The Digital Media Era Is Definitively Dead

A requiem for a more optimistic time

Photo by Carolin Thiergart on Unsplash

Last month, veteran media reporter Dylan Byers reported in Puck that Vox Media was being disassembled and sold off. The collection of brands Vox had accumulated over the years includes SB Nation, New York magazine, Eater, and the Vox Podcast Network. It’s unclear what’s going to happen to any of these sites, or the people who work for them — last year Vox sold video games site Polygon to something called Valnet, which immediately laid off most of Polygon’s staff. Byers speculated that Jay Penske, the media mogul who owns Rolling Stone and part of Vox, could buy some of the brands; supermodel Karlie Kloss might take the Cut, the acclaimed women’s interest vertical from New York. It’s truly an exciting time to be working in media, when the value of some of these pretty well-known media brands is probably less than the cost of a private jet.

Vox is the last remaining of the big-name digital media companies. Vice went bankrupt in 2023 and shut down its editorial operations the following year. BuzzFeed had a disastrous IPO in 2021 and shut down its news division amid a pivot to AI-driven content; today it’s teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Gawker was famously sued to extinction by Hulk Hogan with an assist from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, and its network of sites was sold off. Vox, by comparison, has been professionally managed by CEO Jim Bankoff. “One has to commend Jim for sticking around long enough to see the process through,” Byers wrote. “He built out a portfolio of solid mid-market brands, diversified the business, tried and failed to sell, landed the Penske investment, and positioned the assets for their best-possible exit, all things considered.”

The above paragraph represents the devastation of an entire industry. At the height of their valuations, around a decade ago, Vice, Vox, and Buzzfeed were estimated to be worth a combined $8.4 billion, with Vice accounting for $5.7 billion by itself. Those bets turned out to be catastrophically, hilariously wrong. But it’s worth recalling what those investors were betting on in the first place.

Digital media companies were all built around a single idea, which was that the internet and its attendant platforms — social media sites, Google, YouTube — had created an opportunity to build massive audiences. These companies used technical and editorial strategies that were totally foreign to their print forebears. The Huffington Post pioneered SEO practices, Gawker perfected the format of the can’t-look-away personal essay, Vice was an early adopter of online video, BuzzFeed practically invented a half-dozen viral post formats. All of this was in service of building those precious audience metrics, but the actual customers of these businesses weren’t the readers or viewers but the advertisers who coveted access to that audience; all of the major digital media companies also had teams that produced ads, including ads that looked like editorial content, a.k.a. “native advertising” or “branded content.”

There were sometimes controversies over whether some companies were inflating the size of their audiences¹, but the underlying assumption that those audiences would lead to profits was rarely, if ever, questioned. None of the digital media companies used paywalls in the 2010s. Executives and investors wanted to see those traffic numbers increase, and locking out non-subscribers would mean the numbers would go down — number go up, good; number go down, bad. If these new media brands could attract huge numbers of people, particularly young people, they were bound to become financially successful at some point, right?

The early 2010s were a time of techno-optimism more generally. The internet was going to connect us and lead to the formation of new communities. Social media would fuel and spark pro-democracy movements in autocratic countries. Citizen journalists could livestream newsworthy events in real time. The media world would have fewer gatekeepers. A connected world, it seemed to many, would be more populist, smarter, idealistic, more progressive, just plain nicer. And incidentally, we would all get rich. Sounds like a pretty good deal.

I was among the Kool-Aid drinkers. I joined Vice in 2010, early enough that I got stock appreciation rights that would have been worth something had the company been sold or gone public near the peak of its value. Sometimes I would do some back-of-the-envelope math to try to figure out how much I would make in an IPO, but the numbers were too complicated and vague — certainly something in the five figures, which to a journalist in his mid-twenties is kind of a lot. I never saw that money, of course, and my consolation is that if I was wrong about the future of the media, so were a lot of other people. Investors put hundreds of millions of dollars into Vice and its competitors. Digital media companies used that money to rent flashy offices, hire hundreds of journalists, and build video teams, all of that more or less gone now.

Looking back, what of any of that was real? The flood of money was certainly real (a trickle went into my bank account). The jobs were real, and the equipment, and the stories the journalists produced, and the awards that some of those stories won — I remember the collective feeling of pride digital media journalists had when Official Journalism Bodies began handing out awards to online outlets. But it was all built on sand.

Digital media companies were attracting their audiences in large part through social media apps and search engines — that audience wasn’t “ours” in any meaningful sense. These platforms gradually realized they wanted to keep people on Instagram or Facebook or the Google results page rather than sending the traffic to publishers. The tech giants began capturing a bigger and bigger slice of online ad revenue.

At the same time, competition for eyeballs was increasing. It soon became clear to everyone that social media networks were not places people would congregate to celebrate their common interests, but the most vicious attention markets ever devised. As entrepreneurial actors attempted to game these market dynamics, you saw a blossoming of influencers, streamers, and conspiracy theorists, all competing for eyeballs with some combination of sex appeal, controversy, and sensationalism. Say what you will about Vice or BuzzFeed, we generally tried to tell stories that were true². We never stood a chance.

The players of the digital media age are mostly still around, at least in name. Vice was bought in bankruptcy and has resumed publishing and making films. Vox never stopped publishing and will likely continue after its sale. Even the Huffington Post, now owned by BuzzFeed, is still kicking. A group of former Gawker Media employees launched the site Defector as a kind of successor in 2020; more recently, a collection of former Eater staffers launched the new food site Ravenous. But all these outlets have retreated from the old ad-driven model, and are instead asking readers to actually pay for journalism. The dominant idea kicking around the industry is that a small but devoted following of readers who will pay you for your work is far more valuable than a much larger readership that merely clicks on your links. Everyone working in media wants to cultivate an intimate community that will follow them from one platform to another. Increasingly, the things we are creating are being put behind paywalls, in private Discord channels, on subscriber-only podcasts.

The dream of an open internet, a shared culture beamed into millions and millions of phones, tablets, and laptops, is dead. The companies built on that dream are even more dead. But man, wasn’t it fun when all that stuff was alive?

If you like this essay, please tell someone about it in real life. Please subscribe if you haven’t already.

1. Short answer: yes, they were.

2. I mean, at least after like 2009 or so.