News in the information space
Why packaged media is losing ground to individuals.
Last chance to weigh in on how publishers are approaching identity solutions now that the third-party cookie’s long goodbye has gotten longer. Take the four-question survey.
Also, I screwed up the link to Lucas Quagliata’s piece about how brands and creators can work well together. Check it out here.
The Olympics and the future of TV
This week on PvA, we discussed several topics:
- The Elon Musk conversation with Donald Trump on X
- The decline of social networking and rise of algorithmic content machines
- YouTube emerging as a power center in the post-TV mediaspace
- Why the Olympics were a modern media product
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On my radar
Doesn’t matter if you’re a creator hustling up donations, Apple is going to take its cut; Eric Newcomer embraces the “influencer journalist” lane; Eric Schmidt says the quiet part out loud that much of AI is based on theft (and the boss class doesn’t think you’re really working from home); The Trade Desk’s valuation vs agency holding companies is a reminder of how much better tech businesses are than services; thanks to AI, search is fragmenting and verticalizing; the University of Florida’s independent student newspaper did the work and exposed outgoing president Ben Sasse’s questionable spending; go figure, webinars are a breakout tech of the presidential campaign; the war on GARM will bring needed scrutiny of the brand-safety racket that’s bled news publishers of ad revenue; we might be nearing the point where being “terminally online” is a go-to insult and being on your phone all the time is decidedly uncool; Meta vacuums 21.3% of digital ad spending while only accounting for 7.5% time spent; the Boston Globe nixes a new podcast because it found podcasts don’t drive subscriptions but they’re a good way to expand a brand like Wirecutter; Google’s ham-handed AI ad during the Olympics is a sign of how hard it is to use the typical emotive tools of brand advertising for a tech wants to replace the needs for humans; churn rates will go up as the infernal call-to-cancel era ends; and finally in great moments in lawyering: Disney tries a novel wrongful death defense by pointing to an arbitration clause the widow plaintiff agreed to as part of a Disney+ trial.
News in the information space
Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not agree on much. One thing they do agree on is that the information space has swallowed the news media. On Monday, Trump was engaged in an audio conversation with Elon Musk on an X Space, drawing over 1 million concurrent listeners and far greater reach as the packaged news media dutifully amplified it. Yesterday, Biden hosted 100 influencers/creators to the White House, declaring them “the future.” Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has not given a single interview to the news media or held a press conference, choosing instead to ride an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm that’s been turbocharged by memes.
One of the defining features of the information space is how packaged news media competes with anyone or anything with an audience. Centralized mass media has fragmented, dissipating the power of packaged news in favor of new forms of what I call conversational media. This is most acute in political news but is not confined to it. Whether in business, tech or lifestyle, packaged media is losing ground to individuals.
