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\u2019s 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\u2019s halfway down this road, on the one hand its content nuggets keep themed around \u201cbooks you read in 11th grade\u201d on the other hand I only realized this because I clicked through someone\u2019s Twitter bio had her as their advice columnist
VICE, man, I\u2019ve never really known what\u2019s up with that, even before Disney sunk half a billion trying to make it Time-Life for the hipster generation, in the mid-\u201900s when it already had a reputation on paper and McInnes was like \u201cwait it\u2019s NOT cool to be a junkie, what\u2019s COOL is being a RESPONSIBLE SKATEBOARD DAD\u201d and the whole rest of the magazine was like \u201cwhat\u2019s COOL is being 23 and discovering cocaine 6 months ago\u201d
(and then they sold their name as a symbol of \u201chip parties\u201d to some iffy NY/LA DJ nights promoting Colt 45 malt liquor)