where's tha money?
A long-predicted collapse hit digital media. For an industry that has grown accustomed to layoffs, it all should have seemed like more of the same. And yet, the week felt more apocalyptic than usual. That’s because the “corrections” are coming for the digital outlets that were supposed to have been the survivors.
in "The digital winter turns apocalyptic" 25 jan 2019
It would be a mistake to regard these cuts as the ordinary chop of a long-roiling digital media sea. Instead, they are a devastation.
in "The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency" 30 jan 2019
This latest round of layoffs goes beyond personal and institutional tragedy — it’s further, frightening evidence of an industry whose old and new players are locked together in crisis.
in "A brutal week for American journalism" 28 jan 2019
Esses outlets digital-nativos: os infantes terríveis BuzzFeed & Huffington Post. Mas os legacy media não se estão a rir, apesar do escárnio tomavam essas publicações como ponta de lança em terrenos — digitais — por desbravar, e as opções são agora francamente mais reduzidas.
BuzzFeed & Huffington Post: the two sites would help create an online media boom, as investors rushed to buy stakes in the belief such outlets were more nimble and more in tune with the desires of readers who grew up on the internet rather than with traditional newspapers and broadcasters. On Wednesday, HuffPost’s parent company, Verizon Media Group, and BuzzFeed both announced plans to lay off hundreds of staff. The news signalled a collision between the dream of an online media boom and the accountants’ harsher reality: questions over the long-term profitability of digital media companies, and, as a result, concerns over the future of online journalism itself.
in "As HuffPost and BuzzFeed shed staff, has the digital content bubble burst?" 24 jan 2019
O primeiro mês do novo ano já cimentou no consciente colectivo o pivot-to-subscription, solução insuportável a longo prazo que tende a concentrar sobre as marcas mais conhecidas, e mesmo estas, desconfiamos, não o poderão manter por muito tempo sem os dividendos inesperados do Trump bump.
The New Yorker is thought to have brought in $118m last year with its subscription model. Vanity Fair and Wired, report improved audience engagement almost as soon as a paywall went up.
in "Future of digital journalism in question as BuzzFeed and HuffPost lay off 1,000" 27 janb 2019
Mas...
Seeking money on absurdly inflated subscription rates works for The New Yorker, because The New Yorker is the One Magazine — the winner in a suddenly winner-take-all market. Can subscriptions sustain a large and diverse media ecosystem — one already dominated by a few huge players that already charge subscriptions? How many newsrooms can we expect individual consumers to directly fund?
in "Future of digital journalism in question as BuzzFeed and HuffPost lay off 1,000" 27 janb 2019
O big picture então.
We already knew that local newspapers were near the bottom of their death spirals, running with skeleton crews as hedge funds bleed them dry. The legacy brands, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even the Los Angeles Times, are doing fine for the moment, thanks largely to the Trump bump and billionaire owners, but nobody thinks that’s a sustainable trajectory for industry growth. So that left BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Vice, and Vox, which weren’t exactly expected to keep growing forever, but which we hoped would make it long enough to hire us when we got laid off from Mic, Mashable, Gizmodo Media Group, or Vocativ. What became clear this week is that if the digital natives do survive, it might not have much to do with newsgathering, which both investors and advertisers have recently discovered an allergy to.
in "The digital winter turns apocalyptic" 25 jan 2019
Dessa alergia — haveremos de cruzar posteriormente àquilo do autêntico.
The brands want to spend pennies to reach millions, and ensure that their ads never appear anywhere potentially controversial. News is not a pathway to that future. The old arrangement, where if you wanted your ads to reach Rolling Stone‘s prosperous young readers you had no choice but to subsidize Hunter Thompson calling the White House a den of thieves, did not survive the digital revolution.
The investors who pumped money into the new media companies now realize, as a few others quietly did back when they were investing that money, that with herculean effort and a few undisturbed years to find an audience, you can build, at most, a modestly sized and modestly profitable advertising-supported media company with no clear path to further growth, in a chronically uncertain industry. News for a time was a respectable, and respected, bit of polish, subsidized by everything else. Now that price is too high.
in "The digital winter turns apocalyptic" 25 jan 2019
Interrogam-se de caminhos menos do óbvio. A dar-lhes tempo.
Regressando ao apocalipse e fim de caminhos,
The cause of each company’s troubles may be distinct, but collectively the blood bath points to the same underlying market pathology: the inability of the digital advertising business to make much meaningful room for anyone but monopolistic tech giants.
in "The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency" 30 jan 2019
Built on the expectation of fast growth in advertising sales, companies like BuzzFeed and Vox Media have instead found that Facebook and Google – “the duopoly” – have simply tightened their grip on digital advertising revenue. Revenue-per-click, the business strategy that has informed digital publishers for years, was effectively pronounced DOA this week as leading players in a sector once viewed as the future of journalism announced deep cuts. The job losses followed sales or cuts at Mic, Refinery29 and elsewhere. But publishing as a whole had already shrunk sharply. By some estimates the shift to digital has resulted in an overall reduction in the business of 50% to 80%.
in "Future of digital journalism in question as BuzzFeed and HuffPost lay off 1,000" 27 janb 2019
...e mais fim de caminhos, bigger picture.
It is the rare publication that can survive on subscriptions, and the rarer one that will be saved by billionaires. Digital media needs a way to profitably serve the masses. If even BuzzFeed couldn’t hack that, we are well and truly hosed.
in "The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency" 30 jan 2019
"What if there is literally no profitable model for digital news?" [There's] a growing fear among media executives that the current model of paying for journalism on the internet is broken. Executives are coming to terms with the fact that, in the modern world of mobile consumption, most sites are just another form of distraction. Their competition is not just rival scoops – but a vast online ecosystem of entertaining, shareable and social content. It’s clear that we have a digital content bubble.
in "As HuffPost and BuzzFeed shed staff, has the digital content bubble burst?" 24 jan 2019
Concorrência de outras formas de distração? Digital content bubble? Outras formas de entretenimento? O nosso segway aos cómicos, certamente. Mas antes, a ironia maior: como o jornalismo falha na época de maior apetite por notícias:
Coming in a time of economic prosperity, at world-historical levels of interest in the news — consider: We are in the midst of a persistent global information war. We live our lives on technologies that sow distrust and fakery, that admit little room for nuance and complication, that slice us up into ignorant and bleating tribes. It is an era that should be ripe for journalists and for the business of journalism — a profession that, though it errs often, is the best way we know of inoculating ourselves against the suffocating deluge of rumor and mendacity.
in "The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency" 30 jan 2019
Readers, on the other hand, still love the news. But this week has shown that they don’t always get their way.
in "The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency" 30 jan 2019
E um brinde a regressos por fazer.
A return to smaller and more calculated media ventures.
in "The BuzzFeed Layoffs as Democratic Emergency" 30 jan 2019
- $$$
Extra 2020: dois anos passados, o Buzzf- compra o Huffp. "Calculated media ventures", mas no oposto do small.
Acquisition unites two of the largest players in digital media; News comes after both companies made deep cuts;
The news comes after both companies have made deep cuts after years of phenomenal growth but falling online advertising revenues. The partnership follows other online deals. Vox Media acquired New York Media last September and Vice Media bought Refinery29 the following month.
in "BuzzFeed agrees to buy HuffPost in latest online media merger" 19 nov 2020