M.G. Siegler
2 min readApr 23, 2021

Ben Smith for The New York Times:

Digital media executives scrambled last year to tell their boards about their new subscription products, but something strange happened: Their old, unfashionable advertising businesses exploded as consumers stayed home and shopped online. And now, travel companies, liquor companies and basically everyone else hoping to capitalize on a wide open summer and the marketing dream of a post-pandemic Roaring Twenties economic boom have begun pouring money into advertising on virtually every platform, but digital media most of all.

As was foretold by, well, me, earlier this year. When asked, “What do you think will be the biggest trend or story in digital media in 2021?” this is what I had to say to my old colleague Anthony Ha at TechCrunch:

It’s sort of boring, but I wouldn’t be shocked if we see a swing back toward advertising-based models. I think there are two parts to this: First, if and when the pandemic recedes, I think a lot of traditional big advertising players like travel, will come roaring back. Second, it feels like there’s been a move away from advertising to paid subscriptions for a while now and I think these things are cyclical.

To be clear, I think both will continue to exist, I just think that after years of underindexing on paid subs, now we’re perhaps on the verge of overindexing on it … Obviously, advertising never went away, I just think it may be due for a bit of a renaissance (though I say that hoping the powers that be make those ads a better user experience — I think that’s the only way there’s not another backlash against them).

It is boring because it should have been fairly obvious. The advertising market is both cyclical and tends to swing quickly and this recent wipeout was extra extreme due to both COVID and the aforementioned shift towards subscription. Things were always going to correct the other way, and they are. But, as noted, we are likely to hit some sort of equilibrium where both ads and subs are a part of a healthy ecosystem. Some publications will focus on one type, some the other, but anyone that gets large enough will likely need both.

There’s a reason that even perhaps the world’s biggest ad cynic keeps coming back to the well: Apple. At Apple’s scale, the advertising money is too big and the margins too fat to pass up. They must be looking at Amazon’s rise in that world and saying some version of, “fuck, yeah we have to get into that game.”

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Written by M.G. Siegler

Writer turned investor turned investor who writes. Now writing at: https://spyglass.org

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

the marketing dream of a post-pandemic Roaring Twenties economic boom

Brittany at Better Marketing calls this trend YOLO Marketing.
And then of course there's the other trend of people who loved shelter in place and want keep it. I guess that's SOLO Marketing.

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Time to update adBlock then

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