sari

Here is the cold hard reality for media companies: if you don’t have access to customers — whether because of the Internet generally, or the pandemic specifically — you don’t have pricing power. Actually, that doesn’t go far enough: if you don’t have access to customers’ wallets, you don’t have pricing power.

Notice the progression here: the Wirecutter was genuinely useful content that took a lot of time and expertise to produce; BuzzFeed, Gawker, etc. was rather less useful, but still content that had marginal costs to produce; Honey, meanwhile, was zero marginal cost skimming. In short, the affiliate game grew increasingly commoditized over time.

We need to find ways to invest in the non-college bound, and create on-ramps into the corporate economy without the ritual of a $200,000 college education.