Goodbye To All That
2010s digital media closes up shop.
I don’t know if anyone but me noticed, but digital media died last month.
In mid-May, a media mogul named Byron Allen bought a majority stake in BuzzFeed, which has been culturally invisible and financially struggling since shutting down its news division in 2023 and pivoting to AI content. Just weeks later, Vox Media, a collection of brands including New York Magazine, sold its more valuable properties to Lupa Systems CEO James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch. Companies like Vice and Vox were hailed as the future of media in the 2010s, standard-bearers of a new generation of youth-focused, internet-savvy publications that would take over from the New York Times and CNN. At the height of their valuations, around a decade ago, Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed (the “big three” of the digital media industry) were estimated to be worth a combined $8.4 billion, with Vice accounting for $5.7 billion by itself. Supposedly smart investors were betting on these companies, and venture capital enabled them to build shiny New York headquarters with hundreds of mostly millennial staffers, including me.
I joined Vice in 2010, just on the cusp of this era. I thought I was going to work at a magazine, and for a while I did—we had fashion shoots, photo spreads, fiction, a comic on the back page. For a while, we gave Bob Odenkirk his own page where he could do anything he liked; once, he wanted to do a Highlights-style “can you find the dildos in this picture?” game, which meant I had to go out and buy a half-dozen fake penises.
As Vice grew—and investors bought in—our focus shifted more toward the internet, and toward social media in particular. Weird magazine shit was out. The game was to capture attention, in the form of clicks and shares and interactions. We were ostensibly competing with BuzzFeed and Vox and other smaller sites like Upworthy, but all of these outlets were fellow-travelers in the same ideological project.
Digital media companies were all built around a single idea, which was that the internet and its attendant platforms—social media sites, Google, YouTube—had created an opportunity to build massive audiences. These companies used technical and editorial strategies that were totally foreign to their print forebears. The Huffington Post pioneered SEO practices, Gawker perfected the format of the can’t-look-away personal essay, Vice was an early adopter of online video, BuzzFeed practically invented a half-dozen viral post formats. All of this was in service of building those precious audience metrics, but the actual customers of these businesses weren’t the readers or viewers but the advertisers who coveted access to that audience; all of the major digital media companies also had teams that produced ads, including ads that looked like editorial content, aka “native advertising” or “branded content.”
There were sometimes controversies over whether some companies were inflating the size of their audiences (short answer: they were), but the underlying assumption that attracting traffic would lead to profits was rarely, if ever, questioned. None of the digital media companies used paywalls in the 2010s. Executives and investors wanted to see those traffic numbers increase, and locking out non-subscribers would mean the numbers would go down—number go up, good; number go down, bad. If these new media brands could attract huge numbers of people, particularly young people, they were bound to become financially successful at some point, right?
I had extremely self-interested reasons to want this to come to pass. I jumped aboard the Vice train early enough that I got stock appreciation rights that would have been worth something had the company been sold or gone public near the peak of its value. Sometimes I would do some back-of-the-envelope math to try to figure out how much I would make in an IPO, but the numbers were too complicated and vague—certainly something in the five figures, which to a journalist in his mid-twenties is kind of a lot.
The early 2010s were a time of techno-optimism more generally. The internet would connect us and lead to the formation of new communities. Social media could fuel and spark pro-democracy movements in autocratic countries. Citizen journalists could livestream newsworthy events in real time. The media world would have fewer gatekeepers. A connected world, it seemed to many, would be more populist, smarter, idealistic, more progressive, just plain nicer. And incidentally, we would all get rich. Sounds like a pretty good deal.
The flood of VC money that accompanied these sunny feelings was certainly real enough (a trickle went into my bank account). The jobs were real, and the equipment, and the stories the journalists produced, and the awards that some of those stories won—I remember the collective feeling of pride digital media journalists had when Official Journalism Bodies began handing out awards to online outlets. But it was all based on sand.
Digital media companies were attracting their audiences in large part through social media apps and search engines—that audience wasn’t “ours” in any meaningful sense. These platforms gradually realized they wanted to keep people on Instagram or Facebook or Google results rather than sending the traffic to publishers. The tech giants began capturing a bigger and bigger slice of online ad revenue.
At the same time, competition for eyeballs was increasing. It soon became clear to everyone that social media networks were not places people would congregate to celebrate their common interests but the most vicious attention markets ever invented. As entrepreneurial actors attempted to game these market dynamics, you saw a blossoming of influencers, streamers, and conspiracy theorists, all competing for eyeballs with some combination of sex appeal, controversy, and sensationalism. Say what you will about Vice or BuzzFeed, we generally tried to tell stories that were true. We never had a chance.
The players of the digital media age are mostly still around, at least in name. Vice was bought in bankruptcy and has resumed publishing and making films. Vox never stopped publishing and will likely continue after its sale. Even The Huffington Post, now owned by BuzzFeed, is still kicking. A group of former Gawker Media employees launched the site Defector as a kind of successor in 2020; more recently, a collection of former Eater staffers launched the new food site Ravenous. But all these outlets have retreated from the old ad-driven model, and are instead asking readers to actually pay for journalism. The dominant idea kicking around the industry is that a small but devoted following of readers who will pay you for your work is far more valuable than a much larger readership that merely clicks on your links. Everyone working in media wants to cultivate an intimate community that will follow them from one platform to another. Increasingly, the things we are creating are being put behind paywalls, in private Discord channels, on subscriber-only podcasts.
A lot of the individual journalists who got their start during this era are still bouncing around as well. A few of my colleagues and competitors washed up at The New York Times or The Atlantic, old-school publications that weathered the social media age better than the upstarts that were supposed to replace them. Others pivoted toward advertising or “comms.” I remember one editor I worked with at Vice quitting to go work on a flower farm and all of us congratulating him for getting out. I stayed online: I landed a job at Eater after getting laid off from Vice, then got laid off again, then began devoting more time to my Substack (many such cases).
But our collective dream is gone. We were supposed to build… what? I’m still not sure what the end goal of the digital media era was. A more populist vision of journalism, where reporters and editors were accountable to their audiences? A shared cultural and political vocabulary that would cross borders and define a generation? A forum for frustrations with the “establishment,” whatever that might mean? Just a platform for a lot of young media talents?
Whatever we were trying to do, it failed. The money is gone. The jobs are gone. The websites we made are atrophying into junk floating around in cyberspace. I don’t know if anyone will believe me, but man, it was fun while it lasted.
Harry Cheadle is a freelance writer and editor living in Seattle.
A version of this article was originally published in Notebook Dump.
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