2025 trendlines

Welcome to the end of the year. Thanks for reading the newsletters, listening to the podcasts, attending our events and downloading our research. We have a lot planned in 2025, including more events. I’m looking to expand the purview of The Rebooting with an analyst steeped in what I call the Information Space. The future of the media industry is being determined on the fringes, in niches and with alternative business models. I’ll have a full post on this in the new year.

Today, a 2025 preview of trendlines in the media business. 

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2025 trendlines

2025 will be the year the full force of the Information Space is brought to bear. The decline of mass media isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. It’s been happening since the beginning of the internet, only the pace dramatically accelerated coming out of the pandemic. 

The Information Space is decentralized, often niche and personality-driven. 2025 will make clear how much larger, and in many ways influential, it is than mainstream media. From chaos to anarchy.

Just look at the Timothée Chalamet press tour, which is hitting College Football Gameday, Theo Vonn and other podcasts. Promo tours were a fixture of magazines and late-night TV. The results are better than some rehearsed funny backstory workshopped in the writer’s room on Jimmy Fallon, or magazine cover story based off of a 15-minute interview. 

The overall mainstream media industry will continue to shrink as alternative media rises. It’s hard to see dynamics that will reverse that trend. 

The mainstream news industry had the roughest of years. Influence has leaked to the periphery. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy used X to kill a massive funding bill. Like it or not, X will serve as a major locus of news in 2025. Most of this will be in interpretation, without a doubt, but I expect we’ll see growing power in a new breed of Drudge Reports like, I’m not kidding, Autism Capital. 

Cable news is in for a downsizing. The math isn’t mathin’ here. CNN continues to lose viewers. MSNBC has lost half its viewers since the election. The five panelist shoutfests have entered the uncanny valley. Ground will continue to be lost to podcasts and YouTube shows.

Podcasts will move from the fringe to the center as the most influential shows become media entities of their own. They’ll build out their own networks and operate from a position of power, even if they will continue to position themselves as the outsiders to mainstream media. 

Publishers of all stripes will continue to look for ways outside of ads to make money. Events and activations will be pushed to the limit. Commerce ambitions will be scaled back until Google sorts out what business models it finds acceptable. (Imagine Google telling publishers they need to have people as W2s vs contractors.) More consumer-oriented publishers will look to B2B, which never had an extinction event. The mechanics of these businesses are different, so I expect plenty of false starts and disappointments at slow traction.

Direct payments will remain top of mind for most publishers. The open web will be more like a series of gated communities. Expect to hit a lot of walls and dead ends. The inevitable onset of subscription fatigue will lead to more bundles.

Email newsletters will remain a refuge of sorts, only a much-needed winnowing will take place of the many growth-hacked arb plays that are following outdated playbooks. Email will get rougher overall as yet again publishers will recognize that what they thought of as a direct connection is actually mediated. Wait until AI fully comes for emails. I don’t see why Gemini shouldn’t be able to read all the email newsletters I got, summarize each briefly with the option to read more. It could unsubscribe on my behalf. 

AI media engines will disappoint. When it comes to creation, I haven’t seen much, outside of demo videos, that makes me think they will create much that’s unique and valuable. Synthetic media will continue to flood social media platforms to the point where they’ll become horror shows. Just take a look at what’s happening on LinkedIn right now. 

Publisher-AI company tensions will continue because the bid-ask spread for publisher content is too wide. No publisher is getting a big enough check, and most will see very little. Unless the New York Times pulls off a win against OpenAI, I don’t see AI licensing being a meaningful business drive in 2025.

The use of AI will become a central role in continued management-union tensions at publishers. In the long run, it won’t change the economics of the business. These businesses need to do more with less and get even leaner. 

See you all in January. Appreciate the support. Have a great holidays.