Is Text-Based Publishing Dead... Or Just Changing Shapes?
Everyone says you need video or a subscription to survive. They're wrong. Here's the playbook for building a thriving, modern partnership-focused media business on a simple, overlooked format.
They say that text-based publishing is dying. That no one reads anymore. That the future of the internet is a never-ending stream of AI queries, 60-second videos, and algorithmically-fed YouTube podcasts, and if you’re not a personality-driven “creator” or have a sustainable subscription product, you’re already a ghost (Never mind that you’re reading this on Substack, a platform built entirely on the premise that people do, in fact, still read).
It's easy to see why people think this when short-form video now accounts for more than half of all time spent on social media, according to the Digital 2024 report from Hootsuite and We Are Social. TikTok boasts over 1.6 billion potential ad viewers, and YouTube Shorts generates 70 billion daily views. The gravity of video is undeniable.
Except no medium ever really dies. Think about your music habits. I listen to terrestrial radio in the car, Spotify when I’m getting my step-count up on a walk around my neighborhood, and vinyl records in the evening when I’m doing the dishes. Three different media, all delivering the same beautiful thing. As the band Phish says in the aptly-titled song Death Don’t Hurt Very Long, “you’re just changing shapes!”
Human communication is always evolving. Forms lose their perceived value long before they lose their actual utility. And while the traditional article page—that block of text you scroll through, dodging the programmatically served 300x250 display ads—is indeed on life support, text itself is finding a new, potent life in a format most people are too busy to notice.
People Don’t Read Articles, They Read Headlines and Comments
Let’s start with the diagnosis. The old model for us Internet publisher types is on life support, if not already dead. There are still people winning at the game, but there’s no denying that people’s content consumption habits online are completely changing.
People see a headline, maybe skim a sentence or two, and then dive headfirst into the comments on their desired aggregation platform of choice—Reddit, Instagram, Newsbreak, or even Google Discover (if you read comments on the publisher’s site), which has become a sort of last-chance saloon for many a publisher’s programmatic ad business. I’m guilty of this, and not afraid to admit that’s the game now. The article itself is just the excuse for the conversation. Perhaps you gather some facts and context, but ultimately, you use them to form your own opinion on the subject.
And this isn't just a hunch; there are numerous studies supporting this change in our information consumption.
It’s one thing for me to say it, but it’s another to hear the idea being passed around by the digital media world’s tribal elders. Brian Morrissey, specifically, did a wonderful job breaking this publishing evolution down from a specific study in The Rebooting, then riffing on the aftershocks with Troy Young and Alex Schleifer on the People vs. Algorithms podcast.
The research comes from Google's Jigsaw and Gemic, who confirmed what we’ve all been feeling if you’re millennial-age or older working in digital publishing: young people (18-24) don't surf the web rationally; they do it emotionally. Their prime directive is to maintain what the researchers call "emotional equilibrium"—a clinical-sounding term for simply protecting their vibe at all costs.
Most of their online time is spent in a mode the study perfectly nails as "Timepass"—a state of mindless scrolling for fun or to feel relaxed. In this mode, actually vetting information is a drag they actively avoid. A cumbersome 3,000-word investigative piece is considered “heavy content," a certified buzzkill that requires effort they're not willing to spend.
And that’s the brutal math every publisher faces: how do you justify the cost of a 3,000-word report when your ADHD audience just wants a two-second vibe check? It’s a resource allocation nightmare when you’re trying to make payroll.
This is why the headline → comment dynamic is now the default setting for the internet. Why slog through an article when you can instantly get the "social thermometer" of public opinion from the comments? It’s the ultimate shortcut to figuring out what to think without the burden of actual reading. It’s the playbook for every talking head on TikTok or Instagram Reels who just regurgitates news that some underpaid writer broke. It’s lazy aggregation with a face, served up in a much more lucrative arena.
For traditional web publishers, including in my day job at BroBible, this is a five-alarm fire. No clicks from these channels means no ad inventory, which means the programmatic revenue flywheel sputters to a halt. And now Google is dropping the final bomb, using AI Overviews to scrape what little traffic is left. Soon, the only buttons on the internet that matter will be “post”, “play”, “send”, and, most importantly, "buy now."
If you listened to our internal meetings at BroBible, you'd think Google is the only thing that matters—and to our bottom line, it often is. But the truth is, all the compelling, engaging stuff is happening in formats that have nothing to do with search rankings and everything to do with how the internet works in 2025.
The Power of the Instagram Tile
So what's been our saving grace at BroBible? For the site itself, a hard-won, direct relationship with an audience built over 15 years. Being consistent and having a couple of lanes of expertise, like memes, has resulted in passive loyalty that still brings people to our site out of pure habit.
That, and the strength of our brand on the social platforms where that audience actually lives now. We learned we had to meet them there, in a new text-based format, and speak directly in our own voice. We didn’t wait for the old world to return; we built a playbook for the one that exists right now.
So, what’s the playbook in a world where people care about the headline and the comments in their content sandwich, but not the meat in between?
Many in the media and marketing industries believe the only solution is short-form video and creator personalities. But those formats are noisy, expensive, cumbersome to produce, filled with agents and middlemen, and the quality is… let's say variable.
We've found a huge win in our little corner of the attention economy with something I call "Instagram tiles."
They look like this:
They're insultingly simple: static, text-based images that package up a news moment, a study, a product release, or a funny observation. They’re designed to stop your scroll and deliver the whole story in a glance. Think of them as a magazine article or ad for the algorithmic age.
Specifically, we’re leaning all the way into them on our BroBible Instagram channel.
The format reminds me of old-school print ads. We spend significant time nailing the design for maximum engagement and shareability (shout out to Brett Haman on the BroBible team, who helped develop our current aesthetic and executes these with killer design chops).
We churn out a dozen a day, making deliberate creative choices based on taste, our collective idiosyncratic yet authoritative editorial voice, and a finely tuned perspective on sports and culture.
The magic is that this format doesn't fight the "headline → comment" behavior; it embraces it.
I’m of the opinion that the Instagram feed is the new article page. The tile is the headline, and the comment section is right there, waiting for people to get stoked about a new beer, argue about a sports take, or tag their friends.
I think this format gets overlooked by heady media and marketing types because its beautiful simplicity makes it difficult to value. You can’t easily plug it into a media plan spreadsheet next to a celebrity pitchman, a creator campaign, or a programmatic ad buy. It’s not a shiny object, like a creator rambling into their phone about how great some product is or an expensive stunt. It’s also so commonplace that few have considered how it’s become an entire sub-medium of its own.
It's a strategy that has built empires. Pubity, for example, has amassed over 35 million followers on Instagram largely through this text-on-image format, creating one of the most powerful content distribution networks on the platform. Brands regularly invest in advertising to get their brand news in front of people in this format. For example, I recently noticed Subway partnering with Pubity on the news of their Happy Gilmore 2 promotion, which has generated over 55,000 likes.
Ladbible runs the same playbook, inking sponsorship deals with brands like Bud Light to get their news into the cultural bloodstream. Here, check it out for yourself on Instagram.
This has been standard operating procedure for years with all the major sports media properties, including ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and Bleacher Report. Motorsport.com is doing this in an incredible way in autosports world. Whiskey Riff, in country music. Smart legacy brands like the New York Post, Rolling Stone, and the Condé Nast titles are mastering it. They invite you to go deeper and tease the 3500+ word thing, but they don’t insist on it to get the gist.
Every niche and affinity has an example on Instagram like this. Jenke Magazine about skateboarding comes to mind. Same with Field & Stream. It’s just what magazine publishing is now.
One of my favorite independent instances of this is extremely relevant to my interests, as an obvious fan of the aforementioned band Phsh: An account called PhishOnPhilm. With 98,000 followers and growing at a rapid clip, it’s basically an independent music magazine that aggregates concert videos, interviews musicians, shares news, shares memes, dabbles in the occasional music review, and gives life advice, all from the eclectic written point of view of its author, in a feedback loop with its audience. If you love music (and not just Phish, in fact Phish is more in the periphery than the main event), it’s truly one of the elite tier Instagram communities around.
This is all the proof you need: the rumors of text's death have been greatly exaggerated. It's thriving, but only for those who have unshackled themselves from the old, broken model of 'post, pray for traffic, and serve ads.’
I’m very enthusiastic about how we’ve adapted this playbook at BroBible. I believe it’s the most effective way to mainline information directly into people’s brains when they’re in that “timepass” state on socials. I’m pretty damn happy went all in on this format a few years ago on Instagram, because now it’s become a full-fledged partnership marketing product.
How about some receipts to back that up? Here you go. This was earned media and not paid, but we posted a simple tile about the old computer game Backyard Baseball '97 and the legend of Pablo Sanchez on the day the game was reissued on PS5 and Nintendo Switch.
It reached over 2.8 million people and was shared by more than 100,000 of them.
This, and scores of other “wins” like this, have taught me there’s immense value in thinking smaller and more strategically.
It’s a format that allows us to take a point of view on almost anything, much like a monthly magazine would. We can declare that boat shoes are making a comeback, debate the best way to grill a steak, or settle the score on a new movie. It’s a direct line to our audience’s daily conversations, all packaged in a simple, shareable 4:5 1080x1350 px portrait format.
And audiences like it because, well… It’s not 2000 words on something with ads that they hate in between, even though that option is available to them, should they desire to go deeper. Nor is it a video with a questionable payoff for the viewer after a couple of seconds of watching.
In the Internet arms race for attention, format matters.
A New (and Better) Native Advertising
So, how do you make a dollar doing this?
For us, it’s with advertisers.
The engagement on these tiles is consistently high, so we've turned them into a killer format for our advertising partners.
This is where, as a publisher, I get excited… !!!!!!
The 'share' and 'save' rates on our branded tiles often rival those of our best-performing organic posts, which is almost unheard of for paid content!!!!!
It’s a way to monetize diminished attention spans without feeling terrible about it. But it’s only as good as the idea itself. The stronger the impulse to DM it to a friend, the better it performs. This is why I’ve changed BroBible’s tagline on Instagram to “humble curator of oddly specific vibes you’d send to the group chat,” because that’s precisely what we do on that platform.
Here are a few we’ve done with partners we’re thrilled to work with.
Tap to see the posts themselves:
BroBible x Voodoo Ranger / Malort: Announcing a very wild new beer collaboration.
BroBible x Twisted Tea: Running a contest to fly a fan to the biggest golf tournament of the year that happens in Augusta, Georgia every April that we couldn’t legally say.
BroBible x Pabst Light: Light beers are all the rage these days, especially to us calorie-conscious millennial dudes that like to have a good dude. This new product announcement leaned into the blue-collar cool of the brand.
BroBible x HEYDUDE: A Solo Cup collab that just made sense for us to bro-down about beer pong.
BroBible x Dollar Shave Club: Simple, direct messaging that supported the video we made in the partnership.
Yes, this is posting an ad. But it’s also, in a way, not. It’s a brand paying for their message to be dropped into a real, engaged community that actually talks back—because it’s in our voice, not the focus-grouped ad-speak they use to sell stuff ad nauseam. Brands should be cowards about that. They should want to be the DJ of a party, and that’s exactly what this format unlocks when you load up the records on the turntables.
It doesn’t require the same attention from the consumer that video does. We’re reaching people in the “timepass.” The Jigsaw study found that in 'Timepass' mode, users want 'fun, novel content' served to them with minimal effort. Our Instagram tiles are engineered to do exactly that.
As an operator executing this playbook, this requires a delicate dance. You have to be willing to push back on their ever-eager PR teams—the ones looking for free marketing guised as "earned media"—and gently explain that their new product launch isn't news. It’s more akin to the native advertising gold rush that started on blogs over 10 years ago, which Buzzfeed and Vice thought would be the future of advertising (lol). Perhaps they were just too soon, and overly focused on formats destined to become extinct as Internet attention spans evolved over time?
To get it in front of our community, it has to feel like it belongs, and that takes an artful approach that can’t just be churned out as AI slop. That tension, when handled correctly, leads to much better and more honest business relationships.
I also love this format because it’s something most video creators won’t touch. It’s entirely different from their whole thing. For a creator whose audience is hooked on their personality, the tile format can feel like shilling and risk the authenticity that their entire one-to-one business model is built on.
But for a media brand like BroBible with an established voice, slotting a branded tile between organic ones is a natural fit.
To a savvy marketer with enough room in the budget to get a message reach, these two formats can work harmoniously in tandem—it's supplemental, not an either/or. Let’s say you created a cool new product that basically markets itself, or you’re doing a really cool giveaway. You can unlock max engagement and opt-ins via the power of the Instagram DMs by strategically executing both formats, just like what you would do with other cross-media plays.
Anyway, these tiles are now standard in all of our BroBible partnership packages. I think there’s room for it to scale as marketers seek more ways to capture attention for their brand-level programs.
I’m sharing this because I have a tendency to be a blabbermouth when a playbook works. Maybe it’s a need for validation, but I’d rather share a winning strategy than guard it. So here it is. This isn't just a little trick for engagement; we've been running for a year. It's a full-blown philosophy...
It requires brand strength, design resources (very important!), taste (even more important!), a unique voice ( crazy, crazy important!!!), and a deep understanding of your audience and what kind of content they’re prone to share (the most important!!!!). I believe this is how you build a text-based digital business that works right now, not one that hopes for the return of a bygone era.
For scrappy media companies like us, we have to be shameless to survive and occasionally thrive.
There are other ways this text-based format can be commodified as an incremental revenue media product, particularly in platform ecosystems.
If we were starting BroBible today from scratch, I’d go all-in on this format. Content distribution on the open Internet is just too unreliable to scale if you’re starting from square one. I’d build a subscription-based lifestyle product centered on quality storytelling and tastemaking, with a key feature being a commenting community, reminiscent of the message boards of yore. Funny enough, this is what BroBible was, once upon a time, minus the subscription revenue, because the tools to easily unlock that didn’t really exist yet.
I’d also spend considerable time thinking about non-advertising-dependent information products that can be commoditized by audiences, such as publishing a bi-monthly print magazine, and create a ton of "behind-the-scenes" videos about sweating every detail. In my wildest delusions of grandeur, this would lead to all sorts of avenues—events, podcasts, commerce, and an insider audience that actually feels special. The result would look more like PhishOnPhilm is now, down to the always-on grab-bag-of-a-presence (we’re good at that), and diversified fan-supported revenue streams that you actually have some control over (we’re not so good at that).
Plus, I wouldn’t have to give a damn what Google was doing this week, nor would I have to fight it out in Discover and pretend like that’s my entire endgame. Constantly thinking about that stuff can be extremely depressing.
So no, text isn't dead. It just changed its shape to survive this new reality, which is what good media has always done. You can either stomp your feet and complain about algorithms, or you can pay attention and build a hell of a business inside this new form that stands on better footing.
Frankly, I’d much rather be excited than glum all the time about the state of the Internet. It’s just a healthier way to live, work, and—with the winds of fortune in our sails—thrive.
God I miss having like thirty entertaining blogs to read a day.