Scott Karp, one of the deep thinkers about the issues and problems with media businesses, has written a nice piece titled ”Content Businesses Don’t Scale Anymore”, where he argues that scaled content businesses are rare these days, and probably will not happen anytime soon. He uses us as one part of the example, and starts with this: “Can anyone think of a content business—meaning a company that produces original content—that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled—Google, MySpace, YouTube—all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., Gawker, TechCrunch, Paid Content—they are successful at their scale, but that scale is still tiny compared to the scale of the aggregation businesses.”
And then, this: “The result of unbundling, disaggregation, the loss of pipe control...-- i.e. the inability to force people to consume content they don’t want—is that content businesses don’t scale anymore. That doesn’t mean creating content isn’t profitable—independent publishers like Mike Arrington and Rafat Ali can have nice little businesses—but the same phenomenon that allowed them to become business at all will probably prevent them from becoming large businesses...The real wealth generation opportunity for businesses like Weblogs, TechCrunch, and Paid Content is the prospect of being acquired by an aggregator.”
I think the first point he is making has some truth to it, but looking at all these sites as a totality is looking at these things the wrong way. There’s a huge difference between Weblogs Inc, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Gawker, and our company, and despite what anyone might think, our company doesn’t compete for audience, ad dollars or any other kind of revenues with the others. Out of these names, the Silicon Valley crowd compete among themselves, but most of you know this: we keep out of it.
I come out of trade media, and will always consider myself as being a trade journalist. In our industry, digital media, or media business, our combined three sites (paidContent.org, Moconews.net and ContentSutra.com) have bigger reach than any other trade pub you can think of. Secondly, scale for us, and me, doesn’t really mean traffic, or for that matter, scaled revenues...it means influence. The people who cut the checks for everyone else in this industry, including any and all of the consultants writing about this industry, read us. Anyone who is coming to our NYC mixer in two days will see it first hand. Scale for us also means digging deeper, not widen, the traditional barometer which Karp is using in this post. You’ll see what I mean in the next year, as our company grows.
For us, it has been and will always be about breaking stories and providing context and meaning to all of what’s happening in the digital media industry. As long as we keep doing our jobs on the editorial side, my belief (call it naive, but really, we have proved it over the last 3-4 years) is we will be safe, healthy and growing as a business. As for the rest, who cares…