Axios' Sara Fischer on the year ahead in digital media

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Hope everyone’s 2022 is off to a good start. I’m kicking off a new mini-season of episodes this month that will focus on what to expect this year in digital media. To start, I spoke with Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, who has chronicled the industry for the past five years with the Axios Media Trends weekly newsletter.  As a reminder, please leave a rating and review of The Rebooting Show on Apple Podcasts.

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I’ve always thought of the opacity of the digital media system as more of a feature than a bug. As a reporter that means sorting out what success looks like in an industry where smoke and mirrors have long been deployed as a strategy.

“The industry is going through sort of a reckoning around measuring success,” said Sara Fischer. “It's hard to quantify progress in the industry, whether it's television or digital. We just don't seem to have a ubiquitous understanding of how to measure success.”

Here’s what Sara expects to be major storylines in digital media in 2022. 

Expect more consolidation, only smaller deals

2022 presented a unique M&A market for the digital media industry. With a booming stock market and ample opportunities for financing, the focus was on big corporate moves like BuzzFeed’s SPAC and Vox Media’s purchase of Group Nine. But the year to come will likely be less splashy as big digital media players do smaller deals.

“There's going to be less talk about consolidation happening through SPACs. It's going to be more traditional and that's just because we've seen with BuzzFeed that there are some challenges to doing it that way. The SPAC market is cooled. What you're going to see more consolidation, but it's going to be private. So similar to what you saw with Vox Media, merging with Group Nine. You're also going to see more low hanging fruit continued to get scooped up. We're going to see a lot more of the Some Spider Studios getting acquired by Bustle.” 

The pivot from general news

Trump was very good to news publishers. Top news publishers racked up record audience gains and the obsessive attention Trump commanded from those who support and oppose him gave a boost to these publishers’ subscription programs. Of course, what goes up often comes down. For Sara, that means expecting news publishers to follow the lead of The New York Times and diversify their products into lifestyle categories to expand their customer bases beyond political obsessives as people increasingly tune out a “boring” Biden presidency.

“Given the absence of a very volatile news