Never-Ending Niches

In yesterday’s Daily Update I described how Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of Quibi, mistakenly assumed that mobile was simply the next step in the evolution from motion pictures to television, each of which created new possibilities for, in Katzenberg’s words, “the creativity of storytellers [to use] these tools in ways that their inventors had n... See more

What followed was probably my first clear articulation of Aggregation Theory, albeit without the name. The point about effectively infinite competition, though, is a critical one. Neither reach nor timeliness were differentiators, but rather commodities; the companies that dominated on the Internet were those — Google and Facebook in particular — t... See more

Second, given the nichification of everything, whether by subject matter or sensibility, I am not surprised that the New York Times is finding it difficult to sustain an opinion section purporting to represent all sides of an issue. This isn’t the pre-Internet era, when only a few publications had the reach to plausibly claim they had a duty to sho... See more

This point cannot be emphasized enough: the Internet is the single most disruptive1 force of our lifetimes because it does not evolve existing ways of doing things, but completely smashes the assumptions underlying them — assumptions we often didn’t even realize existed.

That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human i... See more