The death of traffic and the death of the 'pageview economy'
I've just finished reading former BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith's book, Traffic, where he charts the growth of the first waves of online publishing through his personal editorial experiences among some well-researched anecdata from those who lived through it.
The Drudge Report, Gawker, Nick Denton, Jezebel, Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed News, and then the fall. It's best read if you already knew what these names represented at an earlier part of internet history. The book is decidedly narrowly-focussed and heavily North America-centric, but that's a good thing in my view. Focussed and relatively short, but useful.
Concurrent to this, Brian Morrissey's Rebooting newsletter is a great regular read about the emerging dynamics from publishers attempting to survive amid all of it. The Verge also has an excellent flair for producing stories which accurately talk about the impacts of technology on publishing -- notably SEO and Google.
An emerging notion which is generally held true by every publisher, but which should now be a semi-truck at 100kph barrelling towards them is that the internet is changing and we are now in, at minimum, the third or fourth era of publishers attempting to monetise their online journalism businesses.
This era is primarily defined by the death of the pageview economy, as Brian Morrissey put it in his newsletter update - "The messy end of the pageview economy".
Why is it worth noting the truck is coming at 100kph? Because regurgitating garbage for clicks is now the jobs of robots, and they can already do a mediocre job at it. You don't really need a human in the loop for that. Spending 5 minutes to write mindless clickbait fluff in order to financially justify 5 days writing an in-depth feature was a tenuous business model to begin with, but rang true for most publishers. Up with the Chartbeat big board. Let's erect totem poles to the numbers. Did we care who clicked? Why? Who they were? Uh, not really!
Make the numbers go bigger and better, they said. We may still have problems to solve when the line goes up, but hey, at least the line goes up - right? That's worth something.
Well, as it turns out, you should care who clicks, because the advertiser cares why they clicked, and you should also care how they found your website to click on in the first place. Line goes up is also meaningless when online attention is now a fundamentally centralised and monopolised thing.
What's the alternative... uh well...
It's ... producing a product... that people like... to sell to them as part of a brand... and then selling the fact you have access to this group of customers ... to other brands - known as advertisers. Either that or as part of selling yourself to these ordinary people, you also persuade them to give you money.
Under the prevailing and dying model, you produce a product that makes the line go up on your Chartbeat board, then you sell the fact you have a big number to an advertiser, and then hope they don't realise Facebook and Google got a hundred times better than you at this about 15 years ago.
Note this retiring model doesn't include producing a product people like, identifying who actually is reading your stories, or giving yourself any kind of direct connection with the customer/reader you're purportedly producing products for.
Unique browsers or pageviews might've not appeared dissimilar to a traditional abstraction such as Nielsen viewing households in the minds of media execs. Yet it was an incorrect assumption to believe these abstractions were similar -- beyond them both being numerical figures. It doesn't matter as much if the number is bigger as much as how well advertisers can efficiently spend money. Therefore, how can you target the ads? Therefore, Facebook and Google.
Pointing out mistakes isn't the same as finding solutions though (that's thus far what this blog post has done). But it is true that diagnosing and sizing up your problem correctly is easier now than it was before in media - we've figured out a whole bunch of bad ideas which failed. It's easier than ever to reflect from the point of view of, "would we do this the same today as we did 10 years ago" with hindsight 20/20.
The vague and high-level general path forward isn't actually complicated. Write and publish things people want. Find out who those people are. Sell them what they want, or sell someone else high-quality and unique access to target them. The difficulty is that this requires doing a lot of experimentation instead of endlessly optimising around the dying paramountcy that was the pageview machine.
The problem comes when you want even slightly more detail than that.
Putting it bluntly in this era, a lot of publishers will die and a lot of journalists and writers will lose their job as a result of this transition. What comes with the opportunity of building a more financially-sustainable, better connected, and more audience and human-focussed publishers, also likely comes with ruining a lot of human livelihoods and careers.
That's why publishers should plan with Google Zero (shoutout to Google Discover Zero) and Facebook Zero as the assumption right now.
There's no point assuming you've still got time.
