Thread · 9 tweets · 24 May 2022

Gee, you people, now a guy can't have a Twitter take without also fixing the whole Internet? I can't wait for a billionaire to come clean up this place. More seriously, I don't know that I can square the circle, but I don't think this is a big-pubs only take.

Random notes because I'm tired and also I have a book outline to write. The incumbent system assumes that publishers are fungible sources of commodity eyeballs. That's great if you produce fungible content for one-and-done visits. It's less great otherwise.

I don't think that this is a big pubs/small pubs distinction. There are big pubs that do bland fungible content and don't build a relationship with their readers and small pubs who do. In the current system, the latter produce signals subsidising the former. That sucks.

One thing worth noting is that most of the current discussions and proposals assume no intelligence at the edges. I don't think that that's right. In the existing system, there is little incentive to be smart at the edges, you want to move cookies into intermediaries fast.

Content management is hard, but small pubs aren't out there starving for want of decent CMSs. I can imagine a Wordpress of SDAs. I also don't think that breadth is the only signal, depth matters too. In general, anything that builds contextual identity should IMHO help.

Now the question is: you support all the sites that have quality contexts and audience relationship, those with unoriginal content and no real audience sink (that doesn't seem unfair), then are there publishers whose loss legit would be felt but who can't monetise?

The Web is big so I'm assuming the answer is "yes." If that revenue transfer is worth doing, the question is how? We can't have one big slosh that transfers from quality pubs to whoever, that's what we have today and it's bad for people, pubs, buyers, and democracy.

If there's a solution in this space, I don't think it can be anything other than by voluntarily pooling SDAs between publishers (leagues, as mentioned). But this can only work if it's organised by the pooling parties, otherwise it's taxation without representation.

Oh and I forgot to mention, the buy side can have intelligence too. This article is old and doesn't cover it technically, but we've been experimenting with that too axios.com/2019/11/19/new…