We need a name for the kinda channel drift where niche brands with existing name recognition end up degenerating to general-interest content farms

Like, Cracked, I remember that as Mad Magazine’s Pepsi, full of black-and-white puerile humor for 7-14 year old boys. And I guess making a comedy writing website from that makes sense, and I guess making individual voice central to that made sense, that was how the Something Awful frontpage went…

SparkNotes, the online competitor to Cliffs Notes, the condensed summaries and thematic analysis of literary works to fake your way through common English class assignments. It’s halfway down this road, on the one hand its content nuggets keep themed around “books you read in 11th grade” on the other hand I only realized this because I clicked through someone’s Twitter bio had her as their advice columnist

VICE, man, I’ve never really known what’s up with that, even before Disney sunk half a billion trying to make it Time-Life for the hipster generation, in the mid-’00s when it already had a reputation on paper and McInnes was like “wait it’s NOT cool to be a junkie, what’s COOL is being a RESPONSIBLE SKATEBOARD DAD” and the whole rest of the magazine was like “what’s COOL is being 23 and discovering cocaine 6 months ago”

(and then they sold their name as a symbol of “hip parties” to some iffy NY/LA DJ nights promoting Colt 45 malt liquor)