Andrew Golis

The Politico stands with one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock, trying to carry advertisers over to dry land as the boat sinks.

Their model of publishing a DC-based publication to distribute on the hill to “influentials” while building out a real multimedia digital presence is, at a business level, quite brilliant.  It allows them to create a revenue stream that political advertisers are comfortable with while ramping up their future business model.  It’s the only way to build a really big online news operation (70 plus people on editorial staff) without accepting huge short-term loses.  Online advertising just isn’t mature enough yet (in terms of market growth, comfort with the medium, and payment options) to support an operation that big without a downright absurd number of pageviews.

So I have to take issue with Ezra and Ross’s gloomy prediction that the Politico only being self-sustaining (breaking even as opposed to being profitable) is bad news for the media business.  We blogospheric youth are ready for everyone to “get it” already, but most haven’t.  The boat is sinking, but to be successful some people have to be picking people up and putting them on the dock.  We can’t all just stand on the dock and wave.  At TPM, I spend a lot of time getting advertisers and publishing partners to understand the medium so that they can start to spend money on it.

The challenge for Politico will be to know when it’s time to let go of their paper product.  They could, like a lot of newspapers and other older media operations, just get set in their ways and not complete the transition.  But it looks to me, based on the insight with which their short-term strategy was designed, like that won’t happen.

Of course, I can hope.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 10:41 am and is filed under media, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.