What Every Growing Media Business Gets Wrong About Reaching an Audience

A media business can be doing everything right. A strong piece of content can be published on a consistent basis by talented people on a schedule that never misses a beat. Yet the business fails to grow an audience. In some cases, the business can even be experiencing slow growth while others in similar circumstances are booming. The business cannot understand why.

While this content is being distributed via various channels (web, social, syndication, partner platforms), in the end it all runs via a certain distribution infrastructure. Businesses that seem to break through everywhere at once usually are running on a very powerful distribution infrastructure that has been built specifically to move content of this kind via these kinds of channels this fast.

Often in the form of automated processes that can deal with many channels at once and that can deal with many items of content. Such systems are typically custom-built to deal with the specific needs of a web-based media business. They are not ‘off-the-shelf’ systems of the kind used by ordinary companies to handle their communication. 

The key to such systems is often found in automated processes that can deal with all the various channels that need to be fed.

The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Content, It’s Distribution Infrastructure

Web, social, syndication, and partner platforms that appear in an instant are powered by special distribution infrastructure. 

In other words, there is a system built to move finished content extremely fast across numerous distribution channels. People in these organizations are using software that allows them to send out content such as news articles, blog posts, videos, and images instantly to multiple platforms.

Media founders navigating this exact challenge, like TDV Media’s Jeff Berwick, often find that the systems behind the content matter just as much as the content itself.

In many cases, the biggest determining factor for whether or not your content will reach an audience in time is the quality of your distribution infrastructure. These are the systems that allow you to syndicate content, partner with other companies to reach their audiences, and more.

Often, media companies are able to get their content to reach web, social, and other platforms instantly. 

How do they do it? The answer is usually that they’ve built, or adopted, infrastructure specifically capable of handling that kind of speed and channel complexity, which is exactly the problem finding the best composable content management system is meant to solve. 

Gartner research states that by 2026, at least 70% of organizations will be forced to adopt composable platforms as opposed to traditional monolithic systems. The older systems are just not able to keep up with the number of channels and formats of content that today’s media consumers are expecting.

The image of a publisher releasing content of equal quality at the same time is emblematic of two media businesses with vastly different architectures for distribution. The first of these two businesses is able to distribute its content across all channels and in all formats at the moment it is published to reach its full audience within minutes.

The other business’s content will, within hours, have missed distribution in certain formats to certain channels and, in many instances, arrive at the moment of its greatest relevance late. It’s not that one group of writers is creating inferior content to the other. No. There are simply two vastly different systems for the distribution of said content with vastly different end results for each.

Why This Gets Missed So Often

Most growing media businesses concentrate resources on content and marketing. These are the areas that are visible and easy to measure. A headline’s performance can be instantly assessed, whereas a publishing bottleneck rarely surfaces to expose the underlying problems.

By default, infrastructure decisions are made early on, usually by the person available at the time, and are based on price or on how fast something can be set up. Once the business has grown, no one ever revisits this decision because the system doesn’t seem to be failing in some obvious way.

It just isn’t big enough for the business as it is currently growing, and before long, it will have grown so much that fixing the problem will seem like a huge job that needs to be done a year or two earlier.

What Actually Changes When the Infrastructure Catches Up

These changes are very tangible for the enterprises that implemented modern content platforms. One example of such a media enterprise is reported to achieve 100% site uptime while publishing triple the amount of content, and even to experience 82% growth in traffic, as described in a case study published by WordPress VIP.

On the other hand, in a case study by Contentstack, K2 Sports achieved a build of websites 75% faster, and publication of content 90% faster, after they adopted a headless architecture for their publishing platform.

None of the above examples are technical notes. They can be used as a competitive advantage because of the above-mentioned business outcomes. 

These are reached faster when content is published consistently on multiple platforms and in different formats. It enables teams to work faster and more efficiently and therefore reduces the number of handovers between teams.

Fixing What You Can’t See

The intuitive fix of a growth problem (i.e., to write more in order to reach more people) produces more content that still does not reach the required number of people in time.

Those media businesses that have grown their audience (by whatever measure) are mostly those that have long ago fixed their distribution infrastructure problems, before they became obvious problems and were causing more and more pain.

So, by the time it becomes obvious that the growth of their audience is slowing down, in fact, the bottleneck in their distribution system has been constraining their ability to grow their audience for a long time.