Addressing Mashable’s “Pivot” and the Digital Industry’s F-Word
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
This is the third in a series about the digital advertising industry. The first post you can read here. The second post you can read here.
A commenter of one of the previous pieces in this series wrote that it was “irresponsible” of me to use hyperlatives such as “Free Fall” in my title when describing the Digital Ad Industry.
Reading between the lines, I understand this comment to mean, “Please don’t create a panic. Not when our occupational existence is so precarious. Not until an alternative route has been figured out. Not until I get a job at Uber.”
I understand the panic. The outsized reaction to Mashable’s recent round of layoffs and shift to more video and social platforms (what start-up folk refer to as a pivot) has business press freaking out for being, well, just like every other digital media company. But should this be a shock? Covering the latest in tech for 10 years doesn’t mean you get emerging-tech multiples. Just ask Om Malik. The HuffPo sale happened years ago; Tumblr hasn’t lived up to its sale price. (Pulling out the harmonica) the irrational upside of media startups is gone.
(Along these lines, Alex Magnin wrote a fantastic piece explaining why digital media founders are like heroin addicts (my analogy, not his), upping the ante and chasing the capital dragon, making heftier promises with each funding round that current business models can’t keep.)
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t make digital media companies feel any better when he recently shared that the Instant Articles capability would now be available to all publishers. Bloggers and small independents jumped out of their chairs for the new, shiny, traffic-generating tool, but more mainstream media companies have a more measured reaction. Are we trading “audience” for “traffic?”
The New York Times validated the paranoia by sharing some disturbing data indicating that digital media companies are maxing out on audience, and increasing percentages of traffic — as much as 40% — on some sites is attributable to Facebook. Facebook has become, in essence, like a virtual mall, providing everything consumers need — or a path to those needs — within it’s virtual walls. We can eat (ordering via Instant Messenger), read our favorite magazines (via Instant Articles), watch TV (via live in-app streaming), fantasize (Oculus/VR), and hang with friends — all within its environment.
So our readers need us…Why?
When I sold the blog-supported media company I co-founded, in 2014, there were grumblings of change in the industry. The exuberance around blogging as a competitor to mainstream media had dissipated, but by and large we’d seen new areas of growth around optimizing our programmatic advertising, building proprietary tools that enabled us to perform media campaigns effectively and efficiently, and licensing our content for native advertising campaigns. In essence we proved that New Media and New New Media could co-exist and add value.
But fast forward to the end of 2015, when I was determining what to do next, and I’ll confess it was a different story. For one, necessary-but-inconvenient ad standards had caused even some of the best content providers to stumble and reconfigure. The new normal was more about compliance than content. It seemed that a preponderance of new media aggregators (or reiterators, as I like to think of them) had cropped up that shone brightly at the onset of funding but then quickly sputtered out when no unique voice or platform could be found behind them. Mobile and video, the darlings in the VC world and full of potential, were riddled with measurement issues and still hard to monetize or scale via the ever-present, ever-despised pre-roll format. Ad tech was no longer a sexy differentiator, but rather like that cousin you saw at every freaking family gathering who ate the food but offered no new conversation — a staple that you put up with. And platforms were becoming so large and established they felt siloed, unapproachable, even corporate.
I wondered, what’s left? Where is there still room to grow? What’s a media innovator to do? And then I remembered: 1999.
That’s when I started my digital career. That was the year when inordinate amounts of capital were put into digital companies, and when best practices in online media were still fairly new. No one yet knew that throwing half your fundraise into a portal deal to stimulate traffic growth was unsustainable, or that dumping millions of random email addresses scraped from a CD-ROM purchased off the Internet was a bad idea.
At least we pretended we didn’t know.
I was on the launching team of a startup that needed to ramp up quickly. We had approximately ten weeks to hire writers, train them, and post approximately 2,000 articles onto our Website. I’m not sure where the founders got that number, but I’m guessing that’s what they determined was a launchworthy threshold and what, from a pageview standpoint, backed into their revenue projections. Doing the math, it accounted for about eight articles per writer, per day.
Our content acquisition strategy consisted of hiring anyone crazy enough to agree to attempt eight articles a day and constant use of the phrase “Chop the chicken multiple ways.” I recall our editorial director attempting to mitigate my concern by assuring me, “These articles don’t have to be long.” On my team of writers: One ad copy guy, an out-of-work chef, an adventure tour guide, a former elementary school teacher, and a lit major just out of college. All but one was under 30. All but one had written professionally before; none of them knew html.
I remember having a bit of an existential crisis, having come from established publishers such as Time Inc., and The New York Times: Is THIS what it will now take to succeed in digital media? A total disavowal of the meticulousness we applied to every word, phrase, headline, and fact? Is sheer volume the most relevant metric?
It got better.
Seven years later, sitting on a panel representing my company, BlogHer, alongside “traditional” media luminaries, I was asked if user-generated content, or UGC, was now the new normal. Would it overtake professionally produced, copyedited and fact-checked (read: expensive) content? My answer: Of course not. If anything, UGC would be the ants that carry the messaging of traditional media out into the corners it couldn’t see. Though the best content, wherever it came from, would always win. The cream, I said, always rises.
All this is to say, should we be panicking now?
I say, let’s not panic, digital media friends. This isn’t 9/11, or a market crash, or anything like what left us unemployed in the past. It’s a warning shot, and a not-so-subtle nudge from our users to stop futzing with user experience and to streamline immediately before they leave us forever. But at least they care enough about the content to want to ad-block it.
OK, Facebook is eating our lunch. But we’ve been eating the equivalent of a soggy baloney sandwich; they can have that lunch. Maybe we ought to change our diet, change the way we monetize, and change what we are monetizing.
And remember: We thought Yahoo was eating our lunch back in 2001, and if we’ve learned anything from Yahoo it’s that you can’t be all things to all people. Facebook would love to do original content, but it doesn’t. In fact, that is the one area where their numbers are declining. Facebook built the perfect content engine, but you still have the gas.
Just don’t raise VC capital while building this content, unless you are planning on building a proprietary distribution mechanism, analytics platform, marketplace, or VR-enabled on-demand food-delivery service on top of it. And think of a new way to get people to pay for it.
And don’t forget: The cream always rises.
If you have managed to figure out how to do this … Call me?
_______________
NEXT: I know, I promised you happy news, in the form of innovation; things that are going right in digital advertising. I’ll share some more on what is getting me excited and The New, New Native Advertising.