new rules of media

No one is media literate. The more you explain who you are and what you do, the better. Preface your newsletter with the explanation of wtf you’re writing, anyway, because your subscribers don’t remember. The “enhanced bios” of NYT, Vox, etc, are long because of SEO but they also make explicit the expertise that was once just assumed from... See more

Not to be Captain Obvious, but isn’t it just trust? People trust other people, particularly those with unique taste or who are obsessives about particular topics. Trying to scale that with faceless institutional brands was always going to be hard. And then you mix in the normal perverse incentives of the internet. To me, there are a couple kinds of... See more

Quantity and atomization build YouTube’s business; power laws are important to the creators, but replicable quantity is the platform’s beating heart. This is not true for a streamer where hits are the beating heart, and where power laws impact the company’s bottom line, not just the creatives whose shows and films appear.

Podcasters are islands in... See more

Netflix brought in a chief content officer like Bela Bajaria (with a history in network) because the company wanted more hits to drive subscriptions. Programs like WWE Raw bring in a number of locked in, live viewers that advertisers can choose to target. Critically, as analysts have pointed out over the last few years, Netflix has started to... See more

success is defined by affinity with the new constant presence that personality brings to a platform. The more time that audiences spend with personalities across different platforms, the more content they may seek out, and the more concrete that streamer’s brand becomes to a viewer navigating a very fragmented, busy environment.

Interviews are much more interesting in longer formats where you get a better sense of the person. I think people have a sense of what feels genuine and the more we experience that (or a semblance of it) the more the canned laugh and prepared question feels uncanny.

Make sure you know why you’re doing something, especially if you’re a publisher or brand and you have limited bandwidth and / or resources. Your print magazine has a blog? Why? What is that accomplishing? Is it even good or does it make you look bad? Define your goals, inspect them thoroughly and be able to have an honest answer about why you want... See more

Related, are our searches and consumption driven by preferences or inquisitiveness?

Rely on nothing you can’t take with you. For now, Substack email lists and Stripe charges are still portable. If they weren’t, I would move to Ghost, because Substack’s incentive is to get you as locked in as possible. (Patreon still keeps your Stripe info, therefore fuck Patreon.) The same goes for audiences: Direct traffic, through homepages or... See more