Twelve Rules for Building Media Companies Post-AI

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.