Price-First or Thesis-First Research?

It's hard to get around that, but the way you can do it is if you build in utility. And I think that is largely because advertising was a hell of a drug for these companies for so long. That is why all these big internet advertising platforms were slow to become marketplaces, because it would have a temporary negative financial impact. Th... See more

Again, as I noted above, Facebook made the 2013 decision to increase the value of newsworthy links for a reason, and in the time since, BuzzFeed in particular has proven that there is a consistent and repeatable way to not only reach a large number of people but to compel them to share content as well. Was Krugman wrong because he didn’t appreciate... See more

This is not to just be a “things were better in the old days” rant. But I do think in the era of growth teams running wild with machine learning algorithms, we accelerated distribution incentives to drive engagement before we really knew what incentives were being created in the internet economy. And now the larger social networks are grappling wit... See more

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

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

But the Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting. You might lose a small handful of subscribers or followers if you overwhelm their inbox, or write an egregiously bad post -- but on balance yo

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The “passion economy” thesis assumes that an audience will want everything a creator brings to market, the way viewers of the “Rachael Ray” show will often buy Rachael Ray cookbooks and cookware. But starting a newsletter does not immediately lead to speaking engagements, and not all writers can generate multiple distinct products. Yglesias told me... See more

The reality is that if your goal is to optimize revenue to the company, shutting down APIs, algorithmically manipulating users, harvesting personal information for better ad targeting, reducing revenue shares, and all the things people don’t like about internet companies is the optimal strategy.