"Nobody reads anymore.”
It's true. I read about it online.
I don’t bake cheese often, but when I do, I bake feta. Baked brie is too rich, best reserved for celebrating indulgent fall and winter holidays, gouda melts too liberally so it’s more at home between two slices of bread, and mozzarella on pizzas nestled between black olives and pepperoni.
Feta, though, is a superb baking cheese. It barely melts under heat. Instead, it softens and sprouts charred peaks that add texture and excitement to its tanginess. It’s creamy enough to spread and sturdy enough to fork.
Yessir, feta is a fine cheese to bake.
I can attest to all this because I’m currently looking through the oven door at my dinner of red peppers and aforementioned feta. Both are steeped in olive oil and bubbling to the tune of 425 degrees.
What draws me to the Greek brined curd is its stubbornness, its uncompromising attitude that declares to its audience that it would rather shrink and shrivel before it ever melts. I can relate to this obstinacy.
I like to think I’m a reasonable chap, and for the most part, I’m flexible and accommodating to contrasting opinions and ideas. I like it when people disagree and enjoy the process of understanding our differences.
But then I start my day and am bombarded with the misguided claims and all-knowing, all-seeing quips of the corporate world. Those wide-sweeping generalizations and humdrum opinions of how sales should sell, marketers should market, businesses should business, and, of course, how consumers consume.
That’s when my shoulders stiffen, my espadrilles dig into the sand, and El-Stubborno Stormo rears his ugly but decently-groomed head.
One of the common cries of today’s marketing industry is that consumers—or people as I like to call them—don’t read online. We’re too busy and our attention spans are impotent, having been bludgeoned and battered into oblivion by a battalion of stimuli. As a result, we can no longer muster the gusto to read lots of words on screens.
That’s the company line.
The pet peeve I have with the folks who proclaim such a thing, besides the fact that there’s a distinct lack of concrete evidence to support it, is that it’s such a lazy way to approach the topic.
Here’s the rub. People do read online. They read the things they find interesting, informative, entertaining, thought-provoking, and altogether captivating. They don’t read bloated, Marzipan words about crap that doesn’t interest them, regardless of medium.
Unfortunately, 95% of sites on the web are full of just that—crap. So yeah, people skim and scroll and save themselves the pain of reading about another industry-leading, best-in-class widget that’s revolutionizing and reimagining and retransformalizing its way through the digital fracas.
And you don’t have to take my petulant word for it. Ask the five million-plus digital subscribers to the New York Times—669,000 of whom came in the last quarter alone, pushing digital revenue past print for the first time.
There are other beacons of contrarianism, too, in the form of notable email newsletters that have established themselves in the messy media ecosystem with strong readerships.
The Skimm, a daily email newsletter aimed at young urban women, boasts 7 million subscribers.
The Morning Brew, a daily business newsletter with 2 million subscribers, recently sold to Business Insider.
The Browser, a newsletter that curates the best writing on the internet of all things, has 50,000 plus readers hungry for new material every day.
The mere existence and wide-spread popularity of Substack—the newsletter platform you’re hopefully reading this post on—is another giveaway. And then there’s the fact that a blogging platform like Medium attracts between 85 and 100 million users per month.
These are signs that, despite what the LinkedIn marketing savants would lead you to believe, we have not regressed into wide-eyed, excitable toddlers, unable to sit in one place for more than a goldfish’s memory, comprehend sentences longer than a tweet, or show interest in content that isn’t ‘snackable’, ‘skimmable’, or swipeable.
People do read. It’s just up to us—writers, reporters, marketers, communicators—to write something worth reading.
And if you disagree with me, then so be it. But please do enlighten me as to how you’ve managed to read all the way to the end of a 700-word post about marketing that started with me waxing lyrical about fucking baked cheese.
That reminds me, dinner’s ready.
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*chef’s kiss*
Allan