There’s no shortage of doom-and-gloom talk when it comes to the future of media in a digital world of abundance. The “content-is-free” crowd doesn’t offer a very appealing business model for professional content creators. Andrew Weissman, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, thinks it’s time media companies get back to standing for something. His thinking goes that in a world of so much information and content, media companies can recapture their mojo by having a point of view and a sense of taste.
If we strip out distribution, promotion and marketing as core competencies, the role of the media company might be, quite simply: curated products chosen by a small group of people who just have better taste than everyone else. In other words, users need to rely on someone or something for taste. Which is hugely valuable. And branded tastemakers make perfect sense. Because taste matters. This is also how it used to work in the past.
Read Weissman’s full post on his blog. Follow him on Twitter at @aweissman.
More in Media
Retailers are rushing to build AI apps. It’s unclear if shoppers will use them
There are almost 900 apps on ChatGPT and 353 Claude connectors, according to AppDiscoverability.com, which tracks AI app data.
Why news publishers are getting into the sports business coverage
Yahoo and Dow Jones are betting on the booming sports business beat, launching new verticals to capture high-value audiences and advertisers.
From ad tech tax to AI data brokers: the new middlemen keep 100%, publishers say
For some publishers, third-party content scraping lands as an even bigger affront than the ad tech tax they’ve spent years navigating – not a share of the pie, but the pie itself.