I feel the word 'creator' was created by the social media companies as a way to trick people into entering an extremely inequitable economic bargain. Basically they promise, 'Hey, Mr. Beast makes a billion dollars. You could be Mr. Beast. Why don't you work for us basically for free for the rest of your life in the hopes that one day, we'll break off a little chunk of ad revenue for you?' Creator is like when Avon or Mary Kay calls you an entrepreneur.
In journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren't going anywhere. The need for high-quality insight isn't going anywhere. Great reporters aren't going anywhere. What surface this all lives on is up for grabs, and you can't be too ideological about that.
After all, I've been saying for a long time now that the original sin of digital media was Jonah and BuzzFeed betting they could so consistently go viral that platforms like Facebook would pay them for content — the way cable companies pay carriage fees for channels like ESPN. This was the big bet for a lot of companies all chasing BuzzFeed's influence and valuation, and it's mostly all come crashing down.
AT&T tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner. Verizon tried content plus pipes when it bought AOL and Yahoo, and, hell, AOL tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner in the early 2000s. You might notice a trend here — all of those deals ended in disaster.
I coined the term Google Zero a few years ago — that's the idea that Google traffic to websites would fall to zero as the company answered more and more queries directly on the search results page. That's gone from an idea Sundar batted away in previous interviews to something the entire media industry is grappling with.
That's gone from an idea Sundar batted away in previous interviews to something the entire media industry is grappling with. Even the CEOs of major publishers like Condé Nast are now publicly saying they're planning for a world of zero search traffic from now on.
The notion of these symmetries all working together and happy harmony and holding hands and the the studios and the streamers and everybody going forth is great. Maybe I'd love that to be case because I want things to survive. But the history doesn't seem to support that.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
