On Patience, and Building Media Brands

Sarah Lacy wrote an article last week for her site, Pando Daily, that really struck a chord with me.

Her point? That new media companies like Vice (and her own) are succeeding thanks to patient founders and slowly building audience and ad revenue thanks to maintaining a unique perspective and the continuous creation of great original content.

It’s a great formula, but rare and hard to pull off. She knows it, and I know — I’ve been part of at least three companies, small and large, that have tried to build a brand as a media entity but for various reasons couldn’t pull off the kind of success the likes of Vice are enjoying. To be fair, not many are.

But this particular graf by Lacy hit home:

Nearly every single investor Pando has has asked me how more money or algorithms can scale our company faster. My answer is always: They can’t. It’s just going to take five to ten years of solid work to build the media company we want to build. There is no shortcut.

It’s the truth.

The first media startup I was part of was Click Magazine, which for most was a no-name publication that covered tech and the dot com boom. As part of 18 Media, a locally successful publishing house based on the peninsula, we were a small, scrappy team and had real momentum with readership, partnerships and ad growth. The magazine ultimately failed due to the tech advertising bust. The publisher, once upon a time, told me it’d take at least five years to be a sustainable title. He was right, but Click didn’t last much longer than two.

Next: TechTV. I was there for over four years, from its final day as ZDTV to the day it was acquired by Comcast (and became G4). We were really hitting a stride and there was a feeling we were poised to take off when we were acquired. I left for Yahoo News.

Later? I helped launch Tonic, a “good news” site that struggled with different business plans but slowly built a moderate following through the creation of a lot of quality original content sourced by a large crew of hard-working stringers and freelancers around the world. Again, the site didn’t last for more than a couple of years.

Content creation, curation, building an audience from scratch, and all that goes with running a content company is incredibly difficult. Building a brand as a media company, like any startup, is an uphill battle. So hats off to the content creators that have made a name for themselves, whether they’re niche like Pando or more mass-appeal like Vice. They deserve credit, and their founders deserve credit for setting expectations with investors and focusing on the product.

As Lacy says, “wait and watch” and committing to a game plan can be worth something. It’s inspiring stuff and should psych up a legion of content-minded folks. That is, if they can take the time to build.