7 Reasons Media Is a No-Good, Horrible, Rotten Business That I Love Anyways

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It sure does feel like the media industry is having a moment. The moment is a funeral, but still, you know, that is a moment. Vice has swung from a $5.7B valuation to declaring bankruptcy. Buzzfeed shut down its news division and is doing layoffs. Disney laid off 7K employees, News Corp, 1,250.

Despite the setbacks, I still love the industry. On the high end, there are some companies that have done exceptionally well, such as the NFL, a24, The New York Times, and Netflix. Closer to home, I find inspiration in successful micro-publishers like Ben Thompson or other newsletters on Substack making millions with one or two employees.

So what gives? How can this industry that is so lucrative for a few be terrible for so many?

To understand why, I’ve talked with dozens of media industry participants. Over coffee in Brooklyn, Zoom calls in Australia, and bars serving drinks somehow infused with mushrooms in San Francisco, I’ve chatted with everyone from media investors managing $1B+ funds to small digital publishers with less than a thousand subscribers. I’ve thought and read and analyzed for months to try to synthesize what everyone is telling me. Today’s post is the result of that work.

The TL;DR is this: Consumers don’t want to pay you, Facebook is better at advertising, and unique distribution is necessary for long-term survival but almost impossible to get. If you somehow get an audience, congrats! Your reward is a million competitors who are constantly trying to kill you and steal your audience. Still, if you are able to climb up the power law, you may be able to build long-term success.

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In honor of my recently laid-off writer comrades, I have structured my arguments into a Buzzfeed style list:

1) Media companies are always the shit eater of consumer tech

Over the past 10 years of building, a media company has been subject to the following technological shifts: newsfeed pivots, the depreciation of cookies, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy, platform-specific article formats, Web3, long-form video, the rise of TikTok, and now, GenerativeAI. Each and every one of these trends merits a reinvention of a media business, but most importantly, a media company didn’t invent or control any of these. All of these were enabled by science but implemented by big tech.