WatchMojo may be the biggest media company you’ve never heard of. If you think you have what it takes to partner with WatchMojo & better harness and project our message, hit me up.

When I launched WatchMojo, we had a series of companion blogs (yes, what’s new is old again). I thought we were late to the web video game, but in many ways, we were premature. This was before YouTube had emerged as the dominant platform, Netflix was still sending out DVDs by mail (let alone be the dominant SVOD platform). There was no Truview/Adsense. There was nothing. I had to read up on media’s evolution to try to guess where the future may take me. As I was planning to raise financing, I was compiling data, facts and figures. Eventually, instead of emailing myself this information, I set up a blog called HipMojo.

Rafat Ali’s PaidContent.org was a pioneer in this universe in the early 2000s. By mid 2000s, most blogs were on tech products (TechCrunch), Web 2.0 (Mashable, ReadWriteWeb) and HipMojo was essentially covering the intersection of Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Hollywood (if you look at Context Is King’s header, you can connect the dots). The writing helped me quite a bit, but eventually I realized that to scale such a property, I’d need to hire an army of writers… Since we were at the dawn of the mobile video revolution, my professional goal was to build a world-class operation focused on informing and entertaining (our Vision) with a video on every topic (Mission). Henry Blodget was plotting his comeback and blogging on Internet-Outsider, which eventually morphed into Business Insider. Eventually, I de-emphasized HipMojo, since the writing was a means to an end: building an organization. I did continue to write weekly columns for MediaPost covering media, advertising, and video; as well as TechCrunch, covering entrepreneurship and startup financing and strategy.

The writing opened up many doors – conference panels – but mainly helped me punch above our weight. In 2012, I published To Blog or Not to Blog for TechCrunch (original article, reposted in our archives) which could essentially be summarized as “Do What Comes Naturally To You.” It listed some of the advantages as being in control of your message: Anthony Robbins put it best when he said: “We’re defined by the stories we tell ourselves.” 

Blogging helped me establish our brand with professionals but by 2012, I also knew that I needed to establish what WatchMojo meant to consumers/viewers. It’s not a coincidence that WatchMojo took off when I stopped writing, though it could also be said that I stopped writing once WatchMojo took off after I tinkered with the production/distribution strategy and made our four big bets.

Paging PR Professionals

If you fast forward to 2020, I decided to launch Context Is King as a companion to Context.TV as I continued to tinker the brand’s identity and editorial to find its platform/format fit and build a new, parallel universe by expanding eventually into scripted programming.

Not being one to have a hard time expressing myself, I never really considered hiring a public relations firm. But as we get bigger, I realize that because I am personally a bit too humble (being transparent doesn’t nullify modesty!) to want to hire a PR / publicist, the company I lead could perhaps benefit from the services of such a professional or firm, especially as WatchMojo and MsMojo celebrate its 15-year and 5-year anniversaries respectively. In other words, I still remain somewhat reluctant to hire a personal publicist, but I do admit that I may be doing a disservice to WatchMojo by foregoing adding such a member to our team. In many ways, WatchMojo is the biggest media company you have never heard of. Help me change that and showcase my awesome team’s work even more. If you think you can partner with us to help us better channel and project our message, hit me up. Check out our sizzle in the meantime!