An interesting read here on CNBC for you media wonks about the changing nature of the big time website.
“Starting an ad-supported business is really, really tough,” said Daniel Gulati, a Comcast Ventures partner, in an interview. “As a general thesis, we are not actively looking to invest in seed companies that have an advertising-based business model.”
It’s a shift in thinking for Comcast Ventures, which has put money behind advertising-based models before, including 2009 and 2010 investments in Vox Media and a 2016 funding of finance news network Cheddar. (Comcast Ventures is owned by Comcast, which also owns CNBC parent company NBCUniversal.)
The article goes on to suggest that the paywall is the way of the future. Could the Former Metsblog become a pay site, and if it did would you choose to pay for it? Another scenario could be similar to the relationship between whatever Cablevision is called now and Newsday. In that scenario, I could see MetsBlog (or SNY.tv/Mets/news or whatever the unmasked URL is) being free to Comcast cable customers, but behind some sort of pay-gate for people like me who have Fios.
One entrepeneur thinks the subscription model makes sense. Jessica Lessin is a founder of a subscription site who wisely points out (in that same article) that for some sites “reliance on advertising led to extreme and outrageous headlines and other editorial decisions that put advertisers before readers.”
That’s the sort of behavior that leads to day after day of articles about how the Mets COULD trade Syndergaard. Those articles might be good for clicks, but are they good for the readers?
The CNBC article goes on to discuss the economics of a pay site such as The Athletic.
All around it’s a good read. One has to imagine that the folks at Comcast regularly look at their investment in SNY and the related website(s) and would begged business-people to evaluate whether or not it make sense in 2019 to even have the website, continue the current model, or if they should retool to a subscription model. Crazy talk? Maybe. But so is trading Syndergaard. But FWIW, Comcast DID shut down at least one site in 2018.
It will be interesting to watch this story unfold as we see which future Comcast chooses.
