183: The solution to the media crisis is to get more talent

The vast majority of us are average, and average doesn’t sell

There’s a lot of concern in the media business right now. It seems as if the world is coming unglued. Brands are dying, or laying off a lot of people.

I’ve heard lots of different sorts of explanations, and while there’s some truth to many of them, I’m going to toss my own into the mix.

There are simply too many people providing content, and this is what happens.

You’ve heard of the Pareto principle – that 20 percent of your customers account for 80 percent of your revenue; 20 percent of your employees do 80 percent of the work; and 20 percent of authors sell 80 percent of the books.

It’s a spooky thing, in at least two ways. First, it continues to apply as you did down, so that if you take that top 20 percent of authors who sell 80 percent of the books, 20 percent of those authors sell 80 percent of those books. And that pattern continues to iterate until you get one or two people who sell most of the books. The second spooky thing is that this principle even applies to planets and ecosystems and hurricanes and such, so it’s not just a quirk of human behavior.

The internet has made it trivially easy to become a content creator. Bob Hoffman jokes that he finally met somebody who doesn’t have a podcast.

YouTube, TikTok, Wordpress – all that, plus the fact that we all have a movie studio in our pocket.

This results in an absolute tsunami of content, and AI is going to make it even worse. I just attended a session the other day where a friend explained how you can create a book with designrr.io in about ten minutes.

Supply is close to unlimited, but while demand for internet content is way bigger than I ever expected it to be – people spend a huge amount of time on their phones – it’s still limited. There are only so many hours in a day.

It stands to reason that the content space is going to have some casualties.

Spotify listeners spent 14.9 million total hours listening to The Joe Rogan Experience in the first month it was available on that service. Those 14.9 million hours were not spent on newspapers or magazines.

My take on all this is that if you’re a media company, the answer won’t be found in revenue or business model innovation. Those are good things, but they’re not going to address the fundamental problem, which is that the top 20 percent are going to continue to take the lion’s share, and with the constant addition of new creators, that top 20 percent is going to get better and better and better.

You’re competing in an ocean of content. New people are coming on board all the time, and while most of them are average, and no particular threat, some of them are talented, and a small portion of them are super talented.

My friend Jimmy Finkelstein recently tried to start a new media business on the premise that people want news from a moderate point of view. My first reaction was “No, people actually want to hear lunatics screaming about the end of the world.”

But my second reaction was that’s really not the issue. The issue is talent. And I don’t mean to speak against anyone at The Messenger. I’m sure there were some talented people there. But in every profession you have some people who are so much better than everyone else that it defies understanding. Think of Patrick Mahomes, or Steven King. These guys are on the edges of the distribution curve.

So my recommendation to media companies is to find extraordinary talent. Things like paywalls and first-party data and all that stuff will pale in significance to the effect of very talented people.