There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
Ad-driven revenue models are just not reliable long term for media publications anymore. All these sites dying or having issues were built on the old world model created by newspapers 200 years ago. These models aren&#x27;t even working for the big TV networks. Their news is now basically 20 minutes of old people new stories (stuff about Jesus, medicare, health care breakthroughs) book-ended by ads for prescription drugs and adult diapers. Their only viewers are 60+, and aging.<p>The new model is, actually, the oldest model: Sponsorships. Remember how things like the Jack Benny Show were sponsored by Jell-O and Lucky Strikes? That model actually works again. It&#x27;s strange, but it&#x27;s really is a bit liberating (I work for a sponsored pub). We actually have the funds and time to do extremely expansive pieces on deep topics we choose.<p>Having fewer people to keep happy means having fewer editorial bonds to advertisers. In a pub with dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, all in the market on which you&#x27;re reporting, it&#x27;s tough to not piss them off by reporting on bad news about them. This happens all the time. ALL THE TIME. &quot;You ran that story about our listeria outbreak, now we&#x27;re not advertising Chipotle on your site anymore!&quot; In the video game world, bad games with ads get good reviews, or ads are pulled. Movies are the same way. Many publications cover the very stuff they advertise, so it&#x27;s a tricky situation.<p>You&#x27;d think sponsorships would be the same way, but they really aren&#x27;t. Instead, sponsors get to post their own content alongside the real good stuff. Paid-for-content, as it were, which isn&#x27;t even always bad, it&#x27;s just stuff these companies want to get out there where people will read it, rather than sitting unread on their corporate blogs.<p>I am now convinced the sponsorship model is the way out of this. It might not work as well outside of a confined vertical, however. One thing is for sure, sponsors love being able to tell their side of the story to our readers, and I feel like the readers just skip stuff they find too marketingy in favor of our really good, deep content anyway, so it&#x27;s kind of a win-win.<p>The other thing I like about sponsorships is it brings the colluding onto the table instead leaving it hidden. In the past, I&#x27;ve worked at places where they&#x27;ve been adamant about separation of church and state: advertising and editorial are divided and do not talk, collude, or work together at all. You couldn&#x27;t take more than a $15 lunch for free, could take no free trips or hotel rooms, and couldn&#x27;t keep neat tchochkes or product samples.<p>Meanwhile, these same places would ALWAYS put their foots on your neck, subtly, to influence content. They&#x27;d even send the lead sales guy and the head of editorial out to do joint meetings which were only designed to sell ads. If someone bought a large ad and you wrote a bad story about them, it could be reworked, or even killed entirely.<p>Sponsorships, however, are known to be collusion, right? Now that I am at a sponsored publication, I can take trips, dinners, hotel rooms. It&#x27;s great! I&#x27;m still making a great effort not to be compromised, but now I can do that in Spain for a week at a conference. Makes a huge difference, frankly. I&#x27;m much better at covering a show far away if I am in the show hotel instead of the cheapest place my failing pub could afford to set me up, 20 miles away on the side of the highway.<p>Journalists know how to be fair and balanced. It&#x27;s kinda their whole bag. The policies publications put in place to dictate this stuff are the first to be ignored when things get thin and business goes sour. It&#x27;s why some sites sell their entire skin to McGriddle: that&#x27;s sales getting creative with the design team, because they can&#x27;t get close to editorial. Not officially, anyway. Frankly, stuff like that is to be praised. It&#x27;s innovative and likely kept some edit staff from being laid off or influenced.<p>In the advertiser model, the editorial team gets slapped around all the time when revenues sag. Once the layoffs start, editorial integrity usually goes out the window. Sadly, if it doesn&#x27;t, the pub usually dies.<p>The nature of the business creates this death spiral where sites churn more and more bad content, faster and faster in favor of getting the most possible eyeballs on the most possible ads. The content becomes an after thought. The more controversial and wrong it is, the more people read it, kinda like how Howard Stern had lots of listeners who hated him for years. Steal from Reddit, add 3 lines, post.<p>I once met a guy from Engadget who said he was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world&#x27;s fastest blogger. He could do 15 stories an hour. And he bragged about this, openly, like it was a badge of honor. Given some of the content on these buzzfeed-like sites, I could do 30 crap stories in 10 minutes, but who the fuck would want to? They&#x27;d all be wrong and have kitten pictures in them to grab hits.<p>I guess this is a long way of saying this: Digital media actually made journalism shitter for a while, but maybe this culling will fix things by making outlets figure out better, more innovative business models, allowing new, better voices to come to light. It&#x27;s the easiest time ever to start your own outlet. Making money, however... that&#x27;s always been the hard part.