Sports Illustrated Layoffs

[jimnance]

I honestly thought SI went out of business years ago.
Can't believe I'm reading they had fat chick's and dudes in swimsuits?
Did that really happen? If so, there is nothing holy anymore on this planet

 

[Ian]

Jim Heckman destroys everything he touches. Add this to the list.

 

[JohnJH]

I honestly thought SI went out of business years ago.
Can't believe I'm reading they had fat chick's and dudes in swimsuits?
Did that really happen? If so, there is nothing holy anymore on this planet

Unfortunately, those things did happen.

 

[Bill Lee]

I've been saddened by recent generations' objection to paywalls. The only alternative is advertising, and our brains are so saturated with imagery at this point that there's little left of what a natural human urges are. The recent research on ultraprocessed foods and appetite hunger disruption are just the latest: we can't even feel hunger anymore and trust it, given the degree of our brain chemistry being engineered by marketing and addictive substances in foods.

Au contraire, the NFL has just showed us that subscriptions are not an alternate to advertisements. They have Peacock grab $6/month from its fans for something that used to be free, and it's still saturated with ads. Media outlets can insert ads in their pay-walled products. The NFL shows that people will tolerate both.

Many services now (Amazon Video a recent new one) are making the baseline product be payment-required with ads, and charging more for a premium product with no ads or fewer ads. Hulu had a premium product that claimed to let you skip ads but they had some weasel words saying they could still force you to watch ads on certain content which IMO they abused. It defeated the whole purpose of paying more to get rid of ads.

In short, once you give big media a way to make money, they will use and abuse it. They don't seem to have anyone in the room saying that there is a saturation point, one at which people will just go do something else. Maybe they are right about that, maybe we are all overly addicted to our devices/streams.

Google the word "enshittification" for lots of articles on how corporations use bait-and-switch all the time to play the end users off against the advertisers and vice-versa. And don't even get me started on subscription software. Adobe and Autodesk can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.

I'd rather just pay the journalists directly, through paywalls, than pay for further brain invasion.

I've written (a long time ago) on this very forum that in the 1990s researchers showed how internet transactions could be made for thousandths of a cent and still be profitable. The thing that killed this concept was the banks. The last thing they wanted was cheap transactions. Yet if we had them, we could just send a nickel or a dime or a quarter to a journalist who wrote something we liked or a creator who produced a song or a video or a picture we liked. Instead the banks shot down that idea and we ended up with the monthly subscription model, mostly because it amortizes the transaction cost across a month instead of across an article. So while you think you are paying journalists you are in fact paying them plus the banks, and the banks have a huge say in how and when such payments can happen.

Human behavior is indeed weird. Evidence shows most people don't seem to care much about what they spend their time on, so they're ok with being buried in ads. Most people don't install ad blockers. They seem to think it's some sort of crime, but it is not. It is your computer, you are paying to download those ads with your electricity so you can turn them off, although Google is doing everything they can to defeat ad blockers for obvious reasons. Most people favor the cheaper or free ad-saturated products over the more expensive ad-free products. They are saying their time is not worth the money, which IMO is the wrong way to look at things.

 

[BTTA]

Au contraire, the NFL has just showed us that subscriptions are not an alternate to advertisements. They have Peacock grab $6/month from its fans for something that used to be free, and it's still saturated with ads. Media outlets can insert ads in their pay-walled products. The NFL shows that people will tolerate both.

Many services now (Amazon Video a recent new one) are making the baseline product be payment-required with ads, and charging more for a premium product with no ads or fewer ads. Hulu had a premium product that claimed to let you skip ads but they had some weasel words saying they could still force you to watch ads on certain content which IMO they abused. It defeated the whole purpose of paying more to get rid of ads.

In short, once you give big media a way to make money, they will use and abuse it. They don't seem to have anyone in the room saying that there is a saturation point, one at which people will just go do something else. Maybe they are right about that, maybe we are all overly addicted to our devices/streams.

Google the word "enshittification" for lots of articles on how corporations use bait-and-switch all the time to play the end users off against the advertisers and vice-versa. And don't even get me started on subscription software. Adobe and Autodesk can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.



I've written (a long time ago) on this very forum that in the 1990s researchers showed how internet transactions could be made for thousandths of a cent and still be profitable. The thing that killed this concept was the banks. The last thing they wanted was cheap transactions. Yet if we had them, we could just send a nickel or a dime or a quarter to a journalist who wrote something we liked or a creator who produced a song or a video or a picture we liked. Instead the banks shot down that idea and we ended up with the monthly subscription model, mostly because it amortizes the transaction cost across a month instead of across an article. So while you think you are paying journalists you are in fact paying them plus the banks, and the banks have a huge say in how and when such payments can happen.

Human behavior is indeed weird. Evidence shows most people don't seem to care much about what they spend their time on, so they're ok with being buried in ads. Most people don't install ad blockers. They seem to think it's some sort of crime, but it is not. It is your computer, you are paying to download those ads with your electricity so you can turn them off, although Google is doing everything they can to defeat ad blockers for obvious reasons. Most people favor the cheaper or free ad-saturated products over the more expensive ad-free products. They are saying their time is not worth the money, which IMO is the wrong way to look at things.

I certainly didn't intend to imply the choice for a given outlet was either paywall or advertising. Having both kinda sucks.
Love this book, even if just for the title: Advertising ****s in Your Head: Strategies for Resistan…

 

[denverpatsfan]

Those SI swimsuit models were smoking hot back in the day. We didn't have the internet then.

 

[Bill Lee]

Those SI swimsuit models were smoking hot back in the day. We didn't have the internet then.

It was really helpful to have someone in your house who was a Victoria's Secrets customer...

 

[jimnance]

Unfortunately, those things did happen.

Mindblowing

 

[JohnJH]

Mindblowing

I wasn't the least bit surprised (as nothing truly surprises me).

 

[JohnJH]

Here you go….

View attachment 56062

Just so I’m straight on this, SI died because of processed foods and not because of their woke BS and Dudes and fat chicks in the swimsuit issue.

I'm in the "It died because of Woke BS and Fat Chicks (and dudes passing themselves off as chicks)" camp.

 

[pctronics0072]

Say it with me ...
Get woke, go broke


Good riddance to bad rubbish whose time of fame was at least 3 decades ago.

 

[Patsfanin Philly]

Back in the day, all this former Mass-hole needed was the Boston Sunday Globe sports section, my weekly SI, and 3 minutes each weeknight night of Bob Lobel on WBZ TV 6 o'clock news.

And the sports huddle w Eddie Andelman et al on Sunday night.

 

[IcyPatriot]

Who reads long articles anymore ... sports fans now want to access and read volume.

 

[PatsWSB47]

I'm in the "It died because of Woke BS and Fat Chicks (and dudes passing themselves off as chicks)" camp.

It was dying long before woke was a thing but by all means carry on with the culture war that hasn't got much to do with why print media is disappearing including with Sports illustrated. Tell me who here was still subscribing to SI before woke, before trans and before fat girls? Personally I haven't even thought of SI in over a decade. It's become a digital Era. That's the reason.

 

[NashuaPats]

Isn’t The Athletic basically the online version of what Sports Illustrated used to be (minus the swimsuit models)?

They’ve done well and and were bought by the N.Y. Times for over $500 million recently.

So it can be done. Sports Illustrated already had the name brand. They just didn’t have the right vision.

 

[Bill Lee]

Say it with me ...
Get woke, go broke

My take on it is, ya gotta keep it simple, ya can't put out concepts that challenge the audience to think.

 

[Patsgofor4]

Those SI swimsuit models were smoking hot back in the day. We didn't have the internet then.

Kathy Ireland and Elle McPherson
SI GOATs 1 and 1a.



The first time that SI dared to show nipples through a wet bathing suit was a momentous occasion during my adolescence.

 

[Bill Lee]

Then we had Tom's not-yet-ex showing up in the mailbox in 2001...



Not looking too bad in 2023, either!

 

[Ian]

I've been saddened by recent generations' objection to paywalls. The only alternative is advertising, and our brains are so saturated with imagery at this point that there's little left of what a natural human urges are. The recent research on ultraprocessed foods and appetite hunger disruption are just the latest: we can't even feel hunger anymore and trust it, given the degree of our brain chemistry being engineered by marketing and addictive substances in foods.

I'd rather just pay the journalists directly, through paywalls, than pay for further brain invasion.

People use adblockers because they hate advertising (and I get it ... it went bonkers after 3-4 banner ads no longer earned anything substantial, so all the companies went way overboard - and later became a vehicle for malware). Then if a paywall is set up, people are like, "Yeah, I'm not paying for that," and if you read the discussions, they all claim "there has to be another way" other than advertising or asking people to pay money.

Um...yeah...there's sort of not another way for a publisher to earn money, other than those two avenues, unfortunately.

That's why the internet is slowly shrinking. Granted, I know there are still other smaller blogs out there and a handful of notable ones, but overall, it's getting harder and harder for independent sites to be found or even garner consistent traffic. A lot of them quietly shut down or stop posting because it's just not worth it. And it's unfortunate because there are some incredibly talented people out there.

Part of that is because it's horrifically difficult to even get an audience. Social media used to help, but the algorithms reduced that reach (due to clickbait outlets who abused it) and the changes in Search engines have also impacted it. If you're a blogger, it's really, really tough. When you're getting shutout in terms of exposure, seeing a revenue drop because of ad blockers, and people are leery of adding yet another subscription, it's extremely difficult. To write anything intelligent, it takes time and research to put something together. To have 40-150 people read it after all that work, it's disheartening.

At the same time, I get that, obviously, whatever it is needs to bring value, but even then, it's challenging. I like what @Bill Lee said in terms of the fact that it would be easier if there was a blanket medium to compensate a few cents per view, which is what I've also discussed with some other people. The issue is that save for Apple News, they all can't seem to get on the same page there, unfortunately. And as a result, it's obviously not an equal playing field.

But at the same time, if it was, that money would all be controlled by one platform, which would be another issue.

As a result, the days of being able to survive in a free model with advertising is getting more and more difficult. I go ad-free in here for registered/logged-in users because this place overall remains somewhat self-sustaining, albeit it goes down a bit every year. But down the road? With AI, etc.? Who knows? But I certainly don't see it getting any better anytime soon.

 

[Ian]

Who reads long articles anymore ... sports fans now want to access and read volume.

Long form is tough to read online. I enjoyed it when I had a magazine sitting on my lap, the newspaper, etc. Maybe it's because I get more eye fatigue from a screen then reading a physical page. Although, at the same time, my eyes are starting to suck there as well, so it's all bad. #GetOffMyLawn