This might be the worst year since I started working in media. Changes everywhere. Digital is evolving again. Both the infrastructural and surface layers of the Internet are changing.
Structural changes to the media business model are needed. More efficient ad sales are no longer enough.
Maybe even state subsidies (the Swedish model). Relevance must be more important than reach.
Paywalls – all or nothing. In a hybrid model, subscriptions don’t grow fast enough.
Charging AI bots (with Cloudflare as intermediary).
Polarization is coming.
On one side – large, established media.
On the other – private initiatives, channels, podcasts, profiles – media without domains, print, or frequencies.
Media in the middle, the mid-sized ones – are disappearing.
Fragmentation of the market = fragmentation of attention = fragmentation of budgets.
Podcasts, YT channels, closed TG groups, niche FB communities – new competition.
Mainstream social networks are reaching saturation.
The model based on user data and massive volume is losing efficiency.
Content radicalization is destroying mainstream audiences, led by political extremists and Facebook moms.
AI-generated content is flooding the networks, just to meet KPI and P&L targets.
We are entering a phase where everything is AI-generated until proven otherwise.
I’m only interested in content from my interest groups: Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp. Maybe I’ll leave in the feed content from friends, everything else is garbage.
Facebook fatigue is visible among advertisers too. Some are already noticing audience saturation – increased investment yields weaker marginal returns.
Budget shifting has already started, largely toward CTV.
The new BIG 3: CTV (already emerging locally), retail media (not yet), LLM ads (coming soon globally).
Influencers, politicians, businesspeople publish on their own profiles – X, TruthSocial, BlueSky – and established media outlets relay their posts, giving them media weight. In the end, that same content is republished by the media through their social channels.
By sharing Trump’s TruthSocial post, the media gives it relevance, boosts readership, and confirms its authenticity.
Traditional media brands are losing reach but retaining (and increasing) credibility.
Once again, the role of editors and curators is becoming important.
Brands and publishers today build credibility scores, not reach.
LLMs are becoming the new interface for consuming information.
AI is no longer a tool, but a new medium.
Source certification, watermarking, provenance – the new trust layer of the internet.
Verified human content becomes a premium category.
The creator economy is evolving into an ecosystem economy: podcast + event + merch + newsletter + Discord.
A new form of personal media enterprise.
From Rogan to MrBeast.
Kids are growing up with an established trinity: TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.
Cloudflare becomes the gatekeeper of monetization.
AI bots pass through customs and pay entry.
The end of the performance era.
Performance agencies can start closing shop.
Pmax and AI bidding are taking over everything.
Influencers are no longer hype. They’ve turned into a commodity.
It’s more logical to book them programmatically (Hypefy).
We’ve already gone through this cycle with display ads, then native.
I like the idea of influencer programmatization (you could even call it vaporization).
Creatives are up next.
Attention metrics (viewability, scroll depth, dwell time) are replacing conversion rates.
AI prompts have devoured search. Google is no longer the gateway to the internet. AI agents are the new discovery layer.
In the process, SEO has disappeared. So has organic reach.
Content still needs to be created and actively distributed to users (Linker, Taboola). Alongside content production, boosting has become a regular cost – for both publishers and advertisers.
Unthinkable just six months ago – now a fact: Google is defending its market share, but can hardly stop the decline.
Users have moved to other LLM platforms, and only a miracle can bring them back.
Search held 40% of global ad budgets, opening room for others.
Part will flow to LLM ads, part will be swallowed by Pmax, Google’s advertising black box.
A few billion will free up for other players.
Finally, the transition of TV advertising is happening as we speak (though not locally, not even close).
Everything is digital, everything is streaming.
GRP goes to the scrapyard; CPM is the new currency. Period.
Once again, there’s a chance for telecoms to get back in the game. Will they fail again like when they tried to keep SMS instead of messengers? My last 5 SMS messages: PayPal password reset, HT, and GLS.
By the way, HRT’s teletext is still alive and up to date. Keep your remotes with the TTX button.
Let’s bury at least some relics – homepage, R.I.P. Feed is the new homepage.
Media in 2025 are no longer the infrastructure of information, but the infrastructure of trust.
Everything else – content, platforms, algorithms – is already written by AI.
This might be the best year since I started working in media.
