Scale is a trap

At the tail end of 2023, we’re starting to see the decay or active dismantling of a number of the bastions of scale that shaped the digital news experience throughout the 2010s.

Sure, some outlets closely associated with this time period are still holding on effectively, like The Verge and The Daily Beast. But companies like Vice and BuzzFeed saw their fortunes decline heavily throughout 2023. G/O Media, the private equity-backed holding company that descended from the legendary Gawker Media, has become a home for many of these built-for-scale sites, like The Root and Quartz, and has sold off others, like Lifehacker and Jezebel, which no longer fit their ad-obsessed model.

(Jezebel was taken off life support, out of nowhere, last month; it was acquired by Paste Media amid an outcry and just relaunched.)

But I’m pretty convinced the reason these sites have struggled to meet the moment is because the model under which they were built — eyeballs at all cost, built for social media and Google search results — is no longer functional.

We can blame a lot of things for this, such as brand safety and having to work through perhaps the most aggressive commercial gatekeepers that the world has ever seen. But I think the truth is, after seeing how well it worked for the tech industry, we made a bet on scale — and then watched that bet fail over and over again.

I think we’re at the point where, if we want to solve this problem of informing audiences, we need to do the hard work of finding them and engaging them at their level. And that means going niche.

That bet, which I personally hope to make in 2024, has to look something like this: Rather than trying to hit the ceiling, find a group of 1,000 people — maybe less — that hasn’t been served and serve them extremely well. Make them something so good and so uniquely suited to their needs that they’ll pay for it. Then find more niches like that — more groups of 1,000 people. Chain that work together so that maybe you’re not hitting a million people with one story, but you’re hitting many thousands of people with content that is valuable to them — and more importantly, those thousands are durable groups that are less susceptible to changes in the ad market or social media.

This is not a new model, or even a rare one. Arguably, what you’d be building is not a news outlet but a community. But I think this kind of idea often gets disregarded by those looking for explosions in traffic because it’s not as attractive as “big number go up in analytics report.”

It’s also contrary to the way things scale in the world of venture capital and private equity. One big disappointment I’ve seen from the Patreons and Substacks of the world (which many journalists now rely on) is those companies’ decision to take VC money to scale their businesses. The truth of the matter is their models don’t need it — but their game is ultimately about scale.

As a good friend of mine, who runs a community television station in his tiny Georgia town, once put it to me: “Scale is a trap.”

What he meant is that scale forces us to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do. It forces us to worry about maximizing profit margins or expanding into new areas, just because someone gave us some money to get bigger and that person wants a return.

I’m increasingly convinced he’s right. It feels like a rallying cry. And I think that we’re not going to find our way back to a stronger journalistic ecosystem until we admit it to ourselves.