Never-Ending Niches

The other obvious problem with today’s internet is the economic structure. Chris Anderson wrote a famous essay called “The Long Tail” back in 2004 that predicted the internet would make media businesses less hit-driven and improve the economics for niche creative people. He was right in one sense: the internet created many more niche communities an... See more

"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."

I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along the way.Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or... See more

The State of FANGEach of the FANG companies is in a similar position in their respective industries: they haven’t so much disrupted incumbents as they have subsumed them:Facebook: The late David Carr, who first broke the news about Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative back in 2014, worried that “media companies would essentially be serfs in a kin... See more

I think the New York Times is its own thing, it’s going to keep being successful, but there’s a huge swath of the rest of the publishing industry that is being disrupted and will continue to be disrupted. If you look at publishers that exist in the world, because the Internet lets you reach everything, there’s probably space for the very best publi... See more

The longstanding struggles of digital media businesses drive home the fact that internet-native media requires a fundamentally different business approach. Monetizing content assumes that the value is held in the content itself. Under the physics of infinity – frictionless content creation and distribution – the marginal value of every additional a... See more