The inefficient and fake market of media and influencers

Many legacy trades are overpriced, influencers are unserious, and AI bros are building fake prestige

There’s always been grifting in the world of marketing, obvious statement of the year I know. But the state of things for media and influencers has become so strange, inefficient, spam-filled, I wanted to share thoughts you can forward to your marketing team, or at least be aware of. This also might be interesting for creators looking to get a check from brands to hear thoughts from this side of the trade.

I’ve been in my field of marketing and tech for two decades and always gotten requests that were odd. But lately there’s a more pernicious form of it, and it’s near constant: “legitimate enough” looking publications want me to sponsor them. Or podcasts. Or so called “influencers.” They come with seemingly impressive (but clearly sketchy or faked) metrics like lots of followers or subscribers. The thing is, the category I currently work in (adtech) isn’t that large. I live in it and know who the real players are. But everyone thinks they have a brand now and deserves sponsorship money (this is for sure across categories). In reality, few do.

Why is this happening? Many trade publications are trucking along like ZIRP is still a thing. They charge mid or high 5, sometimes 6 figures for simple media buys because of perceived prestige. But the publications themselves, save for a few I actually like, publish a constant mix of press release slop and sophomore-level analysis. Many were once great, but were acquired and now run as cheap as possible. It’s a wild time. I poll peers constantly on this topic and their feedback is always the same as mine. Few see them as serious brands any longer. What’s happening is they’re still being propped up by the FANGs of the world with marketing teams happy to write large checks to status signal. Some smaller companies and startups run by people in a hurry also light money on fire here. But the prices are obscene. I’m not mentioning any names, but the same thing is happening in other categories too, we’re not special snowflakes. So what’s happened is the ‘make money online’ class senses blood in the water. And they’re right. They’re opportunists, not morons.

With so many many trade publications enshittified, egos (pricing) the size of a small planet and ‘good enough’ AI, no one stopping anyone from building a low quality but high volume list, and the playbook to getting brand dollars is clear. Real enough sounding indie newsletters, podcasters and blogs come in with what are reasonable sounding prices. They’re mostly junk, but I’m guessing they get enough bites on sponsorship from peers who can’t cut a 50K check- their rates are closer to what trade publications would be charging in a sane world. It’s a bubble that never re-priced. Marketers have jobs to do, and they can’t just throw all their budget into the Facebook and Google machines and call it a day.

Anyway I’ve personally solved for this at least one way by using a product called Beehiiv which is good way to turn your B2B sponsorship dollars you’d normally spend on prestige media into a performance channel. I even contributed to a brief case study with them. You only pay for actual performance which is much harder to fake than a large email list of questionable quality people skim at best. Also note that trade pubs will never be performance-based. And because it’s at the programmatic level this scales, and I now have a tech firm to weed out spammers for me. Even if there were some, they’d be quickly removed (or wouldn’t get much performance anyway) and I’m never cutting any grifters checks directly. Most importantly, I don’t even have to exchange emails with anyone asking for money.

As for podcasters and personalities, the people who are high enough quality to sponsor directly I know already. So it’s really uninteresting to me to get pitches from people to sponsor their life that look straight out of a make money online playbook. It’s all so obviously terrible. No 23 year old knows enough to opine on my industry in any way that’s all that interesting yet (they might get there, keep going!). The ones with cheap outsourced pitching help are never serious or worth sponsoring. Frankly, if you haven’t heard of it already (in like 99% of cases) you shouldn’t sponsor it. Note some of the general interest podcasters that pitch me might not be fake, but since they can’t sell a B2B product I don’t care, although if I were in consumer I might talk to them.

The truth is there’s really only a handful of people and publications in any given sector who deserve your brand’s time, money, ad creative and a check directly. But what we have is a mix of legacy companies phoning in it, charging exuberant rates while producing work with the personality of a stale graham cracker. And then a mix of “make money online” bros using AI to create a Potemkin village of (slop) content and (fake) popularity with an obviously paid for (and inflated) social following/list size. And a small amount of real people and publications deserving of checks. If you can’t determine this fairly quickly as a marketer you shouldn’t be in our field. And many people honestly shouldn’t (this is a whole separate conversation).

All this to say, if you are one of the few people in your category who actually does care, who is doing real things, it’s never been a better time to build a media business. If so many outright spammers are emboldened enough to approach me daily under their real names, that’s because real opportunity is there. Companies do want to reach people online where there’s focused attention + trust. There’s not that many places that have this any longer. With (most) trade publications charging obscene rates that don’t meet their quality or audiences, that means opportunity. Oh yeah and if you’re at an aging trade publication paying you scraps, it might be time for you to do something on your own (if you can run that treadmill successfully long term and handle a bit of business development work, it’s actually not that hard).

This could all not possibly be a less efficient market to exploit by bad actors or aging media brands to feed off large companies. But that also means it’s never been a better time for people to create upstarts that offer something better.