The feeds are dominant
For now—and then the chats will be everywhere.
Good morning.
If you’re in L.A., I hope you’re OK. If you know anyone in L.A.—I hope they’re OK.
No way to find a graceful segue out of that—but let’s get to today’s newsletter.
Bear with me because we’re going to once again be in kind of heady territory again today.
I might be too close to all this “completely changing media ecosystem and information space” stuff but I truly do think these are kind of heady times where one aspect of the previous century is radically changing and taking a new shape for the present century.
I spend a lot of time highlighting things Troy Young has said or written about. And, apologies, I’m going to do it again today.
I like listening to Young on podcasts—it makes me feel like I’m much smarter than I am and that I have a lot more experience running a media business than I actually do.
And last week in a hotel gym in midtown Manhattan, I listened to Young outline a few interesting ideas on a pair of podcasts.
First, he appeared on Puck’s The Grill Room podcast and talked to Dylan Byers and then he was on his own People vs. Algorithms podcast talking about the information space in 2025.
The most enlightening thing Young did was outline the main buckets or interfaces that make up the internet in 2025: search, feeds, and chat.
I’ll just share how Young breaks it down:
“Search is navigation for the open web. Search is all powerful because it directs us to all things and many of these things have commercial outcomes. Today this is the most valuable information vortex in the world.
“Feeds are curated lists of content. Curated by humans and algorithms or both. Lucky people (NYT, Netflix) own their feeds/content and offer subscription access to them. The owned-feed subscription flywheel is the preferred and most stable of media models.
Others organize feeds from many providers. Owning feed distribution is also very valuable because it amounts to owning an access point, a daily habit and the commensurate self perpetuating data position. History shows us that the feed distribution pole position only usually sustains in a digital world if the feed utility is combined with a more magnetic form of utility like communication.
Facebook became an important feed aggregator because it was also a daily communication utility. Google News/Discover is important because it is attached to the firehose of search. Prime Video is attached to Prime Shopping. Instagram and TikTok are killer feeds because they have social network scale.
We have a new growing vortex and that is chat. Today, you ask the chatbot, it does not feed you. But it could easily feed you. Quickly you have something new whose utility transcends either chat or media consumption alone.
Enterprising chat providers like Perplexity want it to feed you. In other words, they feed the AI machine questions, and the AI makes a news feed for you. The output can easily take many forms, including a surprisingly utilitarian AI podcast.
ChatGPT could easily become a feed too. And when it does it becomes increasingly important as a media distribution channel. Rest assured that novel interface variations will come for chat to make it a more accessible media starting point. This is a key trend to watch in 2025.”
I think this framework is a good way to think about the way you use or engage with different parts of the internet right now.
If you work for a lifestyle publication right now—like, say, I do— where does your brand fit into this? How does it stay competitive with places that own better or more widely used feeds? How does it stay competitive with places that are search engines themselves or who have invested in better search functions as the core part of their product? Are you prepared for the emergence of the chat x feed experience?
Feeds are the most widespread experience on the internet today. And there are new ones emerging every day. Substack has a feed in Notes. And each Substack is a feed in and of itself. What makes yours worth paying for? What makes yours worth coming back to? What makes yours worth trusting?
This all feels important based on this need for an “internet sherpa” as I wrote about earlier this week. And in light of Meta’s announcement that they will no longer fact check or moderate content all while they make political content more prominent in their feed surfaces.
That doesn’t seem very promising. At Axios, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei laid the current ecosystem out in their own way via trademark bullets. How do they conclude their story? With this quote.
“The burden now falls on you to find sources of information you trust for reliable truth. That means better scrutinizing not only the publications you choose, but the individuals you follow on social media. That's a lot to ask — but it's the new necessity.
There’s more options than ever and not everyone can possibly move fast enough or engage enough people to survive. That means things are going to consolidate and fall by the wayside over the next two years.
I think it’ll happen slowly and then all at once. I’m just not sure how.
I guess I’d be a lot smarter and richer if I did.
One Rumble quote
“As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: ‘We are the media now.’
The idea seemed to capture a growing sense that traditional journalists have lost their position at the center of the media ecosystem. Polls show that trust in mainstream news media has plummeted, and that nearly half of all young people get their news from “influencers” rather than journalists.
In its place, they argue, are right-wing digital creators who have found hordes of fans online. Rumble, for instance, is tiny compared with YouTube, but it is a primary source of news for millions of Americans, according to Pew Research Center. On election night, its active viewership topped out at more than two million, and the company said in a statement that it averaged more than 67 million monthly active users in the final quarter of 2024.”
This is from Stuart Thompson’s piece in the New York Times about using Rumble as his primary source of information for a week. Classic “I did something for a week and here’s what happened” piece! But talk about needing an internet sherpa…
More links to guide you
It’s been well covered but I had to note that the Washington Post announced layoffs to 4% of their staff earlier this week.
There’s too much drama at the Washington Post to cover but one of the many items that caught my eye was Puck poaching a new chief Washington correspondent from them. I’ve very much enjoyed Abby Livingston’s sober coverage of Congress and I’m interested to see how they continue to cover Washington D.C.
Got a pair of podcast stories for you
Ted Gioia wrote about why your boss will be starting a podcast in 2025.
And Nick Quah talked with the Verge about why every company wants a podcast now.
TechCrunch reports that Bluesky’s post-election growth is slowing. I may not need to talk about Bluesky again!
At Feed Me, Emily Sundberg asked her readers to predict what will happen to every industry (including news and media) in 2025. Some good stuff in there!