The Media Industry is Broken: How Platforms Can Fix it
By: Daria Minsky
Tags: Curation, Media, Content, Future, Platform

The Old-school Tools

In 2010 I created my first online mag because I was lucky enough to have a friend programmer who agreed to code everything for free.

After getting a bit of financial help we started to build our own CMS, investing our savings to pay developers, way more than we were paying actual journalists creating our main content. Insane!

In 2019 it still runs on a modified version of that first CMS. It is heavy, inflexible and extremely expensive to change anything in there. But we keep it. Why? Because we own it. We’re so attached! We spent a fortune on the development. I always ask myself, what are the alternatives?

There are plenty of “no code” products for almost everything. I’m a big fan of Readymag, which I always use to create presentations and landings. Can it replace our CMS? Absolutely not. What works for landings, doesn’t work for a big flow of everyday news. How about Wordpress? Well, it is old, badly designed, and usually requires extensive customization. Oh, and certainly we can bury the idea of creating your media inside of Facebook because of its unpredictable algorithms. Let’s be honest: when it comes to online media, there’s no cheap, beautiful and fully-functioning alternative to your own CMS. At least, we haven’t found one.

The Old-school Distribution

Eventually we became one of the leading lifestyle mags in the country, with more than 1M monthly readers. How much time did it take? Almost 10 years of organic growth. I must say that we got most of our Facebook audience before they changed their algorithm that radically decreased our engagement.

I understand that it would be almost impossible for new mags to reach the same level of popularity without intense traffic buying. Forget about free attention. Except rare viral cases fostered by some random influencers and distribution platforms like Medium, you always have to pay handsomely for a tiny bit of engagement, and our own followers don’t even get to see what we post.

The Old-school Monetization

After 10 years we got our popularity as a huge competitive advantage. Is it financially rewarding, though? Well, no. If you want to make money now, don’t do media. Indeed, our greatest problem is not CMS or distribution: it’s sales. Your previously loyal clients constantly compare your CPM with Instagram and Facebook, telling you that you are way too expensive for them and they get more clients just by investing in context advertising.

Why do they need you at all?

An additional problem is finding salespersons. You have to be ok with making two times less money for way more efforts than in this newly established tech startup. Impossible!

When I complained about this situation, media managers suggested to transform our journalists into sales people. Journalists protested. First of all, it’s not their job. The quality of journalism and objectivity would suffer. Second, they would overwork until they finally burn out and leave media for good.

We have created a vicious circle: you sell people’s attention, but you still have to pay for the attention, and your advertisers prefer not to pay mediators like you because you can’t attract attention anyway

The only way to break this vicious circle is to raise capital from the few available VCs who still believe in media. I’m talking about a handful of financed media startups in the first English-speaking world, like The Hassle and Axios. The problem is that media VCs and supporting organisations are inefficient as well. The only US accelerator supporting media entrepreneurs, Matter.vc, sadly got closed last year.



We should accept it, once and for all: current old-school media model won’t work as your business anymore. Yes, you heard it right, your media business will not be saved!