such audiences are highly targeted, advertising tends to work a lot better here as well and doesn’t necessarily lead down the pageview drain.
Sports, in my mind, is one area that is particularly attuned for the advertising world because since the days of Arnold Palmer, there has been such a natural relationship between brands and athletes. This will continue.
Back to speaking more broadly, currently, to do advertising for a massive audience in any sort of interesting way, you need a large sales team devoted to this. There are ways right now to make this work, but it’s hard to scale. And, going forward, eventually, my guess is that this model eventually breaks down to the point where it no longer makes sense. Maybe it remains an option for the very biggest players. Maybe. But again, you’re already seeing many of them shift more and more toward video for a reason…
And yet, we know content isn’t simply going to go away. To quasi-quote Dr. Ian Malcolm, content, uh, finds a way. It has since the dawn of the written word and that will continue. Which is exactly why I’m excited about Medium’s audacious bet. If the company can figure out a way to do what it’s attempting to do, it’s potentially a new lease on life for some current forms of content, but more importantly, it opens up avenues for brand new types of content that might otherwise never have existed.
I think about myself, ten years ago. I was just a guy working as a web developer down in San Diego who was blogging on the side. But I grew to love writing on the internet so much that I left my day job to pursue it full time. Quite a bit of pain and fear ensued as I struggled to figure out ways to monetize my content. AdSense was easy, but tiny. Reaching out to advertisers directly was tedious, and still didn’t nearly cover the bills (my savings did that). And again, that was ten years ago, when there was less competition and CPMs looked better.
I wound up in the arms of VentureBeat (thanks guys!), and later TechCrunch, because those guys were doing what I was trying to do but at a scale where they could make it work. But even that scale at the time hasn’t scaled with time. You’d need to be significantly larger than those guys were back then to make things work well today. This is not an easy business.
That, in my mind, is why we should be rooting for Medium to help fundamentally change the nature of the business. Again, not for everyone, but for a lot of people. Imagine if your head was bursting with information you wanted to share but simply couldn’t do it with today’s business models. The hope is to not only enable the next VentureBeats and the next TechCrunches, but also the next John Grubers, the next Ben Thompsons of the world, and to make their journeys to success more seamless. But even more importantly, make such paths feasible for far more people.
