Media & AI: exponential change is here

A couple of weeks ago, on the train home, I winced when I saw a notification from a former student, expressing sympathy for the latest wave of colleagues laid off from Business Insider. One-fifth of its staff are going — and yes, AI is the culprit:

The New York-based company joins several digital media companies in restructuring operations as consumers increasingly depend on artificial intelligence for news synopsis, which is eating into web traffic.

We once characterised the shift in media as a battle between the emerging digital pure-play brands and the legacy media. But now, even the digital players have struggled. Business Insider is preoccupied with preparing for sudden, unpredictable traffic drops. Buzzfeed is a pale shadow of the era-defining site it used to be. Vox Media is disposing of once market-leading sites.

Perhaps most shockingly for those of us who have been deeply involved in digital for the past two decades, Techcruch’s new owner just laid off Mike Butcher: 

The backstory: Recently, Regent LP, a US private equity firm, acquired TechCrunch and its staff in the US, from Yahoo. During this process, my colleagues in Europe and I were, unexpectedly, rendered redundant.

We’ve been talking about digital disruption in media for two decades now, and some were predicting it a decade before that. And yet, a generation into this change, it’s still happening – and companies are still being taken unaware. 

One friend of mine once characterised this as the “attack of the snails”. You could see the change coming from a long way off, but nobody reacted until it was far too late. And, while media companies had few excuses in the 2010s, they do have one in the 2020s: those snails can now leap to hyperspace.

Snails with hyperspace drives

Ah, do you remember the balmy days of 2021 and 2022? We were emerging from the pandemic lockdown, and media sites were writing serious articles about how the metaverse was going to impact their businesses. (Yes, yes, I know we were guilty of that, too. But, in our defence, we also sounded caution…)

Then in 2023, ChatGPT charged into the marketplace, and changed everything. All of a sudden, AI has been the focus of every business plan, every startup needs to have an AI angle. And it’s iterating at a frightening pace. It was the final straw for existing media businesses. Digital disruption has regenerated into exponential change. The last two decades of media change look like a warm-up for the big event.

It’s clear that this latest wave of change has taken the media industry largely by surprise. And that’s true of the few years before the rise of AI, too. While eyeing the threat from emergent digital media brands, too often we fail to spot the rise of new forms of media. From the Substack-style newsletter industry that’s eating away at traditional newspapers and magazine subscriptions, to YouTubers and TikTok Influencers stealing away precious minutes of visual attention, even as the traditional media fights over a limited streaming pot of money. 

All too frequently, the media industry doesn’t spot its true competition until it’s too late. But to explain and understand that, we need to take a step backwards.

Media is just the Attention Economy

The fundamental resource that the media targets is your attention. Each of us only has so much free attention each day, and all forms of media are competing for that. There’s nothing new about that idea – the crucial thing is that its importance has grown.

Even as recently as the 1990s, media was (relatively) scarce compared to attention. In the late 1990s, I used to spend a lot of time on trains, travelling to parts of the UK to profile the commercial property market there. I’d often buy a magazine and a newspaper to read on the train, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to finish them before I arrived. How to entertain myself? My mobile was a Nokia, and perhaps I could play Snake for a bit. My laptop was a brick, with infinitesimal battery life. And, besides, Wi-Fi on trains was a decade or more away. I ended up doing a lot of staring out of windows…

In the decades since, we have created, in ever-increasing quantities, media to soak up your attention. And given that so much of it is mediated through our smartphones, everything on that device is a competitor for attention. When I was in the newsagents in the 1990s, I could choose between a handful of (say) photography magazines. Now, every single app on my phone is competing for that attention. And that includes everything from what we’d recognise as “media” – podcasts, newsletters, websites – to other forms of attention harvesters, like social media and games. If I have a news app on my phone, it’s not just competing with other news apps; it’s competing with Reddit and Bluesky, too.

The rise of influencer media

A few weekends ago, I was driving home from dropping one of my daughters at a Guiding event, and I saw three people, in full hiking gear, walking along the green not far from my house. They were arranged in an odd pattern, and it was only when I spotted the lead hiker holding up a phone that I realised they were filming hiking content for social channels. (The phone was held vertically, so I’m presuming Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts.)

Technology has both made the tools to create media massively cheaper, and made it much easier to publish. I named my personal site One Man & His Blog in recognition of that insight over two decades ago, even if I was a little off on the media form that would become dominant…

But now a more fundamental threat hangs on the horizon: AI. Sure, some media businesses see it as a massive opportunity. Can AI cut costs and change workflows to make media businesses more profitable? There are long-term projects devoted to exploring this idea. But there are challenges, too. The public remains resistant to the idea of consuming AI-created journalism, for example.

Our survey data show that, across all countries, only a minority currently feels comfortable using news made by humans with the help of AI (36%), and an even smaller proportion is comfortable using news made mostly by AI with human oversight (19%). 

That, at least, should be a warning to publishers. At best, using AI-generated content is a race to the bottom, as literally everyone can do it. At worst, it drives a wedge between you and your potential audience. 

The new AI gatekeepers

We can’t rely on consumer resistance forever, though. The bigger challenge is that many of our means of discovery are also being mutated through the ever-present touch of AI. For example, search, a major source of traffic and the top end of a conversation funnel for many publishers, is becoming AI-driven, with Google expanding its AI Overviews and adding a separate AI mode.

That means the key problem for many forms of media is that our old gateway to traffic is declining. Some publishers are seeing up to a 50% loss in traffic, thanks to AI overviews.

We’ve been here before. The old gatekeepers used to be printing presses and broadcast antennas. And then they became social platforms and search engines. But those gateways are turning the traffic taps off. Facebook has been declining as a traffic source since 2018 (although there are some signs of that reversing), and the social networks are already filling with AI slop. Quite where we go from here remains to be seen. Could we see the same customer resistance to Google trying to answer everything on its own site? What are the incentives for publishers to create content for them to train the models on, if those models never send traffic back to those publishers?

If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that societies need to be asking these questions – but so do the companies involved. The current direction of travel could be an existential threat to media businesses – and then an extinction event for AI companies as they run out of new content and other material to create new products from.

Emerging media in an extinction event

That said, the media industry is not doomed. There will always be new forms of media. People have the urge to create, and will use new tools to find emerging ways of doing it. And people will always have spare attention they want to fill. The media business as a whole is not under threat. It’s the existing businesses that have to worry.

There’s a parallel here with the climate crisis: the planet will survive, and so will many ecosystems. The big question is: Will they be ones that can support human life? 

And, interestingly, the solutions are mostly the same: we move forwards, not back. We re-engineer our world to create better lives more sustainably, or we re-engineer our businesses to capture our slice of attention in a way that makes sense in the 2020s and beyond. We can’t uninvent AI, but we can figure out how to make our businesses more effective using it, without alienating our customers with AI slop. But equally, we can pivot to the human. At least three of the boom forms of media in the past decade have been centred on parasocial relationship: the identification of the audience and the creator. It’s true of newsletters. It’s really true of podcasts. And it’s at the very heart of the influencer economy. 

Mike Butcher probably has more knowledge of the European tech scene than any other working journalist. TechCrunch’s new owners might not value that depth of knowledge, but it’s certain that others will. And Mike has… plans:

So, I am excited to tell you what’s next. But not quite yet… ;-)

The reality is that it’s never been easier for someone like Mike to monetise his knowledge and reporting skills. He could set up on Substack or Ghost, and be earning within weeks. I hope, though, that he has bigger plans than that. 

Technology changes, humans do not. We still have limited attention. We still want to be entertained and informed. And we are still social creatures. In an age of abundant synthetic media, human connections become scarce. Figure out how to factor that into your media business. Or watch it eroded by people who have.

First published at NEXT Insights, and republished with permission.