The future of digital media: 15 key takeaways

How to win online according to Rick Beato, Ezra Klein, Ethan Strauss, Francis Fukuyama, Sam Harris, Kara Swisher, Kyle Chayka, and more.

“Tell me about the future of digital media!” you say. OK…

📣 Negative attention is better than no attention.

National politics ain’t about cash anymore. Ezra Klein:

Democrats still believe that the type of attention you get is the most important thing. If your choice is between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention. And at least the Trump side of the Republican Party believes that the volume, the sum total of attention, is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention: not only fine — maybe great, right? Because there’s so much attentional energy and conflict.

Source: Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.

📣 Enthusiasm is contagious.

Mike Rowe on Rick Beato:

“Rick [Beato] is incredibly knowledgeable about all things musical, but the reason he’s become so popular is not because he’s an expert — it’s because he’s a fan,” says Mike Rowe…“It’s his enthusiasm that’s contagious. Even if he’s geeking out on musical theory or raving about the contributions of a producer I’ve never heard of on an album I’ve never listened to, I’m always interested in what he’s talking about, because he’s always interested in what he’s talking about.”

Source: How Rick Beato struck YouTube gold with his ‘Everything Music’ channel

Rick Beato.

📣 Go to the new platform. + Keep explaining who you are. + Don’t rely on old metrics.

Stop fighting the last war. A threefer from Kyle Chayka:

The best way to succeed online is to surf the upward wave of a new platform by committing 100% and catering all of your output to it. It’s a land grab game. Once you win the game, then you can be less obsequious to the platform.

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No one is media literate. The more you explain who you are and what you do, the better. Preface your newsletter with the explanation of wtf you’re writing, anyway, because your subscribers don’t remember. The “enhanced bios” of NYT, Vox, etc, are long because of SEO but they also make explicit the expertise that was once just assumed from professionalized media.

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The traditional metrics of success don’t matter. Don’t rely on the old regime to recognize the achievements or potential of the emerging one. There’s no Pulitzer for newsletters or TikTok explainers; BuzzFeed News died winning a single one. The most successful small digital media businesses are YouTube channels that no NYT exec will ever recognize.

Source: The new rules of media

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📣 There is no shortcut to building an audience.

It takes time.

Tom Kuegler

:

I’ve seen students write a viral note, get hundreds of subscribers in days, then go back to the steady slog of getting 50-60 new subscribers per month. Virality comes and goes, and it won’t change your life as much as you think it will.

You need lots of support to be successful at writing, like friends, and a network. I’m sorry, but for 99.9% of people, that’s something that develops slowly over time, not over the span of a few weeks.

Source: What's Working On Substack Notes In January 2025

📣 Sports and culture have merged together in a way that hurts the left.

Gambling is a big reason why.

Ethan Strauss

:

Sports and culture did merge together in a way that helped Trump. You can see it in Barstool’s Bussin' With the Boys interviewing the president elect. The other aspect is that sports companies felt more financial pressure to mirror, or at least not oppose, this changing culture. The sports content consumer was no longer just a passive viewer, watching ads for standard products. The customer became an actual customer and his money started to matter to these financially strained institutions. The sports companies do not care at all about what happens to the men who gamble. They do, however, now care about the opinions of the men who gamble.

Source: One Sneaky Reason Why Sports Media Shunned Kamala Harris

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Related:

I went to a UFC fight and a Trump rally broke out

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📣 Create enemies and be someone’s white knight.

It should seem like it’s you against the world, according to Mike Majlak.

“The easiest route these days to viewership is by creating enemies,” said Mike Majlak, a co-host of the Impaulsive podcast, in July 2023. “It’s me against the world. I’m the little guy standing up for what’s right, against the corporations, against the government greed, against Chuck Schumer. If you want to find a white knight, look to me. I’m your f***ing guy.”

Source: The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers

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📣 Post more.

It’s a quantity over quality world now.

Max Read

:

The key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity.¹ There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience -- break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl -- but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop…demand is so insatiable that there is currently no real economic punishment for content overproduction. You will almost never lose money, followers, attention, or reach simply from posting too much.

Source: Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging

Up ahead: Francis Fukuyama, Kara Swisher, Sam Harris, finding your niche, the free speech coverup, and the brewing social media backlash.