Sustainability in business and art

Christopher Jobson's approach to media business strategy is refreshingly different: “Don’t overthink it, don’t psych yourself out,” he starts. The founder and editor-in-chief of art publication thisiscolossal.com notes that so many business owners create meaningless end goals or unattainable metrics that, more often than not, just cause disappointment when they are not achieved.

“Of course, you want to have a plan and you need strong ideas of what you want something to be, but in our heads things grow exponentially in size and scope. I'm guilty of this too, but nothing has to be like that. You can start with smaller steps and start putting things out there. Look at things you can do within the course of a week or two.” When it comes to passion projects or creative endeavours, Christopher’s methodology has always been about the journey, not the destination: “Think about a sustainable process, a sustainable way to work. Your passion should lead you through.”

Especially for online magazines, the focus on ‘just getting started’ allows you to course-correct while you’re moving forward, motivated. But Christopher notes that, for this to work, you need to welcome feedback, and be open to changing things: “In the first three years, Colossal reinvented itself two or three different times while I was trying to find ‘Who am I? What am I doing?!’” He encourages you to be open to letting things go when necessary and listening to your audience: “It becomes a dialogue with them. Your fate is tied together.”

Even as thisiscolossal.com became a fully fledged membership business, Christoper never let arbitrary ‘business goals’ cloud his own thought processes: “I just asked my accountant and bookkeeper if we were okay. Then I focused on creative decisions such as ‘Are we publishing the right thing?’ — that's really all that matters. I’d ask, ‘Is this the right thing to be talking about? Are people interested in this? Are people still reading the site or newsletters and are our social media accounts growing?’ The answer was yes and that was it.”

Chris tells me that even now he doesn't dive much into reader statistics or behavior: “We don't even have analytics that tell us where people sign up to become members or ‘convert’ to paying customers. We just don't look at that. We have a much more holistic approach”. He says that the plan is just to put out the best work imaginable and ask people about joining the membership program in a casual way: “At the bottom of every article, there's a quick sentence about becoming a member and we mention it in newsletters but that’s it. We're not going to beat them over the head with it.”

Christopher says he’s less worried about exponential growth and more interested in making sure he is “still doing this in five or 10 years from now.” He continues: “I am much more about having a sustainable business.” Of course Christopher wants to get bigger and better, to try new things and meet new people. And there is growth, but “it's only on a sustainable trajectory,” he says, “We're not going to go public, or take out huge loans, or try to get investors.”

Under Christopher’s watchful eye, Colossal had been growing significantly and sustainably. But then the unthinkable happened and everything went wrong, in just a three-week period: “Our income was reliant on advertising, all of which was based on events that were happening in the real world,” he explains. This included universities wanting to advertise their continuing education programs, as well as exhibitions, museums and galleries wanting to share their events.

Then the pandemic struck and global events were halted, almost overnight. “We sat down in March 2020 and our ad rep said everything had been cancelled. There was nothing. It happened very quickly — within five or six days. It was all gone.”

Membership not metrics

At the time, Christopher and the Colossal team had seen many online publications and journalism projects launching membership sites, but still hadn’t truly considered it for their own platform. “What we do mingles with journalism but I treat the site more as a gallery and for education than for news,” he continues. “I was starting to subscribe to a number of local publications but I was having trouble justifying it for us. I was telling myself, ‘We're fine — we make our money off advertising, our store, and our events.’ I didn't want to ask more of our readership.” But the team were, perhaps subconsciously, starting to think holistically about the idea of membership — not just how to monetize but what to offer to readers.

(Nowadays, Colossal does offer member perks — for example, if you log into your paid account, it hides advertising on the site. “If people join at a certain tier, they get some awesome notebooks by our friends [United States of Letterpress] here in Chicago,” adds Christopher.)

In the back of Christopher’s mind was the concept of a different metric or baseline, “a core group of people who would want us to exist.” Christopher and team started toying with the idea of membership perks to offer readers in exchange for support but it seemed a way off. “I was so scared of asking people,” he says, “I don’t want to create this thing and reach out to people to ask for help and they say no.”

But the fear of becoming a slave to algorithms outweighed the reluctance to ask people for help. Christopher continues: “When you're existing on advertising, you are worried about your editorial schedule: What comes next? How good is it? How interesting is it?” Christopher tells me he has seen many websites veer towards clickbait: “Headlines are written in a certain way or you dip a little lower to write about things that normally don't live up to your expectations. Maybe you’re guilty of making some sacrifices because you want to hit a certain metric for advertising.”

The Colossal team found out the hard way that online ads are feast or famine: “With advertising, I cannot emphasize how big the peaks are and how deep the valleys are,” Christopher says, “It is absolutely shocking — I mean, orders of magnitude in either direction.” He explains that one month of revenue would be enough to carry them through for the next two or three, but then at the end of that, there would be nothing for weeks.

Stress was taking its toll on the eCommerce side, too. Colossal’s store was shifting products but of course doing this took more work, and created more pressure. “In the end, we’re like, ‘Wow, so we had a really successful Christmas’ but I can't get off the couch. I'm so stressed and there are 20 lost packages. I’m starting to wonder if it’s even worth it.”

The team needed something predictable and dependable. Christoper realized that launching a membership platform offers “untold levels of peace of mind for somebody who is running a small business and is beholden to themself but has employees and bills to pay.”

Membership makes income more regular, “to the point where the peaks and valleys of advertising don't matter anymore,” he continues. “Sure, sometimes you lose or gain members. And sometimes you come to a renewal period where you did a big push the year before and a larger number of people drop off than you wanted. But that curve is very round: it doesn't spike up or down.” Revenues only fractionally change from month to month. “Even if an event or advertising campaign is canceled, the news isn’t as alarming, because you're like, ‘We still have our members!’” smiles Christopher.

On the note of keeping things consistent, the Colossal team haven't changed their membership structure or messaging much since launching two years ago — but one major edit was to ‘ungate’ the content they had gated. Christopher and team agreed that gating their interview articles, so only members could read their “best content,” didn’t match their altruistic approach.

“You're excited to give your members something but at the same time you realize you’re putting a lot of work into something that only 1% of the audience is going to be able to access,” he continues. So the Colossal team asked their members if they would be happy for this content to become public — in a sense, they would contribute to it so it could be “available to everyone.”

The team sent out a poll in a member newsletter and 100% of the readers agreed to the idea: “There wasn't a single person who said no to doing this,” Christopher confirms. “I’m very proud of how membership worked out but, had I realized how easy it was going to be — how receptive our audience was going to be — we would have moved even quicker.”

Reinvention: Becoming more meaningful through membership

One aspect of Colossal that has changed is its editorial standpoint. “In the early days, we were much more willing to just write ‘Is it cool? Is it exciting?’ without even thinking about what it meant, or about if it harmed the environment or hurt a group of people,” Christopher says. Over time, with feedback from their audience, they’ve decided the things they are going to cover are going to be at least neutral if not beneficial for society at large.

“We are dropping things that we feel are no longer suitable and we’re developing a core set of values,” he continues, “As we've grown, and as we develop these relationships with our audience and our expectations of what they're going to see on the site, what we're doing has become much more meaningful.”

Christopher explains they are now writing about topics he never would have thought about initially. They’ve moved away from “the gratuitous and unhelpful” towards social justice, climate change, and human and animal rights. “That's what really connects with people and it's what makes me wake up in the morning: knowing that you're trying to push for change in the world,” he adds.

“Even the little things add up,” he continues. “Before we used to write more about balloons, and every time we would have environmental activists write to us explaining the real-world effect of balloons in the air.” The Colossal team would write about large installations that involve mirrors as many artists like to build “big reflective monoliths” in forested areas or deserts. “You don't realize just how many birds they kill,” Christopher says, “Activists would reach out to us and write, ‘These are all the birds that they have to pick up every day from around the art installation.’” The team made the decision to stop writing about these kinds of artworks: “It may be something that is visually amazing or groundbreaking aesthetically, but if it’s harmful it’s no good.”

But Christopher has risen to the challenge: “It’s certainly harder to find stories to fill the gap of not writing what everyone else is talking about, but I feel totally empowered to look harder for stories.” He confirms that readers are going to see more about artists that are working in the environment, who are ringing alarm bells, and “doing so in a really aesthetically amazing or groundbreaking way.” The niche they’re leaning into is contemporary art and the environment: “It's kind of ‘our beat’ now and that's what our audience responds to. In this sense, I look at us as an antidote,” he says.

Indeed, even the format of the writing is a cure for modern life: “One metric we do pay attention to is ‘Why did you join today?’ and one of the responses we frequently see is the idea of refuge; the idea of escape,” says Christopher. “Our approach to publishing is soothing. There is a fair amount of good news, but even for the bad news we thread a fine needle of not wanting to be angry and not wanting to get in people's faces.”

The Colossal team finds artists and designers that are dealing constructively with important topics, and then write about them. Christopher elaborates: “We say, ‘Look, here's somebody who's not just being angry about something’. Instead they take this energy, and funnel it into something amazing or something that is effective, or that gets a lot of attention.”

Two recent articles have come to exemplify the future direction for Colossal. One is on the People's Pottery Project, in Los Angeles, which employs ex-inmates for their first job after being released from prison. “How can we talk about mass incarceration on Colossal? It's just not a topic that you can go straight into,” says Christopher.

The employees work for the project, and learn skills for creating ceramics, and “they make all kinds of amazing things.” Colossal loves this constructive approach: “Not only do I get to talk about ceramics and business, but I get to talk about the state of incarceration in the United States.”

Colossal also interviewed Cara Levine, the artist who created the This is Not a Gun project, which was a roaming art installation that has since been made into a book. Contributors were asked to sculpt objects that were mistaken for guns that led to somebody being being killed by the police. “This is something I’ve seen in the headlines every day, but how does it fit onto a contemporary art site?” asks Christopher. “But then you find this project and you realize that this is it. This person is doing it and now we get to talk about it.”

Christopher states that looking for these pivotal projects — “that are dealing with really serious issues that we feel we can bring into this space” — has become Colossal’s raison d’etre. This sort of curation technique has becomes Colossal’s editorial standpoint, on what they do or don’t cover. “This has become our critique of the art world and society,” he concludes. It sounds like Christopher’s approach to business — about how focusing on the process, operating sustainably and growing thoughtfully — has now translated into making the world a more thoughtful place, too.