The Audience Neglect Era

Sometimes it's hard to let go of the good stuff, like a beautiful summer...and the old web.I don’t think we talk enough about how much online publishing has shifted over the years. At a very high level, the biggest shifts I’ve seen went something like this:The Audience Deficiency EraPeople weren’t online enough. It was the mid-90s — a fun period of design exploration, long- and short-form content creation, and community-building through the greatest invention of my lifetime: the hyperlink. The email newsletter was born, but rarely considered its own form of media. Creators started dreaming of making a living online, but not much happened until after the dot-com bubble. Then, the biggest bloggers finally started making a full-time income from content alone.The Audience Abundance EraPeople started showing up in larger numbers. This was the golden age of the blog and the beginning of podcasting. The link played a major role in trustworthiness. RSS made reading and listening to content…