The skinny on old chocolate pudding
You can't teach old media new tricks
Mea culpa. Or some other old-sounding phrase. Too many unCharles posts have been too long recently. Not this one. This one will be over before your pudding gets a skin on it.
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The other day, I wrote about Reddit. Wondering out loud how a company with 70M daily users, looks like Craig’s List version 1.0, and built no meaningful ad tech can lose money with nearly a billion dollars in revenue.
Somehow, on my way to teeing up the IPO as a way to up the price Google will eventually pay for this thing to refine its search results and fix the image of its wayward AI brand, I missed the off ramp to the old folks’ home for old media execs.
Old media likes to yell into its increasingly voiceless channels how they’re getting screwed. How it’s not their fault their businesses are failing. How newer companies are kicking their butts because they unlevel the playing field to gain a competitive advantage. Cue thirty-year-old Abe Simpson meme.
To make sure they’re heard, they retweet themselves into feeds on X, and, these days, Threads, Mastodon, and Blue Sky. Mistaking likes from a self-selected echo chamber of their recently laid off colleagues as reasons to believe they’re right. They’re not. They’re wrong.
Most old media is failing because they’re run like old media by dinosaurs who roamed the planet when people paid roaming charges on cellular phones without apps.
What’s the real difference between Meta and Reddit? Or, TikTok and Reddit? Or, Snap and Reddit? Hell, keep going. Twitter and Reddit? Twitter/X under new management and Reddit? Threads and Reddit? Even LinkedIn and Reddit?
All the folks who run these platforms use silly slogans like, “Connect the world” or, “Your camera.” But behind all the Buddhism in a thong psychobabble was a want be great and look slick doing it. If they didn’t make money, they gloated about revneue growth or user growth. Twitter (now X) was created by an entrepreneur, taken public, and taken private by a different entrepreneur. In LinkedIn’s case, it was bought by a — let’s go with — tech company, Microsoft.
What’s different about Reddit?
Condé Nast bought Reddit nearly twenty years ago. They’re an old media conglomerate. And, while Condé doesn’t own the majority of Reddit these days, they’re the only old media company running a social media company.
Image how pathetic Facebook would be if a big media conglomerate had conglomerated it in the early days? They’d have been pitchforked.
So, the next time you hear a faint whisper coming from an old media company or any person from an old media complaining that life ain’t fair, don’t believe it. They’re probably the reason that their business is failing.
In other news, Bob Iger who’s 73 and serving his second stint as CEO of Disney started his career at ABC in 1974 and got the job running ABC Entertainment in 1989 five years before Amazon delivered its first book is defending Disney’s strategy by telling investors at the Morgan Stanley conference Gen Z isn’t tired of Tony Stark as evidenced by box office receipts from 2008 is in a proxy fight over the future strategy of Walt Disney’s legacy corporation with 81-year-old Nelson Peltz.
Yeah, old media is in good, fresh-thinking hands.
“Does anyone want this last chocolate pudding? I have just one chocolate pudding left. It's only pulled away from the side of the dish about three inches all the way around. And there's a huge fault running through the center of the pudding. Actually, it's nothing but a ball of skin at this point. Does anyone want a ball of fault ridden chocolate pudding skin? I'm only going to throw it away.” — George Carlin.
