Side note on About.com: I freelanced for an About in the late aughts, to about 2013. (I launched and ran the culinary travel coverage, this after about 15 years of writing for top tier magazines.) I get why you used scare quotes for “articles,” and the quality on the site certainly did vary — but by the time I came on it was hard and competitive to get hired, and there was a lot of oversight and support to create quality content. (This was the time when it was being prepared for sale, which likely accounts for a lot of that.) I do understand that there plenty to mock about the site — it looked terrible for one thing — but when I was there, the people who were hired to run their topic areas —whether it was IBS or rollercoasters—were genuinely passionate about their subject and worked hard to make good content. (About was also often confused with similar and way more crappy sites, which often leads to more shade and tarnish than deserved.) With that perspective said, thanks for such an interesting read as always! I had no idea that I’d be reflecting on my About.com time when I woke up this morning. :)
This just triggered a memory for me — when I was trying to make some extra money as a grad student I started some of the process to get hired and it was SO intense. Definitely agree with you that there was a bunch of oversight — I've never thought of About.com itself as junk content so much as very SEO-minded content, if that makes sense.
Oh yes it totally was that! Although — it was a moment where lots of legacy media
started learning how to use SEO. Maybe this was the literal beginning of SEO as a profession? I have mixed feelings about this. I remember it felt very novel and wild to write things based on actual information about what readers wanted to know. (Rather than writing about what the EIC overheard her neighbors talking about in the elevator, true story.) On the other, as we all know — it did genuinely result in lots of crap and contributed to the current media dystopia. Such a complex topic!
I also worked for About.com, starting when they were still Mining Company! See my comment. I also didn't expect to travel back in time this morning :-).
I worked on the business side of About.com from 2010-2013 and echo what you said about the writers, who were called Guides. One of my favorite events there was the annual Guide conference where I got to meet so many of you dedicated writers and topic experts. Those were the days, or more accurately, those were the end of those days!
This totally tracks! A close friend - we met in Emerson's MA magazine program in the late 90s - ran the tech channels and home page for About in the late aughts. She learned so much there about SEO and managing people - it ended up being a great foundation for a move into content strategy for giant corps later in her career.
The thing I’ve noticed about People, at least what comes across my feed in lurid headlines is that every story seems to be about the worst thing that could happen to someone. Murder, kidnapping, kids drowning or being drowned, men killing their families or significant others. I feel like it’s tied to the rise in popularity of true crime, but good lord it’s horrifying and depressing. I want celebrity fluff from People, not murder and dismemberment.
Your observation isn't wrong at all — and the gruesomeness quotient has definitely increased since its founding days. Today I think it actually mirrors what People was trying to distance itself from in the '70s: the incredibly popular tabloids
YES!!!!!! I can’t stand that. It’s all clickbait for a certain segment of the population I gather, but how large is that segment. Can you imagine being the people who have to find these stories?? Can they sleep at night??
(Re: true crime. I can understand getting into a good mystery novel, even one that includes murder, but true crime is about real honest to God people. I can’t understand the draw.)
I came here to say this exact same thing. This why I will not read (or buy) People magazine. They are trafficking in true crime and horror and if you pay attention, the victims are almost exclusively women and children.
I had to unsubscribe to their email list because the subject lines were too disturbing. It’s the worst of the true crime genre and really outside of what I would have considered the People brand
I get push notification headlines, even though I try to turn them off, and they never fail to ruin my day. I’m into true crime, but all this feels somehow worse and more exploitative. There’s no lesson, just awful things that can happen to people. I hate it.
Truly great essay, thank you! I miss the old internet (parts of it) and I miss actual magazines. Thick, healthy ones. I loved People! But the old internet didn't have you or this community, and I am grateful to be here with you.
What an amazing story! I was astonished to read that you traced the origins of People-type content to MiningCompany.com. I launched my second career in IT as an internet content writer when they hired me around 1999 to be one of their human Guides. Their thing at the time was having a human face to bolster the credibility of the content, which had to be researched and well-written. Outbound links had to be curated for relevance and quality. To be hired, I had to go through an (unpaid) competition process where I set up a site for the subject I wanted to cover, my city of Rochester NY. I couldn't tell if someone was actually competing with me, but in any case, I "won." There were several hundred topics. All Guides were contractors who got a base monthly stipend. It would increase in tandem with the traffic each topic site was able to attract. My city wasn't that big a deal, so my site didn't get a lot of traffic, but I used the experience to learn about writing for the internet and using what's now called a "content management system." (Mining Company had to develop their own; systems like Wordpress weren't invented until 2003 or later.) I was still with them when they changed to About.com, which was a big deal at that time. (Individual English words as a domain name sold out long ago--it's hard to buy one these days.) They held a convention in Las Vegas for us Guides after the changeover, and I still have the swag from it. I left About.com in the early 2000s after I was able to attract website development clients of my own. They weren't a bad company to work for.
Thank you! At the time I was lucky to catch the initial "wave" of the internet. In hindsight, setting up a website was much simpler then. You learned HTML (the basic language that tells your browser how to display your images and text), got some clip art to use as images, and you were ready to go. I retired from website development a few years ago because keeping a website secure was becoming a full-time job even beyond its development and maintenance. Working in information technology for 40 years was quite a ride. I started out programming computers ("mainframes") that filled entire floors. Now my iPhone has many times more power and functionality than those machines. As for AI, as far as I'm concerned, it's just huge databases. Not really that impressive when you look "under the hood."
Omg I remember that coding language! I still have the shortcuts stored somewhere on my computer. By the time I joined we needed to sometimes use that — I can’t remember what it was called now — and sometimes HTML. About really was a content behemoth. I too have fond memories of my time there — and also of Rochester, btw, I lived there in the late 1990s. :) From what I understand the final decommissioning of the site was pretty ugly though.
How cool is that! I had moved away from Rochester in 1983 for 10 years and have been back since 1993. Maybe we crossed paths and didn't know it? What About topic did you work on? I still remember how to use HTML, but I don't remember the commands for About's system. They were ahead of their time in developing a CMS, and it was fun to be part of that.
I did Culinary Travel for About, which was super fun! It’s weird, I didn’t realize I missed that work until this convo. (And maybe we did cross paths! I was in Rochester for a little under two years ending in 1999 — in the city, right near Cobbs Hill Park. I had some art work in a show at the library downtown last year, so came back for the first time in a couple of decades. The place is looking good, IMO! :)
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing, I am an elder millennial and feel a lot of nostalgia for that time period but didn’t know about MiningCompany.com or much about About.com!
I feel like that period of the internet was the end of a golden moment for the media — the internet and email made journalism and research SO much easier, but hadn’t yet killed legacy media. Of course I didn’t realize that at the time. I’m a younger Gen Xer — nice to say I’m younger in any context these days!— and it is truly astonishing how much has changed, just since I graduated from college.
I was lucky to get into the internet business at its startwhen it was starting to catch on at businesses in the the early 2000s. It was much easier back then to create websites on your own.
Loved this. I worked for Time Inc. for many years (including all the '90s) and with Teen People specifically in the early aughts, when it was at its peak. Wild times to be in the big corporate magazine world! I once saw Gorbachev in the lobby, and we did a whole thing at Jingle Ball. I haven't worked in an office in like two decades at this point, but I'm grateful that when I did, it was back then. Not sure it's "bad" that that era of gatekeeping and privilege is over, but what replaced it really sucks a lot of the time.
I contributed to Fortune from 2000 to 2003 and that was a blast. More than one editor told me to always book in business class, which I did, and wound up in some stratospheric tier at British Airways. Those stories took tons of work and were meticulously edited. Glad I got to experience it, but those days are pretty much gone.
I so agree with you! I remember how freeing it felt in those early aughts days of writing online— to be out from under the weight of layers of editors of varying skill. But I had also internalized the rigor that came from years of working in that way, and it does seem different now that we’re a generation removed. (Not that I think this is the only difference, of course.)
Yes. And yes. This was a great piece, AHP. As a librarian by trade and one of those same weirdos that loved poring over Guinness book of world records and "Childcraft" digests, the People magazine era was similarly wondrous to me as a child. The ongoing optimization of monetizing journalistic platforms reminds me of other turn-of-the-19th/20th century tensions between "yellow journalism" and the threats leveled at them via corporate sponsors and donors over the content. The listicle as article was indeed perfected by Buzzfeed and others. All of today's noise leaves me craving small message boards and anything that isn't a video. Let my eyes gaze unfettered. Or better yet: let me dream the text since the rest no longer sates that burning query.
The product recommendation articles are the desperate attempt by online publications to stay afloat by generating revenue through affiliate links. There is zero vetting of the products. I know scores of freelance writers who are former journalists making a living churning these things out. It’s sad and infuriating. No one gets a mention without that vital affiliate link. AHP, the affiliate link universe would be a terrific Culture Study topic.
I’ve run a platform about sustainable fashion for a very a decade now. And I desperately want to get away from affiliate revenue.
We take our guides really seriously, and have switched to focusing on guides to non-toxic products because that’s where we can provide the most unique value. But the incentives are all wrong. We could make so much more revenue if I ignored reports from friends and the internet that Pact is causing allergic reactions. That’s why it’s listed on all our competitor sites and by Google’s AI-generated garbage recommender as a top non-toxic option.
And let me say, before you bring it up, yes, newsletters like this and forums are great for recommendations about products that last a while or improve your life. But they can’t completely replace true expert knowledge and investigations into things like hazardous chemicals (my jam) or large scale fraud, etc.
I’ve been trying to pull the site behind a paywall, hoping that people who care will pay $5 a month for unbiased, quality content. Say, an investigation into why organic certification doesn’t mean a piece of clothing is non-toxic, or the aforementioned decline of Pact. But people get *so mad* when they encounter a paywall. They want these guides to be free! Reality check: nothing good is ever free. You’re paying for it one way or another.
I just wonder if there will ever be a tipping point where people will realize that paying a tiny bit of money for content means they will save a lot in aggravation and real money, by not being scammed into buying total crap. Like, Consumer Reports is doing god’s work!!
But we’re not there yet. So, the affiliate articles stay, for now.
I've been paying for content more and more often. I subscribe to a number of online magazines like Science and Foreign Affairs as well as Apple's News which offers a number of publications like Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Flying. I still subscribe to Consumer Reports because I want them around when my next appliance breaks. I also pay for Consumer Labs for supplements; they have their own lab so you can at least tell what you are getting.
More recently, I've been paying for search at Kagi, and I can't say I ever expected to pay for search. They should be paying to sell to me, but search engines like Google and Bing are just awful now. Kagi costs $10 a month and is more like the original curated Yahoo from 1995 combined with some Altavista. It's far from perfect, but it's nice having a search engine concerned with giving good results and less susceptible to SEO.
It all feels a bit like 1984 where party members can turn off their television sets at least briefly and everyone else gets prolefeed.
Monetization is *hard* but you have to provide things that people can’t find somewhere else for free and also build up a loyal base of readers/community (basically what AHP is doing here!).
Do you know about the Lucky Sweater app at all? It’s an app for trading slow fashion and the founders have been very transparent about their business model. I’d recommend looking at what they’ve been sharing about generating revenue.
We also have almost 10k subscribers. But, you know how problem are. On Instagram they comment line “it’s behind a paywall. Someone tell me what it says.”
I’m curious why “podcasts have imploded” unless that’s a reference to several podcast networks going under - I’m not a student of the industry but have found several that I appreciate, niche and mainstream, both short form and ongoing. I’m guessing it’s part of the fracturing of media audiences and the reason I subscribe to half a dozen Substacks and Patreons, so maybe I’ve answered my own question.
This is somewhat inside baseball if you're not part of the podcast industry or follow it closely, but the short version of the story is that the ad revenue has absolutely plummeted (for a lot of reasons, some of them related to Abby's point below re: how stats were collected). Podcasts were also a speculation space for a lot of larger comglomerates (see: Spotify) which created a ton of content for a not massive audience; many smaller production houses made ends meet by producing what were essentially vanity podcasts for companies (think of, like, a Mazda Podcast, or a Adobe Podcast — who actually wants that?) and that money dried up too when the companies realized there wasn't much internal or external value. Quality narrative podcasts are super expensive to make (you're crafting pretty intricate narratives!) but don't last forever so it's harder to sell as many ads (since they're not showing up twice a week in your feed like, say, Huberman). That's how you get the cancellation of a Pulizer-prize winning podcast like STOLEN, and the recent widespread layoffs at NPR in the podcast division, and basically every podcast production company making drastic cuts. The way to make money on a podcast these days is either to have a massive, massive hit with relatively cheap production (see: Huberman, Dax Sheppherd) or do a narrative podcast with the explicit intent to option the rights to make a television series or movie (the number of people who listen to it almost doesn't matter). This is why smaller podcasts (like mine) that will probably always stay relatively small are relying on subscription models. Nick Quah is my go-to for all things related to the podcast industry; his piece at the beginning of this year is a great primer: https://www.vulture.com/2024/01/podcast-industry-2024.html
And a similar weird thing is happening on podcasts, where, for example, on health-focused ones these experts say over and over in interviews that supplements don’t work and you should eat whole foods and take walks in nature. And then they go to break and the host tells you how much they just love this particular supplement. It’s so cringe. Especially when someone like Esther Perel does it. 😖
YES THIS (when I was doing Work Appropriate there were so many ads that weren't THAT BAD but still had a component that was essentially trying to make people feel bad about themselves in some way (their age, the way their bodies looked in clothes) and it was so hard to figure out how to, well, *massage* some of the ad talking points. Not having to deal with those ads is one of my favorite things about doing the Culture Study Pod!
Yes this!! The one that gets me the most right now is Wiser Than Me – so many interesting insights about aging immediately followed by ads hawking suppositories, make up, maintaining ‘youthfulness’, etc. It’s so jarring!
My thought about podcasts is that it appears “EVERYONE” has a podcast now and it’s the in thing and maybe, just maybe, it is about what i kvetched about below, which is capitalism and money. Cuz they all have f’ing ADS, so everyone’s getting their bucks. I feel like podcasts are now over-saturated. Is that the implosion? I wonder.
I loved print magazines, and I had started to like podcasts, but now when I browse, I find myself rolling my eyes over the choices. Cuz, you know, every Vanderpump Rules ‘star’ needs a podcast… ugh.
(I know they ‘all’ don’t but you know what I mean.)
I have heard several podcasters talk about the complete breakdown of ad revenue for podcasts in the last year or two. I think about how Spotify poured out millions of dollars on podcasts, but that era has past. Apple's podcast app update changed how the stats are collected for podcasts. Laura Tremaine did a podcast episode about this around the first of the year, and it was really helpful info.
My grandfather used to work for Time Magazine back in the day (think "Mad Men" but less witty, more swearing) and when Time was getting ready to launch People (which used to be a single-page feature in the original magazine) he was *horrified* ... "Gonna g-damn ruin the magazine" .... he wasn't right, but he wasn't really wrong, either....
Oh yes, my understanding is that People came from that one page in Time Magazine and InStyle came from the celebrity shoe-dress focus in People. Separately, I never found a typo in People! Also I have several favorite recipes that came from their celebrity chef pages so I can’t hate the magazine at all, even though it was not allowed in my house growing up!
As a former fact-checker, I feel your pain. It was my first job out of college at a San Francisco publication, and in one article I missed an incorrect spelling for an actor. I discovered this after the issue had just closed and I was enjoying a Friday night at an art movie house starring this particular actor. At least, I was enjoying it until the credits rolled. OUCH.
If you told me The Spruce was actually being written by AI since its inception, I would 100% believe you. I assume it will be in the next few years if it isn’t already.
So fascinating! I still have a print subscription to People (as well as Vanity Fair). Some of the “old school” People seems to be in the actual issues. maybe it’s the delay between posting to the internet and the actual print, or the nostalgia/act of reading a hard copy, but it feels different than the clickbait feel of online People links and emails.
I'm a magazine girlie, born and raised. As a teen, I subscribed to People AND Us, back when it was a monthly (that's why it's called Us Weekly now). So many magazines I loved are gone, but I still subscribe to the occasional one through Blue Dolphin or Magazines.com, when they have a $5 special.
I currently get People, and can read it in about an hour. The last few covers have been (sorry for the slam) Dead White Women, with Nicole Brown Simpson on one cover and Gabby Pettito on another. Luckily, I don't care about Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's friendship and skipped that cover story to save time.
It seems silly to say there's no there, there, about a celebrity magazine, but People did come from a stronger reporting bent from Time. Now that we are all smarter about celebrity PR it's easy to see the spin in 'reporting' re: Princess Kate and J Lo and Ben. And it took real effort to get off the People.com email list, it's reappeared in my inbox multiple times!
I went so deep on Us Monthly --> Us Weekly in the dissertation, it was FASCINATING. Definitely trying to be much more like, say, Premiere than what we understand it as now. And then the Bonnie Fuller years, and the very real play to compete with People, it's as good as industrial history gets.
I work in corporate content and have a couple colleagues who came from the editorial ranks at People -- one led royals coverage there for 10 yrs during the aughts -- and they are real-deal journalists. Such a bummer, to put it mildly, that these jobs don't really exist anymore.
This is so interesting. I was an avid reader of People and Entertainment Weekly until they were sold by Time Warner and I miss what used to be curation but I guess now is called "gatekeeping." When I scan print Vanity Fair now, or read the NY Times online, I always wonder what happened to real advertising, not just as a funding source for journalism, news and glossy magazines and good sites, but as a part of the culture.
We're awash in crummy makeshift advertising for weird products we've never heard of, on podcasts and online. I guess these "product reviews" are part of that, everyone trying to sell us stuff without us knowing it. But where are the culture-shifting ads for Apple and Gap and Volkswagen and Nike that powered so much of our media while being in themselves smart and creative and beautiful. I assume huge ad agencies still exist, but are they spending all their time and creative energy developing product reviews, slipping ads for bunion-friendly elastic shoes and stick-on bras into all our feeds? If this is what our media has become, what are all those advertisers doing these days?
I remember some 2 decades ago taking a class where the prof talked about ads as educational - like, yeah it's trying to get you to buy a thing, but also, as a consumer ads are useful so that you know about products that exist.
When the first vacuum cleaner went on the market, how would housewives have known about it if it weren't of ads? Assuming some baseline level of truth in advertising (really, a CHOICE to make that assumption) ads can be a way to learn about the world a bit, even ads for something you don't want or need. But today's internet ads are such trash that sometimes I don't even understand whether they're trying to sell me a shirt or a plane ticket or a subscription to some sort of content.
It's weird. Corporate spending on advertising seems to go up and up, but advertising itself has become more and more peripheral and ephemeral. One could blame the fragmentation of media, but that's just the other side of the market segmentation coin. The big advertising firms, Facebook, Google and Amazon, spy on their users to let sellers target their ads. This means that few ads are going to be seen by a broad subset of media consumers. An ad might go viral, but that's a novelty without real cultural impact. You can't do a viral sequel.
Your ad can't become a cultural element if you advertise to married women of moderate Christian belief, between 30 and 40 years old, 28" inseam, with one child between 5 and 8, living in a mid-sized city with a warmer climate and so on through the list of qualifiers. There are just too many other people that will never see it. In fact, since targeted ads cost more, you'd be paying good money for people NOT to see your ad.
I worked at Time Inc. when it owned People, and worked at Dotdash after it acquired Meredith. I can confirm that this is spot-on!
Back when Joe Ripp was the CEO of the then-newly-minting Time Inc (during the Time Warner decoupling), he would hold all-staff town halls and talk about how we should be paying journalists based on the ad revenue they bring in, start doing native ads, etc all the horrifying hits. But what he LOVED was to repeat the story about how Henry Luce's wife was actually a founder of People magazine, which isn't untrue—the actual (awesome, honestly) letter she wrote to the publisher is here: https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/journalistic-popcorn-fifty-years-of-people-magazine.
HOWEVER, Ripp used the anecdote to brush off any notion that Time Inc had a problematic relationship with women & leadership... which is in part how we ended up with Men in Tech destroying an entire industry by stripping good products for parts.
Thank you for explaining the origins of The Spruce! I've been puzzling over its weird affect for a while now.
I had no idea. Just that it comes up all the time. This all makes so much more sense now.
Side note on About.com: I freelanced for an About in the late aughts, to about 2013. (I launched and ran the culinary travel coverage, this after about 15 years of writing for top tier magazines.) I get why you used scare quotes for “articles,” and the quality on the site certainly did vary — but by the time I came on it was hard and competitive to get hired, and there was a lot of oversight and support to create quality content. (This was the time when it was being prepared for sale, which likely accounts for a lot of that.) I do understand that there plenty to mock about the site — it looked terrible for one thing — but when I was there, the people who were hired to run their topic areas —whether it was IBS or rollercoasters—were genuinely passionate about their subject and worked hard to make good content. (About was also often confused with similar and way more crappy sites, which often leads to more shade and tarnish than deserved.) With that perspective said, thanks for such an interesting read as always! I had no idea that I’d be reflecting on my About.com time when I woke up this morning. :)
This just triggered a memory for me — when I was trying to make some extra money as a grad student I started some of the process to get hired and it was SO intense. Definitely agree with you that there was a bunch of oversight — I've never thought of About.com itself as junk content so much as very SEO-minded content, if that makes sense.
Oh yes it totally was that! Although — it was a moment where lots of legacy media
started learning how to use SEO. Maybe this was the literal beginning of SEO as a profession? I have mixed feelings about this. I remember it felt very novel and wild to write things based on actual information about what readers wanted to know. (Rather than writing about what the EIC overheard her neighbors talking about in the elevator, true story.) On the other, as we all know — it did genuinely result in lots of crap and contributed to the current media dystopia. Such a complex topic!
I also worked for About.com, starting when they were still Mining Company! See my comment. I also didn't expect to travel back in time this morning :-).
I worked on the business side of About.com from 2010-2013 and echo what you said about the writers, who were called Guides. One of my favorite events there was the annual Guide conference where I got to meet so many of you dedicated writers and topic experts. Those were the days, or more accurately, those were the end of those days!
This totally tracks! A close friend - we met in Emerson's MA magazine program in the late 90s - ran the tech channels and home page for About in the late aughts. She learned so much there about SEO and managing people - it ended up being a great foundation for a move into content strategy for giant corps later in her career.
The thing I’ve noticed about People, at least what comes across my feed in lurid headlines is that every story seems to be about the worst thing that could happen to someone. Murder, kidnapping, kids drowning or being drowned, men killing their families or significant others. I feel like it’s tied to the rise in popularity of true crime, but good lord it’s horrifying and depressing. I want celebrity fluff from People, not murder and dismemberment.
Your observation isn't wrong at all — and the gruesomeness quotient has definitely increased since its founding days. Today I think it actually mirrors what People was trying to distance itself from in the '70s: the incredibly popular tabloids
YES!!!!!! I can’t stand that. It’s all clickbait for a certain segment of the population I gather, but how large is that segment. Can you imagine being the people who have to find these stories?? Can they sleep at night??
(Re: true crime. I can understand getting into a good mystery novel, even one that includes murder, but true crime is about real honest to God people. I can’t understand the draw.)
I came here to say this exact same thing. This why I will not read (or buy) People magazine. They are trafficking in true crime and horror and if you pay attention, the victims are almost exclusively women and children.
Do you follow Busy Phillips? She had a running bit about this for a long time...that People on IG always led with the worst, saddest content.
I had to unsubscribe to their email list because the subject lines were too disturbing. It’s the worst of the true crime genre and really outside of what I would have considered the People brand
Exactly.
I get push notification headlines, even though I try to turn them off, and they never fail to ruin my day. I’m into true crime, but all this feels somehow worse and more exploitative. There’s no lesson, just awful things that can happen to people. I hate it.
Truly great essay, thank you! I miss the old internet (parts of it) and I miss actual magazines. Thick, healthy ones. I loved People! But the old internet didn't have you or this community, and I am grateful to be here with you.
What an amazing story! I was astonished to read that you traced the origins of People-type content to MiningCompany.com. I launched my second career in IT as an internet content writer when they hired me around 1999 to be one of their human Guides. Their thing at the time was having a human face to bolster the credibility of the content, which had to be researched and well-written. Outbound links had to be curated for relevance and quality. To be hired, I had to go through an (unpaid) competition process where I set up a site for the subject I wanted to cover, my city of Rochester NY. I couldn't tell if someone was actually competing with me, but in any case, I "won." There were several hundred topics. All Guides were contractors who got a base monthly stipend. It would increase in tandem with the traffic each topic site was able to attract. My city wasn't that big a deal, so my site didn't get a lot of traffic, but I used the experience to learn about writing for the internet and using what's now called a "content management system." (Mining Company had to develop their own; systems like Wordpress weren't invented until 2003 or later.) I was still with them when they changed to About.com, which was a big deal at that time. (Individual English words as a domain name sold out long ago--it's hard to buy one these days.) They held a convention in Las Vegas for us Guides after the changeover, and I still have the swag from it. I left About.com in the early 2000s after I was able to attract website development clients of my own. They weren't a bad company to work for.
This is SO cool Mary Anne, I'm so glad you're here in the comments to share this part of the story!
Thank you! At the time I was lucky to catch the initial "wave" of the internet. In hindsight, setting up a website was much simpler then. You learned HTML (the basic language that tells your browser how to display your images and text), got some clip art to use as images, and you were ready to go. I retired from website development a few years ago because keeping a website secure was becoming a full-time job even beyond its development and maintenance. Working in information technology for 40 years was quite a ride. I started out programming computers ("mainframes") that filled entire floors. Now my iPhone has many times more power and functionality than those machines. As for AI, as far as I'm concerned, it's just huge databases. Not really that impressive when you look "under the hood."
Omg I remember that coding language! I still have the shortcuts stored somewhere on my computer. By the time I joined we needed to sometimes use that — I can’t remember what it was called now — and sometimes HTML. About really was a content behemoth. I too have fond memories of my time there — and also of Rochester, btw, I lived there in the late 1990s. :) From what I understand the final decommissioning of the site was pretty ugly though.
How cool is that! I had moved away from Rochester in 1983 for 10 years and have been back since 1993. Maybe we crossed paths and didn't know it? What About topic did you work on? I still remember how to use HTML, but I don't remember the commands for About's system. They were ahead of their time in developing a CMS, and it was fun to be part of that.
I did Culinary Travel for About, which was super fun! It’s weird, I didn’t realize I missed that work until this convo. (And maybe we did cross paths! I was in Rochester for a little under two years ending in 1999 — in the city, right near Cobbs Hill Park. I had some art work in a show at the library downtown last year, so came back for the first time in a couple of decades. The place is looking good, IMO! :)
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing, I am an elder millennial and feel a lot of nostalgia for that time period but didn’t know about MiningCompany.com or much about About.com!
I feel like that period of the internet was the end of a golden moment for the media — the internet and email made journalism and research SO much easier, but hadn’t yet killed legacy media. Of course I didn’t realize that at the time. I’m a younger Gen Xer — nice to say I’m younger in any context these days!— and it is truly astonishing how much has changed, just since I graduated from college.
I was lucky to get into the internet business at its startwhen it was starting to catch on at businesses in the the early 2000s. It was much easier back then to create websites on your own.
Loved this. I worked for Time Inc. for many years (including all the '90s) and with Teen People specifically in the early aughts, when it was at its peak. Wild times to be in the big corporate magazine world! I once saw Gorbachev in the lobby, and we did a whole thing at Jingle Ball. I haven't worked in an office in like two decades at this point, but I'm grateful that when I did, it was back then. Not sure it's "bad" that that era of gatekeeping and privilege is over, but what replaced it really sucks a lot of the time.
Time Inc. in the '90s would've been a site to behold.
I contributed to Fortune from 2000 to 2003 and that was a blast. More than one editor told me to always book in business class, which I did, and wound up in some stratospheric tier at British Airways. Those stories took tons of work and were meticulously edited. Glad I got to experience it, but those days are pretty much gone.
I so agree with you! I remember how freeing it felt in those early aughts days of writing online— to be out from under the weight of layers of editors of varying skill. But I had also internalized the rigor that came from years of working in that way, and it does seem different now that we’re a generation removed. (Not that I think this is the only difference, of course.)
Yes. And yes. This was a great piece, AHP. As a librarian by trade and one of those same weirdos that loved poring over Guinness book of world records and "Childcraft" digests, the People magazine era was similarly wondrous to me as a child. The ongoing optimization of monetizing journalistic platforms reminds me of other turn-of-the-19th/20th century tensions between "yellow journalism" and the threats leveled at them via corporate sponsors and donors over the content. The listicle as article was indeed perfected by Buzzfeed and others. All of today's noise leaves me craving small message boards and anything that isn't a video. Let my eyes gaze unfettered. Or better yet: let me dream the text since the rest no longer sates that burning query.
The product recommendation articles are the desperate attempt by online publications to stay afloat by generating revenue through affiliate links. There is zero vetting of the products. I know scores of freelance writers who are former journalists making a living churning these things out. It’s sad and infuriating. No one gets a mention without that vital affiliate link. AHP, the affiliate link universe would be a terrific Culture Study topic.
I’ve run a platform about sustainable fashion for a very a decade now. And I desperately want to get away from affiliate revenue.
We take our guides really seriously, and have switched to focusing on guides to non-toxic products because that’s where we can provide the most unique value. But the incentives are all wrong. We could make so much more revenue if I ignored reports from friends and the internet that Pact is causing allergic reactions. That’s why it’s listed on all our competitor sites and by Google’s AI-generated garbage recommender as a top non-toxic option.
And let me say, before you bring it up, yes, newsletters like this and forums are great for recommendations about products that last a while or improve your life. But they can’t completely replace true expert knowledge and investigations into things like hazardous chemicals (my jam) or large scale fraud, etc.
I’ve been trying to pull the site behind a paywall, hoping that people who care will pay $5 a month for unbiased, quality content. Say, an investigation into why organic certification doesn’t mean a piece of clothing is non-toxic, or the aforementioned decline of Pact. But people get *so mad* when they encounter a paywall. They want these guides to be free! Reality check: nothing good is ever free. You’re paying for it one way or another.
I just wonder if there will ever be a tipping point where people will realize that paying a tiny bit of money for content means they will save a lot in aggravation and real money, by not being scammed into buying total crap. Like, Consumer Reports is doing god’s work!!
But we’re not there yet. So, the affiliate articles stay, for now.
I've been paying for content more and more often. I subscribe to a number of online magazines like Science and Foreign Affairs as well as Apple's News which offers a number of publications like Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Flying. I still subscribe to Consumer Reports because I want them around when my next appliance breaks. I also pay for Consumer Labs for supplements; they have their own lab so you can at least tell what you are getting.
More recently, I've been paying for search at Kagi, and I can't say I ever expected to pay for search. They should be paying to sell to me, but search engines like Google and Bing are just awful now. Kagi costs $10 a month and is more like the original curated Yahoo from 1995 combined with some Altavista. It's far from perfect, but it's nice having a search engine concerned with giving good results and less susceptible to SEO.
It all feels a bit like 1984 where party members can turn off their television sets at least briefly and everyone else gets prolefeed.
Monetization is *hard* but you have to provide things that people can’t find somewhere else for free and also build up a loyal base of readers/community (basically what AHP is doing here!).
Do you know about the Lucky Sweater app at all? It’s an app for trading slow fashion and the founders have been very transparent about their business model. I’d recommend looking at what they’ve been sharing about generating revenue.
Oh for sure! We certainly do. Like this: https://ecocult.com/is-silicone-toxic-we-dove-into-the-latest-research-to-find-out/
Or this: https://ecocult.com/organic-textile-certification-toxic/
We also have almost 10k subscribers. But, you know how problem are. On Instagram they comment line “it’s behind a paywall. Someone tell me what it says.”
I’ll check that app out!
Yes! And you can forget about actually locating a genuine product review that isn't BS.
I’m curious why “podcasts have imploded” unless that’s a reference to several podcast networks going under - I’m not a student of the industry but have found several that I appreciate, niche and mainstream, both short form and ongoing. I’m guessing it’s part of the fracturing of media audiences and the reason I subscribe to half a dozen Substacks and Patreons, so maybe I’ve answered my own question.
This is somewhat inside baseball if you're not part of the podcast industry or follow it closely, but the short version of the story is that the ad revenue has absolutely plummeted (for a lot of reasons, some of them related to Abby's point below re: how stats were collected). Podcasts were also a speculation space for a lot of larger comglomerates (see: Spotify) which created a ton of content for a not massive audience; many smaller production houses made ends meet by producing what were essentially vanity podcasts for companies (think of, like, a Mazda Podcast, or a Adobe Podcast — who actually wants that?) and that money dried up too when the companies realized there wasn't much internal or external value. Quality narrative podcasts are super expensive to make (you're crafting pretty intricate narratives!) but don't last forever so it's harder to sell as many ads (since they're not showing up twice a week in your feed like, say, Huberman). That's how you get the cancellation of a Pulizer-prize winning podcast like STOLEN, and the recent widespread layoffs at NPR in the podcast division, and basically every podcast production company making drastic cuts. The way to make money on a podcast these days is either to have a massive, massive hit with relatively cheap production (see: Huberman, Dax Sheppherd) or do a narrative podcast with the explicit intent to option the rights to make a television series or movie (the number of people who listen to it almost doesn't matter). This is why smaller podcasts (like mine) that will probably always stay relatively small are relying on subscription models. Nick Quah is my go-to for all things related to the podcast industry; his piece at the beginning of this year is a great primer: https://www.vulture.com/2024/01/podcast-industry-2024.html
And a similar weird thing is happening on podcasts, where, for example, on health-focused ones these experts say over and over in interviews that supplements don’t work and you should eat whole foods and take walks in nature. And then they go to break and the host tells you how much they just love this particular supplement. It’s so cringe. Especially when someone like Esther Perel does it. 😖
YES THIS (when I was doing Work Appropriate there were so many ads that weren't THAT BAD but still had a component that was essentially trying to make people feel bad about themselves in some way (their age, the way their bodies looked in clothes) and it was so hard to figure out how to, well, *massage* some of the ad talking points. Not having to deal with those ads is one of my favorite things about doing the Culture Study Pod!
Yes this!! The one that gets me the most right now is Wiser Than Me – so many interesting insights about aging immediately followed by ads hawking suppositories, make up, maintaining ‘youthfulness’, etc. It’s so jarring!
My thought about podcasts is that it appears “EVERYONE” has a podcast now and it’s the in thing and maybe, just maybe, it is about what i kvetched about below, which is capitalism and money. Cuz they all have f’ing ADS, so everyone’s getting their bucks. I feel like podcasts are now over-saturated. Is that the implosion? I wonder.
I loved print magazines, and I had started to like podcasts, but now when I browse, I find myself rolling my eyes over the choices. Cuz, you know, every Vanderpump Rules ‘star’ needs a podcast… ugh.
(I know they ‘all’ don’t but you know what I mean.)
I have heard several podcasters talk about the complete breakdown of ad revenue for podcasts in the last year or two. I think about how Spotify poured out millions of dollars on podcasts, but that era has past. Apple's podcast app update changed how the stats are collected for podcasts. Laura Tremaine did a podcast episode about this around the first of the year, and it was really helpful info.
That is a hot hot tip - the episode is really interesting! 🥰
My grandfather used to work for Time Magazine back in the day (think "Mad Men" but less witty, more swearing) and when Time was getting ready to launch People (which used to be a single-page feature in the original magazine) he was *horrified* ... "Gonna g-damn ruin the magazine" .... he wasn't right, but he wasn't really wrong, either....
This was ABSOLUTELY the internal attitude, there was so much taste/class stuff wrapped up in it!
Oh yes, my understanding is that People came from that one page in Time Magazine and InStyle came from the celebrity shoe-dress focus in People. Separately, I never found a typo in People! Also I have several favorite recipes that came from their celebrity chef pages so I can’t hate the magazine at all, even though it was not allowed in my house growing up!
Yep, totally correct on both of these!
I can assure you, there were typos! I was a fact checker at People for several years and had at least 2 typos I didn’t catch come back to haunt me!
As a former fact-checker, I feel your pain. It was my first job out of college at a San Francisco publication, and in one article I missed an incorrect spelling for an actor. I discovered this after the issue had just closed and I was enjoying a Friday night at an art movie house starring this particular actor. At least, I was enjoying it until the credits rolled. OUCH.
Thank you for this great essay! As a side note - for readers in New York, there's a fantastic exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of People & showcasing its photography. https://newyork.fotografiska.com/en/exhibitions/people-magazine
If you told me The Spruce was actually being written by AI since its inception, I would 100% believe you. I assume it will be in the next few years if it isn’t already.
So fascinating! I still have a print subscription to People (as well as Vanity Fair). Some of the “old school” People seems to be in the actual issues. maybe it’s the delay between posting to the internet and the actual print, or the nostalgia/act of reading a hard copy, but it feels different than the clickbait feel of online People links and emails.
I'm a magazine girlie, born and raised. As a teen, I subscribed to People AND Us, back when it was a monthly (that's why it's called Us Weekly now). So many magazines I loved are gone, but I still subscribe to the occasional one through Blue Dolphin or Magazines.com, when they have a $5 special.
I currently get People, and can read it in about an hour. The last few covers have been (sorry for the slam) Dead White Women, with Nicole Brown Simpson on one cover and Gabby Pettito on another. Luckily, I don't care about Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's friendship and skipped that cover story to save time.
It seems silly to say there's no there, there, about a celebrity magazine, but People did come from a stronger reporting bent from Time. Now that we are all smarter about celebrity PR it's easy to see the spin in 'reporting' re: Princess Kate and J Lo and Ben. And it took real effort to get off the People.com email list, it's reappeared in my inbox multiple times!
I went so deep on Us Monthly --> Us Weekly in the dissertation, it was FASCINATING. Definitely trying to be much more like, say, Premiere than what we understand it as now. And then the Bonnie Fuller years, and the very real play to compete with People, it's as good as industrial history gets.
I work in corporate content and have a couple colleagues who came from the editorial ranks at People -- one led royals coverage there for 10 yrs during the aughts -- and they are real-deal journalists. Such a bummer, to put it mildly, that these jobs don't really exist anymore.
I loved getting Us when it was a monthly mag!
This is so interesting. I was an avid reader of People and Entertainment Weekly until they were sold by Time Warner and I miss what used to be curation but I guess now is called "gatekeeping." When I scan print Vanity Fair now, or read the NY Times online, I always wonder what happened to real advertising, not just as a funding source for journalism, news and glossy magazines and good sites, but as a part of the culture.
We're awash in crummy makeshift advertising for weird products we've never heard of, on podcasts and online. I guess these "product reviews" are part of that, everyone trying to sell us stuff without us knowing it. But where are the culture-shifting ads for Apple and Gap and Volkswagen and Nike that powered so much of our media while being in themselves smart and creative and beautiful. I assume huge ad agencies still exist, but are they spending all their time and creative energy developing product reviews, slipping ads for bunion-friendly elastic shoes and stick-on bras into all our feeds? If this is what our media has become, what are all those advertisers doing these days?
I remember some 2 decades ago taking a class where the prof talked about ads as educational - like, yeah it's trying to get you to buy a thing, but also, as a consumer ads are useful so that you know about products that exist.
When the first vacuum cleaner went on the market, how would housewives have known about it if it weren't of ads? Assuming some baseline level of truth in advertising (really, a CHOICE to make that assumption) ads can be a way to learn about the world a bit, even ads for something you don't want or need. But today's internet ads are such trash that sometimes I don't even understand whether they're trying to sell me a shirt or a plane ticket or a subscription to some sort of content.
It's weird. Corporate spending on advertising seems to go up and up, but advertising itself has become more and more peripheral and ephemeral. One could blame the fragmentation of media, but that's just the other side of the market segmentation coin. The big advertising firms, Facebook, Google and Amazon, spy on their users to let sellers target their ads. This means that few ads are going to be seen by a broad subset of media consumers. An ad might go viral, but that's a novelty without real cultural impact. You can't do a viral sequel.
Your ad can't become a cultural element if you advertise to married women of moderate Christian belief, between 30 and 40 years old, 28" inseam, with one child between 5 and 8, living in a mid-sized city with a warmer climate and so on through the list of qualifiers. There are just too many other people that will never see it. In fact, since targeted ads cost more, you'd be paying good money for people NOT to see your ad.
I worked at Time Inc. when it owned People, and worked at Dotdash after it acquired Meredith. I can confirm that this is spot-on!
Back when Joe Ripp was the CEO of the then-newly-minting Time Inc (during the Time Warner decoupling), he would hold all-staff town halls and talk about how we should be paying journalists based on the ad revenue they bring in, start doing native ads, etc all the horrifying hits. But what he LOVED was to repeat the story about how Henry Luce's wife was actually a founder of People magazine, which isn't untrue—the actual (awesome, honestly) letter she wrote to the publisher is here: https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/journalistic-popcorn-fifty-years-of-people-magazine.
HOWEVER, Ripp used the anecdote to brush off any notion that Time Inc had a problematic relationship with women & leadership... which is in part how we ended up with Men in Tech destroying an entire industry by stripping good products for parts.