HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN ON EBAY

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Learn How to Be a Better Reader 

The major newspapers have failed in their mission. We need a new format that does everything they once did–curate, inform, educate–without the baggage.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

APR 1, 2025

The major newspapers simply aren’t getting the job done any longer. Apart from the fact that the printed paper is outdated before the press run is even finished, they aren’t telling us what we actually need to know in an effective manner. Smaller local papers continue to disappear, and the three leading national papers cower, cave and collaborate with the demands of the Orange Monster and their own corporate masters – joined these past few weeks by several of the largest law firms and major universities.

We are largely left to our own devices to find alternative sources of substantive news, serious thought, and opposition to the onrushing autocracy.

Newspapers today – even with unlimited online space – are opting for fluff, filler, and a lot of nice-to-know nonsense instead of substantive coverage of pressing national affairs. Many local papers are now dropping editorial pages entirely. And, as they shrink in size and shirk their obligations, they look like unfortunate jugglers trying to catch the wrong end of a bunch of plummeting knives – painful, pathetic, and painted red with the blood, sweat and tears of departed staffers.

The most immediate result of layoffs, buyouts, and bizarre dictates by billionaire owners like Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times and Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post is the continued flight of major talent. Readership is disappearing, too.  Many of the best writers, editors, and reporters have abandoned the major rags to set out on their own to tell their stories and honor their callings through social media, YouTube videos, podcasts and new digital forums. But it’s an enormously difficult task to find an audience and make a living while you’re at it.

The Best Journalists Are Leaving Newspapers Behind 

Online digital channels like Substack, which provide a forum for opinions, reports and longer articles, are the prime beneficiaries of the writers’ exodus, for example, Jennifer Rubin of the Post. I also like Joyce Vance, Heather Cox Richardson, Shelly Palmer, Charlie Sykes, and Frank Bruni. Other new services like Bluesky and Threads — which unfortunately followed the constricted Twitter model best suited to short slander, right-wing hate, and trolling — haven’t really offered much of a viable alternative, despite building substantial audiences.

You can’t really say much of value if your message needs to be truncated into a dozen little squibs. And literally millions of new users signed up for these services without a clue as to what they were likely to find, or which other users and contributors might be on any given channel.

But these new forums, channels and writers face a much bigger obstacle that is likely to financially doom many new authors seeking a viable audience. What you say or how well you’ve said it doesn’t matter if (a) no one can find your work and (b) if, as a result, no one is reading or listening to it. Even if you think you know what you’re looking for, without a specific name in mind, there’s virtually no way to find anything of value among the thousands of returns that a typical Google search might generate. There are no editors, curators or guideposts to manage the constant stream of new material.

How Substack Hurts Its Own Users

Substack makes life even more challenging for its authors to build a sustainable audience by the utterly stupid step of automatically unsubscribing anyone suspected of forwarding a post to a mailing list. In other words, while their own offers litter every column with pitches to subscribe at various fee levels (including free), Substack punishes anyone for aggressively sharing a particular piece with a larger audience of potential subscribers by kicking them off the author’s page. This even includes articles which have been served for free by writers trying to get their message shared as widely as possible.

As if finding new materials and writers wasn’t tough enough, the Substack idiots penalize people for providing free marketing for their authors.

With Trump and his flunkies now threatening to effectively limit access to Social Security and privatize the United States Postal Service, online services may soon be the only effective channels that remain for most of our population. As they envision their brave new, tech-first world, the MAGAts never bother to mention the millions of older, rural and poor people, including their own supporters, who still lack access to online internet services or cellphones.

There are still important and critical nuggets of information regularly buried among the gross amount of garbage we get online. Today we all live in various degrees of fear of missing something critical from a friend, family, bank, litigant, government agency or other correspondent. And we regularly do miss messages directed to us at infrequently visited sites.

How To Be a Better Reader

Given this cluttered context, the scarcity of our time, and the fractionalizing of our attention, you need to selectively invest the energy in finding valuable new information sources, intelligent and informed writers, and news feeds that anticipate important events and prepare you to respond.  That’s in contrast to those that merely regurgitate the same tired factoids we see in dozens of different posts across the web.

You can start by finding out where some of your favorite columnists moved and follow them. But this process is too often frustrating. Medium does a decent job of collecting your interests (very generically) and then provides a long list of suggested writers who might be relevant. But it feels like a complete crapshoot, and you’re required to subscribe and pay a fee to proceed. Plus, much like those of us who presently subscribe to too many streaming services for no good reason, it quickly becomes a fairly expensive proposition to spend $50 a pop to support a dozen of the newspaper columnists you used to follow in one or two places.

Interestingly enough, this process of aggregation, validation and assembly of select writers, educators, scientists and other professionals used to be one of the primary functions of major newspapers. Your favorite paper was basically a one-stop shop, a convenient, well-organized and edited, and relatively painless delivery system especially when compared with the absolute drudgery that discovery on the web today represents. Those were the good old days.

Bottom line: we need a trusted online aggregator, or maybe a linking service more tailored than Apple News, where users can find and designate the content, authors, commentary and topics that interest them and have those delivered in a single, morning submission. Sorta like the newspaper you used to find on your doorstep.  

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why Tech Isn't Improving Your Advertising

The algorithm may have taken over the ad buying, but there's still no telling exactly who is watching your messaging.

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

 

Every entrepreneur will tell you that they absolutely hate to spend any of their scarce cash on advertising, for two main reasons. First, they're not sure that ads work-- there's a lot of "spray and pray" going on and not much in the way of credible measurement or tangible results. Second, they believe that their product or service is so great that people should simply be flocking to their doors to buy whatever they're selling. They think that, if you use your money to create exceptional products and services, you won't need to spend on advertising.

If only life were that fair or entrepreneurs were a little more realistic. For some businesses, advertising is the cost of being boring.  For others, it's an attempt to put lipstick on a pig. But at the end of the day, there's really not much choice. It's like dancing with a bear - you don't get to stop when you want to.

This antipathy is hardly an attitude limited to new business builders. The advertising industry has always known that, while everyone wants to make money, no one really wants to buy advertising. On its best day, advertising is a necessary evil and - much like cable television or insurance - always a grudge buy. Even worse, the advent of new technologies, which in other industries have dramatically improved transparency, productivity, and accountability, have only added more confusion, uncertainty, and imprecision to the ad game.

Advertising follows audiences, but with programmatic algorithms dictating the placement, frequency, and duration of digital ads, no one knows much of what's happening in the field. Claims about the effective addressability of digital ads are mostly optimistic fantasies clothed in the belief that the underlying tech will somehow get the job done. As John Wanamaker said long ago: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." Some things never change.

While some new companies like Dumbstruck can help advertisers determine whether the content of their ads is going to be effective, it's still anybody's guess as to whether you're getting your ads in front of the right buying audience at the right time and place. Context, given the abundant noise and clutter, is just as important as content, if not more so. Smart reach is still the name of the game and, as the migration from linear TV to digital video accelerates, determining whether ads are reaching the right folks, resonating with them, and driving purchase behavior is becoming increasingly difficult.  Average daily TV time is down from 3.5 hours a day in 2020 to less than 3 hours a day in 2023 while daily digital video viewing has grown by almost that exact amount from 2.5 hours a day to almost 3 hours a day in 2023.

As a result, linear TV ad spending has been flat to down over the last four years (stuck in the mid-$60 billions) and, even in an election year, there's not much enthusiasm for 2024. But, at least in the old days of traditional TV, you could sometimes see your ads running on the tube, while these days no one has any idea where their digital placements are showing up, what they're adjacent to, and who's seeing them. X (formerly Twitter and soon to be toast) is the most visible poster child for the risks of having no control and no say over what some algo decides to position next to your offerings. But the whole industry is now driven in large part by fraudulent next-gen click bait systems designed to attract programmatic ads.  These MFA programs have led to an environment where one in five links is to a fake site delivering made-up facts, phony health products, or pathetic financial pitches.  

That's no problem if you're targeting kids up to age 18, because since  TikTok and YouTube completely own the video market, the choices are pretty much locked in,  and frankly the advertisers focusing on these kids don't really care about quality engagement or first-party data. It's all about tonnage. TikTok's ad business is growing about twice as fast as Meta's and almost 4x faster - year over year - than Alphabet's. And because of TikTok's delivery methodology and typical video duration,  cost-per-view to advertisers is a fraction of what they have been paying for decades in more traditional channels.

But for mature and serious businesses seeking to actually connect to real human beings who are interested in learning about and ultimately purchasing their products and services, the problem is much more complex and challenging. TikTok isn't going to get the job done, but new ancillary networks are being built which make much more sense for serious advertisers. The most attractive of these are the retail media networks being developed by merchants like Walgreens, Kroger-Albertsons, and Walmart. They have extensive first-party data about their customers, strong and recurrent connections to them, and relatively high-quality engagement. But they lack the massive scale of players like Netflix. However, in combination, they can provide a solution which also offers levels of addressability, measurement and accountability that the digital vendors can't yet duplicate or effectively compete with.

The bottom line is pretty simple. As attractive and rapid as the newest delivery and tracking ad technologies may seem, as the ad buyer you're being asked to put far too much trust and money in "take my word for it" systems where the results are machine-driven and fundamentally unmeasurable. A much better bet is to take a step back and use channels and vendors whose methodology and mechanics are clear, understandable and auditable in more concrete and convincing ways.

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