Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Drudge, Huffington and Breitbart shaped online news through identity, myth and audience, study finds
Ashlee Humphreys and Gillian Brooks drew on nearly 100 interviews to trace how Drudge, Huffington and Breitbart became the person brands of online news. All three cases succeeded, so the study shows how founders helped write a young market's rules and leaves open whether the same combination predicts success.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Humphreys and Brooks credit three factors working in combination: an identity built on personal social capital, a founding myth, and an audience willing to fund and co-create content.
- The study covers online news from 1996 to 2012, when outlets such as The New York Times were just starting to post articles online and online-only outlets were launching.
- Interviewees described online news as distinct from traditional news, with its own norms, values and practices.
- Arianna Huffington already knew and socialised with many high-status liberal personalities before she launched The Huffington Post.
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Why it matters
- decision Founders entering a category with unsettled rules face an early choice over whether to make their own identity the company's brand, since in these cases that choice helped shape the market itself.
- capability An audience that both funds and co-creates content gives a young company money and material from the same group of readers.
- exposure Building a company's entire brand and operation around one founder's identity makes the business hard to separate from that person later.
The useful part of this research for an operator is the order in which things happened. For Huffington, the network came first and the company came second, and the outlet's identity was built on that personal social capital [8][4]. The researchers say all three founders were journalists who built their outlet's entire brand and operation around their own identity [9].
The setting is what makes the finding new. Earlier work on person brands studied markets that were already established. Humphreys, a professor of marketing at Kellogg, and Brooks, of King's College London, chose a market that was still forming [6][1]. In that market, the founders helped write the rules they then competed under [13]. "We were really struck at how profoundly these three people shaped some of those rules early on," Humphreys said [11].
Of the three factors, the audience is the closest to a business model. The researchers describe readers who were willing to fund content and help create it [4]. Humphreys said that when consumers in an emerging market really love an organization, their support does add up to something [12]. The traits the three shared run from the myth behind each founder's rise to how they mobilized their audiences [15].
A skeptic would say that three winners from one industry prove little. On method, the skeptic has a point. The researchers chose these three because their names stood out from the rest when they interviewed experts and searched online-news databases [3][14]. So the study describes what the winners had in common. It does not count the founders who had the same three things and never became synonymous with their industry [3]. The article says only that for every Edison there have been countless others [16]. Humphreys described the founders' role this way: "In each of these cases, these three people shaped their organization and were kind of like a secret sauce to its success," she said [10].
In my view the trade-off plays out on two timescales. A founder decides to put their own identity at the front of the company in its first quarters. The influence the study traces built up over a 16-year window of online news, and it ended with household names and a hand in the industry's future [1][13].
What to watch
- Publication of the full Humphreys and Brooks paper, and whether it sets out each founder's myth and how each mobilised readers.
- Whether the three-factor framework is tested on founders who had social capital, a myth and a funding audience and still never came to define their market.
- Whether the framework is applied to an emerging market outside online news.