Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing

Must-Read:Ben Thompson: Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing: “As a reader this is frustrating…

…Vox stripped down to the political and policy coverage that is its raison d’être would almost certainly rate as a destination site for me; instead, faced with a deluge of rewrites and summarized videos, I miss most of the good stuff save for what I stumble across on social media. I’m certainly not going to waste my time wading through the filler on the homepage…. Still… Vox is… thriving while Grantland… is dead…. The only destination sites that really seem to be working either have massive brand equity that is being leveraged into subscriptions… or are tiny one-person operations that leverage the Internet to keep costs sustainably low while monetizing through small-scale native advertising (e.g. Daring Fireball and the now-retired Dooce.com, for example) or subscriptions (e.g. The Timmerman Report and the site you’re reading)…. The lesson of Grantland is that there is no room in the middle: not enough scale for advertising, and costs that are far too high for a viable subscription business…