John Battelle's Search Blog Marketers Have Given Up on Context, And Our National Discourse Is Suffering

Thanks to new approaches which fuse at-scale ad targeting with high-quality editorial product, you can step into this renewed role without sacrificing the reach, precision, and targeting afforded by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their kin.

There are those who believe the social web is reaching its terminal point. I hope they’re right. Platform after platform was designed to make it easier and more addictive for us to share content with one another so the corporations behind them could sell ever more of our attention and data. In different ways, most of these platforms

... See more

Most have relied on platforms and algorithms rather than tapping into exciting cultural myth markets. In many ways, brands have lost the magic of being brands: the advantage they generate when they create outsized meaning for people.

“Content is king” became a cliche because it was the hallmark of the media business. Without great content, not much else matters. But the platform and scale era scrambled that. Distribution became the gamechanger. Publications had BuzzFeed envy. By the same token, media’s indirect business models -- content in some publishing organizations can be ... See more

That split between the big audience on Facebook and the influential audience on Twitter was instantly obvious to anyone in any newsroom who ever cared to look. Sicha is right to note that Twitter never sent any amount of meaningful traffic to any website — it was Facebook traffic that warped most digital media executives into futile aspirations of ... See more

The major issue, we think, is that business models based on engagement have created a class of wildly successful media products that distort online discourse. It is increasingly difficult to participate in reasonable discussions on these platforms.