Off the bat, apologies if this is the wrong type of content for this subreddit, I only joined a short while ago. I'm sharing my thoughts on building your own media yourself or with someone's help in order to grow an audience that will trust you and to stop paying for ad space in other people's properties, fighting the never ending fight for attention.
I spent my entire professional life doing exactly this - either starting and running magazines and websites for a huge publisher, or helping the publishers advertisers to start their own white-label publications. So I know this approach works
Hope you find it interesting. Here we go:
It took ChatGPT 5 days to get to one million users. But it took only seconds from the moment OpenAI released it for us to get the first article calling for the death of Google. Yeah, we know Google won’t die, and it most definitely will not be offed by ChatGPT in the next couple of weeks, it is sort of true that the future of search really is precarious.
We are in the last days of typing in approximate guesses of what you need and combing through dozens of results - most of which are SEO death traps that suck minutes off your work day while you struggle to find an answer. We are entering the era of dialogue search - we will be asking direct questions and getting nicely formatted, correct and concise, answer. If you have a product you have to sell, you might see a problem with this near future. If we are getting short answers we will spend less time on websites and be exposed to fewer ads.
We know commercial breaks on TV don’t really work. With the rise of non-linear TV, gen Z doesn’t even know what commercial breaks are. We moved away from them because they are annoying and not effective. Outdoor billboards are suffering a similar fate. Brands who care about how they spend their money and do not need bread, sweeping, image campaigns have moved online ages ago.
But only a few brands have realized that what doesn’t work offline, doesn’t work online as well. Users do not tolerate interruptions. YouTube pre-roll ads drive people crazy and even the relatively nonintrusive Facebook/Instagram ads do not cater to our attention. To get someone to stop scrolling takes a lot - you need to get their attention to stop. Then you need to keep it in order to convert.
But there is a third way. It’s not particularly new, as it has been used for centuries, but it’s highly effective. Instead of interrupting people from the margins, fighting with other brands for their attention, trying to pick a perfect customer from the overall audience, why not build your own audience? A modern brand needs to become a media company.
For years we have focused on SEO. Carefully crafting articles, posts and tags based on meticulously researched keywords. All that work is being flushed down the drain if you happen to end up in a niche where you have to go up against someone who is either better at optimization or cranks out thousands of AI generated articles to over whelm the internet, not caring what the quality is, caring only about the click.
Add to this the fact that the web is overcrowded with ads vying for your attention, as well as with advertisers outbidding you to reach eyeball that most likely don’t care about what you want to sell them - mostly because they are not the audience you want to reach. Also, keep in mind that changes to privacy laws globally remove the ability to track people to serve them ads.
You know where there is no competition? In you own media.
A while ago someone put this into perspective for me perfectly: would you like to own your house or rent your house? Paying websites, magazines or TV channels to run your ads is like renting a house. Only, you are renting a tiny portion of the attention the reader or viewer gives to that particular media. And they get to keep the audience and use their attention over and over again.
On the other hand, if you want to own your own house you need to own your own media. That way you have complete control over your audience and your company gains a long-term investment.
And just like a house you can build it or buy it. Buy it and you will own a large audience right away, but the upfront cost will be higher. Much, much, higher.
Building it, on the other hand, allows you to pick and choose whatever you want - what kind of media you want (magazines, websites, newsletters, blogs, podcasts), how fast you want to develop it and, most importantly, how much money you want to spend on it.
Owning, as it turns out, is better than renting.
Every year, Reuters puts out a huge study on the state of media. The most important part of that study is reader trust. Each and every media in the world today is evaluated on how much its audience trusts it. Because that is what you get when you own media - user trust. And as a company that wants to sell to the public, building trust at the top of your sales funnel is easiest by owning media.
Imagine getting to talk to your every customer. You can educate them or entertain. You can provide them with critical info for their next decision which will lead to a purchase or you can just provide some light reading and while consuming your content you are building a rapport with them.
If you don’t own your own media you have to aim for the general audience. Some advertising tools will allow you to segment this audience a bit. But with all advertising you send a message into the ether, hoping it stick to someone who actually needs what you are selling.
Own the media, and you will get people to join you around a shared interest, preferably one that matches what your company produces or provides as a service. Instead of asking for a favor when they don’t owe you one, your media company acts is a platform for beginning a meaningful conversation. It can be the ultimate door-opener. The bigger your platform becomes, the more doors you can you open. By providing high quality content, you build loyalty. If you are successful in doing this, your messages to the audience will not look like ads - they will be messages they want to receive.
It’s a win-win: you convert your audience into customers, and your customers actually want what you have to offer, without anyone being annoyed by ads.
Being a company that either buys (for a lot of money) or starts (to create a perfect audience) its own media is nothing new. Thousands of companies have already done so, most with excellent results. These are just a few:
Media is not just content. For media consumers this might not seem so obvious. But ask anyone who has ever written a single article. Owning your own media requires a wholistic approach to whatever you put out.
Sit down and write a sentence. There you go. You’re on your way to having a media. However, what are you going to do with it? Having a media means planning what you will write about, when you will write about it, where and how you will distribute it and how you will reuse it. Reuse it? Yeah, a good media plan takes into account every piece of content you create and plans what to do with it. It’s not easy work.
Also, instead of simply publishing words online, you can harness different mediums:
You need to shift your mindset. Stop trying to promote what your company does, and start thinking in terms of who your audience is, what matters to them, and what they would find most interesting.
Now that you have done that, you can start creating content. Start a blog. Launch a newsletter. Just sit down and start creating. But keep one thing in mind - just like Canvaa democratized design and the no-code movement democratized development, AI writing suites are democratizing content. You can do it all yourself.
However, you also know that Canva and no-code are often good enough to get you 70-80% of the way there. When you need that final 20-30% push, reach out to professionals. People who have spent their lives in the media business and can handle this entire operation for you. Not only will you get a superior product, this will often cost a fraction of what you would have to pay a whole editorial staff if you wanted to go all in on media.
Can you afford a car? It depends, right? You might be able to afford a Toyota. But won’t be able to afford a Bugatti. There is no one cost to producing media. If you want a weekly newsletter, maybe it will set you back $1000 a month. Want a full blown media operation? How does $10.000 sound?
Building a media brand is not a short-term growth hack. It takes time and patience. But in the end, experience shows it’s worth it.
Thoughts?
I spent my entire professional life doing exactly this - either starting and running magazines and websites for a huge publisher, or helping the publishers advertisers to start their own white-label publications. So I know this approach works
Hope you find it interesting. Here we go:
It took ChatGPT 5 days to get to one million users. But it took only seconds from the moment OpenAI released it for us to get the first article calling for the death of Google. Yeah, we know Google won’t die, and it most definitely will not be offed by ChatGPT in the next couple of weeks, it is sort of true that the future of search really is precarious.
We are in the last days of typing in approximate guesses of what you need and combing through dozens of results - most of which are SEO death traps that suck minutes off your work day while you struggle to find an answer. We are entering the era of dialogue search - we will be asking direct questions and getting nicely formatted, correct and concise, answer. If you have a product you have to sell, you might see a problem with this near future. If we are getting short answers we will spend less time on websites and be exposed to fewer ads.
We know commercial breaks on TV don’t really work. With the rise of non-linear TV, gen Z doesn’t even know what commercial breaks are. We moved away from them because they are annoying and not effective. Outdoor billboards are suffering a similar fate. Brands who care about how they spend their money and do not need bread, sweeping, image campaigns have moved online ages ago.
But only a few brands have realized that what doesn’t work offline, doesn’t work online as well. Users do not tolerate interruptions. YouTube pre-roll ads drive people crazy and even the relatively nonintrusive Facebook/Instagram ads do not cater to our attention. To get someone to stop scrolling takes a lot - you need to get their attention to stop. Then you need to keep it in order to convert.
But there is a third way. It’s not particularly new, as it has been used for centuries, but it’s highly effective. Instead of interrupting people from the margins, fighting with other brands for their attention, trying to pick a perfect customer from the overall audience, why not build your own audience? A modern brand needs to become a media company.
WHY YOU NEED A MEDIA ARM
For years we have focused on SEO. Carefully crafting articles, posts and tags based on meticulously researched keywords. All that work is being flushed down the drain if you happen to end up in a niche where you have to go up against someone who is either better at optimization or cranks out thousands of AI generated articles to over whelm the internet, not caring what the quality is, caring only about the click.
Add to this the fact that the web is overcrowded with ads vying for your attention, as well as with advertisers outbidding you to reach eyeball that most likely don’t care about what you want to sell them - mostly because they are not the audience you want to reach. Also, keep in mind that changes to privacy laws globally remove the ability to track people to serve them ads.
You know where there is no competition? In you own media.
A while ago someone put this into perspective for me perfectly: would you like to own your house or rent your house? Paying websites, magazines or TV channels to run your ads is like renting a house. Only, you are renting a tiny portion of the attention the reader or viewer gives to that particular media. And they get to keep the audience and use their attention over and over again.
On the other hand, if you want to own your own house you need to own your own media. That way you have complete control over your audience and your company gains a long-term investment.
And just like a house you can build it or buy it. Buy it and you will own a large audience right away, but the upfront cost will be higher. Much, much, higher.
Building it, on the other hand, allows you to pick and choose whatever you want - what kind of media you want (magazines, websites, newsletters, blogs, podcasts), how fast you want to develop it and, most importantly, how much money you want to spend on it.
Owning, as it turns out, is better than renting.
WHAT DO I GET WITH MY OWN MEDIA
Every year, Reuters puts out a huge study on the state of media. The most important part of that study is reader trust. Each and every media in the world today is evaluated on how much its audience trusts it. Because that is what you get when you own media - user trust. And as a company that wants to sell to the public, building trust at the top of your sales funnel is easiest by owning media.
Imagine getting to talk to your every customer. You can educate them or entertain. You can provide them with critical info for their next decision which will lead to a purchase or you can just provide some light reading and while consuming your content you are building a rapport with them.
If you don’t own your own media you have to aim for the general audience. Some advertising tools will allow you to segment this audience a bit. But with all advertising you send a message into the ether, hoping it stick to someone who actually needs what you are selling.
Own the media, and you will get people to join you around a shared interest, preferably one that matches what your company produces or provides as a service. Instead of asking for a favor when they don’t owe you one, your media company acts is a platform for beginning a meaningful conversation. It can be the ultimate door-opener. The bigger your platform becomes, the more doors you can you open. By providing high quality content, you build loyalty. If you are successful in doing this, your messages to the audience will not look like ads - they will be messages they want to receive.
It’s a win-win: you convert your audience into customers, and your customers actually want what you have to offer, without anyone being annoyed by ads.
THESE PEOPLE ALREADY DID IT
Being a company that either buys (for a lot of money) or starts (to create a perfect audience) its own media is nothing new. Thousands of companies have already done so, most with excellent results. These are just a few:
- Porsche has published the Christophorus magazine since 1952. which is now distributed to more than 500.000 people. They also went into new media and launched the Type7 instagram magazine
- Mailchimp owns several extremely popular podcasts. They also launched Courier, a printed magazine, newsletter, book publishing operation, printed guides and podcast network that helps entrepreneurs build businesses
- In 2021, Hubspot, the marketing and sales software developer, acquired the 1.5 million subscriber business newsletter The Hustle, as well as over 20 very popular podcasts which now broadcast from the Hubspot podcast network
- The VC firm Andreessen Horowitz started future.com and several podcasts
- Stripe, the payment processor, bough IndieHackers, buying directly into the market that is most likely to need their services.
- PNGaming bought Barstool, the sports website, for $550 million
- Huckberry Huckberry redefined eCommerce in 2011 when they launched as a combination of a store and lifestyle magazine. They used adventure reporting to sell outdoor gear from their webstore
- Robinhood bought the 3-minute financial newsletter MarketSnacks
- Early on in its existence Red Bull realized that they need to differentiate themselves from other energy drinks. Now, Red Bull is primarily a media company - with its own TV shows, magazines, movies, music and thriving events organizing branch - and an energy drink secondly
- Intel has been very successful in starting their own media - from their own digital magazine IQ, to the award winning media partnership with Vice on the Creators Project
- AirBnB runs its own print and digital magazine
- Hodinkee Hodinkeestarted as a watch blog and is now a $100+ million online horology store
IT’S NOT JUST CONTENT
Media is not just content. For media consumers this might not seem so obvious. But ask anyone who has ever written a single article. Owning your own media requires a wholistic approach to whatever you put out.
Sit down and write a sentence. There you go. You’re on your way to having a media. However, what are you going to do with it? Having a media means planning what you will write about, when you will write about it, where and how you will distribute it and how you will reuse it. Reuse it? Yeah, a good media plan takes into account every piece of content you create and plans what to do with it. It’s not easy work.
Also, instead of simply publishing words online, you can harness different mediums:
- launch a podcast
- Create a YouTube series
- Host an award series
- Publish a print magazine
- Produce a documentary
HOW DO I DO IT?
You need to shift your mindset. Stop trying to promote what your company does, and start thinking in terms of who your audience is, what matters to them, and what they would find most interesting.
Now that you have done that, you can start creating content. Start a blog. Launch a newsletter. Just sit down and start creating. But keep one thing in mind - just like Canvaa democratized design and the no-code movement democratized development, AI writing suites are democratizing content. You can do it all yourself.
However, you also know that Canva and no-code are often good enough to get you 70-80% of the way there. When you need that final 20-30% push, reach out to professionals. People who have spent their lives in the media business and can handle this entire operation for you. Not only will you get a superior product, this will often cost a fraction of what you would have to pay a whole editorial staff if you wanted to go all in on media.
YEAH, BUT I CAN’T AFFORD IT
Can you afford a car? It depends, right? You might be able to afford a Toyota. But won’t be able to afford a Bugatti. There is no one cost to producing media. If you want a weekly newsletter, maybe it will set you back $1000 a month. Want a full blown media operation? How does $10.000 sound?
Building a media brand is not a short-term growth hack. It takes time and patience. But in the end, experience shows it’s worth it.
Thoughts?
