Does Any of This Actually Matter?

It’s time for an existential crisis newsletter. But stick with me because I think once we get past questioning the meaning of it all, we’ll find ourselves in a place of agreement. And for those who have read me for a while, I like to ask these dark questions from time to time.

As a newsletter writer about the business side of media, I, of course, believe all of this does matter. Creating great ad products, thinking about intelligent audience development strategies, building ultra-fast websites, and having all the analytics you need to make decisions are all crucial to building a thriving media business.

But it is so easy to get distracted by all of these things. And none of it matters without first answering the one fundamental question every media company needs to ask: is my content great?

I ask these existential questions—including the above-linked piece about readers missing our publications if they disappeared—because we can’t lose track of what really matters for a media company.

I got lunch with a media executive this week, and we were talking about many media companies that have struggled over the past decade. They all had something in common: they didn’t have a bias toward creating great content. Yes, they also raised too much money and didn’t prioritize profit over revenue. That is true.

But they didn’t have a bias toward creating great content. Instead, they tended to prioritize hacking distribution or innovative ad products; they were biased toward platform-first formats and scale at all costs.

BuzzFeed is down nearly 69% year-to-date. It trades for less than 1x revenue. You can say the economy is crap and all sorts of things. But BuzzFeed never prioritized creating great content. Instead, they prioritized creating as much content as possible—paying writers low amounts of money—so they could grow traffic as quickly as possible. It was a business built on hacking distribution, not creating great content.

The same can be said for all the companies that got caught up in the pivot to video. It was never about creating great content. Instead, it was about pumping as much video content onto platforms as humanly possible to reach distribution goals, which would help them hit revenue targets.

And it’s not just these companies. Netflix had its first quarter where it lost subscribers, and while there are various reasons for it, I’d say there’s one obvious one. The content got very bad. For every House of Cards, there was an untold number of duds. Dozens of articles and Reddit threads ask the same question: “why is Netflix content so bad?” It has made so much content, yet, a significant perception is that so much of it is terrible.

Are we then surprised that businesses struggled?

You cannot grow a sustainable business without first having the content part right. You might have all the business model pieces—subscription, lead gen, content studio, etc.—but if you don’t have the content your target reader wants, you’re in an uphill battle.

And here’s why… An old saying says, “garbage in, garbage out.” Or, for my data friends, “bad data in, bad data out.” So if we put garbage content out there, we’ll get garbage traffic back. And garbage traffic is very hard to monetize.

This is a big reason, by the way, why everyone is so excited about the creator economy. Because they are creators first and operators second, they lead with great content. I’ve seen creators who know nothing about the business side figure out how to generate full-time incomes (and I don’t mean the pivotal full-time rates some media companies pay).

I remember talking with Nathan Baschez, co-founder of Every, about content creation. And he said that their goal at Every was to create the best content out there. They agonized over it. But they were creators first. They knew their way to success was by giving their audience the best content possible. They didn’t try to game algorithms or anything; it was just creating great content.

Now they’re figuring out the business side of media. They launched with subscriptions but realized over time that they were leaving money on the table, so built an ad product. They’re building out the systems that go into building a great media company. But they started with content.

Now, here’s the ugly truth: exceptional content only gets you so far. You can have the best content in the world, but if you don’t know how to unlock the economic value, it doesn’t matter. And that’s why I write A Media Operator. My assumption is that readers of AMO are biasing to create great content (though I like to write these pieces from time to time as a reminder). And therefore, my focus is on the next level. What comes next?

If you have great content, you can build the business side to support it and make it unbelievably successful. If you have garbage content, there is no business side that can support it for the long term. Garbage content in, garbage audience out, monetization becomes very hard.

Thanks for reading my annual existential piece. Stay tuned for next year’s. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. Have a great weekend!