Mic's Drop
August 23, 2017 11:25 AM   Subscribe

How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it

The site had an unfiltered voice that spoke on behalf of marginalized individuals. Breitbart called it “SJW Central.” “I think a lot of people in today’s day and age want to know, ‘What are we supposed to be outraged about?’” a former Mic staffer who left the site earlier this year told The Outline. “It seemed as if we were trying to position ourselves as, ‘We are the definition of woke, and this is how you break down this narrative or fight the mainstream.’”
posted by poffin boffin (48 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
In contrast to their staff, Horowitz and Altchek seemed to embrace the idea of being an activist website without really understanding the issues, based on anecdotes about their conduct internally.

Altchek, of course, will be remaining.
posted by Artw at 11:56 AM on August 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


Didn't we have a nearly identical article about MTV News, too? I'm just imagining all these essentially interchangeable sites vowing to be "the leader in video" - what kind of person is able to say that to their staff with confidence?
posted by atoxyl at 11:59 AM on August 23, 2017


It’s unclear what type of video Mic will do next. The company has been producing video stories from footage sourced from social media and wire services and then overlaid with text, a format that is becoming widely popular because it’s fast, cheap, and gets lots of views. After former VEVO Chief of Revenue Jonathan Carson joined Mic as president in April, the company had a large staff meeting where he took questions. One employee asked Carson who of Mic’s competitors he thought was doing good video; Carson couldn’t answer. Instead, he said, to the recollection of an employee who was there: “I’m in love with the concept of media. I don’t watch any show or outlet consistently, I watch one episode of every TV show to see what’s out there.” Rather than a video visionary, staffers I spoke to remembered him for cutting costs.

That kind, apparently.
posted by Artw at 12:02 PM on August 23, 2017 [4 favorites]


In the Fall Quarter issue of Rich Idiot

"Restaurant or Online Media? - Burn Your Cash Faster"
posted by atoxyl at 12:03 PM on August 23, 2017 [22 favorites]


Video is popular with advertisers because it bypasses adblockers. Actual people for the most part fucking hate it. There is no strategy and the people who actually want that stuff will go to YouTube anyway.
posted by Artw at 12:04 PM on August 23, 2017 [37 favorites]


It's interesting that a site that first became dependent on Facebook headline clickbait (which eventually failed), then became dependent on Google SEO keyword clickbait (which eventually failed), is now all "surely THIS" about the video-with-overlay text clickbait, having apparently learned zero lessons.
posted by misskaz at 12:06 PM on August 23, 2017 [14 favorites]


"popular with advertisers" == "incredibly annoying for every other human being on the planet"
posted by murphy slaw at 12:08 PM on August 23, 2017 [32 favorites]


I remember Mic mostly for the relatively short period when I'd added their Tumblr feed to mine. They had this really fucking irritating habit of making a post about, say, a BLM protest, then adding an update (which may or may not have added anything of particular interest) to the original post and reposting it. Say I'm checking my Tumblr feed once a day; I'd come across a Mic post with maybe ten bits of info on it, and then, since I'm working my way back in time, I'd come across the post with only nine updates... then eight... then seven... drove me nuts. Finally unsubbed from it and haven't missed it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:11 PM on August 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


My feelings towards them were generally positive though it completely makes sense that they had editorial pushing them to go off the handle about things in dumb ways. I had some problems with this article though, which was probably their biggest hit for ages.
posted by Artw at 12:18 PM on August 23, 2017




What “Pivoting to Video” Really Means

It’s grueling to write about this stuff. I have pals at all three places, including Grantland alums who were the founding mothers and fathers of the rebooted MTV News. It’s one thing to think of a video replacing a writer in theory. It’s another when the writer is Brian Phillips.

Moreover, any of us who attempt to write about the “pivot to video” do so from inside the same new-media vortex that swallowed our comrades. Last week, Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld published an article about the layoffs while sheepishly apologizing for the autoplay video he knew would sit atop his words. The video was called “Silicon Valley Can Help Save Journalism.”

Why this is happening is simple: The web has a surplus of copy versus advertising. Companies have decided that sticking an ad at the front of a video makes it less ignorable than putting a similar ad next to an article. It doesn’t matter what the video is. I often get a paragraph or two into a Sports Illustrated story only to find Madelyn Burke in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, giving me a summary of the sentences I’m already reading.

posted by Artw at 12:25 PM on August 23, 2017 [11 favorites]


Video is popular with advertisers because it bypasses adblockers. Actual people for the most part fucking hate it. There is no strategy and the people who actually want that stuff will go to YouTube anyway.

And YouTube's rules around monetisation are so byzantine and arbitrarily-enforced that most YouTubers get more income from Patreon and sponsorships than ads anyway. (A couple of channels I follow have even deliberately demonetised themselves on YT because of the hassle.)
posted by tobascodagama at 12:42 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


I read somewhere (ironically) that the next big influx of people to come online is predicted to be semi-literate people in third world countries and a lot of the coming video content is going to be targeted towards them.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:45 PM on August 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


Maybe

the bosses don't believe in what we believe in
posted by entropone at 12:46 PM on August 23, 2017 [17 favorites]


There are so very few things that are better presented in video than in text. In fact, of the videos that could be articles, but are made better by being video, fully 40% of them are made by Jon Bois.
posted by explosion at 12:49 PM on August 23, 2017 [19 favorites]


I watch a lot of instructional videos for photography, darkroom processing and photoshop because those are inherently visual subject but I hate, hate, hate having to sit through any video that is just someone reading copy that I could read myself in 1/4 of the time.

How long before we're reading articles about sites pivoting away from video because everyone hates it?
posted by octothorpe at 12:59 PM on August 23, 2017 [8 favorites]


(And, hey, speaking of YouTube's byzantine and arbitrary rules about monetisation... And that's just the tip of the iceberg. PushingUpRoses, who mostly does videos on old school adventure games, recently had monetisation pulled from a vlog video that was mostly about socks.)
posted by tobascodagama at 1:08 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


"How long before we're reading articles about sites pivoting away from video because everyone hates it?"

Yesterday I saw some 2 minute video on twitter on why some confederate statues fold like they're made of uncooked clay when they're toppled. Two minutes that could be explained by a simple sentence: they're very cheap crap, sponsored by the United Daughters of Racists, at the height of the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Movements. This is 13 characters short of 140. Takes a few seconds to read. Would only need a gif of the statue falling to get my attention. Yet, because some jackass took a look at youtube and thought "well, everything needs to be video content", I had to squint at the subtitles (because I didn't have my headphones around, and think having media with sound with other people around without them is obnoxious) for two minutes.

I don't need some bored-looking intern facing his very expensive Macbook Pro in a improperly lit office telling me that. I doubt anyone needs that. If Twitter was a Vine-like service for people who do small (30s to 3min) audio/video news clippings, random thoughts or whatever and allow people to create lists and play them at their own convenience, sure, it would be what I signed up to. But Twitter is supposed to be a fast browsing medium, and these videos are a slog.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:11 PM on August 23, 2017 [8 favorites]


Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, had an interesting thread up about "pivoting to video" a few days ago. Excerpt (but read the whole thing):

I like how you cut off the excerpt basically right before he says the piece everyone is thinking.

I can't tell if I'm being sarcastic either.
posted by PMdixon at 1:12 PM on August 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


I like how you cut off the excerpt basically right before he says the piece everyone is thinking.

What was it? Some people have been blocked for pointing out his annoying centrism. Not naming any names.
posted by rhizome at 1:14 PM on August 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


That users hate video?

i think we can consider it covered.
posted by Artw at 1:25 PM on August 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


(If he has you blocked, you can just open the thread in an Incognito window.)

(There's a meta point in here about the fact that a Twitter thread is the only format that is objectively worse than talking head videos for long-form essay-style content.)
posted by tobascodagama at 1:32 PM on August 23, 2017 [16 favorites]


(There's a meta point in here about the fact that a Twitter thread is the only format that is objectively worse than talking head videos for long-form essay-style content.)

If only. Tumblr is even worse.
posted by praemunire at 1:47 PM on August 23, 2017 [6 favorites]


Didn't we recently hash out the video conversation in this MTV thread? Sorry if it's been linked in a previous comment, I must have missed that.
posted by R a c h e l at 1:49 PM on August 23, 2017


Successful “frameworks,” or headlines, that went through this process included “Science Proves TK,” “In One Perfect Tweet TK,” “TK Reveals the One Brutal Truth About TK,” and “TK Celebrity Just Said TK Thing About TK Issue. Here’s why that’s important.”

I mean, you always knew this, but there's something striking about seeing in laid out so baldly.
posted by Ragged Richard at 2:00 PM on August 23, 2017 [8 favorites]


What was it?

Not just that consumers hate video but that there's probably no money in that bucket either. There is no money in any of the buckets except the ones labeled "be the monopoly search provider" and "be the monopoly social networking platform."
posted by PMdixon at 2:22 PM on August 23, 2017 [12 favorites]


I did enjoy their video content even if it was somewhat tendentious vague lefty content at times. I particularly liked Gabe Gonzalez and Natasha Noman and some more European white guy whose name I can't find right now, but most of this material vanished around the time of the adpocalyse. this last spring (which isn't really mentioned directly in the FPP article, but independent content producers seem VERY aware of it). It also introduced me to the awesome Liz Plank, now at Vox -- although she seems a lot less visible over there.

But yeah, this sort of convergence-on-a-thing (Facebook! Google! and who can forget Altavista!) seems a counter-intuitive byproduct of the global flattening of the web where instead of a zillion independent specialty bookstores it all falls into a bucket called "Amazon", etc. (except for shoes, one thing found a way out, huh). So the idea of having a huge variety of publications pointed at different topics and audiences and even scales of audiences all falls toward the vortex of chasing the largest number of eyeballs differentiation be damned. There's probably something here about political parties and the Current Occupant as well. It surely doesn't seem good for the "content" not to mention the producers who have to hew to scripts ... although you wonder at what a reporter from the mid-century era might say about the 21st century model of media, Remington-to-Asus adjustment aside. There was a good swathe of media criticism going on already by the 80s and 90s (see Ken Finkleman's The Newsroom for some of that).

But yeah, what PMdixon said. That's the elephant in the room. Content only pays on the margins.
posted by dhartung at 3:01 PM on August 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it

I don't know what to say about the fact that the headline is itself clickbait and the fact that the editors/headline writers apparently think anyone else thought differently (or is that beside the point when it comes to clickbait)? Seriously, show me an even vaguely marginalised person with a Facebook account who thought that Mic.com wasn't using them as clickbait.
posted by hoyland at 3:30 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


Clickbait would imply a misleading headline or lack of content behind the link?
posted by Artw at 3:34 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


What was it? Some people have been blocked for pointing out his annoying centrism. Not naming any names.


Talkingpointsmemo is annoyingly centrist? Talking 'The president is a certifiable russian stooge' Points Memo?
posted by Sebmojo at 3:47 PM on August 23, 2017 [4 favorites]


I would say pretty anything of the form "How [blank] did [bad thing]" is clickbait. One of the example headline templates in the article is "TK Reveals the One Brutal Truth About TK", which is almost the same. (I have no idea what "TK" means. They don't seem to define it.)
posted by hoyland at 3:49 PM on August 23, 2017


There are two business models for content -- (1) make content good or useful enough that content consumers will choose to pay for it or (2) pay nothing or virtually nothing (relative to volume) for content, editorial and moderation -- and one universal constant: expect Google, Facebook and Amazon to constantly mess with your traffic and customer acquisition.
posted by MattD at 3:52 PM on August 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


I would have thought video would be more expensive to produce than written content, but it seems it may be just the opposite.

So much online video is now stock or wire photos overlaid with text that's essentially quick summaries of other people's news stories--something that can basically be created by anyone reasonably fluent in English with the skill to use a simple editing tool. (I think Tronc, the former Tribune Co., has already boasted about building software to make this as automated a process as possible).

If you post that kind of material as a written article, Facebook and Google are smart enough to realize it's derivative and lump it in with other indistinguishable posts about the same subject, but so far they don't seem to be doing the same kind of checks on video.
posted by smelendez at 4:17 PM on August 23, 2017


The latest thing on Facebook is to make videos of meme images, since FB prioritizes video content.

FB is a land of dumbness.
posted by Artw at 4:19 PM on August 23, 2017 [7 favorites]


TK means to come. It's a standard placeholder
posted by (Over) Thinking at 6:10 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


It used to be that advertisers would spend a lot of money on TV commercials, billboards and print ads, and if sales rose they'd say: "see -- our ads worked."

But the rise of the internet created a crisis of attribution, because suddenly there was the ability to actually measure whether the ad led to a sale -- there was a click-stream. Impression-based ads (which all non-internet ads are) became less popular in part because you can't get direct metrics on how well they worked.

Unfortunately, when you actually do follow the data on internet ads, you find out they generally don't convert to sales all that well.

Which is to some degree why video ads are popular now. Fewer people block them, and you don't get dismal conversion rate data back from them because they're just cheaper versions of tv commercials in a shiny, new, internet-y form.
posted by mrmurbles at 6:11 PM on August 23, 2017 [7 favorites]


My theory is that video is being pushed by broadcast media graduates with student loans to pay.

Something tells me internet ads are working just about as well as ads always have, it's just that they can measure it now and can use advertiser assumptions and myths about those measurements to push prices down.
posted by rhizome at 6:27 PM on August 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


Fewer people block them

…because they weren't that popular until about six months ago.

give it another six months.
posted by murphy slaw at 8:41 PM on August 23, 2017 [1 favorite]


Something tells me internet ads are working just about as well as ads always have, it's just that they can measure it now and can use advertiser assumptions and myths about those measurements to push prices down.

This was widely stated during the newspaper collapse, although I don't know if anyone ever really tracked down the data to see if it pans out. But it was alleged that newspapers basically survived as long as they did, because there weren't any better options for certain types of advertising -- not really that the advertising was particularly effective.

Modern advertising is arguably no more effective (in terms of ability to get someone to actually do something -- contrary to some dystopian predictions from the last century, people are pretty resistant to becoming mindless slavedrones), but it can be more efficient in terms of costs: you can target the subset of people who are likely to become customers rather than just shotgunning the message out to a broad audience.

Personally, I don't think we'll see a viable micropayments system emerge until advertising collapses as a media-funding model. We've been trying to crack that problem from the other side (get micropayments working as an alternative to ads) and it just doesn't seem to be happening. But if and when ads finally become nonviable (which could take a while -- the cost of putting stuff online has also collapsed, though I view that as a plus), I think you'll start to see a significant migration to other models, and demand for the infrastructure to enable them.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:04 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


Younger adults more likely than their elders to prefer reading news

Yes, but will they pay for it?
posted by Going To Maine at 11:17 PM on August 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


There are so very few things that are better presented in video than in text. In fact, of the videos that could be articles, but are made better by being video, fully 40% of them are made by Jon Bois

and another 40% by Louis Rossmann.
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 AM on August 24, 2017


Talkingpointsmemo is annoyingly centrist? Talking 'The president is a certifiable russian stooge' Points Memo?

Not the thread for it, but yeah, they are milktoast boring-ass center left pony sheet coverage. The left is far more vast and extends far greater distances from the center than most folks realize.

On topic: A pivot to video sounds like a way of gracefully deciding to fold your business by being able to say you tried something new, rather than saying you tried something bold.
posted by turntraitor at 10:46 AM on August 24, 2017


TPM are definitely Democrats, but they're not annoying left-punching jerks about it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:48 AM on August 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


On topic: A pivot to video sounds like a way of gracefully deciding to fold your business by being able to say you tried something new, rather than saying you tried something bold

There I'm not going to disagree.
posted by Artw at 10:56 AM on August 24, 2017


Personally, I don't think we'll see a viable micropayments system emerge until advertising collapses as a media-funding model.

There are so many Ph.D's in Financial Technology these days, does the Ad industry just not want to pay for them? Is the problem too hard? If so, maybe impression advertising will have to be fine, and advertising that begs for interaction (e.g. autoplay pause/mute) will be found not to be worth the extra money. Then again, maybe there have been studies that say even an annoyed target is receptive to advertising messages.
posted by rhizome at 5:21 PM on August 24, 2017


maybe there have been studies that say even an annoyed target is receptive to advertising messages.

Even if there haven't been, can you imagine any advertiser missing the opportunity to cite them?
posted by flabdablet at 2:51 AM on August 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


But it was alleged that newspapers basically survived as long as they did, because there weren't any better options for certain types of advertising -- not really that the advertising was particularly effective.

One of the free newspapers around here (well, "newspaper", it was a bunch of fluff pieces and ads for Lidl) at a time had select listings from olx (the most used ebay thingy around here), I suspect most of them were premium ads. Sometimes I think if newspapers were quicker to jump on that ebay/craigslist market, as well as freelance job offers sites, they could have leveraged their existing position to corner the market on online ads.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:39 PM on August 25, 2017


Nylon to Shutter Print Edition - Pivoting to video.
posted by Artw at 6:06 PM on September 7, 2017


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