Do media companies value reach or influence most?

Technology giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon – along with the data analysts at legacy media companies like Disney and Time Warner – spend their days trying to seduce their audiences by creating ultra-targeted streams of news, television clips, opinions and other pop-culture ephemera. When members of that same audience log on to social networks, Hulu accounts, Netflix or Amazon Prime they consume ads, videos and news items that cater to what the algorithms driving those services believe users want.
I’ve always disliked living in this hall of mirrors. So I still read newspapers cover to cover, peruse the op-eds and trawl blogs and newsletters to know what the world cares about – that is, the world beyond what my friends and contacts care about.
Over the past few years I’ve also turned to Jason Hirschhorn and his merry band of curators at REDEF for their daily email of media and fashion stories, to see what they care about too. (Thousands of people also subscribe to REDEF’s free, link-filled notes on music and sports.) I use REDEF’s emails to filter out most of the Internet’s random content, in part because REDEF shares important, compelling stories, even when it disagrees with the writers. That’s what you have to do to deliver the most compelling ideas online.
Even the executives who helped bless this new world of ultra-targeted media have been longtime subscribers to Hirschhorn’s product, including insiders such as Barry Diller, Reed Hastings, Judy McGrath, Dick Costolo and James Murdoch. Steve Rosenbaum, the CEO of a video curation site, Waywire, notes that these influencers rely on Hirschhorn to keep abreast of what’s important and what will spark conversation within a sophisticated, engaged audience.
Hirschhorn is in many ways part of that same group, but he was also early to the idea that technology would upend their business models. It’s part of the reason why nearly a decade ago he became an executive at Sling Media, which made a streaming device, the Slingbox.
Sure, algorithmic targeting generates lots of clicks, shares and digital ads, but it also can blunt curiosity. Barry Diller has noted that to survive in today’s media business you have to be curious because it’s not enough to be smart anymore. Other executives seem to agree.
In other words, the titanic, valuable and troubling changes technology and the Internet have brought to the media world have landed publishers at this crossroads: Do they want reach or do they want influence, and can they or can’t they have both? For his part, Hirschhorn says he isn’t trying to build a Buzzfeed-size audience (which is the current yardstick for any media company seeking bragging rights about Web traffic). He won’t give out specific numbers, but he says he currently has tens of thousands of subscribers. That’s an extremely small audience compared to the tens of millions of unique visitors major media sites reel in, but Hirschorn says the ultimate size and value of his business depends on something other than traffic, something that no tech company has been able to measure very accurately – the value of influence.
A subscription price hasn’t been set yet, but Hirschhorn is betting that people will pay somewhere around $10 a month for him to help them consume wisely and be part of a more refined conversation.
He raised $2.25 million to build his subscription business and he plans a small test launch within the next month or so. REDEF will probably never be a billion-dollar business, but Hirschhorn thinks it could someday be a $50 million company. In that regard, it is very much a boutique operation and is likely to stay that way.
Websites such as Gawker, Business Insider and the Huffington Post have spent years aggregating content for clicks and ads, with varying degrees of success. REDEF, on the other hand, gives its readers only a headline, a teaser and a link to the work it curates. The writers and publishers of the original story get the credit, traffic and attention.
He sees this effort as supportive of the media outlets that put in the resources and money to create original work. He plans to arrange revenue shares with the publishers of work featured on REDEF properties.
Hirschorn realizes he may always be niche, but he and his investors believe that niche represents a viable, valuable business. How well or poorly REDEF and its kind ultimately stack up against other media properties will be one small data point informing the debate about the value of reach versus the value of influence. •


Katie Benner is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about technology, innovation, and the cult and culture of Silicon Valley.

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