The One Media Model that Makes Sense

Unless you fully own your audience, you're only renting success.

This is the newsletter I didn’t want to have to write. I wanted to follow up my last edition with something fun about an app that I vibe-coded that turns vintage paperback book covers into custom 3D-printed bookmarks.

But in the wake of the disastrous Washington Post implosion that destroyed 30% of that storied newsroom, it’s important to come back to the topic of the media industry and its ongoing travails.

I’ve quoted Hemingway before, saying that there are two ways to go bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly. The media industry’s bankruptcy of ideas, progress, and even hope has gone from sliding towards irrelevance slowly to now very quickly indeed.

At this point, we can all agree that most of the traditional media models don’t work for the vast majority of people or companies in the media space. If you have a media property that’s built on a pageview model, which means getting lots of eyeballs onto your pages so people either view ads on those pages or click on affiliate links on those pages, your trend lines have been going down, not up. With Google Zero sending less and less traffic to your property, that situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

What biz model?

If you’re hoping for a successful paid-subscription-based business, well, you better have years, or decades, of big money to back that up, proving that you deserve people’s direct investment. And even if you found success on a third-party platform, whether YouTube, TikTok, Threads, or Google Discover, you must know that in the end, you’re only renting success. You don’t own it because you are on someone else’s platform playing by someone else’s rules. At the end of the day, you own virtually nothing from that transaction.

I’m hopeful that there’s a handful of reporter-owned or employee-owned cooperatives that can actually combine high-quality content with a robust subscription model and some ownership of their audience. But even those are based in large part on bringing in mass eyeballs through search engine discovery or social media sharing. And I doubt that there’s room for more than a small handful of them to become self-sustaining media properties in the long run.

This new Nieman Lab article covers some of the challenges of that journalism co-op model. For every success story like Defector, there are plenty of other co-ops that don’t make enough to count as full-time employment (and even Defector, the most-cited journalism co-op success story, only pays its highly experienced staff a base salary of $70K, plus profit-sharing).

Own your eyeballs

When I think about what the media model of the future looks like, at least in terms of something that can be sustainable and successful for a reasonable number of people and properties, I keep coming back to one key concept: ownership of your audience.

The most obvious way to own your audience is to communicate with them directly through email, like this very newsletter that you’re reading. Building a mailing list for a newsletter takes a tremendous amount of work, luck, and people liking what you’re doing and being willing to divulge their email address to you. That is a big bond of trust and not one to be taken lightly.

But that added level of control is what makes all the difference between a direct-to-the-audience model versus a third-party model where you’re relying on outside agents to either direct eyeballs to your content or direct your content to their eyeballs.

The YouTube algorithm might love you one day and hate you the next, and there’s not really a lot you can do about that. Google Discover might highlight one of your articles one day, and then you won’t turn up there again for another six months. Trust me, no middle manager is waiting around for you to score another unlikely Google Discover hit when the month-over-month pageview numbers are in the red.

At least for right now, the only really solid way I can think of to truly own your audience is to have a direct email relationship with them, via something like a newsletter subscription. And yes, in most of these cases, you’re using a third-party platform whether it’s Beehiiv or Substack or something else. The key point to differentiation is that if you decide you don’t like working with Company A, you can pick up stakes, including your mailing list, and move to Company B. Or you can even set up your own email serving.

There’s another option, but one available to only the most fortunate, and often best-financed, publications -- become a true destination website. That means people will actually type your URL into their browser’s address bar and make a conscious decision to visit you. The New York Times has this level of direct audience connection, as does the Atlantic, WIRED, the New Yorker, and maybe a handful of other examples. But as that short list shows, this is a category mostly reserved for legacy publications that have had decades of reader goodwill and newsstand-derived authority.

No magic, just eyeballs

So that’s my not-so-magic formula for media success. The publications and individual creators that will thrive long-term are the ones that understand what they do and how they get it in front of an audience is more important than any specific platform. You own your ideas. You own your content. You don’t own the algorithmically determined slot machine of search engine, AI overview, or social media platform promotion.

That’s why I create content the way that I do, in an almost platform-agnostic way. If I’m doing better on YouTube one month, maybe I’ll make more YouTube videos. If I’m doing better with my newsletter in a different month, maybe I’ll do more with my newsletter. Maybe I’ll make a video and put it on multiple platforms. Maybe I’ll rewrite an article from this newsletter as a LinkedIn post.

The common denominator is the creator, their point of view, and the information and expertise they are transmitting to the audience. The actual outlet matters a lot less, especially because no outlet is ever going to truly love you and you always need to be ready to have your heart broken by the algorithm.

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