Media
25 tweets
Ladies and gentlemen: Over the next week, we’ll be launching a handful of updates for our creators & power users. To kick things off, we’re opening up X Articles to all Premium subscribers. We’ve seen some incredible articles go viral over the last few weeks — and we’d love to see more writers posting on X. More to come.
The Oscars will stream exclusively on YouTube, starting in 2029.
I talked to 3 friends over the holidays about a model I have in my head for classifying all the media I consume because I’m that kind of nerd, and I want to share it because I think it’s useful for folks who care about content, whether that’s as a creator or as a consumer. >It’s also just fun to make up graphics and pretend like I know things about stuff, so buckle up for some chart art. The model is pretty simple. It combines two well-known spectrums together: the purist-tourist spectrum, which Virgil Abloh came up with and has been discussed in creative circles forever, and the timely-timeless spectrum, which is a marketing 101 idea. I’ll elaborate on both below, but here’s a visual to start. Let’s unpack this a bit. On the x-axis, from left to right, we have the purist-tourist spectrum, which covers the range of target audiences that a piece of content might have. A purist is an expert or someone with domain knowledge. They’re high context people who can appreciate the finer things in their niche because they know what to look for. A tourist on the other hand is a low context person that’s new to a niche but keen to learn. Side note: In this framing, “tourist” does NOT carry the negative connotation of not-belonging that it usually does on social media… instead, it’s meant to signal fresh eyes and curiosity. Next up, on the y-axis, from top to bottom, we have the timely-timeless spectrum, which covers the range of how time sensitive a piece of content is. For clarity, let’s say that “timely” means responsive to the present discourse and “timeless” means evergreen. When you slam these two spectrums together it creates 4 quadrants with different characteristics, and I labeled those with different grey boxes to denote the kind of creator that makes content at each intersection. I’ll define each of them quickly. Clockwise from top left we have: Insiders. These creators make content that’s timely for purists. They’re very plugged into the web of people and information in their niche, and they have access and insight that’s highly esteemed by other insiders. Scouts. These creators make content that’s timely for tourists. They go deep into new topics like insiders do, but they’re focused on making complex ideas accessible to a wider audience. Guides. These creators make content that’s timeless for tourists. They focus on curating the core ideas in a niche and explaining them to new people. Artisans. These creators make content that’s timeless for purists. They go deep on topics and add original insight to their domain. Often this sort of content becomes canon and is referenced by other purists. Let’s rip through 2 examples in real life to illustrate this further: tech media first, then crypto media second. Feel free to read both or skip to the topic you resonate with most. Here’s a tech media mini map with some example brands/creators. Starting from the top left and going clockwise we have… TBPN. The Technology Business Programming Network is insider media. Jordi and John host a 3-hour daily show covering The Current Thing in tech. They have a massive fan base because they’re high trust people that are widely connected and their content is very aware of the niche they operate in. It’s timely content for purists. WSJ Tech News Briefing. This particular Wall Street Journal podcast is an example of scout media. They have good, bite-sized coverage of tech industry news that I can send to my college friends without context to help them understand current events. It’s timely content for tourists. Wired: 5 Levels Series. My favorite example of guide media is this series that Wired does where they find an expert in a deep tech category like machine learning or zero knowledge cryptography, then they get them to explain their subject at different levels of complexity with an emphasis on education. It’s timeless content for tourists. Acquired. This podcast is the epitome of artisan media. Ben and David publish ~10 episodes per year that spend 3+ hours each covering a well-known business like Google, LVMH, or the NFL. Every episode has a long shelf life and millions of people make time to listen whenever an episode drops. It’s timeless media for purists. Next up, here’s a crypto media mini map with some example brands/creators. Starting from the top left and going clockwise we have… CounterParty TV. Threadguy is one of the biggest steamers in crypto, and CounterParty is his company and daily show. It’s an example of insider media because he gets the best guests in the industry to come talk about current topics, and people tune in because they get to hear from folks who don’t otherwise do interviews. It’s timely content for purists. CoinDesk Daily. As one of the oldest publications in the industry, CoinDesk publishes a lot of content, but their Daily series is an example of scout media. These videos cover what’s going in crypto in terms of regulation, price action, and company announcements in a way that's accessible for people who just want to follow along with headlines. It’s timely content for tourists. Coinbase’s Earn series. This video series was an entry point into crypto for a lot of people. It’s an example of guide media because back in the day it helped newcomers learn about the industry with the added incentive of letting them “earn” some coins in the process. Even though it was technically corporate media, I think it fits well as an example of timeless content for tourists. The videos are still helpful. Cobie’s essays. Cobie’s essays are the best example of artisan media that I can think of in crypto. I’m not sure whether he thinks about his writing like that, but in terms of essays that get referenced as canon in the industry his stuff is at the top of the list. There’s something shiny about distilling a decade of experience into a few thought pieces. It’s timeless media for purists. Now, there are lots of ways to analyze both the tech and crypto charts. We could geek out in 34 directions if this was an in-person chat, but to keep things tight, I’ll only share one pattern I notice before moving on, which is that purist media (in any domain) tends to be a point of reference where groups of people gather around the same podcast, essay, or video and use it as shared context… then on the flip side, tourist media tends to be an individual exercise in downloading knowledge like that scene in the Matrix where Neo learns martial arts by being plugged into a computer. TLDR: Purist content is social in nature while tourist content is not. Ok this is the part before wrapping up where I have to admit that there are some problems with the mini map we’ve been using. An obvious one is it’s rare for creators and brands to fit cleanly into a single category, and the grid struggles to capture that nuance. There are other good critiques as well – we’ll see if they come up in the comments – but friction aside, I like this model because it helps me make sense of media in different niches. There’s a quote from an old statistician that’s relevant here which is, “all models are wrong, some are useful,” and that’s the thought I want to end on. Even though these things have pros and cons, I think forcing a model onto the world is a worthwhile exercise because that process helps you understand where it does reflect reality and where it grates up against it. You learn just as much in either case. -BR P.S. Here’s an empty version of the mini map if you want to play around.
YouTube TV’s multiview is getting a huge upgrade, letting viewers mix and match channels
YouTube TV’s multiview is getting a huge upgrade, letting viewers mix and match channels | TechCr...
X really is the Forum Romanum of our time I think A place where anyone can post anything and if it resonates it rises to the top of the global conciousness And then it gets debated by other people, and if they have good counter arguments, those also rise to the top And everyone learns in the process It's rapid collective iterative thought development on a global scale
Today, Netflix announced our acquisition of Warner Bros. Together, we’ll define the next century of storytelling, creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences everywhere. https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-bros…
Paramount is launching a hostile takeover bid to buy Warner Bros. They are going directly to shareholders with a bid valued at $108.4 billion (Source: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-hostile-takeover-bid-warner-bros-discovery-1236603175/…)
Top global artists on Spotify this decade: 2020: Bad Bunny 2021: Bad Bunny 2022: Bad Bunny 2023: Taylor Swift 2024: Taylor Swift 2025: Bad Bunny
Stoked to announce the @a16z New Media Fellows! Some people have nicknamed this “the Thiel Fellowship for the terminally online.” True to form, there are a lot of names you might recognize from your timeline - like @OfficialLoganK, @swyx, @gaby_goldberg, @signulll, @netcapgirl, & @jxnlco. But it’s not just the timeline masters. We have top-tier creative talents like @SarahChieng, @covacut , @clairevo, @robcgiani, & @thejamesreina. World-class startup operators like @pallipau and @lindsmccallum. And many, many more. Can't wait to get started. More here: https://a16z.substack.com/p/meet-the-a16z-new-media-fellows… Real joy to be building this with @eriktorenberg, @liangsays, @humford, & the new media team.
Netflix is rolling out a live voting feature
Netflix is rolling out a live voting feature | TechCrunch
In a couple hours, we'll be rolling out About This Account globally, allowing you to see the country or region where an account is based. This will be accessible by tapping the signup date on profiles. This is an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square. We plan to provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X. And for those in countries where speech has penalties, we've included privacy toggles to only show your region. This was a huge undertaking. A special thanks to the engineers who made this happen: @sandeep_rao @singhai @mingsong @striedinger @rzhao0506
Sinners just got a record 16 Academy Award nominations. They should have created a new category and added one more for that unreal educational explainer Ryan Coogler made explaning all the different film format types to see in theatres.
We founded @MorningBrew on a set of principles. Those principles have evolved, but they've never been more important. In a post-AI world, trusted distribution is one of the final moats. Here are the 12 rules of the media game as I see them today: Rule #1: Personality-driven content is becoming a bigger and bigger part of consumers’ media diets. - The democratization of creation & distribution (read: internet & social platforms) means that people can attract as much distribution as institutions. Consumers have always longed for content that feels personal & relatable. Rule #2: Brand-driven content isn’t dead. The expectations of it have just changed & it serves a more important role in media than ever before. - In an era of personality-driven media, consumers expect relatability & resonance with brands, even if they’re faceless. This just means that even if a person isn’t attached to the brand, consumers want to feel an individual person behind it. - Personality-driven content is a necessity for most media brands today, but with it comes a lot of risk. One of the ways to derisk personality risk is by having faceless franchises that give you ownership over a healthy % of your audience. Rule #3: Riches are in the niches. - Democratization of creation & distribution not only increased consumer appetite for personality-driven content. It also drove a content supply glut, allowing consumers to be pickier than ever before. - We went from 12 channels on the original TVs to near unlimited choice. And in a world of unlimited choice, consumers can find great content related to any/all interests from the most mainstream to the most obscure. Rule #4: Diversifying risk across the audience funnel is key. - There are three types of audiences: rented audience, owned audience, and monetized audience. Each type of audience offers benefits & trade-offs to a company, so it’s less about targeting a single type and more about maximizing the benefits of each, while mitigating the risks. - Rented audiences offer rapid growth, but platform risk. - Owned audiences put you in control of your audience, but growth is slower. - And monetized audience is how you pay the bills, but you can’t monetize your audience without building trust via rented & owned. Rule #5: Content channels & trends change but human psychology does not. - Human beings are selfish. We selfishly do things that satisfy our most basic desire: survival. Survival in modern day society boils down to physical safety & psychological safety. - Physical safety: For the modern day media consumer, that looks like acquiring knowledge that helps you: make money, improve professionally (so you can make more money), or save money. - Psychological safety: For the modern day media consumer, that means consuming content that makes you feel belonging (i.e. entertainment, hobbies, niches, passion areas) and helps you with courtship (i.e. attracting a partner/procreating). Rule #6: We are late stage on most content platforms. - In the early days of Instagram, Tiktok, and Twitter, attention was cheap, and you could amass a large audience simply by being an early adopter and actively creating on-platform. Those days are (mostly) gone. Aside from LLMEO/GEO, you can no longer build distribution simply by taking at-bats. - As platforms have entered the later innings of their life cycles, content has gone from scarce to abundant, while attention has remained finite. This means that the quality bar for what is “worthy” of a consumer’s time continues to increase. Rule #7: The tiktok-ification of media is almost complete. - Social platforms were built on the social graph. You see the content of the people you follow and your content is seen by people that follow you. - Practically speaking, that meant those with big audiences would always get more views than those with small audiences. - Interest graphs (made popular by TikTok) flipped internet media on its head. With the advent of For You, you now see content the platform believes you’d be interested in, and your content is seen by people the platform thinks would be interested in your content. - In practice, this means that every creator/brand is only as successful as its last post, the variance of performance has never been higher, and it’s never been easier for someone with a small audience to get outsized results on a single piece of content. Rule #8: Software is becoming content. - As the barriers to build software approach 0, software is a new content medium which can be used to build and own audience. Rule #9: AI is a supporting actor in media. - The question to ask is not how much of this content is AI or human-generated. - It’s how well does this content resonate with its audience and accomplish one of the base human needs. - Human judgement and taste is still essential in accomplishing that goal no matter how much or little AI is used. Rule #10: No content is original. - It’s all a remix of prior ideas that came before. Great artists steal, bad artists copy. Media companies should behave in the same manner. Rule #11: A modern media company serves 3 customers - Its audience, its creators, and those who pay the bills. - The product a media company offers to serve each of these customers can be/is likely different. Rule #12: A media company is like an investor. - Deploying resources based on the risk/return profile of an investment and the amount of resource required. - Example: a book should start as a blog. A blog should start as an article. An article should start as a tweet.
I asked my 430,000 followers for their favorite podcast episodes of 2025. Here are the 10 that came out on top:
𝕏 is offering $1 million for the top article posted on the platform in the next two weeks. Nikita says, “It’s time to write,” but also “Please bear with Article Armageddon.” What’s the strategy here, and what will the outcome be? It’s sort of crazy that Twitter (launched in 2006) lasted so long before making any real changes to its posting format. The expansion to 280 characters happened a full decade later in 2017. Even though it’s always been an important watering hole for tech power players, Twitter never captured all the value it created. Tons of businesses grew by exporting audiences from Twitter to other platforms (although this also happened on LinkedIn and elsewhere). The Elon acquisition feels like the biggest turning point in product strategy, but there were a bunch of projects in the works before Twitter became 𝕏 that launched post-acquisition (Community Notes was the big one). The previous management team had acquired the Dutch newsletter startup Revue, but the product was shut down within 2 years. 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. February took it from 280 to 4,000, April expanded it to 10,000, and finally in June they maxed it out at 25,000. That’s longer than most blog posts, and you can still thread them together. So the launch of “Articles” in March 2024 didn’t really hit for me. It was sort of nice to have more formatting options, but it didn’t feel super necessary. Last year, I started writing daily op-eds for the TBPN newsletter and cross-posting them to 𝕏. These pieces are usually closer to 5,000 characters, so they fit fine in a long post. I stuck to long posts until earlier this year when Lulu dropped “Standing Out in 2026” as an 𝕏 article. The piece is short, 443 words, 2,762 characters. It easily could have been a long post or a thread, but it did really well from a distribution standpoint, so I thought it might be worth revisiting posting pieces as articles. Based on the first two weeks of the year, I think my writing does equally well as an article rather than a long post. The title and thumbnail are way more important for posting Articles, so there’s something to optimize there, but I’m generally happy with the experience. Strategically, the big article push reads as another shot at Chris Best’s company, but owning your email list directly and being able to monetize with a variety of subscription tiers is too important to really get anyone to focus purely on 𝕏 as a writing outlet without building another platform up. Maybe that’s coming later this year. 𝕏 has subscriptions already, but without a real direct line between subscribers and publications, it feels hard to imagine any serious writers going all-in on 𝕏. At the same time, does 𝕏 even need writers to go all-in? 𝕏 just needs good content, so if it incentivizes more people to bring content from other platforms to the timeline, 𝕏 could benefit from that alone. People always seem grumpy with 𝕏 generally, or Nikita specifically, but I’ve always felt that any sloppy algorithm changes sort themselves out pretty quickly. If you ever really get sick of the For You page, you can always use 𝕏 in the browser and use an extension like Social Focus to hide everything but the Following tab. The revealed preference is that everyone still loves the Internet’s Dive Bar, and even if the timeline gets a little sloppy during the Article Apocalypse, it’s no worse than an annoying chart-topper getting overplayed at your local spot. You might step out for a smoke break, but you’ll be back.