>Your problem is that you make shit. A lot of shit. Cheap shit. And no one cares about you or your cheap shit. And an increasingly aware, connected, and mutable audience is onto your cheap shit. They don’t want your cheap shit. They want the good shit. And they will go to find it somewhere. Hell, they’ll even pay for it.<p>I have said this almost verbatim to many many people, and they stare at me like I've grown two heads, and I don't get why. Content attracts eyeballs, bad content burns eyeballs. This is why TV dying (and depending on who you ask, already dead), this is why radio is basically dead, this is why content delivery systems that have large libraries full of good things have won the battle (Netflix, et al.).<p>If you don't fuck up, you win. Big media doesn't understand this basic rule anymore. You can't buy eyeballs anymore, not like you used to. You have to give them a reason to stay, because no one cares about your branding; no one cares that CNN said it, or it aired on CBS prime time, or even it was some NPR podcast. They are if it is accurate and/or sufficiently entertaining or thought provoking.<p>If you have a history of producing good content, people will subscribe/follow/whatever. If you have a history of producing bad content, people will tell other people. The worst case? You Fox News it, and an echo chamber of people hating your brand engulfs your entire company and slowly burns it to the ground.