NDM: Weekly News Article - W/C 27th February (49)

The Outline’s Josh Topolsky: There’s too much sameness in digital media

https://digiday.com/publishers/outlines-josh-topolsky-theres-much-sameness-digital-media/

Summary

While watching the Super Bowl, The Outline Founder and CEO Josh Topolsky saw a trailer for "stranger things". Once he saw the trailer he predicted what was going to happen next, he said multiple sites would rush up with posts as an excuse to embed the trailer and cadge some pageviews. Topolsky said "everything about digital media is insanely boring" "Everything looks the same, everything sounds the same". Topolsky set up his own tech news brand "The Verge" after leaving Bloomberg media last year. He promised to take a different path than, the scale players who were too busy embedding the 'stranger things' trailer into all their posts. The Outline was born from Topolsky finding that there was a lot of sameness in digital media. Topolsky said “I felt like there’s a hole in digital media,” “That hole looks like the stories aren’t very good, the presentation isn’t very modern, the advertising sucks, and the voice and sensibility of the world you should be occupying isn’t there.” 

Key Quotes

• New digital brands get on the scene and say "I've got to get 20 million visitors, 50 million whatever". 

• Topolsky raised $5 million to build The Outline on the idea that an advertising model could be found to support high quality content.

• There are 3 billion people on the internet.

My Opinion

I think that Topolsky makes a very valid point about there being to much sameness in digital media. Something comes out and then a million differently people try to put their own spin on it and create something different but they without realising haven't really changed it. So, as a result we end up with multiple different copies of the same thing out there in the digital world. For example, on YouTube one person will create funny videos of music artists or bands with their fails 'things that have gone wrong in performances' and then somebody else will take that same video and put a different backing track and re arrange the clips and post it believing it is different but it isn't. I believe that people need to find there own ways of getting content out to their audeinces they need to be original.