Eliminating “the Platform”

Every media company is trying to become platform-agnostic. The New York Times is trying to be more than print, Buzzfeed is trying to be more than quizzes, and MSNBC is trying to be more than garbage (Kidding, of course).

It’s natural. As networks and newspapers have seen their audiences erode, they’ve realized the risk of being on one platform.

Some new media companies are taking this to an entirely different extreme though.

Now This media (you’ve probably seen their annoying Facebook videos) doesn’t have a website with articles, the mainstay of almost every media company. On their website, alongside links to their social media pages, is the simple phrase “HOMEPAGE. EVEN THE WORD SOUNDS OLD.”

And it’s working for them, really well. Their Facebook pages have tens of millions of likes and hundreds of millions of video views (maybe billions), because they create content natively, rather than trying to ship Facebook users off to a website. Their Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts have similarly admirable followings.

I’m not quite ready to give up the homepage though. It sacrifices one of the biggest networks out there. Google!

This concept of platform-agnostic media is really interesting to me though, which is why I’m working on making M0rning Short a platform-agnostic company, not an email company. Our specialty is stories, not emails.

We’ll see how it works out. Are you sold on the platform-agnostic approach?