“ But in a world where magazine are a lot more than their printed artifacts, what’s a brand? I’ll go through my evidence in a minute, but here’s my current hypothesis. Brands are probabilistic now. The primary power of a brand is to increase the probability that someone clicks on, upvotes, or links to a story associated with your brand. It is not calculated primarily on a per issue basis as in the past. Instead, it’s a kind of implicit regression based on all the stories a publication has produced. This isn’t a completely foreign idea. In the past, a brand’s strength would have been measured by how likely people were to buy or subscribe to a magazine. Today’s probabilistic brand, though, is less coherent and much broader than before. ” - The Probabilistic Magazine Brand in the Social News Age, Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic - × × ×