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As we have written previously, Vox isn’t alone in moving away from video. Prior to the Vox ²Ô±ð·É²õ,ÌýMic had cut staff after pivoting to video. Cracked did the same, and . Adding Vox to the mix underlines the reverse-trend. Pivoting away from video is the new pivoting to video.

The changes at Vox come in the wake of Facebook’s , undercutting the strategy of driving video viewership on external properties; if the distribution dries up, the implied, hoped-for monetization dries up as well.

If there was ever as much money in video as previously word-focused publications hoped is debatable. I lived through a video push at a publication a few years back and am utterly not convinced. Video is always twice as hard and four times as expensive as anyone expects, and a supply gut will wrangle margins to dust. (On a related note, this is why podcasting is so popular. It’s easier to create and monetizes decently.)

But there is good news on hand. The Atlantic that it is working to hire about 100 new people over the next year, a “30 percent boost in personnel, with new people joining every division—from print, digital, and video to Live, CityLab, and Atlantic 57.”

How is The Atlantic making that financially possible? Here’s a hint from :

It’s oddly encouraging that something that wasn’t good—mass-produced social-focused god-awful video clips—is fading while consumer-financed traditional journalism is bubbling up.¹ It’s now a question of when the latter can overcome the cuts brought about by the decline of the former.

1. This is not to imply that Vox was up to such things, merely that such things were up at other publications.

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The Internet is half-ruined at the moment by tangentially-related auto-playing videos firing up whenever you want to read something. They talk at you, mostly about something only near the issue you wanted to read about. Sometimes you have to make them shut up multiple times before they give up. Sometimes they follow you down the page.

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It’s not great. But those irksome videos are merely another installment in making the economics of digital publications work. And there has been an ocean of capital deployed into the digital media space that is still hunting for returns.

But worse than autoplaying videos is watching publications shift their focus to video at the expense of their written business, only to then fall apart.

Take Mic’s pivot to video, which required a cut to  in the process. The success of this pivot : “Millennial publisher Mic.com says comScore data showing a shrinking audience is wrong — and it exposes a critical disagreement in digital media.” In short, the company claims reach on social networks for its video content, at the expense, it seems, of its on-site traffic.

It’s hard to get too cheery about a publisher giving up its own platform.

However, there’s more bad news, as is par for the media course. Out this week is sad news concerning Cracked. While Cracked isn’t a news site, the lessons are the same. Here’s :

This week, the humor site laid off a majority of its staff in the latest sign that ad-supported digital publishers are withering on the vine.

Twenty-five employees were let go, according to Kari Wethington, a spokeswoman for E.W. Scripps. She added that the onetime magazine, which in recent years has built out a robust YouTube presence in the hope of cashing in on video revenue, will now pivot back from its previous pivot and resume producing more written content.

So much for that.

All this fits into the bad news coming from the highest-valued media startups: Buzzfeed () will its 2017 revenue goals despite ; Vice () will is 2017 revenue goals despite ; and Mashable just for a fraction of its prior valuation .

It’s all incredibly depressing. The good news is that the largest publications — the Times and the Journal — are  with growing subscription incomes. Even some smaller sites (The Information, TPM, PoliticalWire, and others) are seemingly pulling it off. And Medium’s own clap-based payment system has shown . Those are all good things.

But it seems that we are going to need more digital subscriptions in our personal lives if we are going to keep as much media alive as we would like. At least if we want it to be any damn good.

From The :

Compass secures $450M from SoftBank

• SoftBank strikes again. This time, the firm is backing a massive $450 million financing for , a five-year-old online real estate sales and rental platform, at a reported $2.2 billion post-money valuation. The new investment brings total capital raised by New York-based Compass to $775 million.

Moda Operandi raises $165M

• , a high-end online fashion retailer, has raised $165 million in a growth capital financing round led by and Apax Digital. New York-based Moda plans to use the money to expand its footprint in the Middle East and Asia and to build up its online showroom and stylist offerings.

Tax bill will affect startups

• Startups are generally unprofitable, so corporate income tax cuts won’t impact their near-term finances. However, expected tax code changes are likely to have a ripple effect in the startup ecosystem, impacting M&A activity, employment decisions, and availability of investor capital, Crunchbase News reports.
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