Primary-engagement media

Many Americans are experiencing inflation for the first time in their lives. They have no memories of the gas lines of the 1970s. I have vague memories of being packed away, likely without a seat belt, in the far reaches of a wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon while we waited for gas that was in short supply. Inflation devalues a currency. Returning to equilibrium and stable pricing is a painful process.

While inflation is new to the overall economy, it isn’t new to digital publishing. The limitless nature of the internet has meant that audience numbers grew to absurd, Zimbabwe-like levels. Pageviews went from the millions to billions, soon to be joined by Facebook video views. GroupNine’s viral video news outfit, NowThis, was bragging about 2.6 billion views a month. There are 7.8 billion people on earth. The numbers were enormous, only they proved fleeting. Nobody paying attention was surprised when Facebook said its video view metrics were inflated. If they were, they were negligent or lying. There isn’t that much attention to go around for all the people claiming billions of video views.

In the Facebook era, the scramble was on to tap into the “bored at work network,” as Jonah Peretti called it. I suppose this was doomscrolling in happier times, as people sat in their cubicles after a sad desk salad lunch and killed time between meetings. Cheddar took this to a new level, as Jon Steinberg pushed aside questions of who exactly is watching Cheddar to peddle it “ambient media” that exists in the background of an office or when someone is pumping gas. This apparently added up to an audience of 148 million, enough to top 1 in 2 adult Americans. It’s no surprise that Ozy Media would want to construct an audience out of whole cloth.

Digital publishing is now in a painful revaluation cycle to achieve equilibrium. Outside of CNN, no publisher is bragging about their ComScore reach. You don’t hear much about how many billions of views are being done on social platforms either. Instead, publishers are talking more about their tight ties to specific audiences. There are, of course, still inflationary flareups. Publishers still choose to brag about their big overall subscriber numbers while skipping over how many are on cheap introductory offer deals – not to mention how much subscription revenue they’ve generated and the lifetime value of their subscribers.

This will be a painful but needed process as publishing becomes more focused, more profitable and more comfortable with smaller but real numbers. The simple truth of digital publishing is most top line audience numbers are nonsense. If you stay in business long enough, you’re going to get a ton of random visitors to pages that rank high in search, not to mention the dopamine of the viral hit. Instead, the name of the game in the coming years will be what one digital media veteran called “primary engagement media.”