I have a long relationship with digital media. I’ve been blogging for decades. I’ve been a news junkie forever. And I started a startup in the real-time and historical content analytics space (Parse.ly) that ended up shipping a widely-used product in the industry.
What’s more, Parse.ly’s network-wide data (billions of online news reading sessions every month) was used to understand the media industry, via various (aggregated and anonymized) data compilations and reports in partnership with organizations like Axios and Pew Research. This was one of my favorite studies we did a few years back, on the shape of different page visit lengths, using engaged time (PDF).
Aspirationally, I’d like for my media habits to move toward that top 1% of engaged sessions on the regular — that is, 7 minutes or more of reading time per article, as shown on the right-hand side of the graph. Intentional, slow, deep reading. And I’d also like to avoid having a big portion of my day whittled away by the kinds of quick-hit information conveyances that put one on the left-hand side of that graph.
Parse.ly was acquired by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com and WPVIP, in February 2021. WordPress is probably the most widely used content management system in digital media, powering over 40% of the web.
I’m no longer involved with Parse.ly and Automattic – I came to the end of my tenure in 2023 and we parted ways amicably. Lately, I’ve moved back into the role of “mere observer” of the media industry while I work on a new project in the land of cloud dev tools. But these 5 essays from my archive give a good sense of my views on media from the last few years:
- Putting Your Media on a Diet
- Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view
- The Great Reckoning in Digital Attention
- The Internet is a cult generator
- The Twitter growth conundrum
This is just a round-up for convenience. You can also check out my Media category to filter all my posts in my archive to that topic.