Never ending pivot to video

A couple of weeks back I saw a re-branding that really made me laugh. The company formerly known as Pico, which was essentially a paywall and email service provider focused on helping small publishers monetize their written content, re-branded as Hype, with the new goal of helping creators monetize their audiences.

One reason I found this funny is that literally naming your company Hype as you are chasing the hype of the "creator economy" bandwagon seems too ironic to be a real thing, but yet it is. A big factor in this hype chasing is surely the fact that Pico is VC-backed. And as a VC-backed company you need to have a total addressable market that is essentially infinite. Saying you are going to address creators (and everyone can become a creator in the creator economy!) instead of a known (and relatively small) amount of local news and niche online publications, surely is more interesting to their backers.

But apart from the go big or go home mindset of venture capital, this is also a story about the never ending promise of video and media companies pivot away from the written word. You can see this in lots of legacy news providers who have tried to produce more video content, "new media" companies like Vice that were strongly focused on video from the beginning and in social media where Instagram is trying to copy TikTok's video success at the expense of many users who liked the old picture-sharing experience.

Yet the written word endures, as it has for thousands of years, while many of the legacy publishers cut back their new media efforts when they had to get leaner, Vice has become one of many new media caution tales and the rise of Substack shows that people do like to read things after all. I might be wrong and the domination of video still turns out to be inevitable, but I think there are lots of great businesses to be built around written content for a long time still. And video will continue to be a black hole for lots of companies who think they have to pivot there.