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David Emmett

This is a spectacularly good analysis of why traffic referrals from social media have fallen off a cliff and what it means for publishers. This all comes out of what @pluralistic calls the enshittification of publishing, social media, and ads. People are tired of and overwhelmed by clickbait journalism. The answer, of course, is to provide actually good content, and present it well.

baekdal.com/strategy/the-futur

As a media analyst, I share the frustration that many publishers have. As a niche publisher, I stopped using Facebook several years ago because that was when they stopped showing my followers my articles. And we see the same thing now on other channels, like Twitter. But, at the same time, it's painfully clear that this fake social focus, where we are not actually being social and creating communities, but are instead optimizing for random people doing random crap, but having zero interest or connection, was never a good future for publishers to have.
What doesn't work is to produce even more crappy content. If Netflix did that, everyone would cancel their Netflix subscription. Instead, the winning strategy (which is not as easy as it sounds) is to produce really good content for bored people to watch. It's the same for magazines or newspapers. You can't fix this by creating more crappy content because the 'source' of traffic is not realistic. For instance, I see many who are saying that they will just use AI to produce a ton of low-quality crappy articles to have something for their bored audiences to see, often via SEO. But, it's only going to be a matter of time before Google de-ranks that type of content because none of it is what people want when they are searching for something they need.
And finally, we have the elephant in the room... which is advertising. The way advertising works today, for publishers, is fundamentally hostile to our future business model. Obviously there are different types of advertising, but the main culprit here is third-party programmatic display advertising. The problem with that model is that it's defined around scale and volume, and now that publishers are seeing a decline in that area, these third party ad networks are acting against our future strategies and revenue potentials. For instance, right now we see a lot of economic uncertainty that has caused brands to not only demand better results for less money, but also made brands very reluctant in terms of ad spending.
Sep 30, 2023, 12:00 PM·Public·Web
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Paul Squires

@motomatters @pluralistic wonderful article, thanks for sharing.

I was chatting recently to someone about the nature of outsourcing - you don’t outsource your core competencies. However, that’s what publishers have done with ad-tech middlemen.

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David Emmett

@pasquires @pluralistic
Exactly. There is a lot of value in online advertising, but it's in direct partnerships, not in ad exchanges.

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Angus McIntyre

@motomatters @pluralistic From the article: “... people are, generally speaking, worn out by everything.”

I think they might be onto something there.

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Lou Katz

@motomatters @pluralistic We don' need no steenkin' actually good content. Click or die!

Public
Mike Spooner

@motomatters @pluralistic That future might not be what actually happens, but it may be, and that gives some hope to all of us, not just the publishers.

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