Image credit: Pixabay – https://pixabay.com/en/graph-chart-stock-down-crash-36929/
American Thinker
by Thomas Lifson
12/16/2018
Excerpt:
Websites are not yet going the way of newspapers, but financial stringency has arrived for web-based media, including American Thinker. The carnage extends from independent voices to the big, investor-backed sites. At the top end, the gold rush for staking claims to digital readership has gone bust, and the Big Money investors are licking their wounds after a number of changes have taken out much of money that flowed to digital publishers.
SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, presents a good overview of the forces at work that are changing the way online media struggle to survive. The focus is on the Big Money crowd:
As legacy news companies suffered tremors over the past decade, money from venture capitalists poured into upstarts that promised to leverage a keener understanding online reading habits to create a giant-killing class of new media ventures. Today, the money is starting to dry up. Big ambitions have been downsized. And the tremors that continue to shake many newspapers are now moving through new-media companies.01:07
Among those facing headwinds are BuzzFeed, Vox and Vice. Another one, Mic, last week abruptly laid off most of its staff — and the company that a year ago was valued at $100 million garnered a fire-sale offer of $5 million for its remnants.
But any impulse I might have toward schadenfreude over the problems facing lefties and their backers is tempered by the impact these changes are having on us. If you care about the future of media, I suggest that read the whole thing. But here are some of the relevant details:
…many sites relied on Facebook and Google to build their audience. But just as many financiers were pressing to see more tangible financial results, Facebook changed its algorithm to favor posts from friends and family rather than news organizations.
Some new digital media firms saw audience declines. Others scrambled to alter their business models on the fly, making expensive bets on video that did not pan out.
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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/tough_times_for_online_media.html