Matryoshka nesting dolls
From The Awl:I was talking to someone who works at one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept that distracted everyone for a few years while they settled into their roles as slightly different ways to text. He mentioned something, offhand, while describing his anxieties about how his company might succeed or die, that to him felt obvious. In his weird zone of the internet, he said, the concept of a large publication seemed utterly hopeless. The only thing that keeps people coming back to apps in great enough numbers over time to make real money is the presence of other people. So the only apps that people use in the way publications want their readers to behave—with growing loyalty that can be turned into money—are basically communications services. The near-future internet puts the publishing and communications industries in competition with each other for the same confused advertising dollars, and it’s not even close.
Vox is now publishing directly to social networks and apps; BuzzFeed has a growing team of people dedicated to figuring out what BuzzFeed might look like without a website at the middle.
This is a stray observation from an app bubble within an investment bubble. But if you listen to what the internet’s best-capitalized and savviest media companies—which themselves exist in a (separate) set of Matryoshka bubbles—are saying, and watch what they are doing, you can tell that they don’t think it’s crazy.
Here is a question worth asking of any large media company, as well as an answer:
Disney has given Fusion a lot of money to launch. What does the company see as a successful return on that investment? Traffic goals? TV audience? Influence?
I think it’s all of the above. Part of our overall mission is to be a lab for experimentation and innovation for our parent company. Univision and ABC want Fusion’s help in figuring out how to reach this incredibly dynamic, diverse, and digitally connected audience, so we’ll be investing heavily in audience development and technology and transferring knowledge to the parent company about what we learn.This might sound a little deflating to Fusion’s newly launched site, which surely doesn’t think of itself as a market-research arm for an entertainment conglomerate, but it’s not, really. This is a journalist and manager speaking the language of her business, acknowledging Fusion’s particular relationship with the capital that keeps it running. If anything it should be read as comforting. It suggests a mothership that is more interested in observing than meddling, at least for the time being. (The startup’s equivalent answer: “Sale or IPO, idiot! And in the meantime…”)...MORE
