The Year(s) Ahead in Media — Disintermediation

The Declining Role of Traditional Intermediaries

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

DALL-E 3, prompt: “abstract image of a series of brushstrokes, simple color palette, progressing from strong to weak”

Note: This is the second 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’s part 1, part 3 and part 4.

Tl;dr:

• This post explores the second trend, disintermediation.
• Disintermediation refers to the declining bargaining power of traditional intermediaries.
• Many of the household names in media (film and TV studios, videogame publishers, newspapers, music labels) are intermediaries between creators and consumers. They have historically taken the lion’s share of value because they do things that have been hard for creators to do themselves: financing and coordinating production, marketing, monetization and distribution.
• Technology is systematically making all these things easier for creators to do themselves, improving creators’ bargaining power or enabling them to circumvent these intermediaries altogether.
• Some intermediaries still own or control very valuable IP, they are marketing machines and many creators will still want the validation of working with them, but on the margin, they are getting squeezed.
• And the clear arc of technology is that it will continue to marginalize them. For instance, GenAI will democratize high-quality production tools and NFTs may democratize access to capital.
• In the next post, we’ll examine the third trend, concentration.

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