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An Open Letter to The "New Media" [1]

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Date: 2023-04-29  

A creative effort in the endless media beg-a-thon.

Congratulations, my friends, you slew the ogre!

I'm referring, of course, to the "old media" - the conglomerates of reporting and distribution that served as a gate-keeper to the public awareness - the monopolistic controllers of public punditry that brought us Cronkite, and Rather, and endless CIA-promoted talking points in the New York Times. It didn't die in a glorious battle, though, it died by being suffocated with a plastic bag over its head. And, unfortunately, you're in the process of slowly discovering that you suffocated yourselves, too, in the process.

The old media had a comfortable relationship with the advertising industry - which paid lots of money to run their important messages in tasteful, easily ignored, corners of its work. We consumers could predict that the ads on the TV shows would come every 1/2 hour at the top and bottom of the dial, until it became every 15 minutes. We could predict that there would be ads wedged between the columns of the newspaper, where our eyes could seamlessly flick past them. And, because this was not too annoying, and was manageable, the consumers of media put up with it, mostly, and subscribed sometimes. Sure, there were complaints and threats of regulation when a product placement in a movie was just a little bit too obvious, or whatever, but the landscape of media crap was in a fairly stable homeostasis - enough so that we were willing to subscribe to the newspapers, magazines, go to the movies, or watch "free" television with its built-in snack and bathroom breaks. The old media sucked, sure, but it was a regulated, genteel, sort of suck.

Then, the new media came along and pulled off what has to be one of the greatest feats of indirection of all time: you collectively said "it's free!" and forced the old media, which charged money, to compete against free. Who would pay to have ink-covered dead trees delivered to their door when they can click over to a free website where there's virtually unlimited quantities of, well, stuff produced on the cheap, often, in order to tease consumer eyeballs away. It wasn't obviously predatory because the new media preyed on itself as much as it did on the old media, but what it did was suck all the oxygen out of the subscription-based media model, rendering the old media unsustainable and bankrupting it. We consumers cheerfully played along with this, because we didn't really love the old media that much to begin with and besides, the new media was free and it just seems impossibly stupid to expect your consumers to pay for something over here that they can get for free over there with the same amount of effort. That's what I mean about suffocating the media giant by putting a plastic bag over its head and watching it slowly expire: the value proposition of a subscriber-base is that there are a lot of people giving a little money, and it all adds up. Or, should I say, it "ads" up? Because the new media, in order to provide its goods for free had to make the same devil's bargain with advertisers that the old media did.

I don't use the expression "devil's bargain" lightly, because the new media stumbled around with the advertising industry and managed to produce a new advertising metastasis that is substantially worse. Now, if you look on youtube (for example) the content is interrupted with ads that are completely unregulated - they pop up wherever, whenever, and sometimes they're stupid, badly-produced crap that drones on (in violation of the advertisement policy) or tries to link the viewer to someplace that's a gigantic, seething, sea of crap. Youtube, since it's an important content aggregator, has some control over its advertisers (for now!) but small sites that tried to fund their free content were increasingly pushed into a corner where they had to advertise with random marketing robots that would pop up political ads, porn site ads, or whatever. As an aside, the new media/old media battle has played itself out in the porn world as well - I don't think that there is anyone who still pays for porn, unless they are paying to make the obnoxious ads go away, and that's a discounted payment to the aggregator platform - which has placed a plastic bag over its head, too, because it has created a consumer community who expect the content to be free, or they'll go somewhere where it is.

Meanwhile, new media has responded by trying to convince its "content providers" to work for free, so it can pass the savings on to the consumer. I'm just kidding, they pocket the difference. But, there were countless free news media that sprung up, and gutted the old media news sources by giving away their content - in return telling their writers "someday, when we figure out how to make money doing this, we'll give you some - but in the meantime, this is going to look great on your resume!" In other words, when you're still unemployed, your resume will stack up more or less favorably against the resume of the unemployed old media journalists whose jobs you suffocated to death with your free content and your listicles. Didn't see that coming, did you? You should have. Now, even huge content aggregators like Youtube, which used to make some of its content providers quite wealthy, have been pushing the monetization problem down the stack to the content providers: post your stuff here for free, and have a Patreon or an onlyfans or a substack and you can be your own boss, meanwhile we'll pocket the advertising revenue and we control the algorithms that decide who sees what and, therefore, who gets advertising revenue at all. Then, the content providers have to crap up their content by embedding another layer of marketing or product placements in their material, where it's competing with the platform's own marketing and product placements and it's a race to the bottom to see how fast everything turns to crap. Meanwhile, I have to cringe as I hear a formerly respectable podcaster like, say, Malcolm Gladwell, touting stupid products instead of telling me interesting things for free. Do you want to know the price of Malcolm Gladwell's soul? It's free. All of these media are about to completely put the plastic bag over their heads and realize that they can't make ends meet by giving their content away, either, and they're in exactly the same corner that they painted the old media into a couple decades ago.

I'm not crying for The Washington Post or any of the old media, but I'm not going to cry for the new media, either. In fact, I've had a couple of good laughs when I read about how some new media like Buzzfeed are thinking of switching to AIs like ChatGPT to write listicles automatically and they imagine that will hold the consumers' interest long enough for an ad-marketing company to pay them a few fractions of a penny for the clicks? The dying wails of the websites will not be heard, because nobody will click on them. The bottom of the feeds are already jamming with AI or meat robot-generated content like, "Aging star ${whoever} walks dog in Manhattan wearing next to nothing!" I have even, I swear, seen a few clickbaits claiming that some aging rock musician has died - and I fell for it, once, I admit. At the rate the ad market evolves, that revenue channel has already died and dried up. You idiots have done this to yourselves, and nobody'll miss you for a second. In a decade or less people will be talking about Facebook the same way they talk about Myspace and Second Life: it was a cool idea for its time, which was about 200 nanoseconds - decades ago. Do you remember what happened to Myspace? Same thing: it was free until it made the devil's bargain and started getting jammed with ads and garbage to pursue platform monetization and ... everybody went someplace else.

Anyhow, I just wanted to say "enjoy the ride." It's just going to get rockier from here, especially if more people catch on and start installing adblockers in their browsers. I get stopped by paywalls, now, from dying websites that moan, "we make our living off of ads, please disable your adblocker if you want to see the article you clicked on." Nope (click) never mind. As long as the stuff is free and the ads aren't too onerous, I'll keep consuming your product, but scrabbling after those ad-click revenues - that's your scramble, not mine. And the AIs are just around the corner, about to start competing with you in that scrabbling contest, which you will lose. But maybe "journalist" will look good on your resume.

One thing remains true: content is king. I'll pay for good content, but only if I haven't been conditioned to expect it for free, and suddenly now you want how much? Or you're going to lay off your "journalists" and guilt-trip me into paying their salary because you have such a lame badly thought-out business model that you already can't make a living doing what you're doing? [DKos I am looking at you] That's not my problem (click) never mind. Suddenly the old public media annual beg-a-thons (remember those?) are going to start to look good to you.

I'm not going to end this with some sage advice for you, how to get out of the corner you've painted yourself into, and you have as much claim on my pity as The Washington Post did. The reason I'm writing this is, I suppose, to explain why it is that you'll find your beg-a-thons don't work and nobody wants to subscribe to your "buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog" genius marketing. Enjoy the scorched, blasted, wasteland you helped create. Really. There's some lovely filth over here! Did you see that ${aging Hollywood star} wore a nearly transparent outfit to the big gala? Let me give you this AI generated list of 10 really great AI generated lists about AI.

[This is a cross-post from my regular free blog, which I write for the hell of it, since I retired after a successful career as a consultant]

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/29/2165240/-An-Open-Letter-to-The-New-Media

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