The Year(s) Ahead in Media — Concentration

The Role of Networks in Concentrating Power and Attention

Starting April 2025, all full posts, including archived posts, will be available on my Substack, The Mediator.

Note: This is the third post in a four-part series that discusses four tectonic trends (fragmentation, disintermediation, concentration and virtualization) that will determine the flow of value along the media value chain in coming years. Here are part 1, part 2 and part 4.

Tl;dr:

• The first two trends, fragmentation and disintermediation, result from technology systematically lowering the barriers to produce, market, distribute and monetize content.
• This trend, concentration, is the consequence of putting everyone on a big network. Networks are subject to powerful positive feedback loops that produce extreme outcomes. In the case of media, they concentrate both power (on the supply side) and attention (on the demand side).
• Historically, distribution of media was siloed, local and one-way. Today, most media is distributed on universal, global, two-way networks.
• The positive feedback loops on networks produce network effects and information and reputational cascades.
• Network effects are a supply-side effect, because they influence market structures. They produce winner-take-all (or most) markets, concentrating power and value in a few companies.
• Combined with these companies’ global reach and universality, that means traditional media companies are now contending with distributors and competitors with unparalleled scale, resources and the ability to cross-subsidize losses indefinitely. Creators and consumers are contending with “new gatekeepers” with unprecedented power, although they wield it differently than traditional intermediaries.
• Cascades are a demand-side effect, because they influence the distribution of consumption.
• Hits are self-perpetuating — the rich get richer — because people interpret popularity as a signal of quality (information cascade) and/or social currency (reputational cascade). This results in power law-like popularity distributions: a small number of outsized hits (in the “head”) and a vast number of misses (in the “tail”).
• These extreme popularity distributions shift bargaining power to the rare breakout talent, hollow out the “middle” of the curve and increase the risk of making content.
• The fourth and final post discusses the last trend, virtualization, and ties it all together.

Click here to continue reading the full post on my Substack, The Mediator.