Great piece! Weird to think I've been in this industry for this long.
One thing I'd add is the labor aspect: part of the reason all these sites became unprofitable is because they actually had to PAY people for content. Now that TikTok, YouTube, et al have figured out they can cut out the middle man of news/entertainment sites by having people do those things on their platforms for free (with the hope of one day being sponsored by an underwear company or whatever), there's no need for actual W-2 labor. :(
Great post. I tweeted this when Quinn said his thing … then I deleted it because I didn’t want to seem churlish … so now it’s going to be an over-long blog comment, which definitely isn’t a churlish medium … but how much do you think the alleged lack of recent nostalgia/“decade thinking” is due to a lack of clear names for the decades themselves? As in, it wasn’t obvious what to call the two decades from 2000 to 2020 until recently, and even then the ‘accepted’ name for each decade has changed a few times.
In America at least we’ve kept changing what we call the 2000s. During the decade itself, we called it the ‘two-thousands,’ iirc, but then after 2010, that didn’t really work anymore — it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the previous decade or the entire 21st century. So sometime later we settled on the Aughts (or just “the Bush years”) and now Zoomers also talk about y2k, I guess. Meanwhile the British call them the ‘Noughties,’ which is horrible.
Then the 2010s were unsettled too. We didn’t standardize on ‘the twenty-teens’ as a name until like 2014 or 2015, I feel like — during the few years before that, if you referred to the ‘teens,’ it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the present or the future, literally because the years 2010, 2011, 2012 did not end in ‘teen.’ (Around then, we also went from saying the names of years as ‘two-thousand-eleven’ to ‘twenty-eleven,’ too … this has been totally forgotten … I don’t have a theory about it.) So it wasn’t until 2017 or later that you could refer clearly and unambiguously to ‘the 2000s’ and ‘the 2010s.’
If this is true, then the return of the '20s would seem to decisively resolve the problem, but between Covid and US-China and everything else, 2020 is such a clear break in history anyway that there’s not gonna be a way to isolate the variable.
Last thought but I do wonder if this lack of clear '00s and '10s decadal names is a persistent trait of the English language, and not anything inherently wrong with our century. So instead countries tend to generate names for that part of the century — so you get the Regency era in the UK for the beginning of the 19th century or ‘the Era of Good Feelings’ in America. And thinking back to AP US History or whatever, didn’t it feel like the period from 1900 to 1914 was a little undifferentiated, just one big boring ‘Progressive Era,’ at least until we got to WWI, then it was 1920 and we were off to the decadal races? Anyway thanks again Max I’ll take my answer off the air.
I don't know what an objectively "good" period of the internet was given that the Weird Internet days featured a lot of unfettered bigotry from all corners but when I saw those blogs listed...man, I just miss bullshitting online and reading good writers bullshitting online. Nowadays to get anything readable: I'm constantly refreshing this site for like the ten writers I follow, attempt to mine Twitter for nuggets of gold, and just generally stumbling around the same 3-4 sites that occasionally have something decent amidst capital-C Content. This is nothing more than a lament; maybe we remember the 10s the same way the 70s are remembered: deflated optimism with a creeping sense that the worst is yet to come.
A truly weird 2010s throwback traffic source is Google Discover, which functions almost entirely like the Facebook newsfeed of old and not at all like SEO in any sense (it's not based on search queries). It usually contributes around 25% of all Google traffic for some publishers and no one, not even people who work at the sites, seems to notice it much or understand how it functions.
Isn't the 2010s' most lasting pop cultural form the prestige drama centered on an antihero man? While The Sopranos was the first one to really break through to mass consciousness, and The Shield has its adherents, the antihero drama reached peak tastemaker approval in the later seasons of Breaking Bad and Mad Men, or, if you like, in Hamilton.
Would love to see the rise of shitty programmatic ad tech (and its industry proponents like Digiday) explored in tandem: how the promise of easy ad dollars via targeted advertising networks misled publishers into thinking they could easily funnel in a gazillion dollars through targeting and automation. It's outlined in Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis, but also evident to anyone who ever attended an ad tech-sponsored party between 2011 and 2016: it all seemed like there would be so much money, for everyone, forever, so easy, so automated, as long as the traffic was there. Targeting! Segmentation! But no one figured out how to put the pieces together in a way that audiences actually liked / made publishers money, and now advertisers just block their ads from showing up next to news wholesale.
Also news to me: Facebook was motivated by jealousy because journalists liked Twitter? That's an extremely specious argument that definitely doesn't gibe with my experience of the era; must have been developed by journalists.
This is the greatest sentence / paragraph of 2023 (so far):
“But the decade really kicked into gear around 2012, when Facebook, apparently motivated by jealousy over Twitter’s popularity among journalists (and specifically the extent to which they were crediting Twitter with the Arab revolutions of 2011), opened up a fire hose of traffic to anyone willing to make their headlines sound like they’d been written by a dog, but a dog who’d been genetically/cybernetically manipulated to have the intelligence of a seventh grader, but was subsequently brain damaged in a lab accident, and was also on coke.”
The decline of media was already well on its way, but whatever life was left in a certain kind of elite media or publishing experience fully and truly died during the 2010s. I believe median advances for trade books fell 40% that decade. Newsroom staff headcount was literally cut in half. The Gay Talese/Tina Brown/Graydon Carter/Nora Ephron world was just gone, dead, period. In publishing, the really big mid-six-figure/seven-figure deals now go in large majorities to celebrities writing a book, instead of celebrity writers. I'm sure Gawker mostly diversified because to meet Nick Denton's traffic goals they simply had to pull in more normies, but as I've said before it also had to because the elite world Elizabeth Spiers used to envy just truly does not exist anymore. And the knock-on economic effects down the chain of the industry aren't good either, obviously.
At the same time, in the 2010s the already-potent aversion people feel to working some sort of traditional white collar 9 to 5 got even stronger. Influencer culture helped to cement in people's minds that only a chump gets up at 7AM to pile into an office moving paper all day. Social media made glamorous lives of professional freedom seem ubiquitous and like anyone who didn't have one was a chump. And so you have this world of media where the cash was pumping in early in the decade but where the foundations were always clearly shaky and the top-level compensation now quite a bit worse than it once was, but you also had an endless supply of young strivers eager to come to the city and live their dreams, despite the fact that the money never made sense. Their sheer numbers inevitably put downward pressure on the earnings potential of everyone. Now interest rates are up, meaning that there aren't huge piles of loose cash lying around looking for investment. Thus the end of Vice et al. Too many people, too few seats.
The funny thing is what doesn't change: if you want to be in media, you better work for the New York Times!
The 2010s doesn't have one vibe, right? It's split in two. The first half was the Obama era, and it started with the 2008 election and its memes. Peak liberal era, you could be cool (most places) by liking the president, because his biggest opponents were so uncool.
Then around the 2015 primary campaigns, internet culture discovered socialism and quickly thereafter discovered communism. And even some of the right wing, for a minute, was funny. And suddenly everyone in between was exposed as extremely behind and uncool. And everything up to 2014 was cringe. And for a few years, we were all on high alert for cringe. Thus all the wojacks of crying faces wearing grinning masks. The "I have drawn me as the chad and you as the virgin!" era.
In 2020, the Mueller gang became the Fauci gang. But now there's a healthy leftist layer to the internet, making fun of the centrists, keeping the culture from sliding back into Obama-era cringe. Still, I think the COVID hangover era will define the first half of the 2020s, while something else will define the second. Maybe violent revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, maybe climate collapse. Maybe BLACKPINK!
Great piece! Weird to think I've been in this industry for this long.
One thing I'd add is the labor aspect: part of the reason all these sites became unprofitable is because they actually had to PAY people for content. Now that TikTok, YouTube, et al have figured out they can cut out the middle man of news/entertainment sites by having people do those things on their platforms for free (with the hope of one day being sponsored by an underwear company or whatever), there's no need for actual W-2 labor. :(
Great post. I tweeted this when Quinn said his thing … then I deleted it because I didn’t want to seem churlish … so now it’s going to be an over-long blog comment, which definitely isn’t a churlish medium … but how much do you think the alleged lack of recent nostalgia/“decade thinking” is due to a lack of clear names for the decades themselves? As in, it wasn’t obvious what to call the two decades from 2000 to 2020 until recently, and even then the ‘accepted’ name for each decade has changed a few times.
In America at least we’ve kept changing what we call the 2000s. During the decade itself, we called it the ‘two-thousands,’ iirc, but then after 2010, that didn’t really work anymore — it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the previous decade or the entire 21st century. So sometime later we settled on the Aughts (or just “the Bush years”) and now Zoomers also talk about y2k, I guess. Meanwhile the British call them the ‘Noughties,’ which is horrible.
Then the 2010s were unsettled too. We didn’t standardize on ‘the twenty-teens’ as a name until like 2014 or 2015, I feel like — during the few years before that, if you referred to the ‘teens,’ it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the present or the future, literally because the years 2010, 2011, 2012 did not end in ‘teen.’ (Around then, we also went from saying the names of years as ‘two-thousand-eleven’ to ‘twenty-eleven,’ too … this has been totally forgotten … I don’t have a theory about it.) So it wasn’t until 2017 or later that you could refer clearly and unambiguously to ‘the 2000s’ and ‘the 2010s.’
If this is true, then the return of the '20s would seem to decisively resolve the problem, but between Covid and US-China and everything else, 2020 is such a clear break in history anyway that there’s not gonna be a way to isolate the variable.
Last thought but I do wonder if this lack of clear '00s and '10s decadal names is a persistent trait of the English language, and not anything inherently wrong with our century. So instead countries tend to generate names for that part of the century — so you get the Regency era in the UK for the beginning of the 19th century or ‘the Era of Good Feelings’ in America. And thinking back to AP US History or whatever, didn’t it feel like the period from 1900 to 1914 was a little undifferentiated, just one big boring ‘Progressive Era,’ at least until we got to WWI, then it was 1920 and we were off to the decadal races? Anyway thanks again Max I’ll take my answer off the air.
I don't know what an objectively "good" period of the internet was given that the Weird Internet days featured a lot of unfettered bigotry from all corners but when I saw those blogs listed...man, I just miss bullshitting online and reading good writers bullshitting online. Nowadays to get anything readable: I'm constantly refreshing this site for like the ten writers I follow, attempt to mine Twitter for nuggets of gold, and just generally stumbling around the same 3-4 sites that occasionally have something decent amidst capital-C Content. This is nothing more than a lament; maybe we remember the 10s the same way the 70s are remembered: deflated optimism with a creeping sense that the worst is yet to come.
A truly weird 2010s throwback traffic source is Google Discover, which functions almost entirely like the Facebook newsfeed of old and not at all like SEO in any sense (it's not based on search queries). It usually contributes around 25% of all Google traffic for some publishers and no one, not even people who work at the sites, seems to notice it much or understand how it functions.
That Nate Silver photo with Bill Keller at Nick Denton's is a perfect summary
Remember StumbleUpon? In 2007-2008 I convinced many an editor I’m a traffic guru using that tool alone.
Isn't the 2010s' most lasting pop cultural form the prestige drama centered on an antihero man? While The Sopranos was the first one to really break through to mass consciousness, and The Shield has its adherents, the antihero drama reached peak tastemaker approval in the later seasons of Breaking Bad and Mad Men, or, if you like, in Hamilton.
Would love to see the rise of shitty programmatic ad tech (and its industry proponents like Digiday) explored in tandem: how the promise of easy ad dollars via targeted advertising networks misled publishers into thinking they could easily funnel in a gazillion dollars through targeting and automation. It's outlined in Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis, but also evident to anyone who ever attended an ad tech-sponsored party between 2011 and 2016: it all seemed like there would be so much money, for everyone, forever, so easy, so automated, as long as the traffic was there. Targeting! Segmentation! But no one figured out how to put the pieces together in a way that audiences actually liked / made publishers money, and now advertisers just block their ads from showing up next to news wholesale.
Also news to me: Facebook was motivated by jealousy because journalists liked Twitter? That's an extremely specious argument that definitely doesn't gibe with my experience of the era; must have been developed by journalists.
This is the greatest sentence / paragraph of 2023 (so far):
“But the decade really kicked into gear around 2012, when Facebook, apparently motivated by jealousy over Twitter’s popularity among journalists (and specifically the extent to which they were crediting Twitter with the Arab revolutions of 2011), opened up a fire hose of traffic to anyone willing to make their headlines sound like they’d been written by a dog, but a dog who’d been genetically/cybernetically manipulated to have the intelligence of a seventh grader, but was subsequently brain damaged in a lab accident, and was also on coke.”
Exquisite.
Ok but what are us mid 30s men supposed to wear now?
Now that I think back to it, the 2010s in general was a really weird decade. Can't quite put my finger on it
livejournal anyone?
The decline of media was already well on its way, but whatever life was left in a certain kind of elite media or publishing experience fully and truly died during the 2010s. I believe median advances for trade books fell 40% that decade. Newsroom staff headcount was literally cut in half. The Gay Talese/Tina Brown/Graydon Carter/Nora Ephron world was just gone, dead, period. In publishing, the really big mid-six-figure/seven-figure deals now go in large majorities to celebrities writing a book, instead of celebrity writers. I'm sure Gawker mostly diversified because to meet Nick Denton's traffic goals they simply had to pull in more normies, but as I've said before it also had to because the elite world Elizabeth Spiers used to envy just truly does not exist anymore. And the knock-on economic effects down the chain of the industry aren't good either, obviously.
At the same time, in the 2010s the already-potent aversion people feel to working some sort of traditional white collar 9 to 5 got even stronger. Influencer culture helped to cement in people's minds that only a chump gets up at 7AM to pile into an office moving paper all day. Social media made glamorous lives of professional freedom seem ubiquitous and like anyone who didn't have one was a chump. And so you have this world of media where the cash was pumping in early in the decade but where the foundations were always clearly shaky and the top-level compensation now quite a bit worse than it once was, but you also had an endless supply of young strivers eager to come to the city and live their dreams, despite the fact that the money never made sense. Their sheer numbers inevitably put downward pressure on the earnings potential of everyone. Now interest rates are up, meaning that there aren't huge piles of loose cash lying around looking for investment. Thus the end of Vice et al. Too many people, too few seats.
The funny thing is what doesn't change: if you want to be in media, you better work for the New York Times!
I feel like the 10s will be thought of as the decade of Twitter. It really got going in 2010 and Musk's purchase is the end of its dominance.
I miss The Outline. And Gawker, of course.
The 2010s doesn't have one vibe, right? It's split in two. The first half was the Obama era, and it started with the 2008 election and its memes. Peak liberal era, you could be cool (most places) by liking the president, because his biggest opponents were so uncool.
Then around the 2015 primary campaigns, internet culture discovered socialism and quickly thereafter discovered communism. And even some of the right wing, for a minute, was funny. And suddenly everyone in between was exposed as extremely behind and uncool. And everything up to 2014 was cringe. And for a few years, we were all on high alert for cringe. Thus all the wojacks of crying faces wearing grinning masks. The "I have drawn me as the chad and you as the virgin!" era.
In 2020, the Mueller gang became the Fauci gang. But now there's a healthy leftist layer to the internet, making fun of the centrists, keeping the culture from sliding back into Obama-era cringe. Still, I think the COVID hangover era will define the first half of the 2020s, while something else will define the second. Maybe violent revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, maybe climate collapse. Maybe BLACKPINK!