If you have wondered what the hell is going on in media, or better put, digital media recently, this is a must-read. After years of growth and surging, fueled by advertising-centric business models and loads of VC money, the digital media landscape sees its most drastic challenge since inception.

Advertising is a dead end. Digital subscription models look really promising, given you have high quality content and an established, ideally pre-digital publishing times brand. Pivoting and pivoting to new types of content formats seems like hopeless actionism. With pivoting to video usually being the end of the death spiral.

My key statement from the article:

“In its inexhaustible capacity for experimentation, digital media has pivoted to programmatic advertising, pivoted to native advertising, pivoted to venture capital, pivoted to Facebook, pivoted to distributed, and pivoted to video. Here is a better experiment: Pivot to readers.”

Enjoy!

Read the entire article here: Why 2017 Feels Like a Media Apocalypse – The Atlantic