John Battelle's Search Blog Marketers: Your Role In Social Discourse Is Critical

This is one of the key reasons we started Substack. We’re attempting to build an alternative media economy that gives journalists autonomy. If you don’t rely on ads for your revenue, you don’t have to be a pawn in the attention economy – which means you don’t have to compete with Facebook and Google. If you’re not playing the ads game, you can stop... See more

A critical assumption of this early model was this: Pairing relevant advertising messaging with quality editorial was vastly more successful for marketers – particular brand marketers – than advertising messaging delivered devoid of context.

Take this paragraph: it is just assumed that Google and Facebook ought to be paying publishers for their content, but any sort of rational evaluation would suggest that money should flow in the opposite direction. Google and Facebook direct traffic to publishers, and in Facebook’s case in particular, that traffic comes from the publishers themselve... See more

Audience arbitrage on platforms has even more destructive attributes. Because media buyers have outsourced their audience acquisition to either the media company or the platform itself, the marketer becomes disconnected from the context of its audience. The context and meaning that holds all brands together is lost. Media companies, pressed by ever... See more