Journalism is in desperate need of a return to first principles, particularly on the monetization side. Want to know why everyone wrestles with the do-we-or-don't-we-optimize-for-traffic problem? Because almost all publications treat "traffic" as a homogeneous set. The ur-audience. Eyeballs are eyeballs are eyeballs in the eyes of most publications, and in the eyes of the advertisers who spend there. Sure, a lot of pubs will pay lip service to how "upscale," "educated," and ostensibly high-value their readership is -- if only to put a premium on impression costs. But the truth is, few people are being very smart about segmentation. We're still being ruled by top-level traffic analytics.

It should be readily apparent that audience size, uber alles, does not yield the best content -- nor does it yield the best audience. I would bet that 10,000 legitimately high-quality readers for a specialized blog post are worth more to advertisers than 1 million readers of a tossed-off Buzzfeed poll. The problem is, advertisers don't know that, and nobody's making an effort to educate them. Everyone's still chasing impression levels and scale, presuming that conversions will always be awful.

The pubs who break this cycle will be the ones who invest in high-quality journalism and high-quality analytics and innovative ad models. It's time for us to completely rethink the journalism ad model. Only then will we change things.

I apologize if I sound like I'm on a soapbox here. It's just that I've spent the better part of this past year wrestling with this problem at various publications, and close to a decade wrestling with it in the TV business before that. The Homogeneous Audience Theory is one of the great, untackled problems in media today. Everyone knows audiences can be segmented. Few people do it. Instead, people assume conversion percentages will always be a tiny fraction, and thus, their job is to multiply that fraction by a huge set of eyeballs. Let's reengineer that equation in favor of the conversion multiplier, by way of building more purposeful and curated audiences.