To remind you, The Medium identifies a few key trends each fiscal quarter that reveal the most important tensions and seismic shifts in the media marketplace. The key trends help you answer a simple question: "what's next for media, and where's it all going? How are the pieces lining up for business models to evolve, succeed, or fail?"

Read the previous three key trends The Medium focused on in Q2 2023. 

I am back from a much-needed vacation. I stepped back from writing — except for my newest monthly Medium Shift column, “Bargain Hunting in the Legacy Media Aisle” — and stepped back from LinkedIn and Twitter (which I do not plan to leave, even after the release of Threads). 

My small experiment over the past two weeks was to consume my Twitter feeds with a Marshall McLuhan-esque question as my lens:

What are the new technologies shaping media’s new content and business models? And with that question in mind, which trends or themes might surface that had not before?

I still watched news developments percolate across my multiple Twitter Lists (which seemed to average out to various, evolving takes on outrage against Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav). The only thing that truly thwarted my attempt at some time away from Twitter was the 2023 NBA Draft ( annual entertainment filled with egos, drama and surprises).

I kept an eye out for anything that would point the way as to which key trends from Q2 to update and how to update them. There was also the question of whether any new trends are emerging, anything that may point to incremental shifts or fundamental changes in the marketplace. 

To date, I have had one answer to this question in the description of The Medium, which is also one of three key trends for Q2 2023: "Premium content" is being redefined by creators, tech companies and 10 million emerging advertisers.

I offered another on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the essay “Consumer Data May Be Too Complex for Media's DTC Models”: One use case of AI as individual native applications sitting within a data warehouse. That puts AI in the ultimate position of dictating which marketing content we will see and/or consume depending on the data a media company has on us.”

Below are the other answers that emerged over the past two weeks, and they are the three key trends for Q3 2023.

Key Trends for Q3 2023

1. Legacy media companies are throwing in the towel on their bets to own the consumer relationship in streaming and beyond.
2. Artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing applications and services are increasingly dictating content consumption.
   
3. There is a less-discussed lens on how the demand for “premium content” is being redefined by creators, tech companies and 10 million emerging advertisers.
   

Total words: 2,100

Total time reading: 8 minutes