You Can't Always Buy Relevance
Monitoring The Situation and burning capital
It is, perhaps, inevitable that popular and entertaining things will be acquired in pursuit of making money. One of the most prominent recent examples is TPBN, the surging podcast focusing on tech and business, which was bought by OpenAI for a considerable sum. It is perhaps also inevitable that capital notices the successes of these popular and entertaining things and tries to build its own by throwing money at the concept.
We woke up today to a new example of this phenomenon: a16z-backed MTS—Monitoring The Situation (of course.)
I am in a rare moment of my life where I was simply too busy to monitor the situation about MTS, but Junto staff writer Lee Becker was kind enough to keep me abreast with frequent texts. He was not impressed. In free moments, my timeline validated this: I saw plenty of snark and criticism. The tastebearers seem to be in relative alignment that MTS is effectively an institutional marketing play, and whatever relevance it has is bought rather than earned.
The secret to new media—and really any media that leans heavily on socials—isn’t just assembling the right ingredients. Organic growth, scaling naturally, surviving the competitive gauntlet: the market selects for what works. Compelling digital content is compelling mostly because it has undergone that competitive pressure and emerged victorious. There is some inherent quality to content that has earned its way to an audience, and most institutional plays lack it.
One may think that aggregating a bunch of independently successful creators is sufficient. It is not. The smart play is to seed something and grow it organically, not to blast it all over the internet, relying on partnered promotion and purchased virality to carry it.
In the moments I was able to consult the timeline, I noticed many of my media compatriots lamenting how big tech seems to have discovered media yesterday. This I can somewhat sympathize with, but generally discard as rooted in jealousy. Who wouldn’t want big tech to fund their project? I sense an overt and implied I could have done this if you had paid me; I could have done this years ago from many of them. And honestly, I think they’re probably right. I don’t think that launching something like MTS would be all that difficult for myself or many of my peers, and we’re not that impressive. Seriously, just pay a media guy and his Twitter friends and you’re halfway there. But should you?
We in media and politics are prolific talkers and rare doers. I have many friends with grand ideas for projects, they just lack the funds. Meanwhile, tech and business is all about doing. Yes, they have more money than many small countries, but just as important, they have a bias for building and action. What they are not good at, it seems, is building durable and relevant media.
Media and politics, however, exist entirely in that space—though mostly in other people’s projects. They have a bias for deliberation and conceptualization, and are not good at the actual build side of the equation.
What we see with MTS is how Capital got the premise of media wrong. The creators who built audiences from nothing on Substack and Twitter didn’t succeed because they were talented, though many are. The random anon posters and writers and artists and thinkers and dreamers succeeded because they had something to say and don’t stop saying it. The content was compelled. That’s what the competitive gauntlet actually selects for: conviction, and production value may follow with success. Or, it doesn’t, and sometimes that’s part of the appeal.
So those with money who want to replicate it glance at the results and reverse-engineer the wrong inputs. You see successful creators and conclude that the secret is the creators. So Capital aggregated them, gave them a budget, pointed them towards the product, and expected the same outcome. But the outcome was a function of the why, not the talent.
When The Federalist launched, when the Daily Wire launched, when National Review launched… They were built by people who believed something about the country and wanted to argue the case. The business model served the mission. I didn’t launch Junto to sell ads, and I don’t think a version of it aimed at making money would be successful. MTS, as best anyone can tell, is just a distribution and influence vector for tech interests wearing the skin of a media company. The mission serves the business model.
I don’t have tremendous love for everything the conservative media ecosystem has produced, and we definitely have our share of problems. But the impulse—people who cared about something building media to talk about what matters—is a hell of a lot more defensible than whatever this is. And, honestly, I can think of many rosters worth of people who deserve the funding more. Many of them read Junto!
Junto is hiring a part time editor. Please reach out at philip@readjunto.com.