In 2015, a slew of different-sized publishing companies, ranging from small shops with a handful of full-timers,

all the way up to massive entities like the New York Times, MTV, and the Washington Post,

began to shift company resources from writing and media that required a great deal of work,

like long-form articles, audio, and scripted video, to shorter form,

often less resource-intensive video projects of the kind that seemed to be doing quite well

on social networks.

This perception of what was doing well was reinforced by data coming out of the social media

world, and this seeming desire for such content also led to a nearly wholesale pivot within

social networks' algorithms to favor video content that often lasted seconds rather than minutes,

which in turn pushed more such videos into the timelines and feeds of users across essentially all social media ecosystems.

The word was that this was the future, streaming, short form video, and anyone who didn't get on board was going to be a fossil in very short order.

Thus, the social networks tweaked their formulas, and the aforementioned publishers of

various shapes and sizes all began salivating over the ad insertion potential, as it seemed

like this was a genuine upending of the normal

publishing order into a state that was more favorable for business models

focusing on shorter videos which in turn meant more ad insertion potential which

meant more exposure and clicks which meant more revenue for everyone involved.

That was the theory, at least.

What happened as a consequence of this shift was many of these publications laid off huge swaths of their employees,

which in some ways was another financial benefit of this pivot,

as it meant fewer people that they had to pay to produce content

with potentially higher ad revenues. And those employees that remained were typically tasked with

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