Since reading Ben Smith’s new book, Traffic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the quest for more traffic that many of the largest media companies had last decade. Even now, there’s still discussion about how to get more scale to compete with the platforms.
Where these media companies went wrong is they were myopically focused on the wrong metrics when it came to distribution. As we now know, the goal should be to reach scale distribution for a well defined audience. For AMO, that’s media operators, publishers, executives, etc. For Dotdash Meredith’s Brides, it’s couples getting married—and more specifically, the brides.
