Communiqué 75: Media as a means to an end

You have heard it said, “Anyone can be a media company.” But I tell you, “Media companies can be anything — if they choose to be.”

Key points

1. The notion that a media company should solely be a media company is outdated, just as the idea that anyone can become a media company is more true today than ever.

2. The future media entrepreneur is not building a publication — they’re creating a platform for experimentation, monetization, and expansion. The product isn’t always the content; sometimes, the content is just the gateway.

3. Most people view media as a product. However, for the smartest entrepreneurs, media can serve as a foundation for testing, launching, and scaling new business lines.

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1. Everything is everything

It used to be much easier to define what a media company is. If you produced content, packaged it (however you saw fit), and distributed it to an audience, you were a media company. Ideally, you’d have a defined set of equipment and resources (cameras, radio masts, printing presses, etc.) and a specific group of people (journalists, production crew, studio engineers, etc.). What you were was never in doubt. Who qualified as “media” was never a question.

But that’s all in the past. We are in a new era. You hear things like, “Anyone can be a media company.” Or, “Everything is media these days.” Often, this is backed by clichés: anyone with a smartphone can become a media company, media is now decentralized, everything is democratized, and so on. None of these statements is false.

In today’s world, content production and distribution have become commodities. While it is sometimes possible to strike gold with content ideas, the general concept of content creation has become so ubiquitous that it is increasingly challenging to convince consumers that it is worth paying for. And so, you find media companies stretching the boundaries of what is possible as businesses. Events are the lowest-hanging fruit. Then you have agency services (consulting, content marketing, etc.). With time, however, this has become a crowded house. Walk into a room full of media professionals, and you will bump into someone whose company offers one or both of these services.

As the definitions of media expand and the parameters for who or what qualifies as a media company stretch beyond elasticity, one must wonder what is next. We know what the past and present look like. But what does the future hold?

2. Paystack’s media threat, revisited

I spent most of 2021 obsessing over the idea of media as a growth lever for corporate entities.

It first culminated in an essay titled “Paystack’s media threat.” The central idea was that tech startups with more resources and dynamic problems to solve could build in-house operations to rival the media companies that covered them, to the point of competing on talent, production, and distribution.

At the time, Africa’s tech ecosystem was flush with cheap and foreign capital. Business fundamentals were less of a priority to investors in lieu of growth potential. VCs were more likely to invest in startups purely based on how fast and large they claimed they could grow, rather than on how they would actually achieve it.

This push for growth sparked several background conversations, one of which was the possibility of in-house media teams producing content solely as a means to an end: driving business growth.

In that essay, I wrote:

If a company with little to no pressure to monetize its media properties begins to tread deeper into the territory that was erstwhile occupied by traditional media companies whose livelihoods depend on reporting news and creating content, what happens then?