Port — what’s left of media and where is it going?
As I promised, ok, warned, I won’t be writing unCharles regularly anymore. But, I will take a moment to answer questions folks toss my way and put the ramblings here. Jake asked: Why did I stop?
Why did I stop writing unCharles’ take on Modern Media regularly?
That’s a good question still in search of a good answer. I think a few things. I have lived in media and tech for a long, longggg time. And, I truly love the thinking behind products, consumption, behavior, strategy, and creating value.
After writing about it for a good while, I began to realize that most of my stories were negative. Grumpy. Curmudgeonly. Media isn’t innovating. And, neither was I. Maybe because this...
Consumers have left broader media for a handful of social or social-like platforms. The ad business left broad media broadly and continues to leave for the same reasons consumers do… lack of trust, apathy, fragmentation, and a lack of usefulness. What’s left of advertising is a soul-sucking mess of technology based on probing the private parts of your online life.
How does a company like DraftKings, which, to me, is a media company with a different model lose money on something as addictive as gambling? Because they employ more than 7000 people to develop games. Really. Accepting that UX evolves, how many betting games are there at a casino or in a sportsbook? How many new ones are going to make a meaningful contribution relative to traditional chance games and money line bets on major sporting events?
In an efficient world, bloat leads to layoffs. Sadly. So, I wrote about that. We saw Musk walk into Twitter on the first day he owned it — sink and all — and change media and change with media. In all sorts of ways – good and bad. Twitter is big enough to be seen and small enough not to be a major player. It’s a perfect lens through which to view modern media. So, let’s start there.
Layoffs
Eighty percent of the staff at X is gone. Their core product is broken. Perhaps irreparably. But it’s not because X has fewer people. That’s correlation, not causation. Musk caused it when he went out of his way to alienate the people who make his product (journalists) and who pay for his product (advertisers). And, here, alienate is me being kind. Jack Dorsey warned him. To paraphrase, “Unless you’re Google or Facebook, advertising is a gift.”
Musk opened X to more points of view and lowered moderation safeguards which led to an overall crapification of content. Forget that Twitter pre-Musk kowtowed to governments. Forget that other platforms still do. Zuckerberg said Facebook did. We see Google doing it. TikTok may be banned for it. View Disney as mouth-horsed advertising gifter. Advertisers aren’t going to gift money to a guy they spar with at luxury events set against the backdrop of yachts bobbing on the swankiest northeastern part of the Mediterranean. And, they don’t even need to look petty doing it. They can point and laugh at “misinformation.” Which leads to…
Trust
Media pundits who won’t look beyond their own petty perspectives trashed Musk’s layoff move. And most of his other moves. Not because they thought it would work or that it wouldn’t. They didn’t think at all. They had a position, found someone who could speak on the record with enough credentials to seem sane and wrote a story around a quote. To wit, “Twitter would break if Musk reduced staff.” Pinned post. It didn’t.
Readers can be bamboozled with codswallop. But CEOs noticed. We’ve seen a raft of staff reductions from companies in the past two years. Why? Because two things gave them cover. One, AI. Just saying that AI leads to productivity allows for layoffs. Two, profits. Fewer people means more money.
It's not just stories about media. It’s stories about everything. As usual there’s only one side to any of these stories. There’s no counterpoint because there’s no market for it. Let’s say the flow says go right. And someone goes against the flow. They’re left. With no audience. Worse, that poor shmuck gets poopooed by a side who doesn’t need or want their beliefs poked.
Google is in that same vortex right now. Journalists boil a complex situation down to a single take. Pushed by a large, vocal crowd of ad techies who want to see Google’s one-party, ad-tech curtain come down. Every story finds an anthill and makes it a moral high ground. This is a smoking gun. That shred of circumstantial evidence is pivotal.
To be clear, I have no doubt that an integrated stack of ad technologies gives Google an unfair advantage. I’m less sure if they used it in sufficiently unique ways to create value. But, then, I’m not a lawyer.
I do know this. A number of solopenneurs (my word for publishers run by one person) can cobble together ad tech from multiple vendors. But, somehow, people from the WSJ and USA Today took the stand to say that’s too complicated. I spoke with two soloists and both said, the best ad prices come from Google nearly all of the time. No paid journalist took the time to find any of these other-siders. Becauce a counter side has no…
Audience
This all causes me to disconnect from media. It’s bigger than a trust issue. It’s the pointlessness of it all. I don’t need to read about surveys of 61 people that seek to answer facts. Like, “Are you paying more at the pump?”
The audience that was so engaged a decade ago has dissed beng active and is unengaged. We moved to social platforms to post there. We don’t anymore. We used to contribute to a vibrant salad of pictures showing vaguely disinterested people what we ate for lunch. Now, we’re passive consumers. Grazing on the prettified pictures of a relatively small group power-producers who create professional content. Which, I suppose, is the normal maturating course of things. And, which mostly leads to homogeneity.
So, platforms find ways to make it easier for us to play along. LinkedIn gives us a “kudos” button so we can seem thoughtful and use an eruditious word. Even when we don’t have a word or care enough to bother to type one. Or, speak-to-text one.
Which in turn elevates the value of the words we do use. “What we say,” as my mom likes to say (Hi, mom), “is of paramount importance.” Yes, it is. All those words we spewed everywhere and, to a much more valuable extent are powering us into the next era of media…
Artificial intelligence
ESPN is having AI write game summaries. Which totally makes sense. The [home team] beat the [visitors] 4-3 yesterday is a riveting game that came down to the last [out, moment, kick] when [player] achieved some outstanding feat. The crowd of [____ thousand] took it all in at a glorious, [weather] day at [insert corporate sponsor who gifted money to a billionaire team owner to more than offset the amount paid by the taxpayers] Stadium.
Child’s play for play. That leaves the fewer people still employed to work on more substantive, more creative, more useful things.
AI brings us to a crossroads because it lets (the) cream rise to the top. A chef’s kiss for Jack Bruce’s massivley underappreciated bass work on the 1968 Fillimore version. Listen for it behind Clapton’s solo around the 2m30s mark. That’s why OpenAI, Perplexity, Musk’s xAI, and a few others battling with Google and the Klingons for next generation synergistic hypercubism interstellar supremacy are bequeathed with massive valuations. Their engines will power ever-cheaper words for increasingly less (it feels like it should be fewer because of the “increasingly.” Sherry, help) interested people.
Which makes perfect sense. In the decades since I delivered news to people’s homes, nothing has changed. News, when it was still paper-based, listed pages of stock quotes. It was cheap media that begat cheaper advertising. Today, as ad rates for free-range media found on the open web plummet — and they say Google is using its monopoly to make people pay more, ha! — media needs to make even cheaper media. I wrote about this a year ago.
Which makes, I hope, my point. Very little is changing. The changes come at tectonic rates. So, I don’t see a reason to write about it as often as I did. It’s just not enough fun.
But, sometimes, when someone like you, Jake, asks a question like this, I get riled up enough to answer it. Setting off this not-so-mini rant.
:-)
Thanks,
Charles