(Apologies to anyone bored by one of my occasional inside-baseball think-out-loud threads... hopefully a few newer media ventures will get some good ideas/cues out of it)
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Whenever I tweet about this stuff, people invariably misunderstand it as a prompt seeking money-making ideas.
No. Money is a) easy if that's what you want to solve for b) not what's worth solving for if you enjoy writing c) primarily useful as a way to monitor your own vanity.
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Actually, one reason I think about this stuff a lot is not for strategizing the future of my own sites, but trying to grok what sometimes strikes me as the completely bizarre decisions made by other, much bigger commercial scale media properties, like say Fox or NYT or Vox.
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Basically, writing is pure ideas. There's nothing else there. No product, nothing to eat, nothing to use/do materially. So it is a real mystery to me how/why people can choose to grow without any clear ideas driving the growth. It's like empty growth.
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A million visit piece of content should in some sense be 10x the "idea size" in some memetic sense than a 100k visit piece of content. Trying to make a 100k idea artificially acquire a million visits seems kinda grimly nihilistic to me.
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To change gears abruptly, there's this idea that aliens will never detect us because after a brief period, our radio emissions have been getting more efficient and therefore less powerful. Our planet will get electromagnetically quieter for its communication levels in the future.
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This is a joules/bit/mile way of thinking about information and communication. Industrial age media models were very... energy intensive reach. "New media" is really "low wattage" media, properly understood. CFLs/LEDs instead of incandescent.
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Let's say that you have an idea that, in a perfect information market, would have highest impact if it reached a set of 5 people randomly distributed across the world. Everybody else would be better off with 2nd or higher order reception. The 1st order bits would be noise to them
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The *ideal* distribution/reach pattern for that idea is the one that reaches those 5, and only those 5 people, at the lowest joules/bit/mile cost. Anything more is waste. That's a sort of thermodynamic efficiency limit model for media. Kinda like Carnot cycle for engines.
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Well actually print went mass market too in the 1890s, a couple of decades earlier... unit economics of offset printing were far better than previous movable type. That's what drove the explosion in pulp fiction, yellow journalism etc. But yeah, your point is overall right on.
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