Good afternoon!
The Medium delivers in-depth analyses of the media marketplace’s transformation as creators, tech companies and 10 million emerging advertisers revolutionize the business models for “premium content”.
Each fiscal quarter, The Medium identifies three or four new trends that have momentum and seem poised to play out at a larger scale in 2023. These key trends pinpoint dynamic and constantly evolving developments in the media marketplace that are emerging from incremental shifts or fundamental changes. The bi-weekly mailings analyze these trends as developments emerge in real-time.
Of the three trends I wrote about last quarter, the trend I wrote about most was “Legacy media companies are throwing in the towel on their bets to own the consumer relationship in streaming and beyond.” Both Warner Bros. Discovery (HBO’s “The Pacific”) and NBCUniversal (“Suits”) are seeing lesser-known titles become hits on Netflix. Licensing matters. But the more advanced examples lay in the “daisy” product strategy at The New York Times and the product-focused strategy at Yahoo.
The trend I wrote about least was “Artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing applications and services are increasingly dictating content consumption.” Now, I wasn’t sure that would be the case, as I conceded at the end of the prediction: “It may be ambitious to assume that the AI marketplace is evolving so quickly that we are guaranteed more answers in Q3 2023, alone.”
But, the gist of the prediction remains true: AI is increasingly dictating which marketing content we will see and/or consume depending on the data that a media company has on us. The continued success of YouTube, TikTok and Netflix as every legacy media company struggles with less data and fewer tech capabilities are each and all proof of the pudding. We also saw it in the rapid, “disorienting” emergence of Meta’s Threads.
As for the third trend—“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”—I wrote in Monday’s mailing that the contraction in demand for legacy media content is playing out alongside a contraction in the supply of legacy media content. This will continue as one of the key trends of Q4 2023.
Here is a quick summary of that trend from Q3, and then two other trends for Q4 2023.
Total words: 2,500
Total time reading: 10 minutes
This trend offers one answer to the question I posed in Q2: “Media companies have millions of consumer credit cards on file. What are ...