Tyler Cowen asks Which of the new mega-web sites will succeed?. He thinks that the answer depends on internal characteristics of the sites. I think it will depend on how the audience behaves.
I have always felt that the Internet supports only two types of group efforts (it supports a variety of individual voices, including Tyler’s). In terms of group efforts, either your are broad and shallow or you are narrow and deep. The linkers and the thinkers, if you will. What is not yet clear to me is where these new sites will fall in that classification. My guess is that success will require making a definite choice, and that the choice will involve giving up breadth. In any case, the only choices that can survive are ones that the audience buys in to.
There is a story about a class that was taking a course in psychology from a Skinnerian behaviorist who liked to pace in front of the classroom as he lectured. The students decided to play a prank on the professor. They agreed that every time the professor moved backward or toward the left side of the room, they would sit up, lean forward, and appear to be paying rapt attention. When he moved the other way, they would slump back and drop eye contact. By the end of the class, the professor was backed into the far corner, because that is where the students’ Skinnerian reinforcement had trapped him.
Where will the new web sites get their Skinnerian reinforcement, which will come in the form of high page views? Will Leonhardt only get reinforcement when he talks about business celebrities and the Fed? Will Silver get it only when he discusses sports? Will Klein get it only when he recycles Democratic talking points?
If you need to make a profit on the Web, then you do not have complete discretion in how you build your site. The audience is in control.
Has the definition of “mega” changed since I last looked it up?
Is this “mega” like the front page article in tens of millions of newspapers the Monday after the Oscars that a picture had gotten 2 million (OMG!) retwits?
I don’t think any of them will succeed. They all look like last ditch efforts by journalists to revive some hope for themselves, but there is none. This is just like the round of redesigns we saw when the iPad was supposed to save the press from the internet somehow.
What they do will select which audience they address though. There are likely audiences for both. Whether any are profitable is another question. We are back to eyeballs now.