Nick Denton, founder and CEO of Gawker Media, one of the
highest-flying native digital media companies of the last decade, wrote a memo to
his staff last week acknowledging that Gawker had faltered in an environment
more and more dominated by BuzzFeed-type traffic methods. While Denton
also used his memo to try to rally his staff, there was a clear sense of his
own weariness. Indeed, he blamed his fuller personal life, and time away from
the office, for Gawker's present problems. And, in an unusual management
solution, he appointed a committee as a more dependable decision-making
overseer for the business than he himself.
But, evident in the memo, it was not just that he had
changed but that the business had changed. And, indeed, at somewhat cross
purposes to his desire to better compete with BuzzFeed (or admitting
that this is impossible), Denton urged his company back to its blogging roots.
In this, Gawker becomes one of the constants of digital
media: Whatever your success has been, you will always be superseded by a
next-generation form of the business. Gawker, with its digital-generation
rancor, superseded, much to many people's horror,Slate, Harvard on the
Internet, as the state of the digital media art (i.e., digital media has about
a five-year life expectancy, give or take).
Gawker, however scabrous, actually succeeded in quite
traditional media terms. It developed highly branded niche sites with a sales
organization able to sell the value of being part of these brands rather than
just the value of the numbers of people who visited them. But during the Gawker
age, audience thresholds grew from a daunting 10 million monthly visitors as
the acknowledged minimum for a high-profile site and big-budget advertising
accounts, to a fantastic 50 million visitors as the price of entry, to even an
absurd 100 million.
Now, in the BuzzFeed era, a media company is really
a technology company, with its highest resources devoted to automating and
increasing the efficiency of audience aggregation. Oddly, such automation turns
out to require hundreds of people to perform. While Gawker is owned entirely by
Denton and has been self-financing for most of its history, BuzzFeed has
needed vast investment. While Denton has rebuffed all offers to buy his
profitable business, the unprofitable BuzzFeed searches the market
for a greater fool. Ben Smith, its top editor, told me recently he didn't
expect BuzzFeed to be around in three years, not under its present
owners nor in its present form.
Gawker, or the Gawker identity, Denton seemed to acknowledge
in his memo, is a casualty in the race for traffic: Gawker succeeded because it
was a carefully molded product. But then it morphed into a business with a much
larger number of ever-younger people having to produce more and more, and
working with less and less editorial vision or leadership. Gawker began to
focus on an open area of parallel writing (i.e. free writing) designed to
enhance its traffic base — but, too, with the natural effect of diluting
quality and confusing purpose.
Curiously, or ludicrously, The New Republic, the
100-year-old Washington magazine, with a circulation of under 50,000, announced
last week that it wanted to transform itself into a digital media business.
This desire seems to have been born out of a sense that all media is now
digital, or must be, that, in the conventional wisdom "digital is the
future." Print is the trash heap, and digital is a wide open world of
possibilities and opportunities.
But, in fact, the Denton memo can be read as an admission or
painful understanding of digital media's rather straitjacket form. Vast
audiences produce limited revenues, meaning content can't cost very much. It's
what, in the traditional world, was called junk publishing.
And, in fact, that is just the digital publishing business
now. Undoubtedly it will morph into something even farther from publishing as
we know it. Denton took advantage of a moment when he could use new technology
to bootstrap himself into creating an original and influential new publishing
form. But today's "vertically integrated digital media company," in
Vidra's self-hoisting words, is another duck all together.
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