John,

As you skipped the backstory — probably because everyone-but-me is boringly familiar with it — I thought I would try to sketch it out from a point of ignorance to better ask, ‘How did we get to this new world?’

If the old old platform was the grey newsstand copy, why did the publishers of the 90’s decide to leap online without looking first at what this might do to their comfortable business (and the classified dollar)? If the new old platform of the wide web had readers but no grand way to make money off them, why did the publishers turn even less thoughtfully to adtech? Did a moment of greed lead to a future of necessity and cheap fixes? (The media shouldn’t feel alone in that.) And, now looking forwards some, is the new thing the kind of publisher’s solution which, insidiously, needs no fixes because it ends up being the last?

Publisher is a bit of a catchall. A wire service story is studiously anonymous (and important) as is so much clickbait (which is not). Readers have a strong sense of a New Yorker story. The Guardian’s conscience spills across its many opinion pieces, attractively so. There is a similar closeness to the authors in one man bands like Daring Fireball, and to leaner (loved) publications like The Toast and The Awl. With the exception of the first two, and good riddance to the latter, I must believe that all of these mixed tones would endure in voice if not economically on a neutral platform. But, again, why leap?

Most of the smaller shops — John, forgive me if I’m wrong here — would have been unsustainably difficult to run in the old old times: on the cost side, an in-house ad sales department would eat up most of the reporting budget; on revenues, the geographical limitations of paper, no matter how well it’s folded, would keep the publication grounded. (The space between is profit, the ugliest word, it pays for lunch.) Here, the new old platform has been great, for reader and publisher alike, as the costs were low enough to take risks and the audiences were large and growing and never touched up for money.

This is no longer the case. The average person’s attention and boredom now live, more and more, on platforms like Facebook (says Facebook). Readers have stayed for the short-attention span theatre and that has drawn numbers down at some publishers. More worryingly, on revenues, people have soured and wizened up on on adtech. I loved Casey Johnston’s thinkpiece for reminding people that there is a human cost to adblockers, but 200m installs and counting is difficult to argue against (as is James Williams). People do not wish to be tracked — not with my ruinous internet history — and that cost should not be lost on publishers. (A friend of mine’s grandmother asked her to install AdBlockPlus the other day, personal proof that a Streisand/HotlineBling effect has moved this past ignoring.)

As cash for staff and cool projects were calculated on the old margins, this hits hard and requires a flexibility most publishers cannot afford. There are a few ports in this storm, and while the dominant strategy seems to be to go with any or all of them, some are far worse. To take one example, The New Yorker should not want to split ad dollars and sit in an endless scroll knuckled between Buzzfeed surveys and Upworthy’s inhumanity (masquerading, awfully, as humanity). As part of a promotion for the paper’s anniversary, many read John Hersey’s Hiroshima: the most photographed thing on Instagram is the avocado. Every metric and strategy at Facebook would prefer you were bombarded with 0.02 megatons of avocados than the complex and beautiful. To win on some platforms is to win in a race to the bottom.

(Some seem more benign. Apple does not really compete with publishers for ad dollars or the business of monetising people’s attention. They have a separate business. Still, Bloomberg News’s muddle in China can be seen as how a publisher exits a sticky situation to protect a different kind of (financial information) platform’s top dollar.)

There are shades of this misalignment in most platforms. It checkers my enthusiasm. However, one to get excited about is a meaningful, shared ad platform. Any. At least with this publishers and the people paying them are in it together and sites can retain their own editorial policies. Let’s take The Deck as an example. The design blog centric network has an understanding of the sites in its small network, the kind of companies it could advertise for, the common decency not to track the readers or to molest them with resent-inducing full-screen ads. The high-cost of an in-house ad sales team is shared across the multiple blogs (it comes out of The Deck’s cut) and readers do not seem to mind. One weakness: The ads run as Javascript and are blocked by the more careless adblockers. As I am suggesting a fictitious, future ad platform, I would equally suggest that the publications within it host those ads natively. I would imagine there is less money, certainly in the short-term, but one should invent a line item and number on a balance sheet with the words ‘option for controlling the future.’

Is this nuts? You tell me.

Cheers,

Geoff