I wanted a third option on the poll - “Staying the same size but redistributing”. It feels to me like the traditional “aggregated” media organisation is becoming less common, but we’re all signing up like crazy to the more specialist sources that interest us specifically. So the total number of people in “the media” stays the same, but they are distributed across a larger number of smaller players. Although it depends on how you measure “size” - number of employers, number of employees, budgets....?
The phrase "long tail" inevitably conjures up images of a bell curve. Earnings in media, as in most creative professions, are not a normal distribution; they're a power law. That still has a "tail" but only one.
You said, "Substack announced a year ago that it crossed 2 million paid subscriptions". That's "data" I suppose, but not the data we really need, which is income brackets on the Y axis, and number of people earning that on the X axis. I suspect you'd need to make each scale logarithmic before you got anything like a straight line.
Thanks for reframing the narrative here. I wrote about SI and Pitchfork in my most recent issue and this is an encouraging counterpoint. I appreciate how you wisely (and correctly) expand the definition of media company and highlight just how long the long tail is.
I wanted a third option on the poll - “Staying the same size but redistributing”. It feels to me like the traditional “aggregated” media organisation is becoming less common, but we’re all signing up like crazy to the more specialist sources that interest us specifically. So the total number of people in “the media” stays the same, but they are distributed across a larger number of smaller players. Although it depends on how you measure “size” - number of employers, number of employees, budgets....?
The phrase "long tail" inevitably conjures up images of a bell curve. Earnings in media, as in most creative professions, are not a normal distribution; they're a power law. That still has a "tail" but only one.
You said, "Substack announced a year ago that it crossed 2 million paid subscriptions". That's "data" I suppose, but not the data we really need, which is income brackets on the Y axis, and number of people earning that on the X axis. I suspect you'd need to make each scale logarithmic before you got anything like a straight line.
I write about Substack here: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/substack-wont-make-you-rich
Thanks for reframing the narrative here. I wrote about SI and Pitchfork in my most recent issue and this is an encouraging counterpoint. I appreciate how you wisely (and correctly) expand the definition of media company and highlight just how long the long tail is.