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I think you need a more nuanced take than "journalism is dying" – a more accurate take might be that journalism is centralizing for professionals (NYT, major ca
by gen220 3y ago
I think you need a more nuanced take than "journalism is dying" – a more accurate take might be that journalism is centralizing for professionals (NYT, major cable networks have scarcely ever been doing better... don't take my word for it, read the financial statements) and decentralizing for amateurs (substack, twitter, etc.).
Journalism is evolving and changing, but it isn't dying or going away. Hyper-targeted ads will not "save journalism".
- asow92 3y agoThat’s a great take, and I agree with a lot of that, and I also feel like targeted ads would help the company that work with.
- gen220 3y agoNews sites can't compete with big tech companies on targeted ads, they're at a systemic disadvantage. News sites have to spend X% of their margin to continuously generate content to attract viewers, while big tech companies spend 0 to attract viewers because viewers are the generators of their content. For this fundamental reason, news sites never be able to compete on targeting granularity or ad pricing. Rather than fighting a losing battle, it's better to put your chips behind a battle where you have a differentiated advantage (in the NYT/Cable News companies, it's the cornered resource of accredited voices in reporting and editorial). It would be net-negative to try to compete in the space targeted ads. They'd be better off offering low-revenue, low-cost blanket ads (i.e. advertise in the "automotive" section of the website to non-subscribers), where the cost to the ad operator is effectively zero because they don't have to maintain a database of user ad profiles.