"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."
Boy, do I know that feeling. BroBible.com founding partner and publisher here. Back in that era, we were a tier below the BuzzFeed/Vice VC frenzy at a company called Woven, which eventually rebranded to UPROXX Media. We had nice SoHo and LA offices and big, ambitious sales teams that significantly outnumbered the editorial infrastructure.
A couple of years after we sold BroBible in late 2012, I got an offer to double my salary from a rapidly scaling food publisher. As a counter, Woven slid a pile of stock options across the table. Naturally, I took the bait, fully convinced that the site I helped get off the ground in 2009 would lead to a pot of gold in those years. I also used to do that back-of-the-envelope math, dreaming about which Brooklyn neighborhood I wanted to buy my townhouse in.
Like everyone in that era, the options were a dud. That was a bitter pill to swallow for a while as the scale era started to wind down. But our corner of that company was still highly profitable under a traditional ad model. Actually caring about the brand and the work forced me to keep a hawk's eye on the business fundamentals... how to grow our ad products and, thus, real revenue (especially from social partnerships in the pre-creator era). Between 2016 and 2018, staring at an actual P&L instead of vanity growth metrics made us realize we were sitting on a remarkably solid media engine. The sinking ship was the VC model with too much overhead, not the brand itself.
Knowing the real math gave a few of us the confidence to scrape our cash together and buy BroBible back right as the parent company was selling off. Almost a decade later, still operating under that same ad model, buying back our independence and sticking to the vision remain the best career decisions I've ever made.
I've always said that the best publishers treat their businesses like great family-owned neighborhood restaurants, not fast food chains. Consistent, reliable, comforting, and deeply committed to both the audience they serve and the bottom-line reality that allows those involved in the business to actually thrive in their own way.
Digital media is a shell of its former self compared to that era in terms of the energy it hoped to accomplish with all these mini Conde Nasts and Viacoms, yes, but I think the same sense of having to give a shit applies to the creator era we're in now. You have to care, all the time, or everything goes sideways.
Thanks for this, Harry. I saw the precursor to this in the 1990s, as the commercial internet was being born. There were those who saw the potential for democratized information to enable a new era of media, characterized by the idea that, "information wants to be free." And then they lined up like puppies waiting for supper when Netscape started planning its IPO.
My lesson: information may want to be free, but greed and power don't. To make anything free requires intense collective will and consistent struggle to keep the greedy from amassing economic power.
I really like what you’re saying here. I think we need to definitely find the balance between the analog way and how digital truly integrates in a healthy manner
I worked in a digital newsroom for 6 years and the downfall rippled through there as well. It always felt like quicksand with multiple changing partners, revolving editors and business folks trying to crack the revenue question for public radio. We tried to tell true stories but they were often formulaic and predictable, driven by “analytics” which still makes me laugh, as if news could be shaped by audience tastes. Who “likes” war? People wanted penis stories, even if they were from ancient Mesopotamia. 🤷🏽♀️ I came in at the tail end of this boom and then got laid off. I’m still reeling a bit from the fact that most stories we told were not actually news but highly curated opinions. I left a career in education to touch this digital journalism dream! Now I’m selling vintage and have a creative outlet through my Substack! Thanks for your post, it was healing to break down the timeline of this roller coaster of a ride.
I worked at TikTok from 2018 - 2022 and resonate deeply with this when I think about social media progression from being something that we thought was expansive to being extractive to the vast majority of players in the ecosystem
"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."
Yep. The competition for attention has low key celebrified everyone's operational logic. It's good to be famous...to even get a normie corporate job now, to say nothing of the kind of industry where being famous is exactly what you're expected to bring to the table, at least eventually. It's imperative you stick out.
Enjoyed reading this! Incredibly informative, nostalgic and depressing. I’m curious what comes next after everyone realizes pay-walling folks and siloing everyone is a bad idea
Loved this! "Say what you will about Vice or BuzzFeed, we generally tried to tell stories that were true2. We never stood a chance." this really stuck with me
Well, the shift from ownership consumerism to rental or "fee" consumerism has already gone overboard and led to too much trouble already, in my opinion. Including a reflexive loathing of being requested to bite the hook once again, for a fee of $60 or more annually.
I remember the days of my paper subscriptions to magazines. It didn't amount to four figures annually, even with CPI adjustment to the 1980s. If I found material that I thought deserved to be preserved in a form less capricious and unpredictably fragile than the Internet, I wasn't forced to use my own labor, printer, and supplies in order to print hard copies.
I have a limit to my appetite for the Rental Economy. It's become something of a turnoff. Especially when it's mandatory.
Also, I'm not made out of money.
I read Substack writers lamenting that their latest article has led to subscription cancellations. I think that it's grounding to consider that some of the paid subscribers are on a budget. That a cancellation without comment might have nothing to do with the quality of the work, or the topic. It's about plugging a hole in a money drain.
I'd buy volumes of archived Vice articles bound in book form. Especially if some of the volumes were organized by topic. There was a lot of good reportage. The writers were good. The reporters asked the right questions, and pursued them. (In journalism, knowing the next question to ask is huge.)
It is a bit depressing to think that the era of open internet media us dwindling... At the same time it seems like a normal consequence to our current technological state, where free and visible increasingly means being stolen by AI.
Is Substack going down the same road? So many comments and notes full of snark & sarcasm, which to me is a sign of intellectual weakness, not strength. Clickbait such as "If you only read one book in your life, this is the book!" "The one most important movie ever made and you never heard of it!" "This is by far the best Substack post I have ever read."
The correct way to use Substack, IMO is not to scroll Notes like it's Twitter, but to subscribe to recommendations from people you read and just have a nice inbox full of longer reads whenever you open the app. Notes is OK for discovery but suffers very much from the same disease that afflicts other social media - blatant attention-seeking and ragebait that's just spiritually exhausting.
Really good stuff. One of the advantages to having a "normal" career in the military and transportation & logistics management before I started doing writing & media is watching how many of these companies somehow thought the new technology was going to by-pass good business practices that are universal. The new media economy was just never going to support the massive overhead costs of how old media ran for decades, much like many other companies in other fields. But plenty of folks thought they would have their own new digital kingdoms with the old corner office corporate perks. Thus is thus...
I don't know, everything is almost laughable looking back but you can't fault any one media house for trying.
It was exciting to see those huge numbers; but yes, not all clicks are made equal. When SA had their own Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry in 2024 trying to blame the big tech companies for undermining journalism (which could be argued); despite testifying in that enquiry, I knew that we simply didn't have our model secured and frankly, you can't blame someone else for your own problems.
The subscription and direct relationship models are exciting too but also not the whole picture. Something new will emerge from this mayhem, something that has semblances of previous and current models but with a whole layer on top of that that connects and enables usage, ads, micropayments, provenance; all these models that otherwsie would need teams to implement can be enabled with far fewer resources. Will make it work.
No its not…shock media and shit journalism is dying…every time I look up its some new documentary about the fringes of society…then throw in new talking heads with their platforms
"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."
Boy, do I know that feeling. BroBible.com founding partner and publisher here. Back in that era, we were a tier below the BuzzFeed/Vice VC frenzy at a company called Woven, which eventually rebranded to UPROXX Media. We had nice SoHo and LA offices and big, ambitious sales teams that significantly outnumbered the editorial infrastructure.
A couple of years after we sold BroBible in late 2012, I got an offer to double my salary from a rapidly scaling food publisher. As a counter, Woven slid a pile of stock options across the table. Naturally, I took the bait, fully convinced that the site I helped get off the ground in 2009 would lead to a pot of gold in those years. I also used to do that back-of-the-envelope math, dreaming about which Brooklyn neighborhood I wanted to buy my townhouse in.
Like everyone in that era, the options were a dud. That was a bitter pill to swallow for a while as the scale era started to wind down. But our corner of that company was still highly profitable under a traditional ad model. Actually caring about the brand and the work forced me to keep a hawk's eye on the business fundamentals... how to grow our ad products and, thus, real revenue (especially from social partnerships in the pre-creator era). Between 2016 and 2018, staring at an actual P&L instead of vanity growth metrics made us realize we were sitting on a remarkably solid media engine. The sinking ship was the VC model with too much overhead, not the brand itself.
Knowing the real math gave a few of us the confidence to scrape our cash together and buy BroBible back right as the parent company was selling off. Almost a decade later, still operating under that same ad model, buying back our independence and sticking to the vision remain the best career decisions I've ever made.
I've always said that the best publishers treat their businesses like great family-owned neighborhood restaurants, not fast food chains. Consistent, reliable, comforting, and deeply committed to both the audience they serve and the bottom-line reality that allows those involved in the business to actually thrive in their own way.
Digital media is a shell of its former self compared to that era in terms of the energy it hoped to accomplish with all these mini Conde Nasts and Viacoms, yes, but I think the same sense of having to give a shit applies to the creator era we're in now. You have to care, all the time, or everything goes sideways.
Man this is a great comment! Thanks for dropping by
Thanks for this, Harry. I saw the precursor to this in the 1990s, as the commercial internet was being born. There were those who saw the potential for democratized information to enable a new era of media, characterized by the idea that, "information wants to be free." And then they lined up like puppies waiting for supper when Netscape started planning its IPO.
My lesson: information may want to be free, but greed and power don't. To make anything free requires intense collective will and consistent struggle to keep the greedy from amassing economic power.
^ This.
It's not just digital, it's post-symbolic, post-narrative, post-literate. We'll tread water until someone figures out the analog.
I really like what you’re saying here. I think we need to definitely find the balance between the analog way and how digital truly integrates in a healthy manner
I’m not sure the digital integrates. It probably serves only as a path to emulate analog, to dev analog software in advance of an analog hardware.
I worked in a digital newsroom for 6 years and the downfall rippled through there as well. It always felt like quicksand with multiple changing partners, revolving editors and business folks trying to crack the revenue question for public radio. We tried to tell true stories but they were often formulaic and predictable, driven by “analytics” which still makes me laugh, as if news could be shaped by audience tastes. Who “likes” war? People wanted penis stories, even if they were from ancient Mesopotamia. 🤷🏽♀️ I came in at the tail end of this boom and then got laid off. I’m still reeling a bit from the fact that most stories we told were not actually news but highly curated opinions. I left a career in education to touch this digital journalism dream! Now I’m selling vintage and have a creative outlet through my Substack! Thanks for your post, it was healing to break down the timeline of this roller coaster of a ride.
I worked at TikTok from 2018 - 2022 and resonate deeply with this when I think about social media progression from being something that we thought was expansive to being extractive to the vast majority of players in the ecosystem
We had fun and did good work. Most of the time I feel damn lucky I got to be a part of the good Internet. Great piece
"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."
Yep. The competition for attention has low key celebrified everyone's operational logic. It's good to be famous...to even get a normie corporate job now, to say nothing of the kind of industry where being famous is exactly what you're expected to bring to the table, at least eventually. It's imperative you stick out.
Enjoyed reading this! Incredibly informative, nostalgic and depressing. I’m curious what comes next after everyone realizes pay-walling folks and siloing everyone is a bad idea
Loved this! "Say what you will about Vice or BuzzFeed, we generally tried to tell stories that were true2. We never stood a chance." this really stuck with me
it would be well worth it for Vice to publish their stories in bound volume form. By topic, perhaps.
Hmmm, yeah, and they could even put out one of these “issues” every month and mail it to interested readers for a fee!
Well, the shift from ownership consumerism to rental or "fee" consumerism has already gone overboard and led to too much trouble already, in my opinion. Including a reflexive loathing of being requested to bite the hook once again, for a fee of $60 or more annually.
I remember the days of my paper subscriptions to magazines. It didn't amount to four figures annually, even with CPI adjustment to the 1980s. If I found material that I thought deserved to be preserved in a form less capricious and unpredictably fragile than the Internet, I wasn't forced to use my own labor, printer, and supplies in order to print hard copies.
I have a limit to my appetite for the Rental Economy. It's become something of a turnoff. Especially when it's mandatory.
Also, I'm not made out of money.
I read Substack writers lamenting that their latest article has led to subscription cancellations. I think that it's grounding to consider that some of the paid subscribers are on a budget. That a cancellation without comment might have nothing to do with the quality of the work, or the topic. It's about plugging a hole in a money drain.
I'd buy volumes of archived Vice articles bound in book form. Especially if some of the volumes were organized by topic. There was a lot of good reportage. The writers were good. The reporters asked the right questions, and pursued them. (In journalism, knowing the next question to ask is huge.)
I think there's a historical ballad in the making here:
"we were sure we were building something new
for humanity's advance
we tried to tell stories that were mostly true
we never stood a chance"
(I'll credit the source of the couplet when I accept my Grammy :-))
It is a bit depressing to think that the era of open internet media us dwindling... At the same time it seems like a normal consequence to our current technological state, where free and visible increasingly means being stolen by AI.
Excellent read. Youre quite an amazing writer
Is Substack going down the same road? So many comments and notes full of snark & sarcasm, which to me is a sign of intellectual weakness, not strength. Clickbait such as "If you only read one book in your life, this is the book!" "The one most important movie ever made and you never heard of it!" "This is by far the best Substack post I have ever read."
The correct way to use Substack, IMO is not to scroll Notes like it's Twitter, but to subscribe to recommendations from people you read and just have a nice inbox full of longer reads whenever you open the app. Notes is OK for discovery but suffers very much from the same disease that afflicts other social media - blatant attention-seeking and ragebait that's just spiritually exhausting.
I wonder if we'll see more retrenched journalists from the above platforms migrating to Substack.
Really good stuff. One of the advantages to having a "normal" career in the military and transportation & logistics management before I started doing writing & media is watching how many of these companies somehow thought the new technology was going to by-pass good business practices that are universal. The new media economy was just never going to support the massive overhead costs of how old media ran for decades, much like many other companies in other fields. But plenty of folks thought they would have their own new digital kingdoms with the old corner office corporate perks. Thus is thus...
I don't know, everything is almost laughable looking back but you can't fault any one media house for trying.
It was exciting to see those huge numbers; but yes, not all clicks are made equal. When SA had their own Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry in 2024 trying to blame the big tech companies for undermining journalism (which could be argued); despite testifying in that enquiry, I knew that we simply didn't have our model secured and frankly, you can't blame someone else for your own problems.
The subscription and direct relationship models are exciting too but also not the whole picture. Something new will emerge from this mayhem, something that has semblances of previous and current models but with a whole layer on top of that that connects and enables usage, ads, micropayments, provenance; all these models that otherwsie would need teams to implement can be enabled with far fewer resources. Will make it work.
But yeah, it was fun.
No its not…shock media and shit journalism is dying…every time I look up its some new documentary about the fringes of society…then throw in new talking heads with their platforms