Morning Must-Read: John Herrman: The Next Internet Is TV

…the changing demographics of America’ that is also ‘a little bit outside of the media bubble.’… For Fusion to talk about ‘promiscuous media’ and ‘build[ing] our brand in the places [the audience] is spending time’–as opposed to publishing everything on a single website and hoping it spreads from there–is not strange in the context of television companies… used to filling channels that they don’t totally control. Meanwhile, some of the most visible companies in internet media are converging on a nearby point…. [Suppose] websites are unnecessary vestiges of a time before there were better ways to find things to look at on your computer or your phone. What happens next? What does a media that knows or believes this look like? This is an incredibly obvious question that nobody seems to have taken much time to talk about???

I mean you have the ‘director of audience development’ at Vox telling trade publications that ‘in general, we do see higher sharing rates from the native-only posts’ and then its ‘global vp of marketing and partnerships’ dropping this excellent quote:

The great thing about Facebook leaning in to the new video strategy is that publishers on average are seeing a lot more views and a lot more engagement with that video content. This could theoretically be a pretty massive revenue stream with publishers when and if they do enable monetization around this inventory….

Companies… begin to see their websites as Just One More App, and realize that fewer people are using them, proportionally…. Some of what worked in print didn’t work on the web; some of what worked on the web didn’t work on social media; some of what worked on social media won’t work in these apps…. What was even the point of websites, certain people will find themselves wondering. Were they just weird slow apps with nobody in them?…