I largely agree, especially the way you describe the lumbering traditional behemoth media outlets — I’ve seen this first hand in the Games industry within the UK. What you describe is almost exactly, word for word, the path of Future Publishing over the last 15 years.

However, I think your opinion on what people want is a little rose-tinted, or should I say very ‘Vox’. This view is pretty much the mission of Vox, and whilst Vox is in the process of proving there’s an audience for that content, far larger audiences appear to love what I would say you describe as ‘shit’.

I think a perfect example of this is where the vast majority of the world’s Internet population goes every day: Facebook. Over the past few years Facebook has morphed from primarily a social platform dominated by photos, to a content sharing platform. It’s been so subtle, most of its users haven’t even noticed, but it has kept them hooked.

This is no accident, of course, with Facebook tweaking their news feed based on demand and what content its users want to see the most.

The reality is that the type of content that dominates on Facebook is click-bait type ‘articles’, images, videos, quizzes, memes, etc. This kind of viral content is not long-form, well thought-out, or researched. In fact, the worst of it is mis-informed, unbalanced, and lacking any substance whatsoever. But, based on the quantity and virility of the content, and the popularity companies churning this type of content out, it’s what the people love.

Take Buzzfeed — it’s younger than Vox Media, has had less funding, uses a much less capable publishing platform (‘SuperPoster’ & ‘Mission Control’ vs ‘Chorus’), and yet it is close to or more than twice the size of Vox based on most publicly available metrics.

Take all the companies producing this type of content, and those promoting it (‘Native’ widgets that continue a meteoric rise, from Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent etc.) and you’re talking about a significantly larger industry and readership than the type Vox Media aims to dominate.

This could go very philosophical very quickly, but I think much of that is down to human nature and the psychology and context of the generation that has been born after the advent of the internet and all of our current daily digital devices.

The key to my point: the evidence suggests most people actually like this type of content, and as a result it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Vox has a lovely platform, a lovely outlook, and lovely content — I’m a big fan. And whilst I think it has vast potential, I don’t believe its current business model and mission will provide it with scale or margins anywhere near to those of companies operating in the ‘cheap’ content arenas — i.e. those that produce the aforementioned cheap content or are user-generated.

I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.