The rise of DTC media

Niche is sexy in publishing

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed. A quick favor: Please forward it to another person if you like it. This is the main growth driver for newsletters. No algorithms needed. This week, I’m examining what’s imperfectly called DTC media, some thoughts on building company culture, my take on execution always beating vision, and an homage to taking seven years to make a mole.

Media is going niche

The media business is changing. The scale-by-any-means era is now firmly in the rearview mirror. The shift from ads to subscriptions offers a sturdier business model for many media companies with real communities. New platforms like Substack, Patreon and others are a boon to a new class of solo operators. Niche is no longer a polite insult for “small and obscure.” There is similarity to what has taken place in e-commerce, where an array of niche brands have taken flight thanks to Shopify and gobs of Instagram ads. The dynamics are somewhat different in media, to be fair. But a new crop of brands could emerge that have far different characteristics than the companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice and GroupNine that defined the previous era of digital media.

Here are some characteristics I see for DTC media:

  • A narrow focus on an area of professional interest (B2B) or passion (B2C). DTC media isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It isn’t HuffPost.
  • A brand serving a defined community, not an audience rented from big tech platforms. The way to tell if you have a community or an audience is the brand can get them to actively participate. As Hunter Walk puts it, “come for the content, stay for the community.”
  • A business model that isn’t all ads. There is a place for advertising. One large digital media company, with a giant ads business, lamented to me the future for ads is as an “add-on” to direct revenue from the audience, often in the form of subscriptions but also through commerce.

The three DTC media lanes: