Unfortunately there is some word limitation (the first post has 17,036 words) for Ghost blog posts at the moment, so I will have to split this entry into two.
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#66: Digital-only nature of BuzzFeed.
FS: You’ve got this very digitally-native, digital-only franchise. I’m sure that people have come up to you saying you should do a BuzzFeed TV program on cable TV or something.
JP: Yes.
FS: What that doesn’t really address is the bigger picture which is where, does digital fit into the broader media landscape? Are we still, for the foreseeable future, basically living in a television world where everything else is an afterthought, and you’re fighting for a share of an afterthought? Or are things converging?
JP: The Internet is certainly not an afterthought. If you include all the Googles and Facebooks and social platforms and tech companies—
FS: In terms of total audience hours or—
JP: I think in terms of revenue. Certainly in terms of market cap of the company. Facebook has a bigger market cap than the biggest media company. Google has a bigger market cap than Facebook, and if that’s a vote on the future of the industry I don’t think the web is going to be an afterthought. The question, though, I think you’re asking, more specifically, is content companies or people creating content, news, and entertainment on the Internet. Already in terms of scale of audience, BuzzFeed reaches more people each month than MTV or Comedy Central or a lot of the big cable networks. The amount of time people spend on television is still much higher. We reach a lot of people, but they don’t spend as much time on BuzzFeed as they spend watching reality shows on Bravo or something.
Depending on whether you measure by time or unique audience, we’re bigger by unique audience and they would be bigger by time, but I think we’re seeing a crop of significant businesses that are built on the web or primarily on the web. Whether it’s Vice or BuzzFeed or Vox Media or Hulu—
FS: Which is an interesting one—
JP: Which is a kind of hybrid kind of thing. Or Netflix. It’s another one where there’s starting to be companies that are in the media space that don’t own cable boxes and don’t own broadcast pipes and transmission towers or any of the infrastructure of the industrial media age, and that are purely or primarily in the digital space and are doing real revenue. I think you’ll see that trend continue.
It’s hard to predict the future, but it doesn’t feel to me like the space of web publishers or web content is going to just be the cheaper faster version with low rates and low margins—maybe a good business, but a small business. I think we’re going to get past that. At least that’s what we’re betting on.
#67: The fear of old media being irrelevant, and the strengths of new media to reach the new generation.
FS: Vice and BuzzFeed and Vox — it seems to me that you’re monetizing the paranoia of brands and of marketers who are like, “Oh shit, young people don’t watch TV they are on their phones all the time they are on the web the whole time—we don’t know how to reach them.”
JP: It’s not paranoid to think that the audience watching broadcast television is old. And it’s not paranoid to think people, particularly young people, are spending a lot of time on their phones and a lot of time on the Internet. It’s accurate to say that media consumption is changing in a pretty dramatic way and that if your marketing stays the same you essentially will be marketing to people who are consuming media the way people consumed media ten years ago instead of the way they’re consuming today.
#68: On life. Very profound.
FS: Is there anything you kick yourself about—that you feel like you had the opportunity to do something and you should have done it and you didn’t?
JP: I think in general it’s like life is tricky because it happens once and there’s no opportunity for A/B testing. It could be that you are living your best possible life and that if you re-play Felix Salmon’s life hundreds of other times, that this life you’re living is the best or among the top 5 percent of lives that you would have lived, and in lots of other ones you’d end up in an alley or in an unhappy relationship or with a job where you’re not intellectually fulfilled, and that you have found this amazing path.