Back in 2019, the publishers of Politico announced they were launching a new tech publication, called “Protocol”. It came out early in 2020, and earlier in November of 2022 it announced it was ceasing publication. Since Politico is a highly successful and respected publication in the national and international political scene, how come their tech effort failed? I had high hopes for Protocol and an exchange with the first editor in February 2020 when the first issues came out. Take a look at my referenced blog, and then let’s dig in.
My view on tech coverage is that, in a market where we’re surely trying to build an ecosystem as complex as any in human history, we’re “groping the elephant”. Remember that old saw about someone trying to identify an elephant behind a curtain by reaching in and feeling around? Get the trunk and it’s a snake, get the leg and you think “tree”, and the side would lead you to believe you were feeling a cliff. You can’t define an ecosystem if you look only at parts. My view, which I conveyed in email, was that more than anything else, tech coverage lacked context, and that Protocol needed to provide it. The response I got was “I completely agree — this is one of the things we want to do really well, making sure we try to tell the whole story instead of tiny pieces of it.” Well, I don’t think they did that, and I offered examples from the early story to justify my view.
An implicit point in my assessment of Protocol is that the publication had an opportunity, which means there was an unmet need. I won’t bore you with the details of what I think the need is; all my blogs focus on that. What that leaves is the question of why the need is unmet, why tech publications (these days that means online publications) aren’t doing what I believe the market needs, so let’s look at that.
To be holistic, you have to understand the whole, and in tech that’s incredibly complicated. But you also have to understand the relationships that turn “the whole” from a collection of boxes and software to a functioning infrastructure that supports some viable mission set. I know a lot of tech journalists, and I think most of them would agree that actually understanding the specific area they cover is a major challenge. Understanding all the areas and how they relate to each other? Forget it.
So is any attempt to cover tech, to convey developments in context doomed? I don’t think so. I think my tech journalists would also agree that if they had an outline that represented the framework into which their stories fit, one that provided that critical knowledge of elements, relationships, and context, they could do their stories in a way that would meet the needs of the market. They don’t get that, and they surely could because editors (including those who ran Protocol) could have talked to people and assembled the view. They could still do that today, but they don’t. Why?
Back in 1989 when I first started to do surveys of enterprises in a methodical way (to populate my forecast model), there were about eleven thousand real qualified network decision-makers. The number of subscribers to the best network publications of the time was about the same number. Ten years later, the number of qualified decision-makers had increased to thirteen thousand five hundred, and the circulation of publications had increased to over fifty thousand. The reason for this was that publications shifted from being subscription-based to ad-based. You filled out a reader service card, answering questions, and from those answers, the publication decided if you were qualified to get a free copy. Sound logical?
Maybe not. Here you are, a lowly tech in some vast organization, with about as much influence on the decisions made as the person who operates the coffee shop nearest the headquarters. One question on the card is “What value of technology do you personally approve or influence?” and you get a range. Pick the truth (zero) and you’ll never see that publication unless you steal a copy from someone else. So you pick (on the average, according to my research) whatever level is about two thirds of the way up from the bottom. This strategy gets you the publication, but it also means that the total purchase influence value of subscribers exceeds global GDP, which isn’t exactly plausible. It does explain how we jumped so far in “influencers” and subscribers, though.
OK, so we printed more copies than we really needed; so what? The right people still got the news, the ads were effective. Then along came online. Now we had the same explosion in unqualified people (meaning people who weren’t actually making decisions), but we could also tell what they were interested in, which we couldn’t easily do with a printed publication.
Ah, and remember that advertisers pay for eyeballs. Now, suppose I have fifteen thousand decision-makers and fifty-thousand hangers-on. I do a long, well-contexted, article that’s rich fodder for the former group, and the latter group tunes out. I have fifteen thousand eyeball-hits. On the other hand, if I do a “man-bites-dog” sensational piece, I get all sixty-five thousand. Why? The hangers-on want digested, exciting stuff, so they’re happy. The real decision makers have nothing else to read, so we get them too.
This isn’t an easy problem to solve, and I’m not sure I’m qualified to suggest a solution. My blog gets roughly a hundred thousand fairly regular readers, but as you know I don’t accept ads, or compensation for running specific stories there. I’m free to do what I want, which is not the case for “real” online tech publications that have to pay employees, website hosting bills, and so forth. I write everything myself, from my own knowledge and experience, so there’s no outside cost for me to cover. But even with all of this, I understand how things would be for an ad-sponsored blog. You get paid by click, therefore you cater to clicks.
Protocol’s challenge is that they came from a background of news, and news is widely digestible and broadly understood. Tech is not; in fact tech understanding is probably what a new tech publication should be trying to convey to readers. Tech understanding means what, though? Does it mean providing enough information to make a truly objective assessment of a technology and the vendor space associated with it? No advertiser wants that, they want something that preferences their own products/services. What Protocol ended up doing was a kind of news slant on tech, and while it was useful to readers I don’t think it offered advertisers the kind of thing they wanted out of the stories, which was something that mentioned them, or at least was favorable to their buying proposition. But that approach would first replicate everything that was already out there when Protocol launched, and second miss the critical goal of actually helping the tech buyer apply technology to business problems, and so justify their purchases. That would require addressing a much smaller audience, and that defies ad sponsorship principles that focus on eyeball counting.
Protocol was launched by the people who gave us Politico, but political news touches everyone and doesn’t require special skills to digest. You can sell an ad on a political website and be assured that millions could be reasonable targets for it. Can we make the same assumption about technology sites, technology ads? No, because only those who influence big tech purchases are viable ad targets. So is there no niche for Protocol to have filled? I think there was, and I think that niche was to advance buyer literacy among those real buyers.
Let me offer some insight I dug out of my old survey data. Back in 1998, almost 90% of decision-makers said that they fully understood the technology they were buying and how to apply it to their problem set. Ten years later, only 64% said that, and today only 39% say that. It’s hard for me to believe that, if we had the same level of tech literacy in 2022 that we had in 1998, we wouldn’t be way further along in tech revolution than we are. We’d be selling more tech products and services, company stocks would be higher, and tech employees and investors would have more money. Seems good to me.
For vendors, this frames a dilemma that I mentioned last week in my blog on Cisco and Juniper, the issue of sales versus marketing. What’s the difference between being sales-driven and being marketing-driven? Salespeople are commissioned to sell, not to educate. They don’t want to spend a lot of time in a sales call, they want to get the order and move on to the next opportunity. Say “consultative sale” or “buyer education” and they blanch. But if a new technology comes along, how do the decision-makers get the literacy they need to pick a product and get the deal approved internally? The best answer would be “marketing”.
Marketing is a mass activity not a personal one. You create marketing collateral and get it to a decision-maker, and you can educate them, indoctrinate them, support them in their mission, in a way you’d have a lot of trouble getting your sales force to support. Marketing is the great under-utilized resource in tech, and it’s the thing that can really drive market change. For vendors who aren’t major market players, marketing is what can make you into one, and every such vendor needs to accept and exploit that truth. Why? So they don’t go the way of Protocol.