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In recent years, there has been a tremendous paradigm shift in the media world. Clearly and unambiguously, power has shifted from traditional media to social media. People are getting their news from social media, and advertisers are shifting their ad budget dollars to social media. And, quite frankly, almost everyone now trusts social media more than the traditional media.
All of this, of course, has a number of consequences for our society. It’s almost impossible to imagine going back to the way things were even a decade ago. The Big Tech giants aren’t going to relinquish their power willingly, and advertisers are going to go where the people are.
The search for new business models
The traditional media, most likely, will need to hunt for a new type of business model to sustain them going forward. If advertisers are flocking to social media, then that’s basically the death knell for an advertising-supported business model. There are simply not enough advertising dollars to go around, and that’s why we’re seeing layoffs and other signs of economic weakness throughout the traditional media world.
And the same thing goes for subscription-based business models. If people are spending all their time on social media, do you really think that they are going to sign up for monthly or annual subscriptions, the way they did in the past? Even with the construction of paywalls, and doing everything they can to get more people to pay, there just doesn’t seem to be an appetite for paid content. Think about your own life. What’s your first reaction whenever you come across one of those annoying paywalls? If you’re like most people, you immediately hunt for the same content somewhere else.
So if ads and subscriptions won’t work, what will? One potential solution is to shift to a new decentralized business model based on blockchain technology. In this decentralized model, media companies would no longer be centralized entities with headquarters in major cities like New York City. And they would no longer own their customers, or the data that they collect on them. Instead, the readers would be in control.
A change for American democracy?
That covers the business side of things. But what about the potential impact on society? That’s where things get dicey, because nobody really knows what will happen next. The notion of a free press is one of the key underpinnings of American democracy. It’s the free press – as a sort of “Fourth Estate” – that acts as yet another check and balance on democracy.
This is not to say that “democracy dies in darkness,” as the Washington Post constantly reminds us, but there are certainly consequences to the disappearance of traditional media. One is that we’ll continue to put more trust into algorithms, and not people. We’ll trust “machine” editors more than “people” editors, and we’ll count on them to keep us informed in a responsible way.
But there’s a bright side to all this, too. We’ll no longer have a media elite that determines the narrative for us. We’ll no longer immediately grant influence to whomever can pay for the best media coverage out there. And we’ll be able to create our own customized view of the news, without relying on the Big Tech giants to curate their own special view of what daily events mean in today’s world.
