🟧 The internet’s distribution problem

Some media thoughtz.

Kyle Chayka: Everyone online is talking about distribution. Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, recently talked about it when he was interviewed about the media industry by Hank Green on his own podcast, Decoder. Ryan Broderick brought it up in his newsletter Garbage Day. The media consultant Brian Morrissey was talking about it in his newsletter The Rebooting when he outlined burgeoning new media archetypes like “The Scaled Individual” and “The Cinematic Universe.” Distribution is the question of how your content — writing, audio, video — gets to people. And that’s been all fucked up lately.

The problem is that distribution of content via social media — a mode that media companies embraced because of a combination of opportunism for fresh digital territory and an infusion of venture capital motivated by the belief that media could operate more like tech start-ups — was an outright failure. The decade-long detour of trying to get digital platforms to connect with your audiences for you was a mistake. (The most enduring efforts have been on YouTube, a platform that uniquely splits ad revenue with its creators.) Even a journalist trying to get her stories out there on Twitter is now confronted with the fact that it is utterly pointless. Linking out is algorithmically discouraged. Remember how we used to post articles on Facebook in the hope that someone would read them? Now Facebook is removing its News tabs, and Google is testing doing the same. Social media no longer feels particularly useful, nor absolutely necessary, for a journalistic media business model.

BuzzFeed and Vice, two media companies premised heavily on distributed content, have all but disappeared. The “number go up” attitude on social media leads nowhere, because money does not automatically follow the number, neither directly nor sustainably. The survivors in the industry are those entities — publications and individuals — who inspire loyalty and can command a premium for the specific qualities of what they produce. Social media rewarded the identity-less and generic because the source of content didn’t matter; the next digital ecosystems will reward the specialized, the voice-driven, and the dependable. The New York Times is one success story in this regard, as is my employer The New Yorker. Institutions inspire loyalty (and addictive word games boost it). But newer entities are succeeding, too, including Marques Brownlee’s YouTube-driven MKBHD; Bari Weiss’s The Free Press (its politics notwithstanding); Semafor, with its profitable events business; and indie journalist-collective sites like Defector, 404media, and Aftermath. Not to mention plenty of solo newsletter writers on Substack and other platforms, who simply charge money for access to their writing. (I’ve been liking Stephen Totilo’s newsletter on the video game industry Game File, though I don’t pay for it yet.)

The question is, what comes next for distribution? You don’t want to just reach people; you want them to come to you, like an old-school luxury hotel that doesn’t advertise much because it doesn’t need to. You can reinvest in the homepage as a destination, trying to inspire people to type your URL into their browser. Nilay Patel’s The Verge has taken this route by adding “quick posts” and little editorial modules to the experience. The additions have caused me to go to The Verge’s homepage a lot more often, as a substitute for the ambient tech-news updates I used to get on Twitter. You can make the homepage feel nice and valuable, unique to the brand or function of your enterprise, the way opening your Twitter feed once felt valuable. Another option is using email accounts, YouTube follows, or Patreon subscriptions like print magazines use physical mailboxes and deliver a curated, finite experience directly to the people who signed up for it. It’s a form of distribution that you can reliably control, at least for the time being.

like a luxury hotel that doesn’t need to advertise

Smaller, slower distribution could mean better content, better relationships, and better businesses — doubtless at smaller scales than what was hoped from BuzzFeed, Vice, etc., but then those didn’t work out. The benefits of cultivating and controlling your own distribution are mutual comprehension between a publication and its consumers; feelings of loyalty and trust; and perhaps an ability to survive in the long term, building a more durable institution. (As long as you’re not actively losing money.) Ultimately, you can’t be authentic — the guiding light of this newsletter — if you don’t know or care who’s reading you.¹

I recently tweeted out Nate’s nice OT essay on turret architecture in DC. Soon enough, a cranky Twitter man Got Mad Online about it because it didn’t reflect his own opinions about how one should discuss DC architecture. This inspired many thoughts for me. 1) It must be exhausting to read things in order to get mad at them. 2) The social-media internet was built around finding things to get mad at. 3) That motivation ultimately made everything bad. 4) I don’t want to do that; I want people to read newsletters (or articles) because they want to be surprised and delighted by them, because we’re on similar wavelengths. Nothing should be for everyone, or for any random person who stumbles across it. Down that path is meaninglessness.

On the internet where distribution was outsourced, there was no impetus to understand intention or context, only the incentive to misinterpret to your own ends. I guess that means I won’t tweet these newsletters anymore. But then, what was I really hoping for in doing that anyway? Better to just have them reach the people who want to read them via email, and grow slowly, convincing one reader at a time that this is a club they want to be in. Then they hit the subscribe button, and we try to keep them coming back.

1. Another problem is scaling up past the model of the single writer or small collective of journalists; Substack is trying to form a kind of distribution network, but it’s hard to imagine it won’t suffer the same problems that all other digital platforms have. What we might need is more blog rolls, web rings, directories, syndication — more ways to make sense of the landscape of newsletters.