The Traffic Report

The new world is about efficiency, and you need to be all over that. I just suggest that at least one of the humans you keep in the loop is a pain in the ass.

If information is becoming easier to summarize, synthesize, and reproduce, then publishers need to give people reasons to show up that go beyond simply reading an article.

For most of human history, if you wanted to tell someone something and they weren’t standing in front of you, you had two options: send a person or write it down. (Or, if you were living 4,000 years ago, you chiseled your grievances over a shady copper merchant onto a clay tablet.)

Why is it that whenever I talk with people about what this ocean holds for the next generation, the consensus is that they’re screwed? (And let’s be honest, “screwed” is not the word people use.)

Is this me bitching about the always-in-my-face AI play right now? Yes. Am I aware of AI’s possibilities? Also, yes. But sometimes I just don’t want the AI version of the world, even if I helped design it specifically for me.

I had this term pop into my head this week: “Dopamine Industrial Complex” and prayed that somehow I would be first. Nope. Ah well. It did send me down the rabbit hole of people who have used the term, and I came to a realization that all of you have had, but I refuse to accept: there’s no way out. 

I was asked to pull together my thoughts on publisher strategy, and I wrote this one line: “Rethink the website to work in a future where we win.” I’ll keep this short(ish) and sweet(ish) on why I like this line, and then what it gets wrong.

Lots of discussion this week in the publisher community about measurement companies. It was sparked by someone pointing out that they felt they had been judged poorly and there was little recourse.

Crunch, crunch, crunch. If you were a number cruncher before, with AI you’re now breaking down numbers to subatomic levels. If anything, you’re craving more data to smash together to see what you can learn. More, more, more. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Our industry feels full of contradictions right now. We need to preserve what made us valuable without preserving every part of how we’ve always operated.