The View From Inside
The media industry is reorganising, not dying. The organisations that win aren't doing more of what was already failing. They're building something people actually seek out.
Everything you've read lately about the media industry tells a story of collapse. Google search traffic to publishers dropped by a third last year. Business Insider's search traffic fell 55% in three years. In Australia, journalists now say the single biggest threat to their industry isn't disinformation. For the first time, it's the changes in how people consume information due to AI.
And yet..
The Onion just grew revenue by 300% and now has 65,000 paying print subscribers, making it roughly the 12th largest print newspaper in America. The Betoota Advocate reaches over 4 million readers a month and recently helped the Seattle Seahawks launch their Australian fan engagement strategy. YouTube essayists are pulling bigger audiences than most current affairs programs. Corporate newsrooms at Apple, Google and Shopify are all publishing more content year on year.
So which is it? Is media dying, or is it thriving? The answer is probably both, and understanding why matters a lot - even if you don't work anywhere near content, communications or media.
For about 15 years, digital media ran on a fairly simple contract. Create content. Optimise it for Google. Collect the traffic. Monetise through ads, affiliate links or subscriber conversions.
That contract seems to be unravelling.
Pew Research found that when Google shows an AI Overview, people are half as likely to click through to a website. Comparison sites that built their entire business on search referrals are watching their model erode with every algorithm update. Ad-funded publishers who need every article to earn its keep through clicks are running out of clicks to earn.
Anyone who's worked in digital media knows the cracks were there long before AI showed up. I worked across multiple publishers during the years that model was thriving, and even then you could feel how dependent it all was on Google continuing to send traffic. AI turned cracks into sinkholes, and it happened faster than most publishers had time to adapt to.
But here's where I think the "media is dying" story gets it wrong. The content isn't dying. People aren't consuming less information. They're consuming it differently, from more places, in more formats, with less loyalty to any single source. The ecosystem is reorganising. And some of the most interesting winners aren't the ones you'd expect.
Think about the last time you formed a genuine opinion about a company. Not a purchase decision. An opinion. The kind that determines whether you'd recommend them to a friend, or believe them when something goes wrong.
Chances are it didn't start on their website. Maybe you saw a Reddit thread where someone described their experience. Maybe you asked ChatGPT and it gave you a summary drawn from sources you'll never see. Maybe you watched a YouTube essay that spent 40 minutes pulling apart the industry. Maybe a Betoota headline made you laugh in a way that told you something real about how the brand is perceived. Maybe a friend sent you an AI-generated comparison that put them third out of five.
All of those moments shaped your view. And while the company in question was almost certainly investing in earned media and running social campaigns, chances are nobody was thinking about how all of those touchpoints connect to each other and to the AI-generated answers that are increasingly the first thing people see.
This isn't a criticism. Most companies care deeply about earned media and social. They just tend to think about them as separate workstreams rather than parts of the same story. The website, the press release, the carefully approved media statement.. those do still matter. But they've become one input among many, and they're often not the first or most influential one. Brand narratives - heck, narratives in general - are increasingly being shaped in places most companies aren't watching. On forums they've never posted in. In AI-generated answers they didn't know existed.
This is where corporate content enters the picture, and where I think most people are underestimating what's happening.
The business model that sustained most digital media is built on traffic. Every article needs to earn its keep, whether that's through ad impressions, affiliate clicks, or driving a subscription conversion. A 55% drop in search traffic doesn't just mean fewer readers. It means the maths that kept the lights on is no longer working.
Corporate newsrooms don't have this constraint. A brand publishing useful, well-researched content doesn't need that content to generate ad revenue. It just needs to be good enough that people (and increasingly, AI models) treat it as a credible source. The content only has to do one job: be trustworthy and informative. That's a fundamentally different economic model, and it turns out to be a real advantage when the systems deciding what to surface are specifically looking for content that was written to inform rather than to sell.
Now, I want to be careful here because I work in corporate content, and this definitely isn't a victory lap. Most corporate content is still press releases reformatted as blog posts. Most corporate newsrooms are underfunded, understaffed, and treated as a support function rather than a strategic asset. But the structural advantage is there for any brand willing to take editorial seriously. Not content marketing dressed up as editorial. Actual editorial. The kind of writing that respects the reader's intelligence and earns attention rather than trying to extract a conversion from it.
Here's the uncomfortable truth for everyone in this ecosystem, not just corporates.
Social, earned media, forums, owned platforms and AI all feed each other now. People are moving between them faster and with less patience than ever. And nobody, regardless of which side of the media landscape they sit on, is fully accounting for how these channels interact.
What someone says about you on Reddit influences what ChatGPT tells the next person who asks. A Betoota headline about your brand reaches more 25 to 34 year olds than a press release ever will. A well-placed YouTube essay can shift perceived credibility more than a dozen trade media hits. And an AI-generated answer that gets it wrong about you will be repeated thousands of times before anyone notices.
For corporate comms teams, the temptation is to hear "owned content has a structural advantage" and conclude that all you need to do is publish more. Build a bigger content hub. Write more articles. Tick the box. That misses the point entirely. You can publish the best owned content in the country and still lose the narrative if you're not thinking about how it connects to everything else.
For media organisations, the equivalent mistake is doubling down on the same distribution channels that are shrinking and hoping the numbers come back. The journalism itself might be excellent. But if nobody is thinking about how that work travels through forums, gets picked up by AI, or competes for attention against a corporate explainer that was specifically designed to be cited, the impact gets lost.
And for the rest of us, as readers and consumers, it's worth paying attention to where our own opinions are actually coming from. When you realise that a ChatGPT answer you've relied on was shaped by a Reddit thread written by someone with an agenda, or that the helpful explainer at the top of your search was published by the company it's about, the way you consume information starts to feel a bit different. That's not a reason to be cynical just yet, but it's at least a reason to be curious.
The organisations that get this right, whether they're news organisations, brands, or something in between, aren't just producing content. They're thinking about how all of these channels interact and making deliberate choices about where they show up and how.
The media organisations that are thriving right now all share something worth paying attention to.
The Onion built a subscriber base that pays $99 a year because they value the work itself. Betoota built cultural relevance that turned into brand partnerships, a podcast empire, and a PR consultancy. 404 Media, founded by four journalists who walked out of Vice's Motherboard with nothing but a Stripe account and a Ghost website, was profitable within six months and won an EFF Pioneer Award within a year. YouTube creators and Substack writers built direct relationships with audiences who actively chose to tune in, not audiences that arrived via an algorithm and could disappear with the next update.
What's interesting is that none of them won by doing more of what was already failing. They won by building something that people actually seek out. Nobody pays The Onion $99 a year because a search engine told them to. Nobody follows Betoota because of their SEO strategy. 404 Media's founders said it themselves: their most important discovery mechanism is word of mouth, people telling friends at parties and in group texts. These audiences chose to be there, and that turns out to be the most valuable thing you can have when every other distribution channel is shifting underneath you.
For corporate teams specifically: your owned content platform just became one of the most strategically important assets your company has. If AI is going to decide what millions of people believe about your brand, you want it drawing from something worth citing. That means investing in editorial quality, not just volume. It means thinking about content as something that builds trust over years, not something you spin up for a campaign and forget about. And it means paying attention to the full ecosystem your content exists in, not just the channels you directly control.
For publishers and journalists: the traffic model is under real pressure, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. But the answer isn't to chase the same shrinking pool of search clicks harder. It's to build the kind of direct audience relationship that makes you resilient to whatever Google, Meta, or OpenAI decides to do next.
The information ecosystem is more fragmented than it's ever been. That's unsettling if your instinct is to control the narrative. It's also a little unsettling as a consumer of news. But having spent time on both sides of this, in newsrooms and in corporate comms, I'm finding it genuinely exciting. The playbook is being rewritten, and the people willing to understand how the whole system actually works are going to have a lot of fun figuring out what comes next.
The newsroom is everywhere now. The question is whether we're paying attention to all of it.