„ But while it’s important to recognize the very real pain and anxiety that many media professionals are experiencing, I do think it’s a bit myopic to measure the industry’s health on the financials of legacy outlets and a handful of high-profile, VC-funded digital upstarts. If you instead widen the lens to include the media’s “long tail” — a group that includes tens of thousands of bootstrapped outlets, creators, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, academics, and even non-media companies that significantly invest in content marketing — then you’ll come away with a much more optimistic take on the state of media.
It would probably take a full month for me to research and quantify the true size of the media long tail, but you don’t have to look too far and wide to conclude that it’s absolutely huge. YouTube alone, for instance, is paying out upwards of $10 billion a year to creators via its ad revenue share. Substack announced a year ago that it crossed 2 million paid subscriptions, a