{"id":258670,"date":"2015-02-23T17:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T22:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258670"},"modified":"2024-11-26T16:09:05","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T21:09:05","slug":"in-the-age-of-niche-media-everyone-still-really-wants-to-be-mass-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2015\/02\/23\/in-the-age-of-niche-media-everyone-still-really-wants-to-be-mass-2\/","title":{"rendered":"In the age of niche media, everyone still really wants to be mass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One of the best things about the web is that it has meant an explosion of choices when it comes to media, especially recently \u2014 with the rise of BuzzFeed, the launch of sites like Vox and Fusion, and blog networks like Gawker. And of course we still have all the old places too, like the New York Times<\/em> and Washington Post<\/em> and The Atlantic<\/em>. If anything, we have too many places publishing great content for anyone to keep up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that brings up a related problem, which Purdue University doctoral student Frederik De Boer wrote about in a recent<\/a> blog post. In a nutshell, De Boer said that his problem with many of the new-media sites that have popped up over the past year, such as Fusion \u2014 which was launched recently by the Fusion network<\/a>, a cable channel co-owned by Disney\/ABC and Univision that caters to millennials \u2014 is that they share a certain sameness of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201dIt just isn\u2019t about<\/em> anything in the way that the site\u2019s founders and editorial people clearly want it to be. You can write a manifesto, and you can have some sort of goofy TV channel side-piece going on, and you\u2019re still another site publishing people writing about news and politics and culture and sometimes sports. And in that, you\u2019re joining every other website that publishes about news and politics and culture and sometimes sports.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

A striking sameness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

De Boer goes on to talk about other sites such as Slate and The Atlantic<\/em>, the revamped New York Times<\/em> magazine, the New Republic<\/em>, Vox and several others, and his point (at least as I understand it) is that each of these sites is producing something very similar<\/a> to its competitors \u2014 the names may be different, and each site has something or someone that might stand out from time to time, but for the most part they are each covering the news in politics, culture and sometimes sports in a very similar way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Reading<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some of De Boer\u2019s specific criticisms feel a bit like a drive-by-shooting: the New Republic<\/em>, for example, consists of \u201cthe same stuff, written by every non-white male [new editor] Gabriel Snyder could find to exorcise the vengeful presence of Marty Peretz\u2019s farting ghost,\u201d while Vox has \u201ca new-fangled invention called the card-stack \u2014 an innovative approach which allows webpages to link to other pages.\u201d The Awl is described as<\/a> \u201ca lot of the same stuff, brought to you by the emotion sadness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those sarcastic descriptions aside, however, I think De Boer makes a good point, which is summed up in the title of his post: \u201cUnless your site is about one thing, it\u2019s about everything.\u201d<\/em> If your site doesn\u2019t have a unique focus, or a theme or defining vision when it comes to what you cover and when, then you are going to look like everyone else. And that\u2019s not a good thing. \u201dI no longer know what a website means as an identity, unless that identity is a specific subject. I know what Guns and Ammo is. I know what Road and Track is. (I know what Redtube is.) I don\u2019t know what Fusion is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s not to say everything is mass-oriented, of course. Sites like Search Engine Land<\/a> and Skift<\/a> are aimed at a niche market, and while they may not get as much publicity, they are arguably better businesses in many ways. Other sites such as The Information<\/a> \u2014 which charges $400 a year \u2014 are clearly aimed at niche readers as well. But most of the attention in the media sphere seems to go towards the sites with the really big numbers, like BuzzFeed or Gawker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A drive for revenue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s ironic in many ways, but there\u2019s an ongoing tension within the online media industry: Even though the web allows individual writers or groups of writers to target very specific audiences and be successful doing so \u2014 as the tech blogger Ben Thompson has been able to do with his site<\/a> Stratechery, for example \u2014 there is still a huge amount of pressure (both perceived and actual) for sites to be as broad as the mass media they have replaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"newspaper<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Much of that pressure comes from an advertising-driven revenue model, which is driven by the need for large numbers, of pageviews or unique visitors, etc. My friend Josh Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab is right that some of this comes from the fact that BuzzFeed and Vox are<\/a> VC-funded and therefore need scale. But on top of that, there is internal pressure for a broad or large audience, because it makes those who are writing and publishing feel as though their work has more value. Says De Boer:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[blockquote person=\u201d\u201d attribution=\u201d\u201d]\u201dThese places run good writing. I\u2019m not disputing that. I\u2019m just saying that they are always launched with fanfare about what makes them different, but I\u2019m not sure that you can ever maintain that kind of vision as an actually-existing publisher unless your site has a very specific, subject matter-based focus.\u201d[\/blockquote]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The risk is that because you can<\/em> write about anything, you feel like you should<\/em> write about everything. But to the extent that your content feels as though it could have appeared at any one of a dozen different sites, that\u2019s bad \u2014 it makes it dramatically less likely that anyone will a) remember your site or b) deliberately choose to go back there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With more and more people finding content through social networks and sharing, there\u2019s already a declining likelihood that they will remember where<\/a> a specific piece of news or commentary came from. Do you really need to make it even harder by writing about all the same things every other site is, or presenting them in the same way? That just leaves you chasing the drive-by, click-through audience, and that has to be the worst business in the world.<\/p>\n

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One of the best things about the web is that it has meant an explosion of choices when it comes to media, especially recently \u2014 with the rise of BuzzFeed, the launch of sites like Vox and Fusion, and blog networks like Gawker. And of course we still have all the old places too, like … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “In the age of niche media, everyone still really wants to be mass”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258670"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269439,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258670\/revisions\/269439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}