Not really. Just a post about sponsors.
Even if you don’t run a media company, the way media companies run matters. That’s because media shapes our culture and how we spend our time.
There are three kinds of ad models, and it’s easy to confuse them.
The most common and historically powerful is the traditional ad. The media company builds content that attracts us, then they sell off our attention to the highest bidder.
You can see the problems here. The first one is that the media company now has two things to focus on, not one. Instead of simply creating value for the viewers/users, they mostly have to create value for the advertisers. They have an incentive to give the users just barely enough content to get them to stay for as long as possible to see as many ads as possible.
The conflict is real, and we pay for it with noise, trite content, link bait and annoying ads. Those aren’t defects in the system, they’re logical outcomes of the way it’s built.
The second model, one that’s structurally aligned and elegant, is the classified ad. These are ads that people go looking for. For a long time, the classified ads in the paper paid all the costs of most great metropolitan newspapers. This model was taken to its ultimate expression with the magic of Google ads, a phenomenon that lasted decades until Google got greedy and broke it. You did a search, you saw an ad about your search, you clicked. There was complete alignment of all three parties.
The third model is permission marketing. Anticipated, personal and relevant ads that go to the people who want to get them. It’s ads that people would miss if they didn’t show up. It doesn’t work for all products and all users, but when it’s working (particularly for small businesses) it’s transformative.
The reason it’s worth thinking about these models is that new tech companies, as they gain traction, often have an important choice to make. One of the things that turned Twitter into a swamp was their ill-considered choice to run traditional ads. If, in that key moment before they went public, they had chosen to be subscription based, their user alignment would have led to a very different media landscape.
The AI sites are burning money in search of a business model, and given their scale, it must be tempting to simply auction off the trust and attention of their users. But seen through this lens, I hope they realize what an opportunity they would be wasting if they did.
When we choose media that has the same goals as we do, it’s likely we’ll get what we came for.
