The future of media

A bold prediction

As one of my New Year’s resolutions, I made it a goal of mine to limit my consumption of “daily news.” It’s endless, mostly useless and primarily clickbait to sell ads. But it wasn’t always this way.

On May 31, 1980 (when I was 3), the world was a very different place. The newspaper was paper, delivered by a kid on a bicycle. The news was on TV at 5 pm, the first 30 minutes local and the second 30 minutes national. It was the window into the world, and people even cut out articles to show their friends “have you heard about Mount Saint Helen’s? It erupted 13 days ago!” “Wow. No. I hadn’t. I wonder if the amount of ash in the air will have a cooling effect on the planet and what the long term impact of CO2 emissions might be…” responded a curious 3 year old. It would be 18 years before I could Google that, and 24 more years before I stopped using Google because of its influence and monopoly on search (currently 93% of the worlds search is done on google and according to research by Dr. Robert Epstein who is a behavioral psychologist, in a group of 100 undecided people, through their “search suggestion options” they can move 90% of that group to a certain point of view, which definitely influences elections. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of google was a close friend of Hilary Clinton, advising her throughout the campaign and was a contributor to the Clinton Global Initiative. So there’s that…)

Then, on June 1, 1980, CNN became the world’s first 24 hour news channel, and the race to produce content worthy of 24 hours a day was on.

Flash forward to today and the world of media is very different. Everything is available digitally, “objective news” has been replaced by “raving opinions” and the model by and large is supported by advertising (as is Google). The consumers are the product and all this free stuff has a very high indirect cost, not the least of which is you buying those sneakers you see everywhere. But it’s reaching a tipping point as consumers realize they aren’t getting what they pay for (nothing).

Which brings me to Spotify. Joe Rogan has become arguably the most listened to talking head in the world. Despite the clickbait headlines to the contrary, he unapologetically brings conversations to the world that allow the listener to decide what they agree and disagree with, and it makes clear that it’s just one persons take. His 10 minute video and backhanded swipe at Neil Young may be the best takedown I’ve ever seen. Add to Spotify, Substack which is bringing readers an aggregation of content (paid and unpaid) that they themselves pick and choose to subscribe to, and the ability to influence the narrative dies with each critical piece from a trusted and followed author.

My prediction? Spotify buys Substack, they expand the universe of independent personalities and the disaggregated world of “pay for content you want” and it becomes the next big media company, successful precisely because it doesn’t drive the narrative.

But DRW, how would they make money, I don’t pay for what I read on Substack or listen to on Spotify? True… but you have Netflix right? They just raised their prices to $19.99 a month and they aren’t growing subscribers as fast so they need to adapt their model to support their astronomical share price. So long term, Netflix pivots and adds the TV portion of these personalities to their movies and they buy the combined Spotify/Substack entity.

So there you have it. Netflix displaces CNN. As Reed Hastings famously said in 2017 “You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep.” And volcanos make exciting TV.