Competition Is Irrelevant in Media
There is an inherent fear of competition in business. So many people hide information about their companies in fear of competitors learning secrets. And in some industries, that makes a lot of sense. When you are developing a brand new technology, protecting it from competitors is unbelievably important. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice published a report that said “economic espionage costs the United States $100 billion each year in lost market share.” So, I completely get why businesses are afraid of competition.
But media businesses are unique in that their fear of competition is almost entirely a waste of energy. On the contrary, I would argue that competition is exactly what you want to see in media for two reasons. First, it acts as a massive validator. And second, it keeps you paranoid enough to not get complacent.
Think about what we do with a media business. We write stories, record podcasts, or film videos. We then use that content to build an audience. And then we finally try to sell subscriptions to those people or we indirectly monetize them with ads. That’s pretty much it. If you look at those three things, there are no secrets.
Look at Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting and me. From afar, we pretty much do the exact same thing. We both write about media, we are both growing newsletters, and we are both selling ads. I can assure you, I do not have a secret strategy for writing content that, if Brian found out, would put me out of business. I can also assure you that there is no secret to how I sell ads that I need to guard very closely.
I was on a recent episode of the Making Media podcast. And we talked about this in relation to Morning Brew launching new verticals. I’ve edited for brevity because I ramble sometimes:
Matt: Is there a point where you think, “Okay, this is too crowded, there’s too much competition in this space?” Or would you rather go in and disrupt it? … How do you think about competition when it comes to launching new verticals?
Jacob: I think that competition is validation. Our executive editor at Morning Brew has pitched me on launching Cannabis Brew for years. And every time, I tell him that we’re not going to do Cannabis Brew until the Federal government recognizes it. And even then, I don’t want to get into it until I notice that there’s somebody else legitimate who’s actually building there.
My decision making process when launching a new vertical at Morning Brew is actually very pro-competition. If there is no one else operating in that vertical, I don’t want to be first. If I see that there are other players operating in the same industry, I get excited. If there are dozens of different advertisers across those competitors, I get even more excited. It’s unbelievable validation.
I saw this play out time and again at CoinDesk. We were not the first crypto publication. Bitcoin Magazine launched a year before CoinDesk. There were plenty of other competing sites as well. It’s normal to see a ton of publications appear when a new industry starts to gain momentum because launching a media company is the easiest thing on the planet—you buy a domain name and start writing.
But what CoinDesk showed was that operating a media company is actually a lot of work and it was able to take the pole position in the industry. And even then, CoinDesk nearly failed. If DCG hadn’t bought the company for pennies on the dollar, it would have gone bankrupt. DCG’s purchase gave it the time it needed to thrive.
And yet, if you look at crypto today, CoinDesk has legitimate competition from The Block, which is overcoming its controversy tied to its CEO, and Blockworks, which was valued at over $100 million. Despite CoinDesk being the dominant player in the space with a ton of money backing it, two other legitimate competitors were able to come in. Because whether we at CoinDesk liked it or not, we had validated the market for those that followed.
It was more than that, though. In their respective sub-niches of crypto, The Block and Blockworks just out-executed us, which was my second point in the Making Media podcast.
If you really think about it, all media is, is an execution game. There’s no original idea. None of these business models are unique. My event structure is not unique. We are unoriginal people, we’re just good at executing, right? And so my belief is that if somebody else has validated this and has actually survived, I believe that I can do better. We can do better storytelling. We can do better workflows from an audience development perspective and from a revenue operations perspective and from a sales perspective, and I believe we can do that, I’ll go play.
The way you win in media is not to have some highly original idea or be first to market. The way you win in media is to just be better. Out-write, out-grow, out-sell… you just have to be better.
So, if I were looking to move into a new niche that had a big incumbent, what would be my play? I’ll remove my Morning Brew hat here because I have an unbelievable gift with our main newsletter as an audience feeder. But if I were launching a new publication, I’d niche way down.
Let’s look at CoinDesk again. We dominated in the retail crypto space. We had the best price page; we were getting a ton of traffic; we had the biggest event in the space. Blockworks came in and started doing institutional investor crypto events. We tried to compete with Consensus: Invest, but that wasn’t our forte. It was a distraction to us much to my disappointment. And so, Blockworks—a much smaller, far less funded company—was able to find its place.
As time goes on, you can start to expand and become a bigger player against said competition. Today, Blockworks not only has its institutional investor products, but it also has a general crypto enthusiast product.
And that’s how you can win. Find the area where your competitor isn’t doing all that well and out-execute them. As time goes on, you’ll grow, get more resources, and be able to beat them on the larger niches. And in many ways, competitors can break down walls for you. For example, Morning Brew has done a great job educating agencies on newsletter ads. I suspect it’ll be easier for other newsletter companies to sell now because of that work.
Don’t run from competition. Find your angle and do it better.
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