Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved (medium.com)

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.

Comments

"we used to"

[Anonymous Coward]

How many years was the market stable for? 20 at most.
There was the era of 2 local papers and 4 channels on TV.
Then there was 1 local paper and 20 channels.
Then 0.5 a local paper and 200 channels and the internet
Now there is 0.1 local papers and 200,000 channels and the internet

The "good old days" really just refers to the time the current batch of high level managers learned the ropes.

Re:"we used to"

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:"we used to"

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:"we used to"

[bev_tech_rob]

Whole-heartedly agree. Where is my mod points when I need them?

Re: "we used to"

[Anonymous Coward]

And in a few years, Google will neaed to cease to exist for the same reason.

Re:"we used to"

[Opportunist]

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"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"we used to"

[Rob Y.]

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 to make these dinosaurs successful in an online world - or as business people with an agenda to promote (though sometimes that agenda is little more than their own self images). So, yes, you're largely right. But no, the New York times is not yet one of these vanity projects - and there are probably a few others.

Re:"we used to"

[MightyMartian]

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?

Re:"we used to"

[phantomfive]

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"

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't anyone watch Citizen Kane anymore?

Re:"we used to"

[phantomfive]

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"

[LWATCDR]

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 to Thisismynext and that became the Verge. They where good with tech news but then they thought they were real journalists. I would be driven crazy by all the errors I found in some of the posts and then they went off on a Hipster social engineering policy and that was enough for me.

Re:"we used to"

[Penguinisto]

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!

Re:"we used to"

[Anonymous Coward]

Old newspapers were never any better than Pravda. At least Russians understood Pravda was a joke.

Re:"we used to"

[thinkwaitfast]

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.

Advertisting

[Anonymous Coward]

Explains the growth of AD BLOCKERS. If they were more STATIC, if they more targeted the person
reading, perhaps there would be less reason to use an adblocker.

Re:Advertisting

[desdinova 216]

I think if the ads were static images there would be less ad blocking, with the way it is now ad are the largest source of malware

Hammer and nail syndrome

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Jonah Hex]

I tried both with and without an ad blocker and I see zero ads. Any wonder that I prefer reading articles there? Compare to Forbes, who won't even let me view an article without disabling my ad blocker or whitelisting it, which means I usually just skip the article or load it in something I don't bother installing an ad blocker on, IE/Edge. Which leads me to wonder, how is Medium doing it the "right way" for my preferences? Any money changing hands? Build now monetize later?

Re:Number of Ads on Medium

[msmash]

Medium is relatively new in the business, and it currently does advertorial. And while it has avoided ads. That is likely to change soon (video).

Has he stopped amd thought about...

[Pubstar]

Has he stopped and thought about the fact that his two sites (Verge and Vox) may just be shit sites? Clickbait, manufactured outrage, and race/gender baiting doesn't sell as well as it used to guys.

Re:Has he stopped amd thought about...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> manufactured outrage, and race/gender baiting doesn't sell as well as it used to guys

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...

[Rob Y.]

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...

Re:Has he stopped amd thought about...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't vote for Clinton or Sanders for assistant carcass remover on the interstate. TRUMP 2016.

Re:Has he stopped amd thought about...

[tomhath]

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.

Re:Has he stopped amd thought about...

[thinkwaitfast]

> selling just fine

I don't follow politics, but I thought most people outside of reddit/slashdot/etc, were very unhappy with any of the candidates.

that's a joke

[phantomfive]

From the article:

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!

"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.

Re:that's a joke

[Zibodiz]

Of course, this is anecdotal, but what about news outlets like Jalopnik? When I started reading Jalop, I was not a car guy. I read it because of the wit of the authors. Gradually, they've turned me into a car guy, and I do occasionally read automotive news from other sources, but even now, I choose to get 90%+ of my car fix from them. They actively avoid clickbait headlines (and the comments quickly call them out for it if they don't), so that's clearly not what draws their audience. In spite of that, they are one of the largest automotive news websites in the world (actually, at one point a couple years ago, they were the largest; I don't know if that's changed). Many of their readers came there just like me, and stayed for the same reason. They don't just produce news; they produce entertainment and community. It's just like a favorite TV show; you'll keep watching it because you have an emotional connection to it, not because of catchy episode titles.

Re:that's a joke

[phantomfive]

There is definitely a market for quality. It's a smaller market, but it's there.
To keep the smallness of that market in perspective, I remind myself that this cat video got 91million views.

Re:that's a joke

[whoever57]

What is interesting to me is how one news site that I read (but probably won't soon) has gone downhill. Perhaps the PHBs were convinced by a "compelling" sales pitch by a content management company, I don't know.

This site 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 more of the page is taken up by clickbait links. The categorization of stories is often wrong. The new site puts the opinion columns in far more prominence, so perhaps the objective is to be a paid outlet for paid (or the owner's) propaganda.

I find it hard to believe that this produces more revenue. I expect that the remaining paying users must be diehard loyalists in order to continue paying for this excrement.

I will continue to happily read

[Anonymous Coward]

and also use uBlock Origin as well as Disconnect, Privacy Badger.

I rather like the "cold war" between the ad networks, their customers and the ad block crowd. It serves to advance technology...

Target the right People, Very True

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting to the right people, not the most people has worked before sometimes in spectacular fashion.
The example that comes most to mind is the campaign for Firefox early on. They had big adds in I think the WSJ. Not because they expected their average user to read the WSJ, but because they wanted to impress on CEO's IT-VPs etc. that Firefox was a viable option. The target was only a few thousand people.

There was another case I heard of when I was taking a business course where some company (forget the name) took out a full page add in a metro paper, just to influence a couple of dozen people.
pgmer6809

I'm sure

[edittard]

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.

I'm sure, that if you tried, you could write, a sentence that, rambles more, and has, more commas in it.

News vs Entertainment

[chill]

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!)

Re:News vs Entertainment

[thinkwaitfast]

Amusing ourselves o Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Re:News vs Entertainment

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. I read the book multiple times. Thing is: I do not see a way out....

A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[Anonymous Coward]

While this new economic environment could be very negative for many web properties, the new owners of Slashdot have a really good opportunity here.

Sites like Reddit, Hacker News and Stack Overflow have become known for their censorship and limiting of open discussion. Say the wrong thing at Reddit or Hacker News, and downmod brigades will take you out. Ask a question that's isn't deemed "good" at Stack Overflow, and it will be locked.

This is where Slashdot could really take the lead. Instead of being a site with rampant censorship and moderation gone wild, Slashdot could become the premiere tech-focused site where freedom of expression is king. People could post here without worrying about some tyrants censoring them, for example.

Of course, a lot of work is needed to take advantage of this opportunity. Just today we saw one topic where the modding was out of control. 7 of 28 comments were modded down to -1, including one relevant, insightful and informative comment that was wrongly modded down. Something is very wrong when 25% of the comments are downmodded. At one point is was closer to 50% of them being downmodded, when the submission was still young!

At the very least, we need to see downmodding comments below 0 removed completely. All comments at 0 should be visible by default, too. No comment here should ever be hidden. But downmodding should be kept around to counter abusive upmods. Sometimes there are comments at +5 that shouldn't be there, so downmodding is needed to fix up those mistakes.

After that, all of the moderation data should be released publicly. We should know who modded each comment, and what modding they gave. This data would also be available in bulk form so that further analysis could be performed by the community. We could collectively detect the various forms of mod abuse and then the Slashdot admins could stamp it out. Mods found to have abused their power would never moderate again. Any modding they had done in the past, including any suspected of being done through alternate accounts, would be undone.

Slashdot's current approach clearly hasn't been working. Traffic here has been dwindling for a long time, so big changes are needed. Revamping the mod system to promote discussion, rather than suppress it, would be a good start. Slashdot could undergo the revival that it as so badly needed for so long. It would be a revival spearheaded by freedom.

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[CrashNBrn]

Maybe your default posting level - which I imagine for many is likely "1" would be the number of down-mods your post can 'resist' until it is reduced.
I think it would resolve the frequent (?) down-mods that are solely done because someone doesn't like what was said.

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[fulldecent]

> "No comment here should ever be hidden"

Sounds like GNAA writing this post

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[CrashNBrn]

Most of the time I would mod a post, I can't as my mod points have expired. I would say that mod points shouldn't stack, but expiring is just shitty.

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.

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[Anonymous Coward]

And as soon as you show me ONE comment at -1 or worse that is worthy of a discussion, we'll talk.

Why didn't you actually read the comment you just replied to?

It linked to one such comment: https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9033805&cid=51989529

That comment should not be -1, obviously.

And how the hell can somebody show you a comment that's lower than -1?

-1 is currently the lowest it can go!

Your comment is a good example of why some down votes are needed, though.

Your comment should be down voted to a more appropriate 1 or 0 rating.

Your comment is not insightful at all, because you're clearly wrong.

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[omnichad]

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.

Re:A great opportunity for a Slashdot revival

[phantomfive]

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.

Micro-Embargo

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[wonkey_monkey]

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

[EmperorOfCanada]

The traditional news business somewhat became a rentier business. One of the biggest revenue sources for newspapers was classified advertising. They would charge 20-30 dollars for something that cost them pennies. 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. If one of their major advertisers got in trouble then little or nothing with lots of room for the companies to spin the negative news.

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?

Re:A somewhat rentier business got end run

[DriveDog]

That last bit... I'm fine with GIF image ads served from the same source. Stuff from other servers and/or animated/video/screen-controlling crud has to go. So... either I get to block it, or I'm not coming to the site at all. Garbage instead of news? Forget it. At least the junk in Us and People might be factual and might have been actually researched. Once I'm gone, I'm forgetting that the site existed, so yep, I'm not coming back, no matter how much you fix it.

Re:A somewhat rentier business got end run

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This makes more sense when you consider all of the newspaper consolidation in the last 20 years. Each regional collective was losing money slowly. So you buy a few regional newspapers, lump them together, fire the duplicate staff, and now you're profitable for a few more years. When the new conglomerate starts becoming unprofitable, you buy a few more regions and repeat the process.

Eventually we'll end up with The Newspaper Company (much like AT&T was The Telephone Company), but who cares? The people who matter made profit the entire way, and the politicians who are supposed to be regulating these mergers are quite glad to have the muckraking staff reduced from hundreds of papers to a handful. Less people to dig through your history and find your skeletons.

Re:A somewhat rentier business got end run

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:A somewhat rentier business got end run

[LWATCDR]

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!

Re:A somewhat rentier business got end run

[EmperorOfCanada]

Adding to this mess they bought each of the newspapers with huge amounts of debt.

Comparing crap to rotting turds

[Anonymous Coward]

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 suck too much to visit.

Ubiquity of access != Success

[QuietLagoon]

TFA seems to indicate that having a large number of access points for content (~(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") ~) is not the arrow to success. I would agree.

.
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., the content provider).

With so many sources of content, the provider can easily get lost among them all.

So let your content stand out and let your content consumers find you.

is dying

[ArhcAngel]

Been reading /. since the very early days and keep coming back because the site stays out of the contents way (the boycott beta days not withstanding) I also used to read Engadget regularly but no longer. When Topolsky and gang ran off to start TheVerge I was intrigued and was there the day they went live. It was clear they had designed their site to be for the blogger by the blogger. I can't say journalist as the content wasn't always of journalistic integrity/quality. I read an article who's entire purpose was to dissect Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe"! The article itself was the author's self musings on his crush on said artist and the comments section was mostly other bloggers complimenting his use of white space and picture placement in the article. Very little substance. Perhaps that's the reason so many media outlets are dying?

Yep

[DriveDog]

Real Things. Hallelujah. One person gets it.

I want news, not blipverts or propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to have news, and by that I mean a run down of facts of things that happened without spin or politics or ads or any of the garbage so common to ALL the so-call news I've heard all of my life. Hell, give me something like that and I'd pay big bucks for it. What I see now I can't trust or (in the case of entertainment news) don't care about. Heck, I've tracked local weather reports that tend to scew towards no rain and sunny skies every single weekend/holiday without fail, even when there is no way that could happen.

riiiight

[vel-ex-tech]

While there are probably some good points to be had here about starting a "media company" vs. say a "journalism company" (or even *gasp* an "investigative journalism company"), there seems to be an additional problem that Vox, Gawker, Medium, Verge, io9, et al all share.

I can't put my finger on it, 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. And sorry, Vox, Gawker, Medium, Verge, io9 et al, I'm pretty certain that there is not a single sexually frustrated misogynderd to be found among all the people I play games with. We play a lot of cooperative games like Monster Hunter. If we play competitively, it's a game that requires some amount of skill such as Gran Turismo or Armored Core. Those are just 3 of my all-time favorites. Nope, us gamers are guys who get laid a lot, the odd man among men who works construction for the day job and comes home to a wife, lots of homosexual and bisexual people, even a former stripper who now works in a more... er... professional field, and hell, trannies, we've got trannies and lots of them and even a few of the elusive kind of genderqueen/transgender person who was born female but mostly identifies as male.

But it doesn't fucking matter. What are we doing today? You need 3 chaos scales and a stout avian bone of all things? Ok, people, I've got the quest up, lock and load, let's hunt us a monster!

Only a dipshit gives a flying fuck what the gender or sex life is of that bowgunner or that insect glave user or that person swinging around a huge-ass hammer.

Vox, Gawker, Medium, Verge, io9 el al are dead.

However, the SJWs have managed to sufficiently infuriate me. You can think whatever the hell you want of me. You think I'm sexual abusive towards your cisfemale hunnies? You think I'm a racist? You think I think women shouldn't be programmers? Get a fucking life. Sticks and stones, etc.

There is one thing the SJWs have managed to accomplish. Well, several actually, in no particular order.

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? Fuck. Well, you done riled up the Apache attack copters. They are not armed with 16 AGM Hellfire precision radar guided surface to air missiles as they may have led you to believe. They are instead armed with 76 Hydra 70 rockets.

You know what, SJWs? I fucking notice when I get hit by a stray rocket. And why don't you just piss down my boots and tell me it's raining if you want me to believe the feminists over there cheering on the Apache attack copters are just some vocal minority. (However, you feminists will wish that the Apache attack copters had gone with the AGM Hellfire precision missiles when the stray rockets start hitting you. I don't need to link once again to documentation that this has already happened to one of your womyn-born-womyn over in Detroit.)

So, call me sexist, but I am no longer willing to teach introductory programming, Boolean algebra, and relational data to the cisfemale hunnies. I don't care about tech's diversity problems any more. There is nothing I can fucking do to get a cisfemale hunny interested in learning this shit enough that she's willing to do shit like run through a Linux from Scratch just for the hell of it and the experience.

You could have had your fucking female programmer. You could have let tech be just a little more diverse. But you pissed off the Apache attack copters before I was able to save up enough money to make it happen. You did absolutely fucking nothing while attacking people close to me and starting up Facebook drama.

You get no female programmer out of me.

Re:riiiight

[CronoCloud]

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 trans so I DO know what I'm talking about.

So, call me sexist, but I am no longer willing to teach introductory programming, Boolean algebra, and relational data to the cisfemale hunnies.

Why yes, you are sexist. And transpeople more than anyone should know better. What if MAC or Sephora had refused me service? What if Makeupalley insisted on my birth certificate before allowing me to register?

In the few programming classes I ever took, there were always women.

There is nothing I can fucking do to get a cisfemale hunny interested in learning this shit enough that she's willing to do shit like run through a Linux from Scratch just for the hell of it and the experience.

I think the Linuxchix would like to have a word with you.

http://www.linuxchix.org/

But perhaps if would be easier to get women involved in "learning this shit" if you didn't refer to them and objectify them as "cisfemale hunnies"

Re:riiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes, you are sexist. And transpeople more than anyone should know better. What if MAC or Sephora had refused me service? What if Makeupalley insisted on my birth certificate before allowing me to register?

We have to stand strong, together; we, the trans people who risk being assaulted and possibly murdered for using the wrong bathroom or entering the wrong place...and those who must endure microaggressions and sexist air conditioning every day. Be strong, more-than-half-the-population-in-the-western-first-world; we're gonna get through this together.

It can be saved

[DogDude]

Your media business CAN be saved, if you revert to the previous business model: SELL YOUR OWN ADVERTISEMENTS. It's the (very wrong) idea that media companies can replace their entire sales staff with some drop in from an ad network that are causing these companies so many problems.

All about comics pages

[WillAffleckUW]

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

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:He is partially wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I still remember how awful things got in the 90's with Clear Channel buying up every radio station they could. I would lie down at night and listen to the radio. When an ad or song I couldn't stand (by that point, Californication by RHCP) I would change stations. It got to the point that no matter which station I changed to the same ad would be playing at the same time on every station, only a few seconds out of sync. The only safe-haven was college radio, but most of the college DJ's had awful tastes in music or were being liberalized with Mexican content for all the illegal aliens.

Re:He is partially wrong

[packrat0x]

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.

[sootman]

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!

*ad*

*ad*

CLICK HERE TO START SLIDESHOW

[ fake "next" button ]

Hey, look at the clock...

[mccrew]

...time for your meds.

so dump the nonconformists, go micro-payment

[swschrad]

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'...

Addons = inferior & inefficient vs. hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

Can addons do 17 items hosts do 4 speed, security, & reliability:

1.) Protect vs. bad sites (past ads)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets
3.) Protect vs. dyndns botnets
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS
6.) Protect vs. poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam bad links
9.) Protect vs. phish bad links
10.) Protect vs. caps
11.) Get by dns blocks
12.) Avoid dns request logs
13.) Speed up 2 ways (adblocks + hardcodes)
14.) Work on anything webbound multiplatform.
15.) Ez data control
16.) Block ads more efficiently
17.) UBlock now uses hosts (no DNS benefits vs. tracker or dns poisoning) - poor imitation = "sincerest form of flattery"

?

Hosts = native vs. illogically "Bolting on 'MoAr'" & not ClarityRay blockable like addons.

APK

P.S.=> Hosts do MORE w/ less & start before REDUNDANT inefficient addons (as 1st resolver)

Hosts ~7mb (current data) vs. threats/ads. UBlock = 63++ MB -> http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte...

I stop ads that infect you & slow you down

[Anonymous Coward]

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...

Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS, routers & antivirus + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lighten dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.

Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads in Chrome

* Ads rob bandwidth/speed paid for, security (openbid adnetworks abuse), privacy in tracking + anonymity.

Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogtrackers) natively. Hosts != blockable by ClarityRay (like. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slower usermode browser addons)

APK

P.S. - Proven safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & yes it is safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )

For the best possible hosts file?

[Anonymous Coward]

APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...

Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS, routers & antivirus + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lighten dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.

Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads in Chrome

* Ads rob bandwidth/speed paid for, security (openbid adnetworks abuse), privacy in tracking + anonymity.

Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogtrackers) natively. Hosts != blockable by ClarityRay (like. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slower usermode browser addons)

APK

P.S. - Proven safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & yes it is safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )

Re:For the best possible hosts file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad hosts files can't block idiots who are far too proud of their simple little scripts.

Re:For the best possible hosts file?

[Anonymous Coward]

He should be proud you can't prove him wrong, that you haven't done better yourself and that you stalk him in jealousy.

WTF? Not content consumption machines?!

[TigerPlish]

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. Heh. Anyway, those 3 toons, despite me being an absolute ink-and-paint addict, boil my blood instantly.

Their theme? Mass Production and Mass Consumption. They were brainwashing material. Ugh.

I don't understand this Topolsky fella. Maybe he isn't a Content Consumption Machine, and I'm sure many here at /. aren't either, but the world is FULL of those machines. Except now, they don't own shit (streaming != ownership, there's no permanence like with physical media) and most distressing for people who make and sell shit -- no one wants to pay for anything.

Media will crash worse than retail did. I hope it burns to a cinder and that from the ashes, a better type of "media" arises.

Re:WTF? Not content consumption machines?!

[TigerPlish]

Dammit, ALFRED, not Albert! T.T

The Preview button, it did not save me!

Corporate control

[Anonymous Coward]

Was never the issue. Their revenue streams are. What they actually need to decide is this: am I willing to keep this afloat even if it doesn't make me famous/filthy rich (that may mean day jobs)? Welcome to the realities of creating things. People that these businesses ride on the backs of did what they did first and foremost out of passion, not profit. Modern media is weak sauce, if you ask me. Stand up for something, even if you aren't paid.

Noooo.....

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"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

[Not-a-Neg]

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. Radio stations were actually the first to start getting sucked up by mergers and acquisition when Clear Channel began buying up every station they could. I still remember stations that started laying off live DJ's replacing them with taped recordings and began playing the same music and ads across each station. Things got even worse in the 1990's as Univision began buying up all the stations they could to push Spanish-language broadcasts to cash in on the growing Latino population (both illegal and legal). The most egregious example in the television world of mediocrity is none other than MTV. remember when they played music videos? Remember when they courted they had people on that were over the age of 25? Remember when people on the Real World actually had to pay rent? Remember when VHS used to play music videos after MTV stopped doing so? Remember CMT "Country Music Television"? Things did not explode into a new world of choice, they consolidated, homogenized, and chased after the advertisers paying the most money for a particular demographic. Then all the Senator's wives started banding together and threatening those handful of advertisers to not support anything they deemed controversial resulting in the conservative television landscape we have now. Things were better in the 70's and 80's than they are now because back then we had riskier content and independent media outlets serving up that content. The biggest threat to returning to that era now are the Internet service providers that are trying to restrict access to alternative sources of media.

I suffer no sockpuppet trolls like you

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: Omniloser it's obvious you sockpuppet downmod (& upmod 'yourself(s)') when you screw up against me https://slashdot.org/comments.... + https://slashdot.org/comments.... to try hide your fails when you troll me 1st.

You're now also projecting you do it via various usernames you use here (& others know it, see parent post to yours as a proof thereof... lol!)

APK

P.S.=> The amazing part is that weasels like you literally INSULT people by thinking you're fooling anyone here - I've asked MANY TIMES that downmods be shown as to WHO ISSUED THEM & troll sockpuppeteers like YOU went NUTS, revealing themselves in it!

No folks, on /.? It'll never happen!: Why?

Idiots like you further your own agendas doing it & so do owners of websites for the same petty reasons - you MAY think it's some "popularity contest" but facts & truth always floor chumps like you, every single time (see links above)... apk