How did a magazine that once covered celebrity culture with a modicum of intelligence become an SEO-driven content farm?
Anne Helen Petersen's essay "What Happened to People Magazine?" looks into the downfall of People, which used to be the top celebrity magazine, but now focuses on SEO and affiliate marketing. People was started in 1974 and by 2002, it had a circulation of 3.6 million. But after being taken over by Dotdash Meredith, People's website now mostly just puts together social media posts from celebrities and makes shopping guides. Petersen says this change reflects bigger shifts in celebrity culture, the media industry, and online content creation. "If People Magazine embodied an editorial idea whose moment had come, then People, in its current iteration, embodies an editorial idea whose moment has passed."
People's decline mirrors larger trends in media, including the rise of celebrity social media, the collapse of print advertising, and the dominance of SEO-driven content. Media conglomerates like Dotdash Meredith are laser-focused on strategies to maximize online ad revenue and search traffic, at the expense of everything else. People's transformation represents a lost opportunity to provide meaningful celebrity coverage in the social media age, instead becoming "indistinguishable from every other site trying to sell my demographic something on the internet."
Previously:
• The Book of Weirdo – a history of the greatest magazine ever published
