Mic raised more than $60 million to build a millennial-focused news company but couldn’t find a business model to support its costs, which include a one-floor office in Manhattan’s World Trade Center (an earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the size of Mic’s office).
If these people were running a baked potato stand, and spent all their money on glitter glue instead, nobody would be interrogating the viability of the baked potato sales model. They’d be like WHY DID YOU BLOW ALL YOUR CASH ON GLITTER GLUE YOU FUCKING MORONS? Just SELL GOOD POTATOES!
Sell enough potatoes to pay for the potatoes and the equipment and people to bake them. God, quit overcomplicating shit and then whining about how complicated it all is.
I mean what a load of horseshit:
“What you hear less about the truth is that it is expensive. Our business models are unsettled and the macro forces at play are all going through their own states of unrest.”
The truth isn’t expensive. Real estate and prezzies are expensive, and you decided you’d rather spend money on that than on doing good work and retaining your people and building your company. I HATE when people talk about preventable catastrophes like they’re natural disasters. Your house burned down, yeah, but you set the fucking fire.
You relied on Facebook — Facebook, in the year of our Lord Jesus Delano Roosevelt, 2018 — for revenue from videos — VIDEOS — and when that went tits-up you had no backup plan. Any ten people on the street could have told you that relying on third-party companies to give you the traffic you’d otherwise have to build like grown-ups was a long wait for a train don’t come and a shitty risk besides, but no, you pivoted like hell until you drilled a hole and fell in it.
A.
Like (Facebook mocking like and also really liking like)
They pivoted in a widening gyre’s what they did. Things naturally fell apart, of course, and their center was never designed to hold. But lordy, were they ever full of passionate intensity. For a while, anyway.
And that second blockquote…Fuckizzat? Some species of CorpSpeak I guess. An Eschaton commenter years ago invented a word I still love: “gleeblefwap”, and that’s as good a name for that shite as any. Frankly I don’t think it’s even language as anyone but, say, linguisticians like Noam Chomsky would appreciate.
Makes my brane hurt just reading it, because you *know* there must be some meaning in that splatter of anodyne nouns and verbs, but…what?! I haven’t read Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit yet (should get around to that). Maybe he has a chapter on this…