Conversation

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer blog” With apologies to Edward Abbey. I’m turning into a media environmentalist. The longer I do this the more useless/toxic big numbers seem to me. The sheer lack of imagination offends me more than anything else.
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It seems brain-dead obvious to me that the shape and size of your audience, and the nature of your connection with them, should be a function of *what you’re saying*. If it’s some esoteric math that only 5 other people in the world get, they’re the only ones worth reaching.
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If your music blog has a million monthly visitors, but suddenly your best ideas seem to all be “only 5 mathematicians will get it”, the rational thing to do is dump the music blog and shift your energy to 1:1 correspondence with those 5 mathematicians. This isn’t rocket science.
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Of course, once your thinking gets entangled with people you’re thinking with, you don’t have full control. But still, raw growth fixation is like tracking the weight of a child as the sole measure of its growth. Yes you can probably fatten an 8-year-old to 90 lbs but should you?
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And beyond a point where organic growth levels off reflecting “right sizing” relative to topic, should you keep trying things to grow bigger, or switch to metrics more meaningful for media “adulthood” and “right shaping”? “Get big fast” is for other kinds of business, not media.
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The right mental model to have is like actors, who lose or gain weight/muscle to suit different roles they play over their career. Like that guy who plays wolverine, Hugh Jackman. Or Christian Bale as Batman vs in The Machinist.
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People like to blame advertising or attention-hacking distribution channels, but those are effects, not causes. Content producers being unable to think beyond “growth” is the root cause. Content consumers aren’t addicted to clickbait. Content producers are addicted to growthism.
Replying to
Money is a bs excuse for pursuing growth because a) most of you will make very little money directly from size effects b) if profitability were only about size we’d all be blue whales eating krill. We fetishize growth as an aesthetic. There is rarely a good reason for it.
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I’ve been as guilty of growthist thinking in the past as anyone, but what saved me from the cancer of growthism is mediocrity, to be frank, not any particularly virtuous digital-environmentalist intentions. I’ve just never been energetic enough to work at SEO or growth hacks.
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My little media slumlord empire built around ribbonfarm isn’t in the greatest of shapes, I’ll be the first to admit. It’s got a dadbod like me, shall we say. But I think I can assert it’s free of growthism cancer at least.
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Addendum: the only rational reason to be growthist is if you want to build a beef-only media property intended solely for “military” use, to beat up on other properties. Then you need to get as big as biggest opponents, as fast as possible. This may or not be a cancerous goal.
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Replying to
If advertising metrics were properly calculated, 10 of the most powerful readers would be higher value than 10M of the least.