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Interview: Most Entertainment News Sites to Go Broke By Mid 2024, Says CinemaBlend Founder

Spyxos

Member
ultsss-scaled.jpg


“To clarify, ad rates are really only down around 30-40% industry-wide. That’s still bad, but not what the hyperbole out there suggests. Not nearly as bad as the rate decline back in 2000 after the dot-com bust, back when I was first getting started. From an ad rate perspective, the level of decrease now is more akin to what happened after the 2008 crash. It should also be noted that even though ad rates are down 40% from last year, they are still way up compared to what they were at any time before 2015. The ad industry has come a long way.

Ad rates are not the problem. No one wants to admit it, but traffic is the problem. It’s also not AI, though there’s a lot of hype and fear about it. That’s an excuse.

The real reason companies like Vice and Buzzfeed are going out of business (and expect a lot more very soon) is that they no longer have any readers. And they no longer have any readers because web traffic is now entirely controlled by a small handful of tech companies. Around September 2022, those tech companies decided to stop sending traffic to news publishers.

Facebook is the biggest one. They’ve all but cut off publishers entirely. Many publishers got as much as 40 – 50% of their traffic from Facebook. That ended in late 2022. No one and I mean no one; at least not if they are honest, gets Facebook traffic any more. Meta has tweaked their algo [sic] to make sure users never leave the Facebook app.” The other 60% of traffic for nearly every publisher came from Google. And now that is gone too. Look at any Google search result. A year or two ago, 80% of a Google results page would have contained links to publishers. Now it’s often not even 20%.”


“There’s no denying that things are a mess and only getting worse. I still remember when I first began noticing the shift.

It was late in my tenure as CinemaBlend’s CEO, and we’d sent a writer to cover a press junket with Clint Eastwood. The reporter came back excited, claiming that in the middle of the junket, Clint Eastwood went on a crazy racist rant.

The reporter wrote up their story, in which they talked in detail about what a racist Clint Eastwood was and how he’d said horribly racist things in a hate-filled tirade.


I reviewed the article with my Editor-in-Chief before we published it since this was a big and intense accusation at that time. We both noticed something strange: the article had no direct quotes from Clint Eastwood in it.

We reached out to the reporter and asked to listen to their audio recording of what Clint Eastwood said.

We listened to it twice; we couldn’t find the racist tirade.

We went back to the reporter; they gave us a time code, and so we listened again.

“We went back to the reporter and asked if that was it. The reporter confirmed that it was. We had a 1000-word story written about Clint Eastwood’s racist tirade, and all we had to back up that claim was Clint Eastwood saying he’s friends with people of color. We killed the story. However, there were dozens of other journalists at that junket. They all wrote the racist tirade story, and their outlets published it. All of them. Not one of those stories published by our competitors contained an actual quote.

Here’s what Clint Eastwood said: “I have a lot of black friends.” That’s it. It was in the context of how much he’d enjoyed working on the movie, and he sort of said it as an offhand comment.”

Early on, when GFR started breaking really big stories, the Editor-in-Chief of one of our biggest competitors contacted me and demanded that I tell him who our source was and give him that source’s contact information. Journalism 101 is, of course, don’t reveal your source. So I declined. It was then insinuated to me that if I did not comply, he and his friends in the industry would do everything they could to humiliate and discredit GFR publicly. I continued to decline, and for the most part, that person and his friends have done their best to follow through on that threat.

I assume similar tactics are being used against Inside The Magic and some of the other very few journalists out there actually doing their job by working on original reporting.

 
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Jinzo Prime

Member
The reporter came back excited, claiming that in the middle of the junket, Clint Eastwood went on a crazy racist rant.

We had a 1000-word story written about Clint Eastwood’s racist tirade, and all we had to back up that claim was Clint Eastwood saying he’s friends with people of color. We killed the story. However, there were dozens of other journalists at that junket. They all wrote the racist tirade story, and their outlets published it. All of them.

And people wonder why the US is so divided, half the people believe people like Clint are racist because journalists print complete lies about them. It's sickening and tearing us apart.
 
AV Club needs to go under because they spoiled the biggest twist of Season 4 of Succession with zero warning.

I went there because they do episode-by-episode reviews. I'll get more thought-provoking insights by reading years-old Reddit threads.
Haha i know of the video you speak of. Autoplays too. Grade A asshats that site.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
If you have good content you'll survive. If you dont, oh well. If people on YT and Twitter or Twitch can make a living uploading videos or streaming themselves live everyday with zero corporate help, it goes to show media and content is really low value stuff people will only watch if dirt cheap or free. Users can live with ads here and there. It shows big media sites or whichever big corporations trending down are overengineered, too costly, and doesn't have content good enough to even compete with random Tik Tokkers doing dopey videos.

It shows traditional media (before the net) which was controlled by a lot by giant media companies with office towers and full staff could charge people $1 per newspaper and $8 per magazine. That's all people had to live off for news and entertainment. But with the net where most sites are free and they live off ads (or some are big enough to get nice endorsement marketing deals), most viewers will just go with whatever sites are free and fun. You dont need content creators with a wall of writing awards to make good content. You need something interesting. And that can come from anyone with an idea who can fill a Wordpress page or a 2 minute video.

But for people doing it themselves, it's easier for the source to live off some shitty ad revenue because it's just them and chances are decent they got a day job too.

As long as it's entertaining enough, almost nobody is loading up on newspapers, mags or paying tons of sites sub fees for content since most is free anyway. The majority of the content is throwaway. You wont remember most of it the next day. Thats why there's that old saying being shit like "yesterday's news". Nobody cares. So they arent going to spend good money on it unless they have no choice (pre-internet).

As crazy as it seems some sites like Wall St Journal or Barrons lock earnings reports behind a paywall. There's nothing special about those articles. I've seen some. Why pay? I just read the free Reuters article that comes at the same time.
 
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Cyberpunkd

Member
And people wonder why the US is so divided, half the people believe people like Clint are racist because journalists print complete lies about them. It's sickening and tearing us apart.
The point is even people with correct education are not immune to being dishonest and outright lying. Countless financial scandals always expose people from top schools preaching that “ethics and character strength is of paramount importance”.
Same with journalists - even if you have a degree this doesn’t make you immune from writing bad stuff. Also, 99% of “journalists” from the article are more like “bloggers” without degree, someone that started in the industry writing free stuff for others to read.
 
No surprise. They're as irrelevant as video game journalism sites. YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Twitter replaced journalism websites forever ago.
This. It never mattered what social trends they were chasing. The clock was ticking ever since twitch and podcasting both grew exponentially larger around the same time frame. Twitter cut the timeframe in half and tiktok cut it even more.

Everyone working for these sites should have prepared for this. They saw magazines die a slow death. They should have known that blog sites were next. Just look around. People want typed words in bite-sized tweets now. If it’s anything longer, they would rather watch and listen than read.

Nerds and hardcore fans, make some new sites. Ppl will read them
No, they won’t.
 
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Cyberpunkd

Member
Everyone working for these sites should have prepared for this. They saw magazines die a slow death. They should have known that blog sites were next. Just look around. People want typed words in bite-sized tweets now. If it’s anything longer, they would rather watch and listen than read.
Disagree, but your site has to be niche and not chase headlines. The New Yorker puts out better stuff than 99.9% of the Internet but they are a weekly targeting upper middle class demographics.
 
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Hudo

Member
Unfortunately the pieces of shit that really should be affected by this like The Sun, The Daily Mail, Bild, etc. will most likely even increase their readership somehow...
 

Laieon

Member
No surprise. They're as irrelevant as video game journalism sites. YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Twitter replaced journalism websites forever ago.

As a teacher, what really terrifies me is that even Youtube seems to be losing relevancy to Tik Tok (and similar short-form video content). Long form content is dead, be it videos and definitely anything that requires reading.

I get the dislike for entertainment news sites, but I don't think this trend-as-a-whole should be glorified at all.
 

StueyDuck

Member
It's gonna be a glorious day when they do...

We can all have a big BBQ, listen to Lynard skynard, put our relative countries flags behind us and drink beer around a bonfire where the pink hairs can come sobbing to burn their boxes of work things consisting of 100s of funkopops, some anime shit and the latest woke flag of the day 🤣

At least in my head that's how it will go
 

Aesius

Member
As a teacher, what really terrifies me is that even Youtube seems to be losing relevancy to Tik Tok (and similar short-form video content). Long form content is dead, be it videos and definitely anything that requires reading.

I get the dislike for entertainment news sites, but I don't think this trend-as-a-whole should be glorified at all.
It’s a race to the bottom for finding ways to perfectly tap into people’s dopamine responses via algorithms. TikTok will eventually be surpassed by another app that does it even better.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
As a teacher, what really terrifies me is that even Youtube seems to be losing relevancy to Tik Tok (and similar short-form video content). Long form content is dead, be it videos and definitely anything that requires reading.

I get the dislike for entertainment news sites, but I don't think this trend-as-a-whole should be glorified at all.
Agreed. But as humans the traditional way of teaching, novels and even handwriting is a long process, but Inthink most people just inherently like more stuff asap.

It doesn’t mean it has to be good content, but just entertaining and then they move on to the next clip.

I do that myself. I’ve never even been a book reader ever except for hockey and baseball 500 page stat books before the internet and I only read thick textbooks for sake of passing class. I was always a tv and movie guy. Not a long thinking book reader. I was always a skimmer when it came to big school books.

Social media and 10 second tik tok videos have just given what I think humans kind of want. Fast info they don’t need to commit time to because life is fast and people don’t want to be bogged down.

Entertainment for my tastes can be a 3 hr movie or hockey game or a 1 min YT video. I’ve never used tik tok. But some people it’s YT clips and tik tok as they don’t have the interest to watch a ball game. They now have the opportunity to get their thrills in 10 second videos and they’ll take it and move on. In the same time I watch a Jays game, someone can watch probably 100 tik tok snippets.

And because the entertainment is mostly everyday people doing stuff for free having fun, established media jobs are at risk. People don’t care if it’s written by a someone on a payroll with additional costs of head office.

The biggest issue media people have is going up against everyday people uploading themselves or being YT stars for free, or who just live off click revenue not caring about a steady pay cheque. The vast majority of uploaders aren’t even trying to make a career out it. They are just having fun making an account and doing videos. They probably got a day job to pay the bills.
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
The extreme politicisation of internet/media discourse is a killer too.

Essentially we have a situation where large numbers of the potential audience are choosing to actively avoid content that they perceive to be aligned with the "other side". Because of this everyone's reach (culturally speaking) is shorter, and outlets lean towards ideological capture out of need to satisfy the audience they have, continuing the compaction cycle.
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
As a teacher, what really terrifies me is that even Youtube seems to be losing relevancy to Tik Tok (and similar short-form video content). Long form content is dead, be it videos and definitely anything that requires reading.

I get the dislike for entertainment news sites, but I don't think this trend-as-a-whole should be glorified at all.
This is the ADHD generation. If you can't tell the story in 60 seconds or less people move on.

I say that as someone with ADHD who struggled to read books in school and do book reports. My mind is constantly chasing squirrels. Even I think attention spans are too short. I've always been annoyed by expository journalism because most of the time I just want people to get to the point. I don't care about their opinions or whatever meaning they want to ascribe to whatever they're yammering on about. I do appreciate relevant detail, though. And we get very little of that these days.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
This is the ADHD generation. If you can't tell the story in 60 seconds or less people move on.

I say that as someone with ADHD who struggled to read books in school and do book reports. My mind is constantly chasing squirrels. Even I think attention spans are too short. I've always been annoyed by expository journalism because most of the time I just want people to get to the point. I don't care about their opinions or whatever meaning they want to ascribe to whatever they're yammering on about. I do appreciate relevant detail, though. And we get very little of that these days.
You don’t need to have ADHD to want to get to the point. I hated reading novels because to me it’s a waste of time and I won’t remember most of the stuff that happens in a 350 page novel.

If I’m going to sink time into an assignment I’d rather sit at the dining room table doing accounting case studies figuring out balance sheets and income statements.

Even as a kid, I preferred reading the funnies, or stat heavy books like sports record almanacs and stuff like that.

I remember even asking my English teacher why it’s so lengthy writing a big paragraph about a tree when all the author has to do is be succinct and say it’s a dark green tree. I’ll imagine the rest of it myself.

My teacher smiled and said I’d probably enjoy reading Hemingway ot edgar Allen Poe or whichever famous write he mentioned since he said that writer gets to the point a lot faster than others. I don’t remember who it was though but I know it’s a well known person.
 
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Wildebeest

Member
Being able to understand which articles the idiots read and which ones they skipped is enough to ruin journalism without all the money leaving.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
How is losing 30-40% of your revenue NOT the problem? lol

This is really all from Apple's privacy protections. Removed 10's of billions of dollars from the overall web economy. Anyone in the ad business (Facebook, Google) got hit hard, and are also passing the pain down to anyone who uses them for advertising.

Beyond the ad business, the worsening of targeted ads means less sales for stores and whatnot as well, the companies who are putting up ads are getting less effective results.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
How is losing 30-40% of your revenue NOT the problem? lol

This is really all from Apple's privacy protections. Removed 10's of billions of dollars from the overall web economy. Anyone in the ad business (Facebook, Google) got hit hard, and are also passing the pain down to anyone who uses them for advertising.

Beyond the ad business, the worsening of targeted ads means less sales for stores and whatnot as well, the companies who are putting up ads are getting less effective results.
That’s fine with me.

The less marketing, spam, and worst of all they get your phone number off a mailing list.

The worse the targeted ads, the more money people should save as they won’t go nuts buying more useless crap from a targeted banner ad.
 
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