Now-established players have learned that Instagram advertisements and influencer campaigns only scale to a point: they can net no more than a few hundred thousand of a brand’s “first best” customers. This has driven a shift toward physical retail and prompted founders to agonize over if and when to peddle their wares on Amazon, making direct to co... See more

Let’s recap: as content creation and distribution tends to infinity, community emerges as true internet-native media. Community is an exercise in cultural production, and communities filter content proliferate a specific point of view. The role of the community, then, is to create and curate cultural artifacts in-line with their collective point of... See more

I regret that second step: I want to believe that companies that produce truly great content will have negotiating power with Aggregators, because customers will want what they have to sell. And, in very limited cases, that may be true. Anything beyond the very best of the best, though, risks a Wirecutter-type fate: yes, the investment in content p... See more

Notice the progression here: the Wirecutter was genuinely useful content that took a lot of time and expertise to produce; BuzzFeed, Gawker, etc. was rather less useful, but still content that had marginal costs to produce; Honey, meanwhile, was zero marginal cost skimming. In short, the affiliate game grew increasingly commoditized over time.