Zen and the Art of the Media Charlatan

Yes, some people made a lot of money.

Get out while you can.

It is time to get started on something bothering me for some time. I am still working in media, in amongst endless fires and glue factories — but now, I suppose, I am more frustrated than I was the last time you heard from me. A month or so can seem like a lifetime.

We are in an endless point of reckoning for digital media and the devil’s list of names grows faster than can be accounted for. But that doesn’t stop those at the top of the pile from screaming what about me?

You? OK, friendo: let’s talk about you.

Over a decade has passed since the social internet launched in a gross fury of traffic and virality. Million-view puppies, viral cats, a video of a fox with eight million impressions you could sell to Lockheed Martin as evidence of Audience Cut-Through. And while the getting was good the getting was got, but that hasn’t stopped our upper class of Media Geniuses from crying wolf. These are a special few, less than a thousand (though you would be forgiven for assuming there’s more) who launched everything from blogs to websites to digital TV stations when the entry point to starting your own “successful” media brand was an email address and a trench of content stolen from across the internet until you couldn’t get away with it anymore, before pivoting to a curated “with permission” model from dozens of individuals with personal accounts who don’t realise the gold they’d been uncovering with their Pigs That Look Like Brad Pitt Instagram account.

Yes, some people made a lot of money. Doing what, exactly, we’re only just beginning to wrap our heads around. And you bet it felt good. Like the first banker to whisper the words subprime mortgage.

But all empires must fall and it wasn’t a pyramid scheme, anyway… Think of it as more of a triangle.

Now that the dust has settled and the Right People have made the Right Amounts of Money we can call it as it was: an entire generation of media propped up by people who act like they are savants on LinkedIn, speaking at conferences and making their way up the corporate ladder, when ultimately they just ran Facebook pages during a time when it was harder to fail than anything else.

And now they are upset that the model stopped working.

Oh, well. I’m with them! Lord knows my career (along with the careers of 10,000 others) would be far more prosperous had we all just agreed to play along with the lie that social media was the answer to media distribution in the internet age. It’s not a lie if everyone’s playing along. Well…

Yes, there is a world where the videos are still raking in millions of views and the articles are viral and that word is not even close to cringe, not even something you hesitate saying, and not something that haunts the dreams of every 20-something social media manager who lived through the last ten years. And the traffic is still coming! From… where exactly? Peru? Tallahassee? … we are seeing reports of traffic spikes peaking from the icy tips of Antarctica. No, don’t read into it. Just sell it, stupid. Oh, how it would be heaven to live only a few minutes in that memory again.

The charlatans of digital media would be wise to learn something from Rupert Murdoch, which is to be honest and cruel about what you are and who you are and tell people constantly. Yes, you might not agree. No, it’s not for you. We’ll take your complaint, certainly, just take a ticket at the end of the line.

I have no issues with discovering a loop hole or a fault in a system and exploiting that to your own betterment. Even in a world where I have been an objective loser through it all. Those of you who have been here a while will know the mantra: it is nothing personal — it’s just capitalism. But wow! Imagine a world where we are honest with ourselves and with each other from the executive suite down. You may say I am a dreamer… Standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing. Saying you deserve to be there is another.

Some models are built to fail. Some businesses just don’t work. But the last decade of… what? Digital media revolution? is proving to be one where the innovators are petrified of being honest with themselves.

And why would you, anyway? There’s always a book to sell.