Loyal Paying Audiences are Sexy Again

Old-school blogging, the big media vibe shift, and pouring love into content

The way older millennial girls dreamed of being the next NYC PR power girl or an EIC somewhere in the Condé Nast, and the young girls today are dreaming of being the next Emma Chamberlain or Monet McMichael, I dreamed of being the next Emily Weiss and Leandra Medine Cohen: a beautiful young woman with a NYC loft and a blog that grew into an empire.

Since then, blogging in its original form has been deemed dead and alive many times following the rise and fall of platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. But in its broader definition of building loyal, engaged audiences around personable brands, blogging has been living a pretty steady life. After all these years of rumored declines and comebacks, it evolved into something more complex and interconnected with professional media, corporate comms and marketing, and independent content creation. In its spirit, it gave birth to a whole range of public figures, powered some of the greatest business ventures of our time, and is gearing up for another big act.

There is a big shift happening in the media business right now. Well-known publications are shutting their doors, laying off their entire staff. Lots of popular writers have gone independent — it seems like every other week, another writer I used to enjoy in The New Yorker, BoF, or The Cut launches a Substack. Editorial consultant

maya kosoff

wrote in a blog post for 18 olives:

“You’ve already been seeing this as writers make the leap from writing for publications to writing for themselves — their names get cited the same way you’d cite reporting or analysis from The New York Times. Some outlets like Semafor and Puck brand their stories and newsletters as coming from specific names of writers and editors, as opposed to coming from the outlet itself. We predict this will become even more commonplace in 2024 — especially as layoffs continue to decimate traditional and digital media and more talent strikes out on their own. As a corollary, the distinction between independent journalism and the creator economy will get even murkier. 

Regardless of the industry you find yourself in, having gone through multiple layoffs and career tribulations, the thing that many of us are yearning for these days is some sense of stability. And in the world where traditional industry gatekeepers are losing touch and firing people left and right on a short notice, and social media algorithms are constantly changing, often favoring the opposite of what the most engaged users enjoy, building a loyal personal audience through independent publishing tools seems like a wise choice.

When the internet was full of free good-quality content sponsored by VC money and occasional ads, I thought paying for content would never catch on. But these days, the internet is so overrun by low-quality amateur (in the worst sense of the word) content designed to be favored by the algorithm, SEO blog posts, and regular people volunteering as salesmen, paying $5-10 a month for extra episodes of my favorite podcast or Substack makes complete sense. The only issue is that at this point, I am hesitant about taking on new subscriptions because I am already racking up around $50 in Patreon and Substack spending a month.

The new media startups, like Puck News, are quickly realizing this too. This thread from Kyle Chayka does a great job articulating how smart media execs are moving away from a business model designed to get a lot of eyes on a web page that displays random ads towards building a loyal paying audience by “giving them access to particular writer / creator personalities under the umbrella of a publication brand.” Personally, I am very close to pulling the trigger on the $100/year Puck subscription after listening to a How Long Gone episode with their entertainment reporter Matthew Belloni and hearing great reviews about Lauren Sherman’s fashion newsletter. Paying less than $10 a month for a couple of well-written newsletters plus whatever else I might get sounds like a great deal to me.

If this is where people’s attention is moving in media and entertainment, there are way too many consumer brands outside of those industries who are putting money and time into getting empty views. If you think of marketing and brand building as entertainment, it makes sense that you too should be redirecting the effort that goes into pumping out large amounts of mediocre top-of-funnel content in attempt to crack the ever changing algorithm towards creating good-quality content with quality talent that builds a loyal paying audience. And that’s where blogging, in its broadest sense comes in.

In a sea of soulless commercial content made by twenty-year-old associates, as an attention grab, coming across any sort of content that talented people poured time and energy into makes the smart, conscious consumers feel curious. It cuts through the noise with its quality instead of clickbait. Mixed comments about product development and new formulas aside, Glossier, to this day, has an impressively engaged audience on social media which was built on the back of a brilliant blog turned online publication Into The Gloss that captured attention of beauty-obsessed coastal elites and tastemakers. Years after Leandra Medine Cohen’s fashion blog turned media business Man Repeller shut down, she is back in action with one of the most read newsletters on Substack called The Cereal Aisle that just celebrated its third birthday. Many of her current readers are the ones who stuck around ever since the Man Repeller days and the controversy that led to its end.

Ultimately, what I hope for isn’t more people rushing to start newsletters, podcasts and other genres of content that closely resemble old-school blogging but more people revisiting their intentions and process. If you want love, pour love. And if you are looking for people who would be loyal to you and your brand, why are you looking for them and treating them the same way as the people who change their aesthetics according to fleeting trends?